You have to earn $115,000 a year to afford a typical house now in the US
You have to earn $115,000 a year to afford a typical house now in the US
It's the same across the world.
The problem is that real estate has become an asset, a form of capital.
The only way out of this mess is to shift taxation away from labor and onto capital.
Higher property taxes (1-2%), that can be subtracted from income tax for working people are the answer.
Let's say Joe the Plumber and Elon the Muskrat both have an income of $100K and pay an income tax of $25K.
Joe owns one property worth $1M that he lives in and pays 2% tax on it, $20K. Which gets subtracted from the $25K income tax, meaning he effectively pays $5K income tax + $20K property tax = $25K combined property and income tax. Pretty sweet deal.
Elon owns 20 properties valued $500M collectively, which means $10M in property taxes. He officially resides in the most expensive $100M property and gets a $50K credit for that. The $50K is larger than the $25K, so he pays zero income tax.
Total tax is $10M.
This (or something like it) is the system the whole world must move towards if we want to simultaneously (a) lower taxes on working people (b) increase taxes on property and (C) not let working people lose economic power relative to the capitalists over the longterm.
The middle class has to outsmart the owning class if we want our children to remain middle class.
It really doesn't make sense to talk about averages for something like this in a country as large and diverse as[US is. Median home price in Hawaii is $973k. In West Virginia it's $158k. The average isn't relevant to most people, just the tiny fraction who live in a place where it's about in the middle. Also worth noting that average salaries vary pretty widely, too.
Its also very expensive to be homeless. There is no legal place to loiter or park your car. Even teh public spaces are strictly enforced with no loitering. Where I live anyways, public space is highly protected. If you dont have a private space you can do go, you are forced to constantly be nomadic going from one place to the next until you tire and cannot run away from the enforcement authorities and are jailed. When you exit jail, there is a halfway house or something you are allowed to go in, but thats only temporary and only if you have addiction problems.
We got our house before all of this bullshit back in 2014 before all of this bullshit happened, so we have a decent mortgage, but we really want to move to another town and we'll never be able to afford it until my rich mother dies and I inherit her money and sell her house. Which sucks, because one of the reasons to move is because she lives there.
I can recall a time when people said home prices will never crash, right before they crashed.