New US homeownership measure puts people first

https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2026/new-homeownership-measure-puts-people-first

by throw0101a • 1 day ago

207 359 1 day ago

bell-cot3• 1 day ago

No mention of vacation homes, homeless people, or some other situations - but their new metric appears to treat those properly.

(Yes, I saw the reference to dorms, nursing homes, & prisons.)

azath92• 1 day ago

Looking at the statistics that are used to measure growth and performance at a population level are such a great window into how they themselves are opinionated stances.

The two measures are both great measures of house ownership that measure different things. The article frames the second one as better, and if you are looking to see the ownership proportion of people (for example as they note to look at the numbers of young people who live with parents) thats great. If however you care about the housing development decisions that will incentivise owner occupancy you might care more about the standard owner occupancy per household.

I often see this with respect to GDP/GDP per capita vs mean income and other economic measures, but its great to see a non economic measure like this compared in this way.

ajross3• 1 day ago

If however you care about the housing development decisions that will incentivise owner occupancy

Genuine question: who, precisely, cares about "incentivising owner occupancy" as a policy goal? What interest does that serve and why should the government prioritize maximizing that metric?

Basically right now we measure "what fraction of homes are occupied by an owner" and not "what fraction of people live in their own home?". It seems bleedingly obvious that the latter is the number we should be maximizing, if either. And in particular it seems to me that a lot of argument about the former is actually using it as a proxy for the latter anyway.

No one cares about the poor homes who don't have local owners!

estearum2• 1 day ago

The theory behind it is that 1) economic growth generally accrues to land values so distributing land ownership is one way to distribute wealth and 2) people generally treat the things they own better than the things they rent or consume.

Incentivizing ownership is more closely aligned with objective (1) while owner-occupancy is more closely aligned with objective (2).

These don't work in the presence of capital's outsized returns though, which allows people who (for whatever reason) have access to more capital to recursively seize more of the growth in land values from objective (1) and therefore price out objective (2).

milanhbs• 1 day ago

You might want to maximize owner occupancy because you care about the poor homes who don't have local owners - as an owner living in the home might be better incentivized to take care of it and provide decent living conditions, for example.

bluGill7• 1 day ago

More importantly, nobody cares about the people where renting is their ideal condition (at least for now - in different situations different ways of living are ideal). There should be nothing wrong with renting. Owning your own should be a worse choice if you will live there for less than 5-10 years. Owning a home should be only slightly better if you will live there for more than 10 years - not enough better to make up the hassles of owning.

If you rent make sure you vote. Make sure you have an informed vote, all too often cities will put rules on rental units that make renting worse for you. (bad tenants and bad landlords exist - good tenants and good landlords need protection from the former). Likewise while rent obeys supply and demand, when property taxes go up that factors into supply and will make rent go up indirectly - is it worth it? (I cannot answer the later question - the more important consideration is make sure the taxes are similar for rental and owned units otherwise you are a renter are harmed)

cucumber37328422• 1 day ago

Allowing people access fairly illiquid and predictable housing allows and incentivizes them to prioritize things on longer timelines which is good for society.

jvanderbot3• 1 day ago

A key difference is illustrated in TFA. To maximize fraction of people owning a home, you dislike people renting or living with a homeowner. A spouse that marries a homeowner, for example. It would be "better" if they broke up and owned their own separate homes. Or perhaps they could buy two homes, one for each. Or they could by two homes and rent a third to actually live in - same metric value.

To maximize fraction of homes with their owner living inside, you focus on the ownership _and_ the lifestyle choice. A family living together is the best use of land in this case. A family renting a side room to a college kid is still the best use of land. If every home were lived in by its owner, you could still have 90% of your population renting and not building generational wealth.

vintermann• 1 day ago

If you live in a place which is used only for vacation homes, or worse, only as investment objects, you know the value of owner occupancy.

Non-occupants contribute very little to the actual value of a place - they don't work here, they don't buy here. But they capture much of the value of other people trying to make the place a pleasant place to live, though rising real estate values.

alphawhisky• 1 day ago

I think that single family homes as a speculative asset needs to be done away with. If all this energy and investment went to purchasing, say, agricultural land, then more "little" people could own that and protect against institutional investors. Small landlords were only good because they kept institutional investors away, but now that they can't purchase more homes, the small real estate investor's money would be better used to hedge against market capture in the next thing up the hierarchy of needs, i.e. food. If we keep walking this back, then eventually we can prevent assholes from speculating on basic needs.

throw0101d2• 1 day ago

Genuine question: who, precisely, cares about "incentivising owner occupancy" as a policy goal? What interest does that serve and why should the government prioritize maximizing that metric?

Culturally, in many countries it helps with household formation (coupling, starting families), which, in an age of low birth rates, can be useful.

Aurornis• 1 day ago

TL;DR: Instead of measuring the percentage of homes that are owned by people who live there, they want to measure the percentage of adults who own a home.

Feels like an apples and oranges situation. The two numbers each have their own value but they’re measuring different things.

One is calculated based on the number of houses, the other is a measured based on the population of adults or households. Both measures have always existed. Trying to replace one with the other doesn’t seem right because they both have value for different reasons.

bluGill7• 1 day ago

Both also make the assumption that owning a house is good. Renting should be just as good.

an0malous• 1 day ago

Why? It’s a position of less security and stability

CuriouslyC• 1 day ago

If houses are capital, renting can never be just as good without de-incentivizing renting via legislation, which in reality will result in a massive rental shortfall, since nobody is going to maintain rental property when they could just invest their money in another asset.

