Exclusive: most renters surveyed by Harris Poll say the areas they live in have become so unaffordable they are ‘barely livable’
The poll, conducted by the Harris Poll Thought Leadership and Future Practice, asked survey takers to identify themselves as renters or homeowners, along with other demographic information. Those polled were asked their opinion on home ownership in the United States. For many, especially renters, the outlook is bleak.
Though the vast majority of renters polled said they want to own a home in the future, 61% said they are worried they will never be able to. A similar percentage believe no matter how hard they work, they’ll never be able to afford a home.
“When you think about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and housing is right at that foundational level of security, the implications on consumer psyche when things feel so unaffordable is something that will impact everyone,” said Libby Rodney, chief strategy officer at Harris Poll. The American dream of owning a home “is looking more like a daydream for renters”.
When I was in my late teens/early twenties I truly thought that in ten years I’d own a home for sure, with some hard work and dedication.
Ten years later, I don’t even get to buy groceries every week or eat every day. I’ve lost 30 pounds in the last year just from skipping so many meals.
I can’t wait to see what the next ten years holds.
And if one more person tells me I should make sure to invest for retirement… I can’t even feed myself, what you want me to invest? My retirement plan is work until I’m too old/sick/injured and then off myself.
I wasn’t smart enough to make that choice this time around, but next life being born into a rich family is my number one criteria :)
It’s really quite easy. Just cut out the avocado toast, stop buying those expensive coffees, and invest that cool $69,000,000 your parents left you from their work on the board of an orphan crushing factory.
One of my friends solved this by sitting down with her parents and having them ‘help her budget things out’.
Suddenly they shut up about it. And gave her some money. So all it takes with some people is rubbing their faces in it so they can’t pretend prices are the same as they were in the 50s.
I posted in another thread that I have nothing to save for retirement but people chastise me for getting the occasional chai latte or buy Taco Bell for my kid once in a while and I got the response, “what are you going to do about your child’s future?”
Hope we can afford to feed her until (if ever) she can make it on her own?
As if I could put the $20 or so a month on “luxuries” like those into a savings account and become a millionaire by the time I’m 65.
Sorry, I definitely might come off as rude in this comment, but this line of thought really annoys me. Do you think people are poor simply because they’re too dumb to think “I should spend less money on groceries?” Don’t you think they’ve already considered finding a better-paying job, if such a possibility exists for them? If moving is even an option for them (which is a big if), where do you suggest they get the money to rent a moving truck, as well as the money for a security deposit on a new apartment?
Your comment is about as helpful as asking “Have you tried not being poor?”
Do you think people are poor simply because they’re too dumb to think “I should spend less money on groceries?”
It’s usually spending money poorly, yes. But I don’t blame them, I blame the lack of education on these topics.
If you aren’t even using freely available budgeting options, then I recommend to start there and assess spending.
I very rarely encounter people who complain about money but also have real concrete budget. If I ask it’s usually met with excuses and changing the topic.
If you truly have a genuine budget and still can’t figure out where the money is going, then it’s a more serious chat.
But the absurd frequency you see people posting about how they can’t afford groceries and lo and behold, they’re buying a bunch of overpriced garbage and paying extra for non necessities, it’s bananas.
If you complain about food costs and I find out you don’t know how to break down a whole chicken, I feel a little less bad for you.
If I find out your buying dumb shit, my empathy starts to go down.
I lived with and worked in a poverty stricken industry for many many years, and the constant frequency I saw people complain about money one day, then waste money the next, has gradually over time led me to just assume most people are completely inept when it comes to budgeting.
And I mean, it’s not exactly a required course in high school, so I am not that surprised.
And it’s mostly food, drugs, and alcohol when it comes to wasting money.
That and the “buying little things you dont need thatll end up in the trash” I see often. Fast fashion and all that jazz.
It’s a serious problem honestly.
Oh dear, thought I recognized that name and vibe. You’re not here to repeat this kind of thing again, are you?
Missing the other big factor:
There’s a large quantity of influencers profiting off of doomsaying and convincing millennial they can’t afford homes with bad math and bogus statistics. They churn out clickbait content with unfounded claims, purposefully designed to rile up viewers and drive engagement.
This of course applies to many topics, housing affordability just being one, that turns out drive big engagement by spreading disinformation.
It’s actively profitable to lie on the internet nowadays, so lots of my fellow millennials have an extremely soured and warped perspective of reality, because if you keep getting told lies by enough different random strangers on the internet on a topic you aren’t familiar with, you’ll start to believe it.
Spreading disinformation, especially about serious topics like economics, medicine, politics, religion, etc, needs to be cracked down on more. Posing as a professional online and spreading damaging info on purpose should result in jail time imo.
Off topic tanget but I’m pretty tired of being told “housing is affordable, just not where YOU want to live” I’m in a midwest state and buying a home anywhere near a city is apparently now a luxury.
All my home owning friends keep telling me to stop throwing away my money on rent, and just move somewhere the nearest grocery store is quick 40 minute drive away. There are USDA loans to help, no city tax, no homeless or crime, if I could only stop clinging to “societal interactions and infrastructure” I could have a great homestead!
What a joke.
if I could only stop clinging to “societal interactions and infrastructure” I could have a great homestead!
