Will Remote Working Lead Millennials to Buy Homes in Affordable Remote Suburbs? (yahoo.com) 111
An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune:
For eight years now, as millennials have entered their thirties and forties, also known as "homebuying age," Bank of America has surveyed over 1,000 members of the generation once a year for its Home Work series. And for 2023's edition... older millennials (age 31-41) are almost three times as likely to move into a house than an apartment, the survey found...
Migration patterns during the pandemic have clearly established that most homebuyers have wanted to flee big cities, with some "zoomtowns" such as Boise benefiting in particular. But the survey reveals something even more drastic. In a section called "suburban nation," BofA reveals that 43% to 45% of millennials — of every age — expect to buy a house in the suburbs. "We expect the ability to work from home to remain an incentive for young families to seek out more remote suburban and rural markets where housing may be more affordable," wrote the BofA team led by research analyst Elizabeth Suzuki. And remote work is still robust, they added.
Millennials are also looking toward the suburbs for wealth-building. A majority (two-thirds) of them believe that they'll buy a home in the next two years, citing a return on investment as the number one reason for purchasing. The interest is pervasive across the generation, and maybe means that the suburb is in for a new and better revival. And a 2021 study from Pew Research Center found that one in five adults preferred city life, compared to one quarter of adults in 2018...
Millennials reported to BoA that the pandemic increased their likelihood of buying a home...
Migration patterns during the pandemic have clearly established that most homebuyers have wanted to flee big cities, with some "zoomtowns" such as Boise benefiting in particular. But the survey reveals something even more drastic. In a section called "suburban nation," BofA reveals that 43% to 45% of millennials — of every age — expect to buy a house in the suburbs. "We expect the ability to work from home to remain an incentive for young families to seek out more remote suburban and rural markets where housing may be more affordable," wrote the BofA team led by research analyst Elizabeth Suzuki. And remote work is still robust, they added.
Millennials are also looking toward the suburbs for wealth-building. A majority (two-thirds) of them believe that they'll buy a home in the next two years, citing a return on investment as the number one reason for purchasing. The interest is pervasive across the generation, and maybe means that the suburb is in for a new and better revival. And a 2021 study from Pew Research Center found that one in five adults preferred city life, compared to one quarter of adults in 2018...
Millennials reported to BoA that the pandemic increased their likelihood of buying a home...
Hahaha (Score:1)
No
Re:Hahaha (Score:5, Interesting)
Millennial, remote worker, we just bought in a rural hamlet.
To buy in the city it would cost ~CA$1-2 million. Where we bought, $315,000. We couldn't even afford to rent at market rates in the city without rent control let alone get a downpayment/carry a mortgage for something priced that high.
Jammed in a slumlord's shoebox with roaches or 2100sqft detatched in the country - which would you take?
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Judging by the prices you listed, people prefer city life by a wide margin compared to the suburbs.
My ideal place to live is someplace that's walking distance from shopping, good transit, and a park or a nature trail. [youtu.be] Of course that excludes the suburbs where it's illegal to build retail and the population density isn't high enough to support transit.
So now we live in places where we have to keep our children under house arrest [medium.com] to keep them safe. But at least that's progress, right?
Re: Hahaha (Score:4, Insightful)
Prices are a measure of demand relative to supply, not absolute demand. By your logic, one would conclude that luxury superyachts and private planes are selling like hotcakes with enormous waiting lists, given the prices they command.
Cities are a relic of a past before cheap and plentiful mechanized transportation. Inertia kept them going. Remote work wounded them. Conspicuous mismanagement will destroy them beyond recognition.
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My logic is that if a Cessna sells for $315,000 and a private jet sells for $1-2 million [slashdot.org], then it proves that the private jet is much more desirable than the Cessna.
Re: Hahaha (Score:4, Interesting)
My logic is that if a Cessna sells for $315,000 and a private jet sells for $1-2 million [slashdot.org], then it proves that the private jet is much more desirable than the Cessna.
No, it doesn't. What it proves is that in order to justify making and selling private jets, which obviously have a higher cost than a Cessna, manufacturers charge a higher price. They're not going to sell jets for less than the cost to make them and the demand for jets is not inelastic like housing. They also have completely different target markets as Cessnas are usually for pilots and private jets are mostly for people who want to be chauffeured which again makes it easier to charge a higher price.