AbsurdCensor2• 1 day ago

Renting isn't 'good' though in many metrics. Ownership is, and that's what the push should be for, rather than promoting basically a monthly subscription to have a roof over your head.

pmnelson• 1 day ago

Another similarly flawed measure is household income (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...), which is used frequently as a measure of socio-economic class. Under this measure, a single adult making $90k and a household of two adults and two children making $90k combined are treated equally, which has always struck me as quite stupid.

giancarlostoro2• 1 day ago

If both parents work they're also easily spending roughly 30+ grand a year on daycare alone. The DCFSA can help, but its tapped out at 7500 atm, which is cute, but unrealistic. A real daycare following all the best standards is not cheap, its like a second mortgage. I can see a major difference in my daughter coming back from daycare, I mean she knows things I don't think I knew when I was her age...

AbsurdCensor2• 1 day ago

If both parents work they're also easily spending roughly 30+ grand a year on daycare alone.

Depends on how old the kids are, because at least in most cases, daycare costs are for a very short period of time compared to the the overall life of the child. And the average in most states is wildly all over the place.

We absolutely should be focused on free childcare, or ideally ways that parents don't need childcare to begin with, but I don't think that has a lot to do with household income. Hell, at that point, why as well talk about transportation costs, as it's different in a single household vs a two parent two kid household, and different still depending on where you live.

GodelNumbering2• 1 day ago

There was a youtube video sometime ago that argued about how life has vastly improved in every single aspect (with numbers about how 'stuff' has gotten universally more affordable), only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income and how that proves we have a better quality of life because of that.

It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours, disproportionately affects people's sense of content and wellbeing. Also, doesn't help that laws and government policy heavily favor home owners (perhaps because home owners vote at a lot higher rate than renters)

applfanboysbgon4• 1 day ago

Singapore is surveyed as either the happiest or second-happiest country in Asia (IIRC), with at one point a >95% homeownership rate due to government policy (although I believe that's now closer to 90%, in part due to foreign immigration?). It seems self-evident that having a home is somewhere on the order of 1000000x more important than being able to buy lots of cheap junk that barely matters.

sarchertech2• 1 day ago

A lot of that cheap junk is clothing and food, which now both make up a much lower percentage of total income than they did 100 years ago.

ch4s311• 1 day ago

Finland is consistently ranked as the happiest country in the world and has a home ownership rate comparable to the US. Denmark ranks 3rd and has a slightly lower home ownership rate than the US. Oh, and Singapore ranks 36th[1], while the US is 23rd[2].

So you're probably wrong on all points here.

[1] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/SGP

[2] https://data.worldhappiness.report/country/USA

I'm curious what people are quibbling with here? Romania has the world's highest rate of home ownership at 96% and only ranks as 34th in happiness. Or maybe Kazakhstan but I can't verify the data on that, and it's right beside Romania in happiness. Switzerland has the world's 4th lowest rate of home ownership and ranks 10th happiest. It seems like from a data perspective there is no empirical support for the idea that home ownership directly correlates to societal happiness.

threetonesun2• 1 day ago

Also if you buy lots of cheap junk for your apartment and then have to move, you will not be happy.

pibaker2• 1 day ago

Singapore is also a city state and has a land and housing policy that can't be easily replicated elsewhere. Tell Americans they will be shoved into government built high rises with racial quota and see what happens.

smaudet2• 1 day ago

What crack was the YTber on?

Income has only raised ~15% (on average), while inflation has been at 30%... meanwhile in the past century, money has lost 96% of its value...

Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...

sarchertech2• 1 day ago

What is the time period for you numbers?

smallmancontrov4• 1 day ago

Durable goods have deflated compared to wages while health care, housing, and education soared. If you are given the job of spinning this (or take it upon yourself in a bid for access), focusing on the former to the exclusion of the latter is how you do it. "Think of the iPhones! Never mind that rent in a mid-rate city is 1 iPhone and 2 big screen TVs every month!"

swiftcoder2• 1 day ago

Not sure how that translates at all into "stuff" being more affordable...

I'm pretty sure "stuff" in this context is mostly manufactured goods, and those have fallen in absolute price. Examples abound in the tech sector: even adjusted for inflation, a MacBook Neo is the cheapest Mac ever released, and so on...

smallmancontrov4• 1 day ago

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives. It's undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive. I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that, but yeah, this is all downstream of structural incentives so fixes are only going to happen through legislative choices that will make people angry and until then the problems will continue to get worse.

CGMthrowaway• 1 day ago

this is all downstream of structural incentives

You are mostly right and the structural incentives are more related at root to unsustainable national debt than any legislative choice (unless that's what you were referring to)

rayiner8• 1 day ago

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives.

BLS says housing, transportation, and food are the top 3. Insurance/pensions is #4, but that also includes car and homeowners insurance and retirement contributions.

Over the past 50 years, both transportation and food got cheaper. Moreover, clothing actually used to be one of the top categories, but that’s fallen off completely.

GodelNumbering2• 1 day ago

undeniably a little cool that luxuries got cheap, but it's severely un-cool that necessities got expensive

Well said. Being told that 'you should be happy without owning' to a party that can't afford to own by another party who is actively scooping up the same resource can feel extremely invalidating.

My personal take is that a lot of support for contemporary political extremism in many countries comes from the fact that a significant portion of population is pissed off and see no realistic chance of the 'settle down and thrive' life, not because they are racist/prejudiced or whatever (although labeling them as such only makes things more extreme)

jenniferhooley2• 1 day ago

Or we just wait for automation and robotics to make building housing much cheaper and the free market system to fix things - which 5 years ago I assumed was too far out, but with all the advances in the sector, seems like we might get significantly cheaper building costs within the next 10 years or so.

kakacik• 1 day ago

Health care, housing, and education

In Europe its only housing, and still proportionally cheaper than what US has, often in higher quality for older homes (bricks / concrete vs cheap creaky wooden houses).