This is so true, and something that really gets ignored in the discussion. I don’t WANT to move to bumbfuck nowhere where I have no roots, I want to stay and give back to the community that raised and nurtured me into the person I am today. Unfortunately I (and a lot of others) have been priced out by home speculators.
How is there a loneliness epidemic in all age groups of our society, and yet no one is asking if one of the factors might be people having to move for education and then work to chase affordability, while getting pushed further and further away from their social networks?
It’s not actually a joke, it’s the reality of the current housing market. If you want to own a house now or soon, that is where they are affordable. The other part of that reality to face is that this situation is not going to be fixed anytime soon, so you will have to deal with it by renting a high-priced small place in a big city, or taking the option to own your home where you can afford to buy.
I’m on track to have my house paid off about 15 years early, out here in rural USA where houses can still be bought. I would never trade this life to live in a big city, unless it was free to do so. It’s 5 minutes away from 2 grocery stores, 30 minutes away from the largest city in this part of the state. Most people in my area commute about 20-30 minutes to work. All of my peers own their own houses here too.
So you can laugh all you want at that “joke” but those of us living it are laughing at you paying $2000 a month for rent.
Veterans get their loans backed by the government, so no down payment.
It allowed me to get a decent sized 3 bedroom house on almost an acre inside of a metro location… For $400 more than a 1 bedroom apartment down the street a decade ago. I got two friends as roommates at first, paid lower than my old rent and they saved up their own down payments and both moved out into homes they bought in just a few years because I charged really cheap rent.
I just checked, my old apartment has went up $700 in that decade.
The Down Payment is the hardest part of buying a home. You can’t save up 25k while paying what’s essentially a mortgage payment.
Give first time homebuyers the same program, and loads of people who think they’ll never own a home would be able to do so and pay less than renting within just a few years.
If we don’t do anything, those people are going to be lifelong renters.
We were lucky enough to buy in 2019 before everything got out of sight in our area. We used a FHA loan which required a 3% down payment and I got a first time homebuyer grant that covered all of that which allowed us to pay closing and moving costs since we were leaving in a hurry due to the small podunk town we lived in for 12 years stopping extra trash haul off and allowing trash burning in town instead. Almost every day my house was full of smoke. I had to choose between my home or my health. We were outbid on about a dozen houses by landlords. With the loan type we got stuck with a PMI, but even with that and extortionate Texas home insurance rates we still pay half of the renters in the house next to us. Although we’ll never be able to afford moving now and if we had waited any longer we would have been stuck in the corrupt small town EPA violation. We paid 96k for a brick 3/1 and five years later it’s shot up to 240k in value. I feel bad for the people that can’t get one now because I fear it’s more going to get any better when half the country cares more about voting for the people they believe hate the same people they do.
because I fear it’s more going to get any better when half the country cares more about voting for the people they believe hate the save people they do.
This is absolutely not an endorsement of fascist traitors and everyone should absolutely (1) vote and (2) pick Biden, but I feel compelled to point out that a lot of the factors causing the housing crisis (car dependency, NIMBYism, etc.) are thoroughly bipartisan.
I mean absolutely. Lobbying, no party actually representing progressive ideas, and corporatism insures that if nothing else does. I’m just saying that the people who tend to vote for the fascist traitor always vote against their own interest. I’m sure it’ll trickle down any old time though. checks watch
How so? This is about home ownership. People who own homes don’t want new apartment buildings going up next to them so vote against that. But apartment buildings do not have home owners.
People are perfectly fine living in suburban sprawl which is what NIYMBism is most often associated with. So there is some argument that this causes higher rent but it seems quite the stretch to apply it to also blame it on home prices.
There is a federal first time home buyer program even for non military members. You can put basically 0% down on your first house. You just also have to pay PMI until you have 20% equity in your home. So you are better off making as large of a down payment as you can but it can be as low as 0%. Of course there’s still closing costs but that doesn’t cost too much more than most rentals charge for a security deposit anyways. As far as PMI goes it isn’t that expensive. With the PMI, taxes, and insurance included my mortgage payment on a 3 bedroom house is still less than rent on a 1 bedroom apartment in my area.
It’s better than renting, but PMI is a racket and needs to be discontinued. It’s a handout to the wealthy. The mortgage insurance is the property itself. If you don’t pay your loan, they take the property. It’s a hassle to foreclose a house, but I think mortgage lenders do just fine overall. They must assume some risk, it’s part of the deal.
Corporations should not be allowed to own and rent out multiple dwellings beyond a single apartment building.
Corporations can’t be trusted to run an apartment building either.
Apartment buildings should be owned by their tenants.
Renting by itself would be fine, it’s just that there’s barely any rent control in North America, and you’re constantly at the mercy of your landlord, inflation and general greed. Put national standards for renter protection and rent increases in place and this would be much less of a problem.
Renting should never be the goal and always leaves you at a disadvantage and subject to market forces.
For decades renters were “pulling one over” on landlords and told there was no reason to ever own a home. Now it’s come back to bite them in the ass.
Rent wouldn’t even be an issue if everyone had been fighting for unions and min wage increases all along.
Wouldn’t it make sense to minimize that disadvantage then? There will always be people who have no other choice but rent, so they should be protected from exploitation. And stronger renter protection could cool down the housing market, because it makes being a landlord work multiple properties less attractive. Win-win if you ask me.