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Is that some kind of joke? Nobody pays higher prices for Learjets than Cessnas just because they cost more to make.
Re: Hahaha (Score:2)
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It was my first lesson in economy class. You set the price at what people want to pay for it. Not at what it costs plus a profit margin. Of course many lessons followed later explaining a.o. that competition will push your margin down... It apparently is a complicated world out there.
You set the price point based on what people are willing to pay, but if that point is less than your cost then it makes absolutely 0 sense to make and sell that product.
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Is that some kind of joke? Nobody pays higher prices for Learjets than Cessnas just because they cost more to make.
No one is going to sell Learjets for less than what they cost to make either, which was my point.
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Is that some kind of joke? Nobody pays higher prices for Learjets than Cessnas just because they cost more to make.
Also, private aviation jet shipments between 2019 and 2020 decreased from 809 to 443 (IBISWorld US Charter Flight Statistics). Piston aircraft sales were 1,393 in 2021, up 5.5% from 2020's 1,321 (generalaviationnews.com).
So how does your logic explain the higher cost and lower sales numbers of jets over piston aircraft like a Cessna?
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it proves that the private jet is much more desirable than the Cessna
I'm not sure if you just don't know anything about planes, or if you really think this is true, but it's fucking so wrong it hurts.
The private jet (of which Cessna actually makes a couple good ones) has vastly more features than the 'Cessna' which I'm assuming you mean like a high-wing C152 or C172 or the like. It has a greater cruising speed, a higher service altitude, and a significantly longer range. Private jets are also, far and away, multi-engine aircraft, where a simple piston Cessna 152/172 is a
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We don't have cheap and mechanized transportation. It is heavily subsidized and you are not seeing the true cost of it. Suburbs don't pay enough in taxes to support their own infrastructure.
It is pretty well covered at this point that suburbs are basically a ponzi scheme that is running out. People will either have to pay what it costs to maintain the infrastructure or those places will die. Cities can't keep up the wealth transfer to subsidize the suburbs.
Re: Hahaha (Score:2)
Most city revenues come from commercial and industrial property taxes, which skew heavily to being funded by high earners who tend to live outside city limits.
In places where the city limits encompass those suburbs, you might be right. In places like the east coast where suburbs ans cities are separate government entities, you're dead wrong: suburbs pay for their own stuff with local property taxes, cities sometimes charge income taxes on those suburban commuters, and if money ever crosses a boundary, it's
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That's been debunked. City centers look like they make more money because they have tons of commercially zoned areas, so they can collect more taxes. But they won't be getting much of anything without people living in residential areas coming in and spending money.
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Nope nope.
Cities are efficient. Suburbs are not. If this was 300 years ago, your "home" would be a rat infested shack on 10 acres of land that you had to farm for a living. Nobody wants to go back to that.
Modern cities have pretty much resulted from those large properties being subdivided into individual housing, then later bought back up and turned into low-rise apartment buildings, and then the entire acre that the previous "home" a century ago was on is re-assembled and a skyscraper is built on top.
This
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Every time I see "skintubes" (basically people sized pneumatic tubes) in fiction, I think "man, that would have been an awesome idea if it wouldn't result in people getting their skin and clothes shredded", but the idea itself is sound. We just need to put those tubes underground and design a capsule for delivering people and parcels with them. Ta-da, no more cars, no more delivery delays. You want a pizza from the pizza place 30 minutes away on foot? Now you can just order it, and it arrives at your door within a minute, intact. Maybe a realistic version of this would simply be a point-to-point micro-transit system that is just a LIM magnet that pulls the capsule along rather than air pressure.
They had this a hundred years ago, at least for smaller items: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Hahaha (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by the prices you listed, people prefer city life by a wide margin compared to the suburbs.
My ideal place to live is someplace that's walking distance from shopping, good transit, and a park or a nature trail. [youtu.be] Of course that excludes the suburbs where it's illegal to build retail and the population density isn't high enough to support transit.
So now we live in places where we have to keep our children under house arrest [medium.com] to keep them safe. But at least that's progress, right?