The idea of saving massive amounts for my kids potential university studies is ridiculous to me. Same for any health issue. I mean any health issue as long as I can work, and then social state takes over (that is not ideal but at point nothing is).

This is also how happiness can be defined - lack of (much shorter list of) constant worries and pressures to deliver, sustain etc.

huijzer• 1 day ago

I'm glad to see a focus on pushing statistics to do a better job of reflecting that

“You have lies, damned lies, and then you have statistics”

testing223212• 1 day ago

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives

In every developed country two of those are basic human rights, and you get them free even if you’ve never worked simply because you don’t want to.

Every developed country except one, that is.

francisofascii• 1 day ago

Health care, housing, and education are the big three drivers of mandatory expenses in most peoples' lives.

Definitely true for my household. The mortgage, college for the kids, and health insurance for a family takes up a huge amount. Not to mention the housing expenses like HVAC fixes, trash collection, sewer, utilities, etc.

ffsm8• 1 day ago

luxeries also haven't gotten cheap, really - their manufacturing has been outsourced into places which often don't pay decent wages - so it's just out of sight/out of mind.

We're currently living in a time where some of the issues are being hidden by the nature of a global market - it's friggin impossible to make any good analysis with a global market, it has just too many influences and ways to hide criteria...

Gormo2• 1 day ago

It's not a coincidence that the three sectors you mention are the three most heavily regulated and subject to political intervention in the US, all with schizophrenic policy frameworks that simultaneously restrict supply and subsidize demand.

mrguyorama2• 1 day ago

Industrialized agriculture drove the cost of food from 50% of a normal person's income hundreds of years ago to like 5% now.

The problem is that after a few centuries of relatively good times, structures have been built up so that the owners of assets can claw back all that income again. They are using housing as the sink for all that wealth, because land can't be industrialized.

They want us to be peasants again.

twoodfin3• 1 day ago

Owning a home creates a stable, personal nexus with a set of vital institutions: Family, community, local economy, government, …

As a driver and measure of well-being, it’s probably at least 10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete.

ch4s311• 1 day ago

10,000 years old, since agriculture made migratory hunter-gatherer societies obsolete.

This isn't really how the transition to agriculture worked. Historically agricultural elites captured lands with conscripted armies and forced people to farm. There are plenty of examples where central authority collapsed and the archeological evidence shows us that people largely stopped farming.

carlosjobim7• 1 day ago

Pastoral nomadic animal husbandry made agricultural societies obsolete.

eulers_secret• 1 day ago

You can have these things without owning a house.

Community is IMO easier in apartments, the higher density means there’s a bigger pool of folks you might click with.

Community gathering spots are more prevalent as well: pools, playgrounds, green spaces, etc are common amenities. Especially if you get a dog, you will meet lots of people.

Of course it depends on which complex you live in. If I move I will miss my apartment and its community. I won’t miss my window aircon though, central air would be awesome.

lotsofpulp• 1 day ago

Your comment got me thinking how youtube videos are a bad place to get any information that is not showing how to do a hands on activity.

eagerpace• 1 day ago

I love to see metrics that evolve over time. Land is a finite resources, as such it inevitably trends up as the best and easiest locations are consumed. So I think the correlation here has to be understood from that baseline.

Zigurd2• 1 day ago

Land as a finite resource only affects first tier real estate market markets. You can see this vividly in China where there's a housing glut on aggregate, but not in first tier cities.

everforward• 1 day ago

Land is finite but not meaningfully so at this point. If my early morning napkin math is right, we could give every person on earth about 6.4 acres of land.

Land where people want to live is scarce. Obviously a variety of factors but one of them is that land is bifurcating the way income is. Small amounts are growing in value rapidly and the rest is declining (or growing more slowly). Urban property is skyrocketing, rural property in coal country is struggling.

dfxm122• 1 day ago

That's too simplistic. The best (and maybe even easiest) locations and local population evolve over time as well. Land can be developed in different ways, allowing for different density. Different people buy property for different reasons, which affects its value.

Zigurd2• 1 day ago

Making the concept a little more abstract can help: if you have personal access to capital because you've got collateral, that has numerous beneficial effects, as some of the other commenters here have pointed out. This effect might be less strong in the US because we have relatively well run capital markets that you can invest in. This would be a book length post to dive into all of the details of it but the net effect is plain to see. It's one of those things that looks a little irrational but in practical terms it's a proven benefit.

throw0101d2• 1 day ago

It got me thinking that maybe the home ownership, or having a place you can call yours […]

Do a search for "the housing theory of everything".

It has been an idea growing in popularity over the last few years, especially in the Anglo-sphere where housing/shelter costs seem to be worse than other places. (One hypothesis I've seen for this is because of Common law, which can give NIMBYs more power to challenge (new) things.)

paxys2• 1 day ago

Not hard to see why that is the case. No amount of flatscreen TVs is going to make up for the lack of food, shelter and medicine.

inigyou8• 1 day ago

CPI disagrees.

jordanb• 1 day ago

Manufactured consumer products and food have gotten much more available. Housing, education, and healthcare have gotten less available.

