Joe Biden doesn’t want me to buy a house
Kaylee McGhee White
Video Embed
My husband and I have been scoping out the housing market for the past three years, hoping for the right time (and price) to buy our first home. But like many young people, it seems we’ll be waiting a while yet.
A new report from the Wall Street Journal reveals just how forbidding the housing market has become over the past few years. Home prices skyrocketed toward the end of the pandemic due to pent-up demand, and when prices finally started to come back down, mortgage rates rose to take their place. As of last week, the average mortgage rate is 7%, more than double what it was two years ago, and the median home price is about $392,000.
FED OFFICIALS PENCIL IN THREE RATE CUTS FOR 2024
The crushing interest rates are the immediate problem. Regardless of whether a buyer is able to refinance later, he’s still stuck spending tens of thousands per year on interest alone, which also means he won’t be able to buy as much house as he technically can afford. The Wall Street Journal uses this example: “Before the Fed started raising rates, a person with a monthly housing budget of $2,000 could have bought a home valued at more than $400,000. Today, that same buyer would need to find a home valued at $295,000 or less.”
This is affecting younger buyers like myself the most. In fact, the average age of first-time homebuyers is now 36, according to the Wall Street Journal. Compare that to the ’60s and ’70s, when the average age was 25.
This shift is already having an effect not just on the economy, but on our culture and the ways in which we orient our lives. A record-low number of people, for example, still believe the American dream is attainable, a separate Wall Street Journal survey found. This disillusionment is especially pronounced among my generation, Generation Z, and younger millennials. It’s not a coincidence that these same demographics are waiting longer to get married and have children, with many deciding to forgo the whole family thing altogether.
Though this pessimism didn’t crop up overnight, it is strongly tied to the poor economic conditions of the past three years. President Joe Biden, in particular, deserves the blame for the downturn since it was he who demanded additional stimulus funding, forced through his multibillion-dollar Inflation Reduction Act boondoggle, and stopped collecting hundreds of billions in student loan repayments. Economists warned Biden that each of these policies would have disastrous consequences down the road — and here we are, three years later, suffering those exact consequences.
Well, all of us, that is, except Biden, who owns two multimillion-dollar homes. The rest of us get to keep scrolling Zillow and hope our rent doesn’t go up.