Good for you. I live in a suburban neighborhood that borders a county park with trails, soccer fields, streams/bayous, a dog park, and a shooting range. I can ride my bike less than a mile to a Walgreens and a Walmart Neighborhood Market. Honestly, its too damn hot to walk much beyond that 9 months out of the year here. On the other side of the freeway, less than 2 miles away, they've been building numerous giant apartment complexes and shopping centers. We have numerous Park N Ride hubs here for people commuting into the city.
In short, you have no idea what you're talking about but you jump to the conclusion that city life is better simply because that is what you prefer.
Re: Hahaha (Score:3)
Judging by the prices you listed, people prefer city life by a wide margin compared to the suburbs.
Just because somebody lives in the city doesn't mean they prefer it. I live in Los Angeles and as anybody who knows me will tell you, I hate it. The reason I'm here is because I've got what one might refer to as a dream job that for the moment requires me to be here. Though in a few months I'll be able to move to a rural part of Texas or possibly the suburbs of Orlando.
My ideal place to live is someplace that's walking distance from shopping, good transit, and a park or a nature trail. Of course that excludes the suburbs where it's illegal to build retail and the population density isn't high enough to support transit.
My house in Phoenix (that I still own) has all of the above within walking distance. It's near the intersection of 24th St and Baseline. Maj
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To put it another way, your dream job is a perk of living in Los Angeles.
One could call you a hypocrite for saying one thing while doing the opposite, but in fact "People's preferences often conflict with each other, and housing, like everything, involves trade-offs." [youtu.be]
Re: Hahaha (Score:2)
To put it another way, your dream job is a perk of living in Los Angeles.
Actually not exactly. I find out after accepting the job that if I had declined because I wanted to be somewhere else, I would have gotten my way. I will anyways soon enough, I only need to tolerate it a bit longer.
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Suburbs were designed for an unsustainable economy with MULTIPLE design flaws which will increase in difficulty as they must address those flaws -- sure some people will always be able to live like that just as some always can live like kings above the laws and some will live like slaves. Those are outliers who are shrinking in proportion to the rest the planet. Ignoring everything, we can't possibly have 8 billion live the suburban life with the land we have (just don't get so simple as to just divide a s
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River walks, forests, fields, parks are all within walking distance. Shopping I would much prefer to drive because I don't like to shop often. We buy in bulk, shop once or twice a month at most, everything except a Costco is within 10mins. Gigabit internet. The only thing we don't have is public transit. I have space to live though. I don't have to choose between enriching my landlord further by doing maintenance myself or not having maintenance done. A private yard to enjoy the outdoors without havi
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I wouldn't either when there's no shopping within walking distance. You're basically forced to drive, and when shopping becomes such a chore, you tend to buy in bulk so you don't have to do it so much.
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Walking distance shopping is such a waste of time. We get 90% of our shopping done in part of a day each month. It frees up so many hours and lets us control expenses so much better.
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How's your BMI?
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Could be better, wife cooks & bakes like a pro so I eat like a king
Re: Hahaha (Score:2)
It is plain supply and demand. Homes and apartments for rent are mostly owned by private people, although companies are starting to take over in the bigger cities. So no big
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So houses are the new tuilps? :)
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You've got some very bad calculations. $62k gross, for now. $300k @ 4.29%
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1) Don't go to a bank, use a mortgage broker (and I'm not talking a Brampton mortgage)
2) Banks are offering far better than 8.5% - you must have really crappy credit https://www.reddit.com/r/Perso... [reddit.com]
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Fellow Canadian here ...
This can't be in Ontario, at least Southern Ontario, where rural is only ~ 20% or so less than cities.
Maybe Nova Scotia?
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Southern Ontario. 2100sqft, renovated but not finished (missing baseboard, trim, a couple doors... stuff I'll have done in a weekend)
~1h North of London
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Nice!
That is a great deal.
Lake Huron beaches should be close in summer if you wish to visit them.
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Rather not if I can avoid it. Not having to be in the office regularly does give me a lot more options but none of them are located in the middle of nowhere.
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Definite No.
Appeal of the City: Things to do, things to see, things to eat. Your Condo or Apartment building is probably owned by a REIT and costs too much, but at least you don't have to maintain a fucking lawn.
Appeal of the Suburbs: Big ugly carbon-copy house built as cheaply as possible, surrounded by a lawn that you need to maintain with even more vehicles, that you also have to maintain yourself. Fuck that noise.