Recently the trend in food and consumer products getting cheaper has also reversed.

dktp• 1 day ago

There was an interesting video by Ben Felix that makes a case that home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0G_OSohLC_A

That being said housing has gotten worse for both buying as well as renting. I think there is a case to be made that having a place you feel comfortable/home in (whether rented or owned) affects people's wellbeing disproportionately.

alexjplant• 1 day ago

home ownership doesn't significantly (or at all) increase happiness

N=1 but for me it didn't. I'm probably repeating myself on this site but 70 years ago a home was a box that kept you out of the weather. Now it's an investment that you have to treat as a going concern. Many industries - contractors, window salesman, landscapers, HGTV, realtors, mortgage brokers, driveway pavers, deck builders, HOAs, etc. - have substantial swaths pushing this neo-feudalist "your home is your castle bro they aren't making more land" narrative so that people are socially pressured into dumping their life savings into a non-fungible asset then spending even more on ridiculous things like building pergolas and updating a 10-year-old bathroom to purportedly improve its value. Everybody's become a property speculator and wants to "get on the ladder".

The upshot is that I spent a lot of time and money on a bunch of stuff I didn't care about for my house because I was concerned with getting my money out of it when I sold. Conversely I chose not to pursue several interesting projects that I liked because they might have been dealbreakers to potential buyers. The whole thing is depressing. It's centered around building/projecting wealth and getting one over on the next guy more than it is on having a place to live. Corporate homeowners have nothing to do with this.

shmolyneaux• 1 day ago

Here's a follow-up video by Ben Felix posted more recently about the case for home ownership: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16eA5ebWMQQ

In the end, home ownership is more based around the kind of life you want to live than costs/benefits of the house as an asset. As a Canadian I see that many of my friends would choose to pay a lot more each month on the principle of a mortgage than they would ever save in a registered account.

gravypod2• 1 day ago

"No man who owns his own house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do." - William Levit (the Levittown one)

pbhjpbhj3• 1 day ago

His point appears to be that each person should only look after their own interests?

Is that your intent in posting it?

Many of us, my siblings and our families inclusive, owe our lives to socialised medicine.

dfxm122• 1 day ago

Many forms of media and social pressure point to owning your own home as a measure of personal success. It probably is. If it wasn't, rich people wouldn't buy so many. Plus it's harder to kick you out of a place you own than a place you rent.

Additionally, buying a house is probably the easiest way to build some kind of generational wealth. It's easy to see this as yet another way the older generation is pulling up the ladder behind them.

ipdashc• 1 day ago

disproportionately affects people's sense of content and wellbeing

It's probably not just homeownership, but the cost of real estate as a whole. And not even just residential. Isn't the often-lamented "loss of third places" at least in part due to those places not being able to pay rent unless they heavily monetize?

I've also heard the theory that the arts often take off in an area when real estate prices drop and it suddenly becomes possible to build cheap art studios and such. No proof or anything, just something I've heard random people talk about online, but it makes some sense.

amanaplanacanal3• 1 day ago

The arts are often the first step towards gentrification. The artists move in for the cheap rent, then the rest see all the arts and think "I want to live there!" Then pretty soon the artists can't afford it any more and move somewhere else.

xnx2• 1 day ago

Possibly referencing the "Chart of the Century": https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...

JKCalhoun6• 1 day ago

Oh, thank god, TVs are less expensive.

;-)

krackers• 16 hours ago

This may not account for enshittification. Clothes are "cheaper" in both senses of the word. Same for furnishings.

anovikov• 1 day ago

The catch here is that homeownership rate is the highest in history now except 2000s speculative subprime bubble when a lot of purely investment properties were bought at 103% mortgage by people who could not afford the risk.

carlosjobim7• 1 day ago

In almost every place in the world, at almost any point in history, the propaganda will always tell you that you've never had it better than you have it now.

But once you start digging and thinking, you start realizing that it's not true.

I understand that most hackers reading the above sentence are already raging, but were you actually there to know that things were worse in the past, or has it been hammered so strongly into you that you're now greatly offended at suggestions that it isn't true?

bluGill7• 1 day ago

There are a lot of factors. Some things are worse than the past. However other things are better. There is no universal correct weighting of these different factors.

In general I think that nobody would be willing to go far back in time. You don't need YouTube, but would you want to live without it? How about electric lights? Safe drinking water? Flush toilets?

cucumber37328422• 1 day ago

policy heavily favor home owners

Policy doesn't "favor" favor homeowners. It screws everything else because it can.

You wanna add a deck to your home. You pay the people the government says you need to pay a grand or two and you're GTG (by which I mean, good to spend further money actually doing the project). Landlord wants to add decks to his triple decker so that he can make the place nicer (more $) while also hitting the egress requirements bird with the same stone and it's an instant 4-5 figure bunch of bullshit where half a dozen worthless interests who add nearly no value in the base case exercise their enshrined in law right to sink their teeth into what should be a petty project.

And it's not just some slum lords triple decker, it's a 10-unit condo, it's those new luxury apartments and on and on and on and on. Everything about owning property, improving property, etc, etc, is ungodly expensive and exclusionary because there's a mile long list of jerks with their hand undeservingly in the pot.

Don't get me started on the financialization that underpins all this, it's just as tileted too.

Policy "favors" homeowners by somewhat exempting them from the worst of this because the buck stops with them. When they get screwed there's nobody else to pass it on to, so they push back.

frig57• 1 day ago

Everything better now than it once was? Hard disagree, take me back to the early 2010s

JKCalhoun6• 1 day ago

See ya, I'm time-traveling back to the 70's, ha ha.

shipman052• 1 day ago

The early 2010s, the age of financial bailouts, Occupy Wall Street, and two "forever" wars.

No one ever thinks they're living through a Golden Age.

cosmic_cheese• 1 day ago

When it comes to housing I think the key thing is stability.

Certainly many would prefer to own if that’s a possibility, but easily the worst part of renting for most I think is the need to move periodically, whether that be to keep housing costs within budget, because their landlord decided they’d like to give the condo to their niece, or because the their apartment complex changed hands and the new corporate giant owner is doing a terrible job at managing it.

