[sbov]

Your calculations ignore property taxes and any other tax based upon the value of your house.

Your rates also seem off. http://www.freddiemac.com/pmms/pmms30.html claims the average rate in 1999 was 7.44% and in 2018 it was 4.54%. The fed also just raised their rates in December and plan to do more raising in 2019 so expect these numbers to rise.

Beyond that, it doesn't matter if the price per square foot is the same if they aren't building smaller houses. Points like this is like tricks we pull to keep inflation down. All that matters is how expensive is a house that can put a roof over the head of the number of people I need to. We have 3 kids and we were looking for 4 bedrooms. Newer ones in our area are massive 3,000+ square foot structures we can't afford. So we're stuck in a 50 year old 1900 square foot house that we can afford. With a 50 year old house comes all sorts of annoyances such as asbestos, lead paint, and orangeburg pipes.

[cheald]

Sure, there are lots of factors in play. Property taxes vary by county and are difficult to make broad statements about (in my county, annual increases are capped so my property taxes are not assessed based on the retail value of the property, for example). Rates examples were literally just my first Google results to illustrate via some napkin math that the loan rate has a substantial effect on monthly payment that isn't necessarily captured in the list price.

The temptation when we read stats like "the real price has doubled in 20 years" is to interpret it as "the real payment per comparable unit has doubled", when no such thing is true.

I don't know what your market is like, but mine has had a lot of new townhome development in the 1-2k sq ft range. The idea that we're only building 4k sq ft behemoths just isn't true in my part of the country, at least.

[oliwarner]

50 years is old? Britain here, in my 130yo house.

I'm not sure I'd trust a house that hadn't survived at least one World War and all the weather since.

[lotsofpulp]

There are a lot of efficiency, insulative, and electrical system improvements that have been made since then, assuming the developer didn’t cut all the corners.

[pjc50]

Yeah, it's swings and roundabouts. We recently modernised my grandmother's terraced house. Positive points:

- high ceilings and windows. Predated Parker-Morris: if you can find one those are absolutely the best. Modern houses are horribly shrunken by comparison, especially when we sell by bedroom count rather than area

- good sound insulation

- solid brick construction (although no cavity wall insulation)

Minus points:

- very leaky of heat

- lead piping embedded in concrete floors

- ancient electrical system (already reworked a few times)

- perilously steep staircase

- bathroom had been retrofitted in the 50s. Yes, the house was built without an inside bathroom, I think it only just had an inside toilet.

[lotsofpulp]

I have the opposite problem in the US. All the houses are too big, with high ceilings and giant 2 story foyers. Other than advertising that you can afford higher heating and cooling costs, I don’t understand the purpose of these high ceilings. And the 2 story foyer means the second floor is constantly too warm and 1st floor is too cold as the heat has no reason to stay at the bottom.

[EADGBE]

> And the 2 story foyer means the second floor is constantly too warm and 1st floor is too cold as the heat has no reason to stay at the bottom.

I understand your nitpicking. It was almost a deal breaker for me when we bought our new home. But we have a zoned system regulating the single unit we would have had regardless. There's no temperature difference now between floors. And with the ability to shut off the upstairs until bedtime, we use about 1/3 more energy to heat/cool 3.5x the space.

[EADGBE]

Though much older homes do exist, in the US (they're using a "$" in their comment) 50 years +/- 10 years is pretty commonly the average age for a "mature" house where most of the cities the homes are in weren't established until the mid-to-late 1800's. Especially for the suburbs, which are about the age of these homes.

I grew up in a home built in 1954. It didn't survive a World War, but it's had its fair share of powerful tornadoes, blizzards, and the like and has been relatively unscathed since its inception (minus a new sewer line). With timber framing!

[hellisothers]

+1 in my 100yo house, I’m suspicious of hastily made new developments and prefer a house built when homes were made to last. Of course I live somewhere that gets neither too cold or too hot so...

[skookumchuck]

> We have 3 kids and we were looking for 4 bedrooms

My family was short on bedrooms growing up, so we doubled up. Nothing wrong with that.

[matthewmacleod]

Me too, but it’s definitely a compromise, especially as the kids get older.

I’d rather have a slightly lower-quality property than shared bedrooms unless the situation makes that infeasible.

[cheald]

It's certainly preferable to not have to double up bedrooms, but we have to remember that our parents did it just fine. I grew up in a family of 6 in a 1600 sq ft house. It worked just fine, but we'd look at that today and consider it unacceptably cramped.

Demand for space per occupant has risen. It doesn't make sense to expect our parents' price tags when we're demanding larger properties.

[skookumchuck]

There's some evidence that kids who share bedrooms have better social skills.

Historically, the concept of separate bedrooms is very, very recent.

The expected size of bedrooms has also risen dramatically in the last few years. Some are even bigger than the living rooms of houses built in the 1970s.

[EADGBE]

It's a slippery slope; always needing to be more successful than our previous generations (At a younger age to boot!).