Posted on 11/22/2019 10:41:46 PM PST by NoLibZone
SUN CITY, Ariz. — When this Phoenix suburb opened on January 1, 1960, it was billed as the original retirement community. From above, it would look like a UFO landing site, laid out in rings to mimic halos surrounding the sun. Just past the entrance, a billboard flanked by rows of palm trees promised “An Active New Way Of Life.”
On the weekend Sun City opened, cars were backed up for 2 miles as some 100,000 visitors waited to gawk at a village built specifically for adults over the age of 50. They found a new nine-hole golf course and a community center with 250-seat auditorium, swimming pool, shuffleboard court and lawn bowling green. Elsewhere there was a 30,000-square-foot Grand Shopping Center, a Safeway grocery store and a Hiway House Motor Hotel, where you could have a cup of coffee or something stronger at the bar. “The finest resort couldn’t supply more,” boasted a fictional resident of Sun City in a promotional video from the period.
The big question looming in this neighborhood — and dozens of others like it in the Southeast and Rust Belt — is what happens to everything from home prices to the local economy when so many homes post ‘For Sale’ signs around the same time?
The U.S. is at the beginning of a tidal wave of homes hitting the market on the scale of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s. This time it won’t be driven by overbuilding, easy credit or irrational exuberance, but by an inevitable fact of life: the passing of the baby boomer generation.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
If the US population at the end of the boomer era, 1965, was 190 million, and the population at the beginning in 1945 was 140 million, then there were about 50 million boomers over a 20 year span or about 2.5 million a year. Over the next 50 years we added about 110 million people, or about 2.1 million per year. Strikes me that a lot of houses are needed. Some people like old ones. Some like new. The lousy ones will cost less. The good ones will cost more. Let your house run down and you will have a hard time selling it.
Recently had my house appraised. There are so many foreclosures in the area going for a song, I will certainly lose money.
Meanwhile there can be a very high average cost of homes West and East:
Suburban Sticker Shock: Why the Same House in L.A. Costs Three Times as Much as Atlanta The bargain cities are Atlanta and Raleigh, the ultra-pricey locales L.A. and Seattle. It's important to note that when the numbers start in Q1 of 2008, near the top of the bubble, median prices in L.A. at $505,000 and Seattle at $366,000 were already a lot higher than in Atlanta ($175,000) and Raleigh ($214,000).....This incredible disparity between prices for the average home in Atlanta and L.A. exemplifies the gulf between two separate Americas in housing. One is what I'll call the "Gridlocked Coasts," a category that encompasses the metro areas of New York, Boston, Washington, D.C, Miami, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and of course L.A., among others.
Housing costs keep American dream out of reach The median home sale price in Massachusetts has hit a new threshold — $400,000. In Suffolk County, it’s $570,500, according to a report Wednesday from The Warren Group....A family would need to earn around $160,000 per year to qualify the median home in Suffolk County, according to data from the National Housing Conference — well over the $90,650 household income of the average two-person household in the Boston area.
I doubt very much that people in our town are aware that 50% of the town population are living in rentals.
Always amusing to look at threads like this...
People blame immigrants... (IMMIGRANTS? ILLEGALS? They drive up the cost of housing? FFR?) or the laziness of the kids who are not willing to work to buy these Gatsbyesque status symbols, or ... well anything but the real culprit.
The FEDERAL RESERVE has been at the helm of destroying the value of the dollar. The channels of inflationary asset storage FOR that deflated dollar is an irrelevant sideline. They happen to be real estate, medicine, and academia, but could just as easily have been hubcaps, beanie babies and kumquats, had the tax policies been different.
The imperial dictates of DC, and the insane flushing of increasingly worthless dollars into real estate (not to mention the military, “social security” (ha!), and other welfare projects) is the cause of this.
I no longer believe it is possible to MAGA, and that rather we are going to have a gigantic explosion of this debt/currency bomb. Trying to protect myself with RURAL property with some sustainable aspects, a few means of self protection, precious metals, cryptos, and a renewed interest in “soul fortification” (memorizing passages from the bible).
It is going to be a ghastly day when this thing comes unwound, and it will
My poor, rural Florida county, Wakulla, is in the midst of an unprecedented building boom. They are mostly 900-1100 sq ft starter homes and mobile homes. This follows about a year of the best job market anybody there can remember. God bless Trump.
As far as the half million dollar homes the earlier generations will leave, they are apparently still selling up north. I base this on the fact that several larger homes near me have sold for absurd money to norther transplants.
Granted, these are just my observations on my tiny part of the market.
they wont continue as 400 to 600K homes in that case.
However overseas folks may afford them.
and realistically a 400K home is not expensive in this inflated currancy
When this thing comes unwound I will still have my beanie babies lol! I started collecting the old ones, with tags only, 5 years ago for pennies on the dollar. Give it another 20 years.
Not even illegals (who would have issues obtaining financing); in my area in NJ some of these homes are being bought by the Asian and Hispanic “replacement Americans”, and others are impossible to sell because the foreign replacements scoff at the idea of paying $1,000 per month in property taxes to pay so many teachers, cops, etc. over $100,000 per year.
Detached single-family homes are becoming a thing of the past, as our standard of living falls to meet the rising standard of living of the developing world (where our jobs went). If you want to own a home, you’ll provide housing for at least one other family just to meet your monthly tax bill.
where are you?
My daughter and her husband did the same, from Studio City.
My other daughter and her husband followed me from Settle to KY last summer. They bought a house a couple of months ago and moved in the beginning of this month. Spectacular acreage and huge custom home, all for $625k. That doesn’t get you much in Studio City or even Seattle these days.
One reason I see more and more people declining to improve homes is that they no longer assume they’ll even recapture that investment when they sell it. Years ago there was a list of improvements that were supposed to improve the value of your home (like second bathrooms); in high-tax areas, the reductions in value due to tax increases likely will more than compensate for the added value you install. If you get the proper permits and such, it is almost guaranteed you’ll see a large property tax increase.
WE downsised from a five bedroom, 3 bath home in the Seattle area to a new 1000 sq foot one bedroom, one bath on 32 acres in rural KY. The price was one year’s wages.
And the real estate taxes are just shy of $250 a YEAR. We absolutely love our “garden of eden” out here. And we get full internet, Amazon prime, Netflix from an LG G3 phone as a mobile hotspot against a wall facing a tower. Works great.
In my neck of the woods buyers can afford the home, but not the property taxes.
In high-tax areas retirees can’t afford t remain in their homes because the retirement income can’t pay the taxes (along with other bills). NJ has a “senior freeze” program where retirees have their taxes frozen, but it isn’t working; the taxes at frozen at a high level, and they have to pay the higher taxes and get a refund a year later.
There will be a free market adjustment, but as always real estate is about location.
Our retirement house and 8 acres at Lake of the Ozarks are of no interest to our son in Seattle.
He just sold his house in West Seattle and moved to a rental cabin in Port Townsend. At age 43, he says he’s made his money and now “wants to do something else for the next 20 years.”
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.