Nobody’s buying homes, nobody’s switching jobs, America’s mobility is stalling

https://www.wsj.com/economy/american-job-housing-economic-dynamism-d56ef8fc

by sandwichsphinx • 11 months ago

156 156 11 months ago

toomuchtodo6• 11 months ago

There aren’t enough homes or jobs. What do?

JackMorgan• 11 months ago

We're heading further into a reality where there just aren't enough jobs. All the money has been hoovered into the stock market. There's just not enough floating around to pay people, it's all going into LLM electricity or graphics cards.

We should be living in a time of ease, where the whole planet is sustained with all of us only working a few hours a week. Instead most people are fighting for scraps barely able to afford rent.

It won't continue like this forever. The line doesn't always go up.

Avicebron• 11 months ago

Tentative book title: The Line Stops.

abbycurtis33• 11 months ago

Money doesn't sit in the stock market. Value, sure, but the money goes right back into the economy.

simpaticoder• 11 months ago

Wouldn't it be nice if individuals decided at the start of their career how much money was "enough" for them, and made a pledge to retire once they hit that number. Then society can give them an "I won!" hat or gold card or something, and the next guy can take the role. In this way all enterprises become an engine pulling new hires off the street, and emitting independently wealthy people to go and enjoy their lives.

But instead we have a tiny minority of people who control more and more capital. This has well-known and terrible consequences for society from almost every angle. What I don't understand is why the .1% don't want to step aside and let someone else have a turn. It's funny that our bodies have stomachs, so we know when we've eaten "enough". But money doesn't get stored in the body.

graeme• 11 months ago

If you buy a stock from a new share sale, that goes to the company as capital. The company then spends the money.

The unenployment rate is quite low. There are complaints you can make about the economy but the model of money you laid out is completely wrong.

chao-4• 11 months ago

EDIT: I wrote this in a rush intending to refer to general market entry. In a broad sense, what I ended up writing is incorrect. To preserve the accuracy of the comment history I will not remove my mistake.

All the money has been hoovered into the stock market.

I think you might misunderstand what the stock market is. Or perhaps you misunderstand what what stocks are? When you purchase stock, it doesn't get locked in a vault, with your name written next to it, and the number of shares it got you on that day. That money goes to the company, and they use that to finance their operations (and ideally, further growth). That financing may go directly to salaries, or even if it goes to services, those services are paid to someone who pays salaries.

If your claim is instead that "all" of that money, or some meaningful majority of that money, is going to electricity and AI silicon, I would invite you to do some basic math on the companies involved.

Zambyte• 11 months ago

Make it legal to build homes

FiatLuxDave• 11 months ago

As far as I can tell, the problem isn't so much a lack of jobs or a lack of homes but rather that they aren't in the same place. In small town America, the problem isn't a lack of housing stock, it's that it is hard to afford it with few good paying jobs. In big city America, the problem isn't lack of jobs, it's that it is hard to find a job which pays enough for you to afford the limited housing stock.

I think this is a large reason behind the polarization in America today. We aren't all facing the same aspect of this imbalance.

I was hoping that the work-from-home movement was going to help with this, but RTO seems to be in full swing. So, I think our best bet would be to stop incentivizing the concentration of job creation. Absent a fix, we will have to wait a few decades for the imbalance to even out.

BobbyTables2• 11 months ago

Always hated how every startup sets up office in downtown San Francisco or similarly absurd cost of living area…

Could pay people well but half as much and have nice office in Colorado mountains, Vermont, or somewhere else beautiful…

Of course, startups rarely seem interested in saving money…

gottorf7• 11 months ago

In big city America, the problem isn't lack of jobs, it's that it is hard to find a job which pays enough for you to afford the limited housing stock.

Maybe the more fundamental problem is that in big city America, it's easy for existing homeowners to band together to forbid any further housing stock from being built.

See Silicon Valley: amazing concentration of high-paying jobs, laughably low population density.

dvfjsdhgfv• 11 months ago

I had also hoped WFH would solve that problem. For sure it alleviated it for the time it lasted - at least some people moved to more affordable locations. Unfortunately, for some reason many CEOs decided to take a step back.

UmGuys2• 11 months ago

Build jails and send in the troops ...duh

petra303• 11 months ago

Why get out of a 3-4% loan just to get into a 7-8% loan?

Esophagus43• 11 months ago

I think if you believed 7-8% loans were normal, you might be more likely to bite the bullet and make your move.

