The aurora was visible for me and it was remarkable how much better it looked through my phone. What were faint grey lines, at first not even something I would think was the aurora if it were any other day, came out as vibrant green and purple through the screen; reminded me of the They Live glasses.
"Affordability" usually refers to cost of ownership, generally as a proportion to some sort of income metric, not the full value of the home.
If home prices don't fall in unison with increased rates sufficiently then of course monthly mortgage payments (or imputed rent) goes up and affordability metrics worsen.
I don't think this is making economists scratch their head so much, if so it's like how "experts don't know how the pyramids were made" -- we know many ways it could happen, we just can't prove which one. Even in the simplest model of valuation, it's not the current interest rate that determines the home prices, it's the full expected rate over the lifetime of the asset. Of course if interest rates are 5% today but expected to be 1% next year, the price will be based mostly on the 1%. The longer term bonds and hence longer term mortgage rates can capture a consensus expectation, but there can still be divergence of expectations by the marginal seller. My dental hygienist on selling her house "The government needs to cut rates back so that people can afford to buy my house" with unsaid portion as I heard it "at my arbitrary zero-interest-rate-phenomenon based expectation of value".
regarding the stat redfin uses: homeownership" is only counting those that are head of household (which is who is responding when filling out a census), e.g. if there are ~100 genZ's, consisting of 96 that live with their parents, 3 that rent, 1 that owns their own home, the stat just takes those last two numbers, ~1/4, and redfin then reports "26% of GenZs owned their own home".
It seems the 2015 flu was limited to the US, while this one has hit Europe and Asia hard too. The global markets might have softened 2015s price impact, see how exports from US dropped and imports increased:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/196095/us-total-egg-impo...
People want more space. They want more space in the country. They want more space in the city. A 2 bedroom urban apt doesn't accommodate 2 people WFHing, so roommates split up, adult children move out, established owners upsize, it's a general increase in demand everywhere, and evidently more than compensated for some people going urban-to-rural.
This research[1] estimates (15.1/23.8) 64% of the increases over pandemic period to remote work change, sounds like it could be a pretty big part of the story.
It's hard to connect interest rates to house prices historically, but I think that's because there's two scenarios going on, with some substitutability, but a general move to the latter over the last 50-30 years due to zoning and planning changes and urbanization.
In areas where developable land is very plentiful - rural, deserts, minimal environmental/nimby protections, etc. - land prices will remain low and house prices should be constrained by building costs. In the same way that we don't expect TV or car prices to go up very much with lower interest rates, even though you consume durable goods over 20years, as competition holds the prices to what it costs to make rather than how you benefit from them. Over the long term, it used to be that house prices tracked construction costs pretty well.
However in areas where the fixed quantity of land is binding - urban, or areas with stringent protections and managed growth policies - land and house prices will be bid up to what people can afford via monthly payments, and will therefore respond greatly to interest rates (and IR expectations)
Further add on that high property taxes in some regions can dilute the costs associated with financing changes (if interest rates increase from 1 to 2%, but you're paying 5% in property taxes, that's only a 7/6% increase in your costs)
edit: to summarize, where supply is elastic, interest rate reductions should cause quantity supplied to increase, price to remain the same, and monthly costs to decrease. Where supply is inelastic, the quantity stays the same, monthly payments stay the same, price increase. We've possibly moved into an environment with more supply inelasticity in recent history.
In the early 80s with high inflation and therefore high mortgage rates, the first years of mortgage payments would be a relatively high percentage of income: it's very front-loaded. However, the debt owed quickly gets deflated away, so over the span of 25 years you're actually paying a much lower percentage of your real income. To take it to the extreme, if inflation was approaching infinity, and mortgage rates were 2% + inflation, your first payment would be 99.9% of the value of the loan, and all subsequent payments would be essentially 0% of your nominal income. Add to that fact that a downpayment went a lot further (if you saved to 50% of your median income, that was 20% down payment of median house), and affordability back even in the worst of the early 80s, while not great, was better than now.
1. Theoretically a tax against potential earnings is actually good, but it's much more difficult to estimate than land prices.
