Squeezed by high interest rates and record prices, homeowners are frozen in place. They can’t sell. So first-time buyers can’t buy.
If buying a home is an inexorable part of the American dream, so is the next step: eventually selling that home and using the equity to trade up to something bigger.
But over the past two years, this upward mobility has stalled as buyers and sellers have been pummeled by three colliding forces: the highest borrowing rates in nearly two decades, a crippling shortage of inventory, and a surge in home prices to a median of $434,000, the highest on record, according to Redfin.
People who bought their starter home a few years ago are finding themselves frozen in place by what is known as the “rate-lock effect” — they bought when interest rates were historically low, and trading up would mean a doubling or tripling of their monthly interest payments.
They are locked in, and as a result, families hoping to buy their first homes are locked out.
Maybe we shouldn’t have played with the idea of “starter homes” and maybe its okay for people to live in one place.
Maybe housing shouldn’t be a fucking investment vehicle, how about that, and then none of this would be a fucking problem at all.
Starter homes aren’t the problem.
People need different types of homes as a single professional vs family with kids vs retiree.
In a normal market, people would have the freedom to trade out to the right kind of house, and move to a new city if that’s what they want.
“Normal” is a term used for idealistic dreams that don’t ever exist in reality.
Twice now I’ve sold my smaller home to move into a larger one to accommodate my growing family.
It’s been a normal thing for millions of families, but not when there’s an interest rate spike like in 2023 or 2008.
So its your own personal experience?
Kind of like… normal is your situation you’re using to define what is an ideal everyone else should have and want.