But if you believe 3-4% is normal, then you’re probably waiting for rates to return to “normal.”

I think it’s a side effect of years of low interest rates… people are conditioned now to believe low is normal, and they want to hang on until we get back to that.

I was hoping rates would stay “high” for a while which I thought would soften the housing market so I could buy, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Instead of prices dropping, inventory just dried up.

Shows how silly I am for thinking I could time the market.

toomuchtodo6• 11 months ago

Real estate market will soften as the economy comes off the rails [1]. 6-12 months from now should have more motivated sellers depending on market (foreclosures in Clark County Las Vegas market are up 32% year over year June 2025, for example [2]). Short sales and foreclosure auctions are also options. If you still want to buy down the road, be in the strongest financial position possible to get financing and make an offer when the market conditions turn more buyer favorable. Seller concessions can be used to buy down the mortgage rate, if that’s useful information.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/us-housing-markets-falling-p...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44907838

SoftTalker2• 11 months ago

7% is close to normal, historically. But not for the past couple of decades, so people forgot.

hibikir• 11 months ago

It's the other way around. If you think 3% is normal, you buy now and refinance while people think that the house is unaffordable. Remember that lower interest rates make home prices go even higher!

If you think it will stay at 7%, that 3% loan you already have is a treasure to keep using for a decade or two.

kdamica• 11 months ago

I know that 3% interest rates are never coming back and that’s exactly why I’ll probably never move again.

nunez2• 11 months ago

I expressly waited for interest rates to jump before we bought ours. Buying couldn't have been easier because of that.

wakawaka283• 11 months ago

If you could get a lower price on the higher interest loan, you could pay it off early and save a lot of money. If you have a very high price with low interest, paying it off early has much less impact on the amount paid.

DonsDiscountGas• 11 months ago

One could also rent the 3% loan at absurdly high prices. But that also requires the extra effort of being a land lord.

la64710• 11 months ago

Homes are unaffordable to most. Even if you sell your house for a million dollar where will You move to?

As far jobs are concerned the job market is completely fucked up. Their is oversupply and there are no wage increase.

It does not take a genius to understand why there is no mobility.

DANmode3• 11 months ago

Because you've all treated housing as a financial instrument,

instead of what it should be: safety for your family.

jmclnx2• 11 months ago

I look at it as an expense. If you can sell and make a few bucks, great. But I doubt any new buyers will make out.

I expect in the not to distant future, the only way someone will get to own a house is to inherent one.

bobthepanda• 11 months ago

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, and in a world where every home is priced this way it’s not like you could go to an alternative housing market.

clipsy2• 11 months ago

Even if you sell your house for a million dollar where will You move to?

Literally anywhere in the "bottom" 99% of the country by real estate costs?

eigen• 11 months ago

median home price was 410k in 2025Q2 [1] so it may take most/all the net gains to purchase a median house.

1. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

zihotki2• 11 months ago

And what would you do there? Are there enough jobs in those areas?

800xl• 11 months ago

The job market is scary. I can afford a better house right now but am scared shitless I won’t be able to keep my income up. So we stay in our small old house for now, maybe forever.

Esophagus43• 11 months ago

Yes - looking around at the volume of people on the job market after years of layoffs, it is a very humbling experience thinking that if I do end up unemployed, I will have a hard time orchestrating my personal soft landing.

bsder• 11 months ago

Nobody is switching jobs because if you move you likely have to switch two jobs rather than just one.

Improving mobility means that you have to make a single earner household a viable pathway again. That means bring house prices down and subsidizing childcare.

Which would cost a bunch of billionaires a couple of pennies. So it will never happen.

rr8082• 11 months ago

I'm surprised you were downvoted because it is a huge difference with previous generation. Its also a reason people move to big cities because its easy to get a variety of jobs for each partner.

Hammershaft2• 11 months ago

The problem with building more homes and bringing down the cost of housing isn't a couple billionaires as much as a massive geriatric class of NIMBY homeowners.

donatj• 11 months ago

I've been casually job hunting for a couple months since rounds of layoffs started at my company.

