How do you feel about your house? How do you feel about the cost of housing? Boy, these are two entirely different subjects, aren’t they? I talk to so many people that just love their home, but stress that if anything goes wrong and needs repair, they will be in a pickle. Rising interest rates, cost of homeowner insurance, and general maintenance add up quick. I saw this article in the MReport this morning that addressed just these issues.
Houses are Better Today. Housing, Not So Much
The American housing situation is better today than it was three decades ago, and yet more than 38 million U.S. households have housing cost burdens, leaving little income left to pay for food, healthcare, and other basic necessities.
That’s the assessment of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies (JCHS) in its annual State of the Nation’s Housing report. Since 1988, when the report debuted, about 40 million homes have been built to accommodate 27 million new households. Houses have become larger, better built, and generally safer to live in, structurally, JCHS reported.
But fewer young adults, millennials, in this case, can afford houses today than 30 years ago. That, the report states, is despite the fact that high home costs in the 1980s kept buyers away in droves.
“With fewer young adults buying homes, demand for rental homes remained high—as did rents despite a boom in multifamily construction,” the report states. “Rapid losses of low-cost rentals forced millions more lower-income households to spend outsized shares of their incomes on housing.”
In other words, 38 million households, in the U.S. in 2018, mainly renters, are considered burdened. This means the residents spend more than 30 percent of their income on household expenses like rent.
Bottom Line
If you are trying to decide if you are really in a position to move forward with buying a home at this time Contact Us. We can give a list of people to speak with to get the full picture so you can make an informed decision. That’s when you should decide how to move forward!
