this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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That tracks with my experiences. It's partly lack of money, but it's partly financial irresponsibility. A lot of Americans are so used to crisis and struggle that they treat every windfall as a treat because they think that their savings slowly fading away or getting eaten in a few chunks is a problem rather than evidence of crises they didn't have to suffer through. Add in the fact that their lifestyles rise to match their income and there's no room for savings.
That's not enough to resolve the big stuff, a low earner isn't buying a house on saved tax returns. But a medium income household might be, and a low income household may be setting themselves up for disaster by buying too expensive of a car because they can afford the payments.
Too few Americans understand that living paycheck to paycheck should be seen as dire financial straits. The goal should be a few months expenses in savings, and if you can take a lifestyle hit to get there you should. My wife and I live in a studio apartment because we were worried about draining our savings too quickly while unemployed.
It would take well over a decade for a medium income household to save up enough money for a down payment on a house with their tax returns. And that's assuming it was placed in a safe investment the whole time like in CDs or bonds. The housing market's just too expensive. I can see the appeal of people using up their money when they get it if it means saving might take an unbearable amount of time, not that it's in their best interest to however.
That greatly varies by location. Especially if you can find a house right outside city limits.
where do you live that closing a house is 5K? closing costs are typical 4-5% of a houses value... so you bought a 100K house? like, what, 20 years ago?
closing costs for a condo in my state are going to run you 15-20K.
first time home buyer programs in my state are capped at a 72K income... on which you could afford a about a 1800 mortgage... the cheapest mortgages you can get are going to run you closer to 2500-3000. so by the time you can afford that mortgage, you need about 125-150K income...
I bought a 100k house 4 years ago with about 13k in down payment+closing costs. Yes I live in a smallish town and that comes with some compromises, but it is an option that exists for people. With the subsequent boom and then normalization of house prices my house has gained about 40k in value, so where I closed with a purchase price of ~120k, it's now showing a value of around 160k (and peaked around 180k a year or two ago)
There's also plenty of large and major cities with home values of around 200-400k if owning property is your long term goal. Quite frankly if that is your long term goal there are options. Maybe you buy a fixer-upper and invest a bunch into repairs and renovations over time. Maybe you have a friend or two you can have join you in a purchase to increase your buying power. Maybe you buy a duplex/multifamily home with a friend or 3. Maybe you buy a duplex/multifamily home and rent out the other units to strangers. Maybe there's a nice place where you can still commute into your city where home values aren't outrageous. Maybe you know someone who aready owns a house and you can convince them to build an ADU for you to rent, or even come to an aggreement to finance the ADU and later subdivide the lot so you can eventually own the property. Maybe you get a property that can be a business like a wedding venue or a museum or a hotel? Maybe you up and leave and move halfway across the country or halfway around the world. Maybe you sell everything, leave everything behind and go buy a small house in the country and drive a school bus or start an organic greenhouse or run a shop. Options exist especially at your income level. You just have to be willing to take a risk
It doesn't exist for the vast majority of the population.
Most of the USA population lives in major cities. 80% of it is urban.
I already own a condo. Stop pretending like what you are talking is available to the majority of the population, it's not, by definition.
Going forward, the only people who will be able to afford homes are the wealthy, who are in the top 10% income and wealth brackets. Everyone else will be renting from them. You can't scale any of what you are talking about, all you are saying is 'a minority of people will have to go to extraordinary techniques to own property'.
Unless housing prices collapse worse than 2008, and nobody wants that either.
Just because some of us are 'successful' doesn't mean the vast majority of folks are systematically denied the possiblility...
I went to Harvard. 50% of the slots at Harvard go to legacy or other pre-approved admits. I was a poor kid... the vast majority of people from my background, don't even go to college, let alone really the top tier ones. Because the wealthy of stacked the deck systematically to advantage themselves at the expense of everyone else.
The idea of 'working you way up' is rapidly diminishing to the point that Gen Z kids only have a 10% change of 'bettering' their wealth/income, and most of them are dependent on parental wealth to keep them in their existing income class.
I'm not pretending that shit isn't bad, but doomerism isn't going to help anything. I'm trying to inject some hope in because if you can't build a better future if you can't imagine a better future. At the individual scale there are always options other than renting forever, and some can be really brilliant options for the right people
There is doomerism, an there is economic reality.
I'm talking about the economic reality. Like the fact more than half of millennia home owners had financial assistance from their parents to purchase a home.
Most people under 50 cannot afford to purchase a home solely based on income alone. It's a hard, cold, fact. And it gets worse for those under 40, and worse still for those under 30.
You can whinge on about fantasizing, I am going to stick to hard cold facts.
Another fact, we have underbuilt housing for 35 years. and we are still underbuilding it, meaning this problem will only get worse and worse unless we start constructing 3x the housing units we currently do.
Again, shits bad, but you're conflating the experience in famously unaffordable cities to the entire country.
The median home sale price in the US for Q4 of 2025 is almost exactly 400k. A conventional 30 year mortgage with 20% down comes out to a monthly payment of $2200/mo, and for a healthy ~30% debt to income you'd need a household income of about $100k/yr. Yeah that's not great at all, but that's with everything 100% conventional and median. You can reach 100k household income with 2 incomes pretty easily since most professional careers will pay around 40-60k/yr
Shop for more of a starter home at 300k (again, the median is 400k which means depending on the market you can very easily spend more or less than that and there's plenty of large cities with home prices starting around the 200k range) and that comes down to about $1800/mo or a household income of 70k. That's feesible for a single working professional at mid/late career, but more importantly that's an easy household income to hit with 2 average working class incomes
Again, shits bad but it's not completely unattainable in most of the country. Saying that because no average person can realistically expect to be able to buy a home in LA or Seattle or New York therefore nobody can isn't spitting facts, it's being a doomer. Can an average person expect to buy a property in a city where the median home price is nearly 7 figures? Of course not! But that's not the reality for most of the country.
Most large cities follow the median home price of 400k, some happen to have lower and some happen to have higher medians. And even better, for a person who isn't too married to the idea of living in a major city, small town America has plenty of wonderful homes for under 200k or even under 100k and some of these small towns are actually quite lovely and haven't been completely destroyed by conservative politics. Again, I'm being real here, shits bad, but it ain't the shitshow youre describing for the entire county
The median income is 70K.
ok so it was a decade ago, when housing values were like 1/3 of what they are today....
hence it seems very out of touch.
in 2017 I was making like 50K a year and houses were 300K. Now I make 150K and houses are 750K. lol
I make more than 85% of people in my city...
mere mortals can't afford homes anymore unless they get windfalls or work their way into jobs that have top 10% incomes.
the average doesn't matter. what matters is the median income to median house price ratio.
yes, in some shitty places, with really low incomes, that nobody wants to live, housing prices didn't skyrocket... but that's not true for desirable areas with good economies.
i can go buy a mansion in Louisiana or Mississippi, but why would I want to live in a state where the qualify of life is on bar with African countries?
lol no. My income is below median. I have a condo. I will never own a house.
Everyone I meet thinks I'm poor as dirt, because their expectation for a 'stablilty' is 300-500K/yr and a 1.5million dollar home.