At least, that’s why I hated renting. If I could stay the same place for 10+ years without getting priced out, without being kicked out for the landlord’s personal use, and without corporate enshittification (which often takes place alongside rent hikes), I doubt I would’ve purchased.

Owning isn’t a perfect bed of roses but at least my costs stay somewhat pinned and I don’t need to move unless I personally decide to. It’s such a weight off my shoulders that I won’t need to go through the stressful ordeal of apartment hunting every year around renewal time just to have options in hand in case things don’t work out.

mlinhares2• 1 day ago

Life is much harder when you don't have a roof over your head or when that roof can be taken away from your or take more from your salary than you were anticipating. I don't think people understand the psychological safety of knowing you will not pay a single dime more on a loan for your home for 30 years. It completely erases that worry from your head.

nxm• 1 day ago

Then come the property taxes

ahf8Aithaex7Nai• 1 day ago

I couldn’t agree more. I’ve lived in the city my whole life and have seen rents rise. That’s been extremely frustrating for me because I’ve been at the mercy of market trends and have worried about what would happen if, at some point, I didn’t earn as much anymore, or if rents rose so much that they became too expensive even for me. What would I do then? The worry that, despite a relatively good income, I might be at risk of poverty in old age because I have to hand over a good portion of my take-home pay to a landlord month after month is very frustrating in the long run.

A year ago, my partner and I bought a small house a short distance (40 minutes by car) from the city, and I moved into a much smaller, cheaper, and less central apartment in the city. I still spend a large part of my time in the city, but I’m also at the house regularly, especially on weekends. I’ve been much more relaxed ever since, because I know that I can give the city’s rental market the middle finger at any time and retreat to our house.

watwut3• 1 day ago

The articles with similar claim I have seen attributed disproportional value to, basically, stupid crap: better phone, more entertainment (streaming movies), cloth I buy once in a while, cheaper gym nearby, some or other luxury I would miss for roughly 3 months and then forgot.

And that leads us to "only housing has gotten more expensive relative to income" - precarity does matter. If I am one sickness or two paychecks from not being able to pay rent, it causes a lot more actual real material insecurity then "having slower phone while everybody else has equally slow phone".

Likewise, if you have trouble to find a job, fear of loosing it makes you work 12 hours a day in a job you hate, it affects you a lot more then whether you can stream movies.

PunchyHamster4• 1 day ago

It's very likely. It's place we rest, do some of the fun part of life and a place to call our "own" in world where increasingly nothing is.

On top of that having that high mortgage or even rent hanging over your head, making sure you can't really downgrade work to something more fun but maybe less paid can be stressful too. Especially in the firing season where you might be let go and take months to find new job.

And housing taking higher and higher part of the income is also effectively getting us poorer or at least stagnate.

redwood• 1 day ago

Everything in the study makes perfect sense. However one thing that's not discussed is change in culture and expectations. For example the United States is probably the only country where there's a general expectation that grandparents parents and adult children all live in separate homes... and most other countries multi-generation living is the norm. And perhaps some of those norms are starting to float into the United states. On the other hand no doubt the fact that people are not able to live to the traditional American norm is contributing to malaise. Still it feels a little simplistic to characterize everyone's goal is having their own home.

Maybe a way to handle this better would be to look at the size of the home because if a home can easily fit multiple generations it feels like a very different situation. Also it's somewhat arbitrary who happens to be the owner on the deed not to mention key questions like whether or not the home is truly owned outright versus largely in debt to a mortgage

jltsiren6• 1 day ago

There is not much difference between the US and Europe in that. In the Nordic countries, children move out earlier, while multi-generational households are more common in Southern Europe.

ryukoposting• 1 day ago

I think you have some valid criticisms, but we have to take baby steps here.

As you mentioned, multi-generation homes are not the norm in the US. If there is a change in that norm, it's worth investigating why that's happening, before we conclude that we need to adjust metrics around it.

Purely anecdotal, but every multi-generation home in my (American) family is the result of disability or student loan debt - multiple generations live together, but that doesn't mean they want to.

Also remember that this new metric is meant to be more informative on wealth, generally. Those other generations living in the home don't typically share in the wealth the home confers, not until someone dies at least.

peteey• 1 day ago

Right now adult Americans can freely chose to live with their parents, and overwhelmingly chose not to.

The article links ownership to costs. Attributing diminishing ownership as "norm float" needs some justification. I suspect multi-generational norms seen elsewhere are rooted in poverty and a lack of opportunity.

Suppose I told you I am losing weight because I cannot afford food, I don't think you should speculate I chose to go on a diet.

rayiner8• 1 day ago

This isn’t “putting people first,” it’s baking in the cultural assumption that adults live separately from kin. Consider the examples:

Housing unit 1. A couple owns their home. The woman’s parents live with them.
Housing unit 2. A couple owns their home. Their son, a recent college graduate, lives with them.
Housing unit 3. A man owns his home. A friend lives with him.
Housing unit 4. A couple owns their home. Their two young children live with them.
Housing unit 5. Three roommates rent their home. The owner lives elsewhere.
As illustrated in Figure 1, these five housing units are home to 14 adults. Because four of these five housing units have their respective owners as residents, the owner-occupancy rate—the measure traditionally viewed as the homeownership rate—on the cul-de-sac is 80 percent. However, because only seven of the 14 adults are actually owners of the homes they live in, the HPOP is much lower, at 50 percent.

I think 1, 2, and 4 should all count as “owning their home.” The new measure is also a recipe for confounding attempts to compare the metrics over time, as demographic change brings in cultures that embrace multi-generational living. So what seems to be a drop in homeownership rate could instead reflect a growing and aging sub-population where the cultural preference is for parents to live with adult children instead of separately.

busterarm• 1 day ago

Also the whole thing is just weird to me. The woman's parents, the kid just out of the college and the two young children aren't going to be paying the mortgage, upkeep and property taxes.

