Demand for both single family homes and multifamily units is high and is forecast to increase. However, more and more obstacles are in the way of buyers getting their first home.
This article takes a look at the German model of renting, what they are doing to embrace the rental market, extending average rental to 11 years and capturing 40 percent of their households. Where's the learning?
How to tell if one has made it in America? See if they own a home. For decades, homeownership has been one of the cornerstones of the American dream, and the U.S. housing market was the envy of the world. But that’s changed.
The federal mortgage subsidy complex, which turned (white) America into a nation of homeowners in the postwar decades and helped build the world’s largest middle class, is no longer doing what it’s supposed to. Faced with stagnating wages and ballooning property prices, fewer Americans can afford to buy their own homes.
The mortgage interest deduction and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are turning into regressive subsidies, channeling taxpayer money to rich homeowners and driving up housing costs while a growing group of middle-income renters must fend for themselves. Rent-stabilization laws have become weaker over time. And New York is dealing with a crumbling public housing infrastructure.
“I wish it were triage,” NYCHA head Shola Olatoye told the New York Times in 2014. “It’s beyond triage.”
If the American dream is all about using homeownership to give more citizens a crack at the country’s wealth, that dream is drowning. What can save it?
It’s worth looking to other countries for solutions. This may be a hard concept to stomach: Pride aside, there’s always been the argument that the U.S. is just so different that foreign concepts won’t work here. Here’s the thing though: this country has successfully adopted foreign models in the past. It can do so again.
