…is a world killing puppy, you might just be a Warmist
The blog of the day is Sultan Knish, with a post saying blaming Boomers is generation victimhood for losers.
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I’ve seen plenty of stories blaming us boomers for the housing affordability “crisis.” We wicked oldsters are not selling our family-sized homes and moving into someplace suitable for just couples, making those family-sized homes less available for younger people with growing families.
But what are we really doing? Selling the family-sized home means that we still have to have someplace to live, and that costs money. Rather than staying in homes on which we might owe nothing, the young whippersnappers want us to have to pay for a place to live, whether it is a smaller home we buy or someplace we rent. In theory, we might buy something with the proceeds from selling the family-sized home, perhaps for less than we cleared in the sale.
But that comes with its own problems. We might be able to buy it for less than we sold the previous home, but property taxes normally get reassessed when a home is bought, so we might wind up paying much more on a house assessed in 2025 than on the family home on which a lower value was assessed when it was bought, and perhaps not reassessed to keep up with Bidenflation. And moving isn’t necessarily cheap, nor easy for someone in his seventies.
That, however, isn’t our real concern, at least not for us. Eventually we’ll go to our eternal rewards, and our children will inherit our property. Whether they choose to move back to the family home or not, they benefit, either from a home which is already paid off, or from selling it at a higher price than a smaller, couples-only house.
I grew up poor, and was 63 years old the first time I was able to take a vacation outside of the United States. Our kids are in their thirties, both have professional jobs, and have already been to Italy, Spain, France, Scotland, and Greece, not even including deployments thanks to the United States Army. We’ve done what we could to provide better lives for our daughters than we had ourselves, at it seems to have worked. One daughter is a homeowner herself, in part because she saw, first-hand, how buying a home improves people’s personal finances. And rather than cash, which can rise and fall, they’ll have well over $250,000 in real estate wealth they can split among themselves, real estate that did not cost us nearly that much.
So maybe the whiners want to blame boomers, but for what they are blaming us is being smart.
… but property taxes normally get reassessed when a home is bought…
Ours get reassessed every year. Somehow, the county decides the property got more valuable even if there are no buyers at the new assessed value. It’s just a coincidence that those assessed values result in higher property taxes that then result in higher county revenues that then result in higher pay for county jobs. Just a coincidence. There is an appeal process, which will make a totally fair determination that you are wrong and the higher taxes are “fair”. It is possible here to even buy property at a county auction and the “assessed” value being about 3 times the actual highest bid price at auction.
Cost of new homes should be declining now that immigrants aren’t filling them up and driving rising demand for more of them. Without Immigrants, America’s population is declining. We could blame boomers for the open immigration policies that led to those high prices, but that wouldn’t be fair. Politicians don’t listen to Boomers any more than they listen to anyone else. It would of course be fair to blame Boomers for having so many kids and then turning them out into the world to all find places of their own. But that is just doing what humans have been doing since forever. Gen X is much more globally responsible with their “family planning”.
There is no doubt that in retirement your expenses are MUCH more affordable if you live in a home you already own, or at least are making mortgage payments on from 15-20 years ago prices.