this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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Housing Bubble 2: Return of the Ugly
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As a Gen-X'er, I had the same conversation with my grandparents 35 years ago.
"Why don't you just buy a house?"
"Do you know how much houses cost now?"
"Well, we bought our first house for $40,000."
"$40,000 isn't even a down payment now. Tell you what, here's how much I make, let's sit down with the real estate listings and you tell me what I can afford."
". . . Oh."
"Yeah, right, 'Oh'."
I did finally buy a house... 33 years later, a decade after they both died.
I've bought two homes with a price tag under 80k - most recently about 15 years ago (and it was a fixer upper to be sure) and sold it for about that 12 years ago. My first house I bought when I was 23. 27 years ago. I don't recall what I put down, but it was under $5k.
Which isn't to argue so much as just demonstrate that this varies wildly with location.
I could see that in some states, pretty much not anywhere on the West coast, at least not a house you could live in.
$25,000 - 1966 mobile home. But you can't get traditional financing on a mobile home that old because they aren't worth anything.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/16745-SE-Division-St-Unit-131_Portland_OR_97236_M22120-62557?from=srp-list-card
$60,000 - 1997 mobile home, same deal.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/12420-SE-Bush-St-Unit-5_Portland_OR_97236_M11761-60151?from=srp-list-card
https://www.justanswer.com/landlord-tenant/jgpyy-depreciation-schedule-mobile-home.html#:~:text=For%20tax%20purposes%2C%20the%20U.S.,useful%20life%20of%2027.5%20years.
27.5 year limit. So anything older than January, 1997.
In both those cases you still have to pay one thousand dollars in rent every month to the actual property owner, so I don't know if I would call that home ownership except only in the most generous sense.