I've applied to umpteen places and haven't had a single callback. In my twenty+ years working as a dev, this is the worst I've seen it since about 2005.

khernandezrt• 11 months ago

I’m in the same boat. I’ve been employed since 2019, got laid off 3 weeks ago. I’ve applied to over 70 jobs and not a single has replied other than to reject me. This is brutal.

abnercoimbre• 11 months ago

I'm sorry to hear that. I have close friends who are brilliant (and seniors) but spent 6-8 months finding a new job. Plan accordingly.

sqircles4• 11 months ago

The thing that seemed to work best for me was reaching out to dev shops in my area and starting a conversation even if they didn't have a position posted. Go to meetups and talk to people, join their discord, etc... and job fairs, as lame as they seem, produced contacts for me that are still reaching out "just in case" even though I found a position eventually.

What's old is new again. Get those soft skills warmed up and go out and shake hands.

tennisflyi• 11 months ago

Good luck. Reddit job hunting(?) sub has it pegged at ~400 applications, IIRC

danans2• 11 months ago

I'd caution from reading too much into numbers like this. 400 applications is borderline spamming, putting quantity over quality, which employers would notice.

It can be far fewer if you have a focus/specialty and specific industries that you target.

No doubt though, it's a slog right now. My recent process was around 10 applications - which became 3 interviews - and the last 2 were offers, one that came via a recruiter. Even this is a marked increase in difficulty vs 4 years ago.

sqircles4• 11 months ago

Recently went on the market after my employer of 16 years went to shit. Got lucky with a hybrid gig that is really WFH 98% of the time after 120 applications and 26 interviews spread out over 15 companies. It was a roller coaster that I do not recommend.

ulfw• 11 months ago

There are no jobs. I've done this for two years now. Bunch of bullshit job ads or referrals to jobs that turn out never got approved internally. Tech hiring is gone, especially in non-direct-engineering roles such as Product, Design, Project/Program Mgmt etc

forducks• 11 months ago

Laid off from tech and out of work for two years. Thousands of applications. Ran out of contacts, luck, savings, patience, everything. I start my retail career next week earning $12/hr. I can't even provide for my own rent and utilities anymore, even after moving.

I almost can't believe it's come to this, sometimes. But another part of me says that's just ego talking, and anyways plenty of others are also desperate for any and all scraps to feed themselves. Problems like mine aren't difficult to come by.

mathiaspoint6• 11 months ago

I was laid off recently but I typically keep applying even while I'm employed since I don't think of employment as stable.

It seems better now than it was two years ago.

yolovoe• 11 months ago

Just a single data point against this. I got interviews with 4 companies out of 30 or so I applied to. Cleared all the onsites. Think FAANG, famous hedge fund, popular data analytics platform, and defense. 4 different industries. Job market's not the best, but it's also not that bad if you have 5 YOE+. Offers were good, ~$50-100K over my current pay.

So many people are using AI during the interviews to cheat, as long as you don't use AI and are good at leetcode, probably not that hard to snag an offer. I also interview people at a FAANG, and #1 reason to reject people these days is AI use. If you don't use AI and can leetcode and system design, you're pretty solid and will stand out from other half-baked candidates.

winter_blue• 11 months ago

Was this very recent? The job markets for software engineers has been horrid, at least from mid 2022 to mid 2025. Maybe it’s changed now?

Anecdotally, I know a few engineers with 10+ YOE in NYC, Seattle, and California, all with actual FAANG or FAANG adjacent work experience, who couldn’t find jobs. One of whom even took a minimum wage job, and another who nearly did the same as well.

Maybe the tax code change is kicking off an industry revival?

itake3• 11 months ago

My friend that left cruise got a 2.3x pay bump (post-ipo) moving to Figma in Feb 2025. He also had interviews at Meta and other FANGA (where he used to work).

If tier3 companies are paying $540k-$1.5m for staff in 2025, then I assume the market is turned around.

nlawalker• 11 months ago

interview […] AI use

Can you elaborate? People don’t do well in the interview and say they could do it if they had AI with them? Or…?

Edit: Sorry, I missed “using AI during the interviews to cheat”.

tiltowait• 11 months ago

Not the OP, but I interviewed a candidate for a remote position. He was kind of halting in his responses, until he suddenly wasn't. Borderline erudite, and I recognized some LLM speech patterns. I told my manager I thought he was using an LLM, but we hired him anyway.

