TL;DR: Americans now need to make $120K a year to afford a typical middle-class life and qualify to purchase a home. Minimum.
Congrats. Do you live in Central Florida (Orlando area)? How much student loan debt do you carry? The article was fairly specific about that $125k. I’m pretty sure you can buy a home and live well within your means with much less if you lived in Gray, Louisiana.
One thing that the author is not taking into consideration is the post-pandemic ability to “work from home”. Gray, Louisiana is 45 minutes away from New Orleans and five minutes away from Houma. You can buy a 4Bd/3Ba 2100sqft brick house there for $165k. Crimenis relatively low and there is a university close by. You get the full suburban treatment for cheap…but you have to have a skill set that allows for remote work.
i dont mean to pry, but i have been trying to work out how i can do this for myself so id be interested how you were able to do it.
im not asking for your life story, and obviously share what youre comfortable with online, but some helpful info would be your salary range, location and cost of home, and down payment (even as just a percentage of the total home cost).
other useful contextual information would be how long it took you to save up for the down payment, whether you did so while paying rent, if you had any other assitance with the down payment (personal loan, gift from family, borrowed against your 401k, etc), state of the home (move-in ready/fixer upper/built yourself), whether you used the loan to acquire furniture, etc.
sorry if thats asking too much but id like to use you as a data point, even if just for myself, and i do need a bit of data to do that.
Sorry, I’m not talking about this any more. Lemmy is too fucking toxic to anyone who goes against the hive mind. My comment was made in an effort to bring hope to people who read this, that there ways to make it work. But I’m done with this community honestly
i replied to your comment because it did give me a bit of hope that it was probable for someone without a six figure salary. i was just looking for some context to see what kind of sacrifices to my lifestyle and living situation i might have to make to achieve that. if it came off as passive or judgmental i am sorry. that was not my intention. i am glad you tried to give others hope that it can be done, but without a clear path to a goal, however conditional, it doesnt end up helping very much.
Note that the source of this opinion piece is TikTok. The salary needed for a middle class existence varies wildly from city to city.
I’m in Salt Lake City, for example, and a recent article has the necessary salary to afford a home around $140,000/year. I moved here in part because it was a much cheaper alternative to D.C. and the minimum salary to own a home is still $140,000.
There are some pockets of affordability out there.
The map in this article is nice (though you have to scroll through some annoying stuff to get there):
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/06/homes/housing-market-prices-affordability-dg/
I would guess those would be the areas of next major population influx as people continue to flee high cost of living in other areas. Climate change making much of the west and southeast more unattractive in the long run too. While the more affordable areas are still relatively cheap compared to the rest of the country, most of them have already been seeing large spikes in housing prices too. We need some major policy changes to encourage cheap and higher density housing, better use of land in general, can’t just keep building only single family homes in low density areas sprawling out forever.
I bought a house while making $40k/yr.
Doesn’t help that corporations own 27% of single family homes.
This is ludicrously false.
The statistic you’re trying to say is that about 25% of homes sold in recent months have been bought by investors, which is a very different thing from saying that nearly one-fourth of all single family homes are owned by investors, which falls apart the moment you actually go outside and talk to people, since, for starters, about 65% of Americans own their home.
The homeownership rate of 66.0 percent was virtually the same as the rate in the third quarter 2022 (66.0 percent) and not statistically different from the rate in the second quarter 2023 (65.9 percent).
65% + 25% = 90%. Doesn’t seem “ludicrously false” by that assertion; I wouldn’t be surprised if the remaining 10% accounted for all individual landlords.
Not all homes are for sale every year. The vast majority are not.
If Wall Street buys 30% of all homes for sale this year, that does not mean that they now own 30% of all homes that exist, only 30% of those that happened to go on sale this year.
To answer the proximate question, about 70% of rental properties are owned by individuals.
This happened because people were lulled into voting for the very people who gave their fair share of corporate profits to the rich. Looking at you, Republicans, especially Ronald Reagan.
