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Unless if you are quite old, you will live to see the adjustment.

Houses at this point are owned by Boomers, some Gen Xers, and the richest subset of Millenials.

But this is quite an unstable situation. Everyone needs somewhere to live, but vanishingly small parts of the population need two places. As the Boomers either die or move to retirement homes they will need to liquidate their real estate in massive numbers, largely all at once thanks to the tight clustering of the Boomers.

There’s simply no way that this glut of housing will be absorbed by the richest groups of Millenials without sudden and deep price shocks, especially since Boomers appear to prefer suburban homes that the childless Millenials don’t typically want.

What’s interesting to me is what will happen politically. Boomer house owners have been very adept at using local politics to prop up their property values, the only notable failure was 2008. What kind of bailout will they ask for when their home is worth 1/5 what they expected?




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