After a few months on the job, he hadn't done any meaningful work. His responses to support tickets were clearly written by an LLM and offered only the most generic (and therefore unhelpful) support. He was eventually let go, and deservedly so.

rr8082• 11 months ago

I'm finding it really hard to detect who is using AI and who isn't for leetcode questions. I'm not even sure its a big deal because as soon as they start they get all the AI tools anyway. I try to talk more about their work experience now.

ipnon• 11 months ago

Let me guess, you went to an elite university and you worked in Big Tech? I think you should be proud of your success, but it's not indicative of the larger American economy or the tech industry in general. There are reports that new grads in CS have higher unemployment than philosophy majors. Something is structurally unsound, even if the kernel of the industry composed of people like yourself is sound.

jb3689• 11 months ago

Where though? The only people I see moving around live in Seattle, SF, and NYC where there are tons of open positions

roncesvalles2• 11 months ago

There is a very simple solution to AI cheating and I'm not sure why it hasn't made a comeback - fly candidates in for in-person interviews (which btw, if people remember, was the norm before COVID).

chao-4• 11 months ago

It is difficult to balance the competing priorities of "home ownership is widely affordable" and "home prices must always go up".

When the balance is not broadly possible, our system seems to favor "home prices must always go up", at least in the short term.

Dig1t2• 11 months ago

There are many places in the US where you can buy a house for less than 50k.

If you want prices to drop in popular areas then we have to make it easy for people to actually build houses and increase supply in popular areas. Of course giving homeowners a say about whether housing is allowed to be built near them, of course they are going to vote against it because they have an incentive to keep prices high.

mingus882• 11 months ago

I think it’s natural for homeowners to be resistant to new builds in the same way office workers hated the move to cubicles.

I was in the Midwest recently and it was wild to see a block of high density houses in the middle of farmland. Houses that look exactly the same, shoved onto tiny lots with little gap between them, and surrounded by miles of corn.

These are obviously attractive to developers as they are maximized profit vehicles, but the downsides to everyone else are enormous.

In my opinion, we need to build housing above stores, so communities can actually work. Build a town, not a subdivision. What’s the point of a $50k home if you have to spend two hours a day driving to make it work?

chao-4• 11 months ago

I agree with all of that, but I think there is additional nuance. I would love if the path were as simple as:

(1) Make housing easier to build.

(2) Receive sufficient housing supply.

Even if you make it easier to build houses, there is a market for the capital that housing developers access. Currently, that market also assumes that prices will go up (or at least not go down). Thus, once we go far enough past the point where existing prices are higher than the return on new housing, even all of our dream reforms may not lead to a flood of new housing starts.

I want to be clear: loosening zoning, reforming regulations, and so forth, are all still worth doing. It is better than nothing. But if the result is a shock of supply, the financing for new homes from the biggest players will dry up. That doesn't make a solution impossible, but it does complicate it.

itake3• 11 months ago

Do the homes selling for less than 50k have a job market to supports owning a home at that price?

totallykvothe• 11 months ago

And add to that an unsupportable tax burden to disincentivize large firms buying up hundreds or thousands of homes and then renting them.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF2• 11 months ago

There's a cute little shipping container

https://www.propertyunder50k.com/list_view.php?show_set_aler...

pragmatic• 11 months ago

Many such cases!

simianwords2• 11 months ago

Mostly the priorities are not competing. You can and should build more homes but the end goal is to improve utility of land which can further drive prices up thus helping both cases.

You can first build more homes - prices go down and more people come into the city and prices start going back up because of increased economic activity.

WarOnPrivacy2• 11 months ago

You can and should build more homes

Yes. The entry point to ownership lies within a state of affordability.

but the end goal is to improve utility of land

For who? If it's anyone other than typical wage earners, this goal competes with home ownership by pressuring ownership costs upward and away from affordability.

For context, home purchases are mostly (if not fully) impossible for typical wage earners.

mathiaspoint6• 11 months ago

Who says home prices must always go up? That's an incredibly dumb thing to say. Houses depreciate. Maybe land prices always go up (maybe over very very long time scales because of currency devaluation) but that's a tiny fraction of the value of a home.

There's no good reason to expect homes to magically appreciate.

daedrdev2• 11 months ago

It's basically illegal to build dense homes in most cities. And despite what people say, the vacancy rate is at historic lows so its not just "people are keeping them empty"

Its a disgrace that people deny the supply crunch we are in

Hammershaft2• 11 months ago

Housing as an investment creates all kinds of terribly misaligned political incentives for local democracies. A land value tax would've helped by shifting people's nest egg from the value of their homes to their accumulated savings from income.