What people really want, and should aspire to have is a home that you can not hear the neig
Re: Hahaha (Score:2)
The problem with Boise (Score:1, Troll)
The problem with buying a cheap house in Boise is then you're stuck living in Boise.
(Yes, I've been there - many times. If you're gonna live in Idaho, at least move to the north part where they have trees and mountains rather than just dirt. Sure they also have more Neo-Nazis but hey you're in Idaho so it's just a question of degree anyway...)
Re: The problem with Boise (Score:5, Funny)
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Yeah I don't think you have to worry about anyone wanting to move to Idaho.
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Re:The problem with Boise (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you overestimate how much people care. While it isn't for everyone, a lot of people don't crave excitement. If they can have a family, send their kids to school, make enough money to live, and eat out at a decent variety of places (which most small suburb type towns can provide), than that's perfectly fine.
And if your hobbies trend towards outdoors stuff (eg hunting, fishing, hiking, camping, etc) then you're actually far worse off in the city with regards to things to do.
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The problem with buying a cheap house in Boise is then you're stuck living in Boise.
The problem with buying a cheap house in Boise is that you're too late.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: No (Score:3)
Re: No (Score:4)
And that isn't going to help one bit.
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Remote working will increase the prices of the suburbs and make them no more affordable than the city.
That, and they will bring their politics with them, and just bring the problems of the cities with them.
I mean, where did they think the problems came from? Governance by those like themselves.
Ah yes, the irrefutable argument of the downmod, lol
I'd seriously like to hear a counter argument. The same people doing the same things move from the city to the suburb. Why would the outcome be different?
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
Housing is going to continue to be a mess until the number of viable housing units matches pace with population growth. But that's not even close to happening. Even in places that are adding units, they are often of the wrong type, aren't necessarily enough to keep up with growth, and the plans don't take into account that many older units just aren't really very good anymore. Unfortunately there are so many warring factions that the problem actually exacerbates in that areas become more and less desirable and during that cycle some houses that could have been maintained end up being in a state of disrepair and that pulls units from the market.
RL experience (Score:2)
While knocking down and building in the inner city I got bored and we bought a 'weekend' shack about an hour away, tucked away in a state forest. 8 years later due to the fashion for 'treechange', remote working, and Covid, it is now worth as much as the shiny new inner city house. We live in the bush most of the time now.
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That's what happened where I live. Bay Area people moved in and drove up the housing prices. Now an "entry level" house is about $600K. It used to be one quarter of that price.
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Remote working will increase the prices of the suburbs and make them no more affordable than the city.
That's not how housing markets work. The price premium of cities is because that's where all the jobs are. If prices in the suburbs and the urban core become the same, then for the same price buyers can dramatically cut their commute to their office. Even with work-from-home that still leaves plenty of people who must work on site, in the urban core. Urban prices will always remain higher.
That being said - prices can rise in an entire city to such a point that the whole city becomes unaffordable. That can
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It fucking should (Score:2)
In the next two years?! (Score:2)
Housing is at least 30% up from 2020 lows. Buying now in most markets will not see you increasing home value over the next two years. Possibly in some really highly desirable areas to live in such as parts of LA or San Diego and some other cities but overall the market is not going up much more.
Now's the time to sit on your hands and wait for the crash. Especially if you plan to live in the boonies anyway.
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Now's the time to sit on your hands and wait for the crash. Especially if you plan to live in the boonies anyway.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but in the crash you will have to compete even harder with capital groups [slate.com]. Between them, and most of them own pieces of each other, they own the majority of affordable homes.
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That's probably the biggest thing working against us for having affordable homes anyway. We allow businesses to own as much residential stock as they can get their hands on, because homes aren't for living in but for investment. It's sickening.
Yes, middle-aged millennials buying family homes (Score:5, Insightful)
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Deploying high speed fibre optic broadband is probably one of the cheapest and least controversial things a government can do to address the housing cost crisis.
I am so old... (Score:4, Interesting)
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I imagine there are a lot of depressed house in Gary, Indiana [youtu.be] that could be revitalized for much cheaper.
