A global housing crisis is suffocating the middle class

We need to stop using the term "middle class."

Back in the day, middle class meant Archie Bunker/Al Bundy supporting a family of four with one job.

Today it's two college graduates struggling to keep up with the bills.

We're in Tsarist Russia; a huge mass of serfs, a small set of professionals, and an aristocracy that controls 90% of the wealth.

Supply and demand. Stop letting people (or corporations) buy more than one house and watch prices fall. I own a home, and I’m perfectly willing to see it lose value in order to avoid seeing my country turn into some modern feudalistic hellhole.

Stop letting corporations gobble up single family homes.

Stop letting multi-home owners buy and buy and buy.

Tax vacant homes.

At some point we need to have a grown up conversation about the finite nature of land, specifically land that people can live on and find work from.

This "the rich make up the rules and lets pretend land will never run out" nonsense clearly isn't working for anyone but the rich.

There is no middle class - there is the working class and the exploiter class. People have misidentified a chunk of the relatively better off working class as somehow not part of the working class. Over time the systems of capitalism and the power imbalances at the heart of the non-unionized workplace will eventually reduce better off workers to the lowest common denominator as the exploiter class demands perpetually growing profit that must come at the cost of the working class.

I'm on my thirties, I don't know a single person that can afford to live alone, they are either sharing with a stranger/spouse or still with their parents.

The prices are set by banks. The only limit on what somebody can sell you a house for is what the bank is prepared to lend you.

If the interest rates go down, the price goes up. If the term lengths go up, the price goes up. Prevent lending, and the landlords will buy it up because normal people can no longer afford them.

The system has been fucked for way too long, and in order to fix it, you're going to have to upset a lot of people who have put their money into their home.

The governments solution will be to start offering 40 year mortgages. Do nothing to make housing affordable, just extend the time to pay it off like they've done with auto loans going from 60 months to 72 months terms.

This is part of the plan to keep crushing the middle class. The powers that be would be able to change this situation within weeks if they really wanted to.

Just want to point out, EU inflation rate from 2015 - 2024 is a 12% change, so out of the 3 examples listed only the EU has had stable prices. Technically housing prices went down in some EU countries based on this information, like Portugal. And EU inflation has gone down since the 2022 spike, which means there was a tiny housing bubble in 2022.

This only applies to housing prices of course - rent is a different story so being addressed in different ways across different EU members.

Well, in the Post 2008 Crash World with the most favorable policies for the Asset Owner class since the time of the Monarchy, after the rich finished draining the Poor and Traditional Working class using rent-seeking anchored on their control of assets connected to life essentials (most obviously, Housing) and, especially in the West, their leverage of the Demand Side for Work thanks to having sent most jobs abroad with Globalization (something which was itself pushed by the rich in the 70s and is core in Neoliberalism), they would obviously go after the Middle-Class next.

I mean, did anybody really expect that the Greed of the Owner Class would somehow magically stop when the only large pool of wealth left out of their hands was the one held by the Middle-Class?

What I find funny in all this is the "Modern" "Left" parties were the scions of the Middle-Class obsess over Supposedly-Left-but-really-Liberal ideas (mainly Identity Politics) having forgotten the core concern of the old-fashioned Traditional Left (such as Communism, Socialism, Social-Democracy and independently of one agreeing with their actual solutions of not) which is about Power (in the sense of who, if any, can impose their will on others directly or indirectly) hence totally ignoring the detail that 4 decades of Neoliberalism have de facto turned Money into a Power far above the State, and which most definitelly forces on others choices such as were to live, how to live, and what to do.

The "Modern" "Left" thinking, birthed in the 80s from some ideas from American think tanks and without Equality explicitly as an Ideology (instead they had some pre-made policies for "Equalities" - i.e. Equality on a group by group basis, with how much each person's deserving of fair and equal treatment and access to things in life depending on their "group" membership defined by their genetics, religion, gender, sexual orientation or place of birth - that avoided like the plague even mentioning Equality For All, the only real Equality) were useful idiots for the Neoliberals and now here were are, when even those priviledged scions of the Middle and Upper Middle-Class are starting to be squeezed by the wealthy, whose power they so pointedly avoided talking about and criticizing, must less trying to control and reduce.

Con-fucking-gratulations!

Basic, modern human needs such as housing, healthcare, education, nutrition, utilities (electricity, internet, water & sewage), and transportation should never be a means of profit. As with everything, there is a cost to maintaining these systems and to profit off of them inherently means diverting resources away from these systems that serve our society into the pocket of an individual.

You guys have a middle class?

I'm in the middle of relocating to Ohio. I sold my house in GA and despite getting mildly fucked by the "they're first time homeowners" BS I still have about $130,000 profit from the sale. 100k of that has to go into the down payment just so I can afford anything over 200k.

My initial budget was about 310,000 but I had to bump it up to 350 just to find something that isn't a poorly maintained shit hole that would require 50k just to make it decent again, and to have more than 1.5 bathrooms.

And this is on top of all the houses bought by people who watched a a season of Flippers, and thought it they put shittier grey vinyl on the floor they could net 100k.

It's affecting the working poor worse. the middle class can still afford rent far easier.

Hey, here’s a thought: outside of banks holding the deed in the context of mortgages, corporations aren’t allowed to own residential properties for perma-renting purposes.

Come round everyone! I got a proposal! How about we buy up entire city squares, then remove all vegetation and houses, then build endless labyrinths of corridors, cubes where we can live. And elevators and stairs to reach the next level! Using an elevator is just like riding a commuter bus thru the 4th dimension! Because you start at your cube and suddenly you're at the cube on the next block that corresponds to your cube! But see you didn't have to travel a full block horizontally! You rode vertically!

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Where have you been for the last 30 years? You're just noticing this shit now?

In Canada in top of that, we have 500k-1 million new people entering the country, per year. We have no housing, and not enough services, schools, healthcare, etc.

Canada is about the same population than California, imagine California going from 39 millions people to 40 next year, then 41 the year after, then 42 the next year, etc. Is it sustainable?

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Wait, what?

Hold on. Around here, house prices have falled, dramatically recently.

In fact, 54% increase from 2015-2024 is low. When my house was appraised a year ago, it was +72.5%, it is now +54.5%.

Housing prices, anecdotal as it is, are going in the right direction.