Once those stop getting paid, none of those people are housed. This is tracking things that don't matter.

dachworker• 1 day ago

It's an economic metric, not a political statement.

rayiner8• 19 hours ago

The article touts that it’s a “homeownership measure [that] puts people first,” which seems like it’s trying to at least be politically relevant.

Brystephor• 1 day ago

1,2,and 4 all have owners and non-owners. Are you suggesting that the parents of the adult children and the adult child should also be marked as owners?

How does the multi generational preference living theory work given the correlation to rent to income ratio? Is multi generational living preference a cause or a symptom?

memcg• 1 day ago

"Housing unit 3. A man owns his home. A friend lives with him."

I own my home. If I let a friend stay with me for unstated terms(friendship, charity, money, sex, whatever) then I no longer should be counted as owning my home?

xyzelement• 1 day ago

Perhaps this measure is useful to something but I find it directionally annoying as I don't think "higher is better" as it would be with the more traditional metric.

Here's an example from the page - a couple and the wife's parents - a couple and their college grad son

In this example the two couples (4 people) are counted as home owners and the 3 others (wife's parents, the son) as non owners - so the ownership rate is 4/7 = 57%.

On the traditional metric that scenario would be 100% because roughly each family owns its home which is good.

Now look at what would have to happen for the new rate to move to 100 - the wife's parents and the son would need to move out and buy separate homes. In other words the metric "punishes" living with family even if that's what you want to do.

I find the traditional metric is more useful. If I am a renter that indicates the desire to have a separate place - so it makes more sense to "ding" the ownership metric.

idbnstra• 1 day ago

i think it would be best just to do a survey asking what housing situation they are in and if that's what they want. do you really think that every single renter wants to be a renter?

alistairSH2• 1 day ago

Of course not, but many do - it generally doesn't make sense to buy if you won't stay for a longer period of time (used to be ~7 years, not sure if that's shifted) due to closing costs, interest on loans, etc.

alistairSH2• 1 day ago

Yeah, I'm leaning towards this new metric could actually be harmful (assuming the government goal is to increase it).

It makes sense for some families to cohabitate. Family with infants cohabitating with grandparents providing some care. Elderly parents being cared for my their middle-aged "kids". Etc.

tndibona2• 1 day ago

Actually I don't think this metric goes far enough. In my opinion a homeowner should "own" their home. I.e should have majority equity in his or her home. An owner who pays 3% down is basically a risk bearer for the bank. The bank really owns the majority and is renting out the "owner". I don't think my opinion is fringe. It does measure the risks of not being able to make rent and getting evicted.

bell-cot3• 1 day ago

Yes. Unfortunately, the Minneapolis Fed would get a whole lotta push-back if they suggested any such metric. That risk bearing & interest-rent is a near-perfect way for the 0.01% to milk the "could afford a house" demographic.

ozgrakkurt• 1 day ago

50 year mortgage incoming to raise the home ownership rate to 90%

SpicyLemonZest• 1 day ago

That's not a useful metric, because the mortgage interest deduction means that it's almost always financially optimal to take out a mortgage even if you have the assets to pay cash.

tndibona2• 1 day ago

Point taken. But surely there must be a way to account for that. Can we assume if the net asset value of the individual is greater than the value of the house by some percentage? Then they are owners instead of renters.

randusername• 1 day ago

I find it hard to trust economic narratives when so many metrics cited upon further inspection do not really measure what they are implied to measure.

Or maybe we measure what is easiest to measure, not what is best.

I see this everywhere, though. Jobs data is really job openings not actual hires. Unemployment data is really paperwork filing not people out of work or retiring early. And now home ownership is really "count everyone in the home if the owner resides there".

RationPhantoms• 1 day ago

To your last point, the Minneapolis Fed just put out a call for a new actual-owner backed housing occupancy rate called HPOP which I think is a step in the right direction: https://www.minneapolisfed.org/article/2026/new-homeownershi...

wasabi991011• 1 day ago

Are you aware that you are linking to TFA of this exact hackernews post?

cfbradford• 1 day ago

"count everyone in the home if the owner resides there"

It’s even worse than that, it’s not counting people at all. It’s number of houses with at least one owner living there divided by total number of houses.

whack• 1 day ago

the U.S. homeownership rate is 53 percent

I hope this number drops below 50%. Well below 50%. Maybe then we can finally vote down the NIMBY regulations and NIMBY politicians. And start rapidly expanding our housing supply. Given our current political system, it seems high homeownership rates are the root cause of the housing affordability crisis

OrvalWintermute• 1 day ago

I’m happy to see our metrics being improved because much of the economic policy seems to have been based around what was good for boomers.

Not what was good for young people who, for the most part, can’t afford to live in houses and these days are getting ripped off with overly expensive apartments too, so they never have a chance to buy a house and build equity.

ecshafer2• 1 day ago

Housing can not be a viable asset class, or it will continue to rise in prices. Step 1 is Land Value Taxes. Step 2 is remove/greatly reduce zoning, allow construction and streamline the process. If you allow density, building up, and incentivize it, then it will be built. Developers spend tens of thousands of dollars in permits and interest payments before they can put a shovel in the ground. Being a landlord isn't really an issue, morally, ethically, or with regards to people buying houses. The issue is when there are limited number of units, and people turn them into investments.

mchusma• 1 day ago

The issue is not investment at all, we want more investment into housing.

But you are absolutely correct you cannot both want housing to be a good investment (increase in value faster than inflation) and an affordable (drop in price lower than inflation).

