I'm 38, so I basically came of age during the Great Financial Crisis. I had so many friends who were slightly older than I lose their asses on houses. Multiple of my single friends had partners who also owned houses, and when they finally got hitched, they had to either pay the mortgage for a house that sat empty, come up with five figures to pay someone to buy their house, try to negotiate a short sale (in a recourse state), or risk renting it out.
I'm not talking one or two people either, this was an extremely common situation, it was a common lunch time topic of conversation at every job I had in the 09-13 era. Even my parents were against my buying a house at the time, as they were severely underwater on the poorly-built boom-time piece-of-crap they ended up buying.
I'd argue part of the problem is an entire generation of people saw houses as anti-investments and avoided buying them when they were $80-120k because one look at the pricing history showed they used to be $100-140k for the same house just six years earlier. Renting was (at the time) cheap, had none of the maintenance requirements, and was less risky if you wanted to move.
Of course, the contrarian people who had a long-term outlook made out like bandits. People who bought those heavily discounted houses with ultra-low interest rates using the housing buyers credit are enjoying the housing boom right now.
I'm not talking one or two people either, this was an extremely common situation, it was a common lunch time topic of conversation at every job I had in the 09-13 era. Even my parents were against my buying a house at the time, as they were severely underwater on the poorly-built boom-time piece-of-crap they ended up buying.
I'd argue part of the problem is an entire generation of people saw houses as anti-investments and avoided buying them when they were $80-120k because one look at the pricing history showed they used to be $100-140k for the same house just six years earlier. Renting was (at the time) cheap, had none of the maintenance requirements, and was less risky if you wanted to move.
Of course, the contrarian people who had a long-term outlook made out like bandits. People who bought those heavily discounted houses with ultra-low interest rates using the housing buyers credit are enjoying the housing boom right now.