Wikipedia says Belgium and the Netherlands have it too. It’s worth keeping in mind that the US housing market is very unlike that of other industrialized nations in that the US is sparsely populated compared to most.
Fair enough, but I don’t think setting national policy based on what stuff costs in Manhattan really makes sense.
Tenancies-in-common were becoming “common” around here pre-collapse, at least relatively speaking, ( they’re rare to impossible to obtain now ). Although fractionating the mortgages made them affordable ( i.e. a 500k home legally split by two people, so each is paying the mortgage for 250k ), I believe they’re still counted as a single mortgage. A rarefied case, but we’re talking about thousands of units locally.
When I moved here 16 years ago we looked at the school numbers and wanted to see Cupertino. The real estate agent showed us the houses we could afford - not many and not nice. I wasn’t joking about the shack - the one really reasonably priced house was a falling down shack on a hillside - slightly worse than the cabins I used to stay at in Boy Scout camp.
Define Middle Class. The people who bought the house next door are pretty much middle class. I don’t know what she does but he’s a tech writer, and that isn’t a super high paying job. I’d call them middle class.
The Bay Area is insane. You pay $100k more for the same house across the street from its like because one sends your kids to a better high school.
Cupertino and Palo Alto are two of those districts where you pay a lot more than if you choose Milpitas or Oakland, or the boonies (Ben Lomand or Gilroy).
I love this idea that houses in the bay area aren’t real houses.
You have a $500k house, that’s a thing worth a lot of money and you are a rich man. Just because your neighbors might have even more expensive houses doesn’t make you less rich.
This is America. Everyone is middle-class.
If I had a $500K house, I’d sell it and retire. I could live better than the lifestlye I’m living now until Social Security kicks in, even if the proceeds don’t do better than inflation.
Not in a vacuum, no - but if house prices are high, then the cost of living generally in that area is probably also high.
“The cost of living” in an area become high because people who live there are rich. Rich people have more money and pay more taxes. That’s how it works.
Or because the population density is high.
Yep. If a large number of poor people migrated into your neighborhood tomorrow and raised the population density your neighborhood turns into the SF Bay Area.
In most cases, the bank owns the house. We’re just paying off the mortgange.
So what? Are mortgages free to anyone who wants one? Is the bank doing you this service from the goodness of their hearts?
Around here, $500,000 is a standard single family house. Once you get below $300,000, you are talking about tiny places that are falling apart, with unreliable wiring and plumbing, without A/C, and full of mold and vermin.
So what, what? I was responding to someone who seemed to think most of these people actually owned their homes. They don’t. Buying a $500k house doesn’t mean you own very much of it, even after 10 years of paying a mortgage, so it doesn’t make you rich. It just means you can afford the mortgage, with the accompanying tax deduction.
Large numbers of poor people don’t randomly migrate into neighborhoods.
And where I live, I have a standard 3BR/2BA home, which is almost 1300 sq. ft. The purchase price was just under $100K, in a nice middle/working class neighborhood in the middle of the city. If you have a $200K home, your rooms and your yard might be a little bit larger than mine and you might have a garage or nicer appliances inside. There isn’t much in this county that goes over $300K.
I don’t understand why people are saying the mortgage interest deduction is only for the wealthy. Plenty of middle-class income people own homes and everyone I know who owns a house takes that deduction. It’s the only reason I itemize (I have basically nothing else to deduct). Losing that deduction would hurt me, a lot, and most people I know where I live would also feel a negative impact.
If your home cost $200k, and you aren’t deducting much else, it will probably hurt you less than you think (even if they do away with it completely). I was quite surprised to discover the deduction for our similarly priced home wasn’t significantly more than the standard deduction - something like $300, I think.
150K mortgage, 5% interest - that’s $7.5K in interest in a year. Even if your marginal tax rate is only 15% that’s $1125.