Hereditary Housing

As housing prices soar, the only hope for home ownership is death.

According to Redfin, there are currently 28,508 homes for sale in New Jersey. The median list price for a home in New Jersey is $579,000. In my town of about 30,000 residents, there are only 30 homes for sale. Those homes range in price from $685,000 to $6.3m, with an average cost of over $1 million.

There is no way that a young family can afford to buy a house in my town without double-law-partners income or a substantial handout from their parents. None. No way. My sons have zero chance of ever buying a home in this town.

We also can’t move.

We bought our standard split level suburban home 14 years ago. It has doubled in value in that time. Theoretically, we could sell our home for a nice profit. Even after the mortgage deduction, we should be able to downsize to an apartment in an urban area and have extra spending money. I could be an A train away from the evening speaker series at the Met and free summer concerts in Central Park. That’s my retirement fantasy.

The reality is that if we sold our house, we would have no place to go to. All those urban apartments are now unaffordable, too. Our mortgage and local taxes are less than the rent of a 1-1/2 bedroom apartment in a second tier neighborhood in New York City or Hoboken. Which would be too small, since we still have two adult sons living with us.

Things are even more complicated because one of our sons is receiving disability benefits from the state. If we moved to New York, it would take a full year to complete the paperwork to get him into the disability system in that state. It would be nice for him to be able to qualify for independent disability housing around here, but there’s a ten-year wait list for that.

I had a group of parents with twenty-year old sons with mild autism over my house on Friday night. We’re trying to figure out how to set up our guys with affordable apartments with minimal supports. We might form a corporation that would merge government and private funds and then buy a house somewhere, but we need to do more research on how all that would happen.

My older guy, with his utterly useless liberal arts major, is currently waiting tables. He needs to retool his skills with an additional associates degree in a medical or technical field, so he can get a better job. If hopes to get an apartment near his friends in Jersey City, he needs a job that pays at least $120K per year, so he can afford rent. The average rent in Jersey City, NJ is $3,138 per month.

More and more old people are living in homes that are too big for them, because they can’t afford to move. They might prefer to downsize to the apartment on the A Train line, but they can’t do it. With all the old people remaining in their overly large homes in the suburbs, the available housing stock has shrunk and driven up housing costs even further.

For many young people, achieving independence by renting or buying a place of their own seems increasingly unlikely. So, they’re stuck living with their parents. This problem seems to be hitting young men especially hard.

We need affordable housing, not just for low-income families. We need affordable housing for seniors, for young singles, and for disabled people. It’s a crisis that is resulting in very weird side effects.

In another split level down the block from us, the original owners retired to Las Vegas about ten years ago. Now, their two children, their spouses, and one grandkid live in that home. Their driveway is cluttered with vehicles that leave for work every morning. It’s probably not entirely legal to have multiple families living in a single residence, but nobody really cares.

Without any changes in the status quo, hereditary homes will become the norm. Homes will be only acquired through the death of parents or their relocation across the country. We’re going to be stacking multiple families in single homes. Young adults will live with their parents for way too long. Maybe developers will figure out how to turn abandoned malls into housing units, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Change will require breaking through calcification of local government and convincing current residents that new housing units won’t ruin their schools or investments. That will be hard to do.

Photo by Breno Assis on Unsplash