Don’t subsidize demand. Allow more supply. Private homeowners, big developers, all of the above. Build.

vablings3• 1 day ago

The issue is that housing should not be an investment but due to rising labor and materials costs and also more restrictive code, they are now an investment.

jgeada• 1 day ago

And stop allowing people who view their house(s) as an investment from being able to veto any and all building. While that incentive is present, there will be massive hurdles to being able to build the amount of housing that is necessary.

WD-42• 1 day ago

Investment certainly feels like a problem. The amount of completely empty homes in my area (coastal ca) is disgusting. There are entire real estate brokers that specialize specifically in investment - these people aren’t even pretending that their clients will use the house, they may never even step foot in it.

Meanwhile economic stratification continues and the other side finds it increasingly difficult to make the down payment.

ecshafer2• 1 day ago

To be more specific, I dont think owning a sfh to rent out should be good. But building an apartment complex should be a good investment. Unrestrict building, and tax underutilized land.

FloatArtifact3• 1 day ago

Get rid of property tax or somebody below a certain income.

jmyeet2• 1 day ago

This is just wrong. Western economies have largely been hollowed out from productive output in favor of hoarding land and property because there is inelastic demand and increasing prices has become a political goal.

It should be super expensive to own more than one house. This by the way is what China did where Xi Jinping famous said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [1] as he quietly popped the real estate bubble a decade ago.

Increasing house prices are just enriching the already rich and stealing from the next generation. Nothing more. Houses should depreciate in value. They should not be an asset class.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

mrguyorama2• 1 day ago

And when "Just build more" doesn't work because private builders have no incentive to build a million dirt cheap starter homes for a mediocre profit and instead focus on building a few mcmansions?

We have a lot of building going on where I am. It's all for $500k homes. Nobody builds cheap one or two bedroom homes on tiny plots of land because the target consumer is more constrained and therefore far less profitable.

So much of the problems in the US right now is that capitalism optimizes for maximum profit, not any profit. It isn't sufficient in the US business culture to run a business that merely employs a bunch of people and produces things, because in the US, the "business" exists to be an asset class for the extremely wealthy.

So if the free market has no interest in serving people with less money than god, what do we do then?

I don't know why people believe there is a regulatory impediment to building a home outside of a city core. My dad is a contractor and he serves pretty much exclusively rich (gay) tech bros who fled california to increase our cost of living here in maine because nobody else can pay what they pay. His clients that don't fit that mold all inherited a good mid sized business or are well connected families. He does this instead of the plan he had a decade ago to refurbish or build about 10 new homes on a specific plot because it's literally twice as profitable at 1/100th the effort. Instead of working himself into an early grave, he can work 25 hours a week and live as upper middle class with his $100k pickup truck that is owned by his business.

anal_reactor2• 1 day ago

I've posted it already, but at least in my country (Netherlands) it seems like the problem isn't the lack of housing, but lack of marriages. If people ages 30-60 married each other at the rate they used to in 60's, then there would be no housing crisis.

The statistic that doesn't compute for me is how is it possible that we're having a housing crisis while at the same time we have historically low average number of people per house.

jorgen123• 1 day ago

Is that true, though? When my parents got married in the 60's in the Netherlands, they had to move in with my grandparents because there was no housing available and eligibility was restricted. It took a few years and a 2nd child before they were eligible to rent an apartment. Perhaps that does not show up in the statistics?

pixl972• 1 day ago

we have historically low average number of people per house.

I'd like to see the actual statistics method used to calculate that. Saying it's marriages alone just doesn't past the smell test for me. Just because people aren't married doesn't mean they don't live together and the number of unmarried people living together is higher than ever. What makes far more sense is the number of children people have has fallen off a cliff which drastically drops the number of live at home adult children.

jmyeet2• 1 day ago

We shouldn't allow people to hoard housing and land. That’s the core problem here. It should be super expensive to own more than one property. I refer people to the Housing Theory of Everything [1].

I disagree with the Ultra-YIMBYs who believe in removing all zoning and regulation. If you do that, you get Houston. Because that's what Houston is. What we need is to prioritize living over investment returns in housing. Part of this (IMHO) is to have expansive social housing like Vienna to compete private land use "honest". Also, we should really not allow rich enclaves. There should be social housing in every ZIP code.

[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

em-bee4• 1 day ago

There should be social housing in every ZIP code

exactly. it has been shown elsewhere that one problem that makes it difficult for people to escape poverty is that everyone around them is poor too. as long as you live there there is an invisible ceiling in how much you can improve your life as an individual/family. people who were able to move to a better neighborhood found it much easier to improve. mixed housing avoids that poor neighborhood trap.

the same btw, is true for the integration of immigrants.

pibaker2• 1 day ago

I don't know why people say Houston is unregulated. Minimum parking requirement is a huge factor in any kind of housing development and Houston has one.

tokioyoyo2• 1 day ago

I’ve been part of housing-related online discussions for a decade now, and everything reads like a wish-list.

- Majority of people own their homes. So it’s in their best interest for the housing prices at the very least not go down.

- Less, but still, some amount of people are buying houses with sky high prices. After a huge purchase, they will also do their best to ensure prices don’t go down.

- Another good chunk of people are waiting out to inherit homes from their parents.

All these people, in one way or another, will protect asset prices (e.g. voting for certain people to ensure nothing gets built). The only ways I can see it being resolved is:

- China-style benevolent dictatoresque commitment to surgical detachment of housing prices from the general economy (they’re trying, a lot of people are unhappy, but some progress is visible)

- Population collapse, to reduce the demand. But looking at Japan, metro areas will keep skyrocketing, because people will flock to the main cities even more

Any of the options will make a lot of people unhappy. A huge political no-go zone.