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Of course you bought a new car regularly because you had to. Back then a car with 100K on it was on its last legs and now a car with 100K on it is just "a pretty good used car". If you live where they salt the roads the rust alone would often make a car "just a few years old" worth almost nothing where now (depending on the car) the rust won't generally be what kills the car.
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Well, I suppose then it's a good that you could buy a new car every few years back then. If modern cars were only good for 7-10 years like back in the 1970's a lot of people simply wouldn't be able to afford to have a car. Or perhaps there would be a lot of unsafe barely running wrecks on the road.
lol no (Score:2)
Nobody wants to live both in a suburb and far away from modern city conveniences. You can't staff modern city conveniences in the middle of nowhere. Look at the failed zoom towns.
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Nobody wants to live both in a suburb and far away from modern city conveniences. You can't staff modern city conveniences in the middle of nowhere. Look at the failed zoom towns.
What conveniences do you mean? I live in a suburb and within two miles of me there is a Walmart (with McDonalds), Wendys, Burger King, banks/credit unions, a grocery store, beer and wine stores, barber shop, pizza joints, sub joints, a few restaurants and gas stations, a Target and other stores complex, a hotel, a few car dealerships, a shooting range, car wash, and several different convenience stores. The only thing truly missing are bars, and some of the aforementioned restaurants have bars in them. N
Conveniences? What conveniences? (Score:5, Informative)
Nobody wants to live both in a suburb and far away from modern city conveniences. You can't staff modern city conveniences in the middle of nowhere.
I scoff at your "modern city conveniences." In our suburb, within two to four miles there are three different grocery stores; a home depot; lots of different restaurants including two or three nicer chains (Clydes, Bonefish grill, etc.); any variety of ethnic food with multiple options for Chinese, Thai, Indian, mediterranian, kebabs, etc.; four or five parks, bike trails, swimming pools, a hospital, a couple of different microbreweries, movie theaters, metro stations for direct subway into a major metropolitan city, and just about anything else you could want.
At the same time, I'm less than 30 min from two different locations for stargazing/amateur astronomy with decent dark skies, an international airport, a huge state park with camping, a few wineries, a couple of more rural town areas with open air main streets that are nice to walk around and visit, etc.
I have room to set up a woodworking shop and enough space from neighbors that noise won't bother them, reliable power with buried power lines, high speed fiber optic Internet, 5G wireless, etc.
Then there are things we don't have: rats, major bug infestations, city traffic and noise, and ultra-high mortgates/rent.
Setting aside major/nationally significant museums (which I'm willing to take the 45 min trip downtown for), deep city nightclubs I don't care about at my age, exactly what are these "modern conveniences" you think the suburbs lack?
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You're not in a rural suburb, which is what the article is talking about. You're literally close enough to a large metropolitan area that there's a metro running into it. That does not count as rural.
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I’m in a rural suburb, as in, the closest urban downtown is 1.5 hours away and our regular 3-mile round trip walking path from our house takes us by ranch land with cattle and horses.
The previous poster might as well have been describing my area as well, though our drive to the national-class amenities is obviously a bit longer. Even so, the local amenities are already good enough that there’s almost no reason to hit the big city up. From Brazilian steakhouses and French fine cuisine to pho shop
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That's kind of true for failing farm towns in fly-over country. OK, KS and similar states, outside of the few urban cores, are not tech-friendly. Wasn't Tulsa, OK offering $10k for "digital nomads" to move there recently? I've been there a few times and it's not horrible but suffers from the usual low-income crime and general malaise. So many Midwestern areas have the same problems. Trades and manufacturing left these towns and there's not much left to replace what was lost.
Where it's at, and has been for 1
I already did (Score:2)
WHAT affordable remote suburbs? (Score:2)
It depends on who wins (Score:1)
I honestly don't know. On one hand you have multi-billionaires whose fortunes are built on dragging us into the office every day. It's naive to an irresponsible degree to pretend those people aren't going to do everyth
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Well, there is one effect: Those that force people to work on-site are already experiencing that they do not get access to the best workers anymore. That may just be a strategic killer.
I'm Way Out There - It's Good, But NOT Cheap (Score:1)
Here's a few things to consider: Reliable internet is scares in the boonies. I'm lucky to be on a street with good cable. Many of my neighbors get by with line-of-site microwave, and it is not fast. Water is insanely expensive because our water district has to supply a small, widely distributed customer base. Power is expensive, just because. Fire is a constant threat in the rural areas of
I'm considering it right now (Score:4, Insightful)
My spouse has an employment opportunity that would take us to a small city of about 20k, it would be over an hour away from our current city of 1m.
