The shift to rental in single-family homes is visible on streets like Recktenwall. Between 2005 and 2009, about 80% of such houses in greater Las Vegas were owner-occupied; by 2013, that had dropped to 71%, a 12,000-unit shift…
But the homeownership decline is not entirely tragic. For the footloose, the empty-nested, the risk-averse and assorted others (contract workers, military servicemembers) renting makes sense…
The housing crash’s ground zero was Las Vegas. People who thought you couldn’t lose money on a house lost everything. At one point, an astonishing three quarters of Las Vegas mortgage holders owed more on their homes than they were worth, a percentage that still hovers around 25%.
That’s one of many factors suppressing home sales. Another is the fact that millions of houses have been flipped to rentals by investors who snapped them up at rock-bottom prices years ago.
This long article that covers presidential support of homeownership in recent decades to the perks of some newer apartment complexes presents an interesting conundrum: Americans – including young adults – tend to say that they would prefer or aspire to own a home but for a variety of reasons – from bad credit to tight credit in the mortgage industry to uncertain jobs to college loans to better perks in rental complexes to more options like single family homes available for rent – see renting as desirable at the moment. Some of this might only be determined over time; will the housing market conditions continue to push people toward renting? And, if this happens, does the aspirations of owning a home also slowly decline?
What would be helpful to see with this article that uses Las Vegas: where has the population increased or declined in the metropolitan region over the last ten years or so? While the single-family home market was hit hard, does that mean the suburbs lost people and residents moved closer to the region’s center?
Legally Sociable 