All the talks about allowing construction and streamlining the process have been circulated for a decade+ at this point. But incentives for people aren’t there. “I got mine, don’t care about you” is the general attitude of majority of people.

HaZeust2• 1 day ago

I've always wondered if UBI can replace the category of "viable asset class" that homes are now, wherein UBI offers upward mobility now AND generational wealthy in the future - the same way owning a house does. Wouldn't that be a valid populist play, an actual policy rooted in pragmatic, and all-around a winning strategy?

big_toast• 1 day ago

I've thought about that for a while and agree that's a big problem. I wonder if people unwilling to 'exit' bear some responsibility too?

I agree most owners are incentivized to have their leveraged ROIC be high. So they put pretty strong pressure against supply increases.

Defectors (other neighborhoods, cities, regions, states) and other living options might tank actual long term ROIC of supply constrained places. The economics eventually stop working in the supply constrained place as the real cost of housing production is significantly lower elsewhere.

profdevloper3• 1 day ago

Why is immigration always absent from these discussions on HN? the US has absorbed millions of people through immigration (both legal and illegal) which puts pressure on housing supply which drives up prices since supply is relatively inelastic. Enforcement of immigration policy would increase housing supply without needing to build more capacity in the short term and would lower prices.

MiscCompFacts• 1 day ago

It was pointed out to me recently that immigration crackdown has maybe already started to affect housing prices in DFW since H1B crackdown. https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-dallas-h1b-housing-m...

HDThoreaun4• 1 day ago

We need immigration because there’s a construction worker shortage. No immigrants = even more expensive to build new homes

anon291• 1 day ago

People say things like this, and yet housing has -- for most of history -- been a viable asset class, including in the times that people idolize as the great boom times of America.

The main issue is mismanaged regulation, as always. Real estate is probably one of the best examples of that. For example, in my city of Portland, OR, it's easier to keep an existing structure and not build new housing than to build new housing (because then you can do things by right). To build new housing, you have to hire a company called 'faster permits' (seriously, that's what it is called, look it up) which promises to 'expedite' the process of having things approved. If you, like me, are skeptical of engaging in investments in which you have to bribe your government to approve housing, then you won't put your money into building housing. Portland is probably not alone in these sketchy arrangements, which is why real estate developers often seem sleezy -- due to how the government manages itself, only the sleeziest people are willing to engage at all.

pfisherman• 20 hours ago

I think land value tax is misguided. Issue is what happens to retirees on a fixed income when value of their property increases? Are they forced from their home to lower priced area? Regardless of how one might feel about the morality of that it is also worth asking whether this might create perverse incentives to become landlords?

lemoncucumber• 4 hours ago

Issue is what happens to retirees on a fixed income when value of their property increases?

That’s not specific to a land value tax, the same thing can happen with traditional property taxes when the property is re-assessed.

California tried to “solve” exactly that scenario with Prop 13 limiting how much the assessed value of property can increase without a change in ownership and it’s been a disaster (and a contributing factor to the housing crisis, albeit far from the only one).

BeetleB6• 1 day ago

Looking at this, seeing that 50% are homeowners is actually astoundingly good. In a lot of countries 50% cannot afford to be homeowners.

This is an international community here on HN, would love to hear takes from other countries.

vinyl7• 1 day ago

Instead of praising a mediocre number, maybe we should strive to make that number 90%

BeetleB6• 1 day ago

50% is anything but mediocre.

therealdrag02• 23 hours ago

Why is ownership a goal? Housing is the goal.

em-bee4• 19 hours ago

that number does not feel right. global statistics show only very few countries with a homeownership of less than 50%, two of which are germany and switzerland. and there it's not because they can't afford it but because the cities where people want to live do not even offer enough properties for sale because the majority of housing is owned by large rental businesses.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/home-owne...

the europe average is around 70% and globally i expect it is similar. unfortunately numbers for africa are mostly missing. the few examples there suggest that homeownership is either high, or extremely low, which means you could be correct, but i'd like to see actual numbers. and then it is still a question why it is low. it could be because land is owned by government, tribes or private and not for sale.

https://globalhousingdatabase.com/ shows more african countries, with most of them being medium to high. but it also hows high for nigeria, whereas the other statistic shows nigeria with 25%, and south africa and kenya are shown as much lower here compared to above.

BeetleB6• 8 hours ago

Keep in mind the differing ways they calculate home ownership percentage. The ones you are looking at likely are calculated using the "older" method, which is 80% in the US.

readthenotes1• 1 day ago

Even worse is the number. When you count, how many people actually own their own home, and don't have a mortgage on it and thus are paying rent in the form of interest and possibly mortgage insurance.

I am of course excluding property tax from the ownership- if you fail to pay property tax, you'll find out you really owns your property?.

paulus_magnus2• 16 hours ago

[Invert, always invert] If you're not a homeowner then "you'll own nothing and be happy",

Homes are not #1 best investment asset and they shouldn't be but the world works better if people own homes they live in. It's a matter of not having the most significant part of your life being exposed to the market volatility. Plus it nicely aligns incentives of the neighbourhood.

Go and check areas that are mostly rental and see how maintenance (of both homes and infrastructure) is forgotten on the altair of rentmaxxing.

Of course if you're at $400k at FAANG, your best investment isn't realestate but for majority of middle class and working class buying your own home, taking a good care of it and passing it to your grandchildren is a very good investment. Also the society benefits.

The easiest way to solve the unafordability without putting everyone into negative equity is WFH. Land is only expensive near where traditionally the good jobs are. Just allow people to move to a low cost area, build there and WFH

New US homeownership measure puts people first

Related Stories