2. LVT is mostly about redistributing rents, with the land use efficiency bonus as a big second order benefit.
3. Professions aren't exclusionary. A person doesn't squat on their teacher gig for 20 years in order to see how their claim on being 1 of finite-X allowed software developers might rise in price. Other people would just become software developers.
UFO-ers were using things like the rotation speed as definitive evidence of some like other-worldly advanced technology. Demonstrating that it was the glare/gimble brings it back into the realm of just a normal far-away plane. It also casts doubt on the expertise of the pilots/military who didn't realize what happened.
I've noticed situations on the job where I've had little issues with management on my own, but experienced going out with drinks/coffees with gossipy venting colleagues and me internalizing their anger. This prima-facie seemed like the primary reason they did it.
If venting is instead a coalitions/tribal consensus building exercise, the psychologists might need to wait until after the revolution to retest the subject's well-being.
According to this[1] you'd have ordinary workers earning 22 shillings p/w (£57.2p/y) and highest skilled labourers (firemen) sometimes earning £300, but yes the average wage seemed to be around 150[2]. (I think most people googling the average 1920s wage are getting the Australian-Victoria data accidentally, which is a bit higher, but it's still in the same ballpark) I think the Christie's equivalent today to US household income would then be 67000*700/150 = 313,000
ok, but it even says they had a passive income (aka wealth) leading to 1/3 of that 25x maid's earnings.
Many factual points in the introduction, with the modest apartment, income in today's value, and her own regard of wealth frame it as if she's relatable middle-class.
"
The couple’s annual income was around around £700 ($50,000 in today’s dollars)—£500 ($36,000) from his salary and another £200 ($14,000) in passive income.
They rented a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in London with four bedrooms, two sitting rooms, and a “nice outlook on green.” The rent was £90 for a year ($530 per month in today’s dollars). To keep it tidy, they hired a live-in maid for £36 ($2,600) per year, which Christie described as “an enormous sum in those days.”
The couple was expecting their first child, a girl, and they hired a nurse to look after her. Still, Christie didn’t consider herself wealthy.
"
Ignoring the point and rest of the article but it's a strange and uncanny framing to start it, while simultaneously giving the true numbers, trying to suggest that Agatha Christie in this circumstance of having income 25x that of the working class might not be considered well-off.
I think this covers a lot of good points and I'm happy to see it, but the final section seems like a just-so. I've wondered if the difference in bike-induced-demand=good;cars=bad follows these lines:
- Roads/cars often leads to the phenomena of something like grid-lock. A network might be able to throughput 100 cars a minute when only <=100 cars are trying to get through, but try 101 and it starts dropping: If 120 cars attempt passage at once, congestion actually causes the throughput to drop to like 80 (think of those backward-propagating traffic-wave videos). If 150, throughput drops to 70 etc.
- You can add more roads/highways but if it doesn't address certain chokepoints, that throughput will still start descending at some point (though maybe a bit higher now like 110 cars/minute).
- Sometimes you can address the chokepoints, but after some expansion the remaining chokepoints are essentially having the buildings and city intersections themselves, at which point you can only address the bottleneck by rebuilding buildings further apart, which leads to a cycle of worsening pedestrian access, local-depopulation, and more cars.
- And then finally, maybe bikes are different in that they are small and agile with a congestion-failure-mode of being walked. It's hard or unlikely to get to a bike usage level that would lead you to want to move buildings very far apart to support them.
- Or maybe bikes are just simply so small that the preferred distance between buildings anyway (for sun light, privacy) can support most realistic biking numbers (which would be limited by density limits anyways: elevators only practically go so high, commuting biking trips can only be so far).
- Ultimately I wish there as a bit more explained here, maybe by someone that designs traffic/city simulations if that's how the best cost/benefits are tested now. It's really confusing that urban planning advocates concentrate on the un-improving car-trip-time/congestion KPIs like it's a dunk when it really seems some throughput-capacity utility metric would be more important.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49753-5
which for that factoid links to
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsenergylett.1c02602
which for that just links to a BBC article with a doctor saying the "value everyone quotes is about"
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56574779