As it is, NIMBYism is likely the biggest driver of rising costs of living, rising homelessness, rising municipal debt, and generational class divides.

sovietswag• 11 months ago

I wonder what you'd think about this video from Gary's Economics about the housing crisis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTlUyS-T-_4

It feels to me like a good faith counterargument to the YIMBY build more housing line of thought, so might be an interesting perspective

Ferret74462• 11 months ago

Devil's advocate, I don't think we should keep building more housing insofar as it encourages population growth (which it does). Like highways, there will always be barely enough, no matter how many lanes/houses we build.

But population growth is the overwhelming factor in all of our sustainability issues.

daedrdev2• 11 months ago

So in response to the rapidly rising prices, we should not build any housing because it doesn't matter? Surely there is still a positive benefit since there must be less than one person wanting to move in per new unit otherwise they would have already moved in?

happyraul• 11 months ago

The reason there will never be enough lanes is not population growth. It's that we generally don't provide people with alternatives to driving, and adding more lanes just makes even more people have to drive, since things get even farther apart.

RickS• 11 months ago

WSJ seems to block the normal archives, but absent a gift link, this twitter referral seems to work:

https://x.com/lindsaywise/status/1956170542601421040

UmGuys2• 11 months ago

With an appropriate amount of x: https://xcancel.com/lindsaywise/status/1956170542601421040

anal_reactor• 11 months ago

Unprecedented mobility allowed unprecedented competition. The core of the problem is that when there's a job posting or a house for sale, you're competing not only with people in your local area, but also with people from all over the world. For example, in my city HALF of home sales are to foreigners. The effect is that top x% keeps amassing wealth, while the rest suffers from brain drain and depopulation. Literally same problem as Tinder - it promised men to date all over the world, in effect it made them compete with other men from all over the world, and nobody's getting dates.

The problem will fix itself when moving to a big city completely stops being a viable option, and average Joe will be forced to live in bumfuck nowhere. Once enough Joes stay in bumfuck nowhere, they'll eventually build a working small-scale local economy.

roncesvalles2• 11 months ago

Lack of universal healthcare is the single greatest hurdle to job mobility and entrepreneurship in America in my opinion.

mathiaspoint6• 11 months ago

Almost no one under 40 cares. In fact for most of us we'll net a profit (not expected, straight up in most cases including one or two events) just self insuring.

Eddy_Viscosity24• 11 months ago

In a way this is the ultimate goal of conservatism in its literal sense to conserve. The rich want have their place in society safely entrenched at the top, with no risk of people rising from below to displace them. Those at the bottom should stay locked in there and work and toil because that is the natural order of things.

Herring2• 11 months ago

According to the election and the polls, this is exactly what Americans want.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/americans-vi...

41% of Americans say the government should provide more assistance to people in need
30% say it's providing about the right amount
27% say it should provide less

41-57? If there are issues in America, it's because Americans want it that way.

Eddy_Viscosity24• 11 months ago

Mobility is not just about assisting the those in need, its also about having opportunities for advancement.

If you're trapped in a job because of its health coverage, that's restricting mobility. People can' take the risk on changing jobs/locations or even something like starting their own businesses because of the would lose coverage and don't have the wealth to self-pay.

If you're working so many hours just to cover essentials like rent you just too exhausted to look for better work or take courses for a new profession.

If costs and prices rise way faster than your wages, then you start losing ground and do so at an ever increasing rate while those at the top who live on investments and passive income benefit because the value of their assets rise faster.

If opportunities for high paying jobs dry up because, for example, AI replaces those jobs.

If fees and interest on student debt keeps you locked down forever.

If all best and highest paying jobs just go to family members of the already rich through systemic nepotism.

The list goes on. I'm not which of these the American public voted for.

- people trapped in poorly paying jobs and/or jobs with terrible conditions by blocking or dismantling unions.

- locking people out of high paying jobs via network effects. Like nepotism in hollywood or firms only hiring from certain universities which you can only get into

mathiaspoint6• 11 months ago

Oh cool you've nominally gone after the rich and then pointed at the middle class again. I'm sure this will make you and your ideas popular.

Eddy_Viscosity24• 11 months ago

Yeah, I don't know what this means.

neonate• 11 months ago

https://archive.md/ZH1ab

mathiaspoint6• 11 months ago

The economy isn't doing bad, it's just not there and everyone is still pretending.

Nobody’s buying homes, nobody’s switching jobs, America’s mobility is stalling

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