[whowouldathunk]

About the same here in Seattle. It makes saving for a down payment even more depressing.

I don't understand who is able to buy these houses when my partner and I can't as software engineer + physician assistant. Maybe it's just because we're not willing to decrease or dip into our retirement savings and we have no help from parents.

I just don't feel comfortable taking out a jumbo mortgage. Even though we could make the numbers work, I'm not confident either of us won't burn out from our stressful careers.

[finaliteration]

I live in Portland but I’m in the same boat you are. My wife and I make a decent amount of money ($120k+) but a combination of student debt, crazy housing prices, and lack of wealthy family members who can “gift” a down payment leaves me fairly hopeless that we’ll ever be able to buy a house of our own.

We’ve seriously considered moving to the Midwest or the South where houses are affordable, but neither of our jobs allow fully remote work, very few cities in those areas have any sort of tech presence, and we’d be leaving pretty much every family member across the country.

[tjr225]

I live in the area as well and I think the reality is that Seattle is going through a massive change due to densification.

Nobody expects to be able to buy a single family house in NYC- and that will probably soon be the case for cities like Seattle and SF...however this is a relatively recent development for us and therefor a much harder pill to swallow.

I came from the midwest (born and raised) - to respond to the other commenter...home ownership is cool, but I like it out here a lot more. Also, I make WAY more money here. Like 50% more, and I'm at the bottom of the engineer food chain. I make more money than any of my more experienced senior engineer friends back in the midwest. The amount of outdoorsy opportunities, interesting companies to work for, and boom/bust culture is just too exciting. Midwestern cities also experience a lot more violent crime (check out any top 10 list of dangerous cities). I think I heard gunshots almost every night that I lived in Kansas City, MO.

[JBlue42]

Someone posted this the other day and everything it said hit home: http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenni...

Relevant pieces:

>Despite the acres of news pages dedicated to the narrative that millennials refuse to grow up, there are twice as many young people like Tyrone—living on their own and earning less than $30,000 per year—as there are millennials living with their parents. The crisis of our generation cannot be separated from the crisis of affordable housing.

>More people are renting homes than at any time since the late 1960s. But in the 40 years leading up to the recession, rents increased at more than twice the rate of incomes. Between 2001 and 2014, the number of “severely burdened” renters—households spending over half their incomes on rent—grew by more than 50 percent. Rather unsurprisingly, as housing prices have exploded, the number of 30- to 34-year-olds who own homes has plummeted.

>Falling homeownership rates, on their own, aren’t necessarily a catastrophe. But our country has contrived an entire “Game of Life” sequence that hinges on being able to buy a home. You rent for a while to save up for a down payment, then you buy a starter home with your partner, then you move into a larger place and raise a family. Once you pay off the mortgage, your house is either an asset to sell or a cheap place to live in retirement. Fin.

>This worked well when rents were low enough to save and homes were cheap enough to buy.

...

>Since the Great Recession, the “good” jobs—secure, non-temp, decent salary—have concentrated in cities like never before. America’s 100 largest metros have added 6 million jobs since the downturn. Rural areas, meanwhile, still have fewer jobs than they did in 2007. For young people trying to find work, moving to a major city is not an indulgence. It is a virtual necessity.

>But the soaring rents in big cities are now canceling out the higher wages. Back in 1970, according to a Harvard study, an unskilled worker who moved from a low-income state to a high-income state kept 79 percent of his increased wages after he paid for housing. A worker who made the same move in 2010 kept just 36 percent. For the first time in U.S. history, says Daniel Shoag, one of the study’s co-authors, it no longer makes sense for an unskilled worker in Utah to head for New York in the hope of building a better life.

>This leaves young people, especially those without a college degree, with an impossible choice. They can move to a city where there are good jobs but insane rents. Or they can move somewhere with low rents but few jobs that pay above the minimum wage.

>This dilemma is feeding the inequality-generating woodchipper the U.S. economy has become. Rather than offering Americans a way to build wealth, cities are becoming concentrations of people who already have it. In the country’s 10 largest metros, residents earning more than $150,000 per year now outnumber those earning less than $30,000 per year.