The houses are cheaper, the day to day is probably calmer and preferable, and there's enough big box stores and the like to ensure our shopping needs.
But it does mean that I'm committing myself to either pure remote work or a hybrid situation long term.
It also means that various recreational opportunities are a lot more limited. The various sports and clubs I participate in are not nearly as available, and even things like meeting friends (or professional contacts) for coffee becomes a much bigger deal.
It's not a very easy decision to make.
Depends on how much remote work pays in the future (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason remote work is lucrative right now is that workers can move to low-cost areas while being paid like they are living in high-cost areas. Companies were willing to pay this extra money during the pandemic. It's not clear if they will continue to do so. Already some companies have reverted to paying low-cost wages in low-cost areas. My feeling is that it's just a matter of time before most companies revert to this strategy.
How much does this wage disparity matter? A lot. Historically workers were willing to move to high-cost, high-tax California because the higher wages were enough to more than compensate. Furthermore, being in Silicon Valley allowed easy job movement to a new company and facilitated networking and promotion within the same company.
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The reason remote work is lucrative right now is that workers can move to low-cost areas while being paid like they are living in high-cost areas. Companies were willing to pay this extra money during the pandemic. It's not clear if they will continue to do so. Already some companies have reverted to paying low-cost wages in low-cost areas. My feeling is that it's just a matter of time before most companies revert to this strategy.
How much does this wage disparity matter? A lot. Historically workers were willing to move to high-cost, high-tax California because the higher wages were enough to more than compensate.
If remote work is here to stay I wouldn't be too worried about that. There's certainly a significant arbitrary aspect to salaries, but there's also a salary vs productivity component. If the remote worker in a low cost area can't get a decent salary from their current employer a new employer shouldn't be too hard to find.
Furthermore, being in Silicon Valley allowed easy job movement to a new company and facilitated networking and promotion within the same company.
This part does matter. Remote work is still new enough that most newly remote employees have maintained their previous networks. But without the physical contact new networks are harder to
26% of net monthly income (Score:1)
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Push more important than pull (Score:2)
Buy and plan ahead for retirement (Score:1)
Predictable (Score:2)
That's not how this works... (Score:2)
From TFA:
A majority (two-thirds) of them believe that they'll buy a home in the next two years, citing a return on investment as the number one reason for purchasing.
Then a majority are going to learn a harsh lesson in personal finance.
Something you live in is *not* an asset . It's not easily converted into cash, and you pay to maintain it. That's called a "liability" kids. An asset would be something like stock, assuming it's not "locked up" in some sort of agreement obviously.
You can cash it in an
Millennials NO. (Score:2)
Stupid Question (Score:2)
Longer Yes: Of course we will. Why would I pay twice as much to live "downtown" in a city when I don't have to? When the only thing that ties me to that city is "Lots of people are there"?
There's obviously a lot of convenience and options for shopping, food, leisure, etc in a city, but most of my leisure is online, as is my work, and the shopping options are fine. If I ever *really* need to go somewhere in "the big city" I can spend the 40mins in a car and do it.
But if you think
No (Score:2)
1. As my late wife, who grew up in a small town (pop around 2500) in central Texas, used to say, the suburbs are the worst of the city and the worst of the country.
2. No, builders will build crap "starter" homes, designed to fall apart and be ripped down in 30-40 years (or less), then house flippers will come in and jack the prices up to unaffordable.
3. The telecoms, esp. Comcast, won't put high speed Internet out there.
I thought WFH was dead (Score:1)
If I'm to believe all the stories from the corpo propaganda rags lik Forbes, WFH is over, so buying a house with remote work in mind would be monumentally stupid. I guess we'll have to see what plays out in the long run.
When I bought my first place back in 2013, I did anticipate working primarily remotely. That was fine until the company I was with cut out my entire function layer and I ended up having to take another job that required a daily commute of, at best, 1h15m each way, every day. Had I seen that
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I thought he was talking about the bad decisions their parents are making sinking all their money into a house hoping it'll go up in value and make them rich.