And it's only going to get worse, I'm sure.

And start making SIMPLE INTEREST home loans to people.

And the banks can price match, or they can go and die.

have been pretty low for some time. That's not the problem. The problem has many causes. One is that builders prefer to build huge homes to smaller ones because they make more money. Another is that there are more people in a given area than there's housing for, driving up the prices. In some places (this happened in Boulder, CO about thirty years ago) people from somewhere else, say California, which has higher home prices, move to this new place and because of the way tax laws on residential real estate work, they wind up paying far more for a replacement home in the new location, again driving prices up.

We were in Boulder in 1988-90. Bought a home, then a job transfer moved us to the Midwest. Six months after we moved away, housing prices doubled there. Now, the place we lived in is more than 6 times what we paid for it. Scary.

And sold for $72K in 1996. I thought that was a big deal back then, but you should see the outrageous prices here now! If you have a crappy little ranch style with 1200 sq ft anywhere near downtown, it is worth well over a million. That's because a builder wants the land to erect one of those 3000 sq ft mansions. At this point, half of the people working in Boulder are priced out of the housing market.

We lived in the Table Mesa area, in the flat part, not up the hill where homes were newer and already much more expensive.

I really liked out house. I loved living in Boulder. I sometimes wished I told my husband to get a different job rather than take the transfer. Sigh. Water under the bridge.

the real cause is the lack of Wage growth in our Nation. Austerity works for the Ruling class and that is about all. Take a look at what is really happening in the UK and Australia,it is playing out in real time.

Conservative Policy will in time destroy Economies.

Hard to buy a new 2018 house when you are making 1970’s wages.

With tens of thousands in college debt hanging over your head as well in many cases.

got Kids battling that at this moment. Think they might be waiting for the Old People to croak or something. Told them,don't count your Inheritance for at least twenty years.

However, in my neck of the woods I see two problems with housing.

1) Builders only building luxury homes and apartments and completely ignoring affordable homes. Affordable homes are often bought as teardowns only to be replaced by a luxury McMansion.

2) The only affordable homes in the area are 55+.

I live in Springfield, MO. To the south east of the center of the city is Missouri State University. In the area between, until about 7 or 8 years ago, were a lot of working class homes. Many of these were rentals, but not all of them. There were many affordable older homes. Now, these are being leveled a block at a time for large blocks of cheap student apartments that will be trashed 10 years from now. And, this phenomenon is spreading beyond just the area between the school and downtown. I suppose out south of town, McMansions are still being built. I do see a few smaller homes being built to the north of town, but the scale is small.

The silver lining of the apartment boom is that our downtown commercial district has gone from nearly derelict to thriving again. The older commercial buildings are being retained and getting new leases on life. I like that aspect, but affordable housing for the average worker is shrinking here.

The homes I see being built in KCMO start at about $250,000 and go up from there. I couldn't qualify for the garage.

is.

This really used to be a place of substance.

Worse than that, the lack of reasonable commercial rental space is hurting our small businesses and driving up prices.

The real issue is WHO OWNS MOST OF THE PRIVATE AND COMMERCIAL RENTAL SPACE AND HOUSING? you will find that most of it is owned by non-Americans but foreign interests. Many may have dual citizenship but basically it is foreign owned. Chinese, Korean, Dutch, Irish, Japanese, Russian, Saudi, Israeli. Absentee landlords who have all the money they want and don't give a damn about American workers. In fact, they relish the economic vice they have us in because it is well hidden.

Money laundering for real property like that which your beloved President was and is involved in.

People don't know what they don't know and the powers keep us focusing on shit that only serves to keep us at each other's throats.

from 1976 to 2005, and every boom is followed by a bust. The frenzy of the boom always leads to conditions that guarantee a subsequent drop in housing prices. Rising mortgage rates are inevitably a sign of the decline to come, as they start making homes unaffordable.