If housing costs are cooling why a rate hike?

[Jmljasmine]

You can chose not to have McMansions. Everything is enormous any more, and everyone acts entitled to be living in extravagance. It's still society's fault. No need for 2800-4000 sq foot enormity. That's part of the elevated housing costs. There aren't any regular sized homes any more.

I agree. We are feeling tight in our house but we don't need more space. People through history have lived in far less. We are 6 people in 1500 square feet. I feel very unusual sometimes not having more space that it seems everyone around here does.

 

[DLgal]

Thanks! I’ll have to look into doing that.

Update. Going to 1.4% effective 7/29.

 

[Christine]

My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril," Biden tweeted on Saturday. "Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you're paying for the product. And do it now."

Makes sense. Not just with gas, but everything. Notice how when the price of a barrel goes up overnight so do the prices at your local gas stations--on gas they bought a few days ago? It can jump. I've seen jumps of 25-45 cents overnight. Then when the price of a barrel lowers, it seems to take weeks to go back down.

This happens with everything. As a poster above pointed out, gas is down by rougly $.60 cents per gallon over the past several weeks. I'm paying a full dollar less than I was on my last tank of gas. Yet NOTHING I've bought in the past few weeks has dropped accordingly--in fact, the price keeps inching up and it's blamed on "fuel costs." I'm sorry but there really is some mild gouging going on in just about every sector. If the costs for production of anything were so high, these corporations would not be reporting record profits. It's all shameful.

 

[Cheburashka]

You can chose not to have McMansions. Everything is enormous any more, and everyone acts entitled to be living in extravagance. It's still society's fault. No need for 2800-4000 sq foot enormity. That's part of the elevated housing costs. There aren't any regular sized homes any more.

Yeah, right. The homes built in the 60's and 70's in my hometown (which is nowhere near a coast) cost about twice as much now as they did only 10 years ago. There is no place in the city proper to build new homes without tearing old ones down. Most of what is selling are old homes, typical 3 bedroom 1-story ranch houses from the Brady Bunch era, and they don't have to be remodeled to make the money. The suburban areas are more expensive, too. I can't afford to live in the city proper, and the suburban house that I live in got a 50% increase in its tax appraisal over the past year. It's a small house but still expensive. All housing here is expensive now. Condemned properties are expensive here.

 

[MillauFr]

You can chose not to have McMansions. Everything is enormous any more, and everyone acts entitled to be living in extravagance. It's still society's fault. No need for 2800-4000 sq foot enormity. That's part of the elevated housing costs. There aren't any regular sized homes any more.

It is the land costs that are driving the larger houses here. A developers can buy a 4,000 sq. lot for $1,000,000 and spend $600,000 building a 1,500 sq. foot house that they can sell for $1.5m. They will lose money. Or they can spend $900,000 building a 3,500 sq. monstrosity that they can sell for $2.5m. It isn't hard to figure out which kind of house they are going build.

 

[Colleen27]

He called on the gas station owners to lower their prices. Today. That was a few weeks ago.

My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril," Biden tweeted on Saturday. "Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you're paying for the product. And do it now."

Thanks. I did miss that. It sounds like he's trying to use the bully pulpit to influence things, but I don't see how that works in a time when companies are far more accountable to their shareholders than to their consumers.

I do get the frustration with individual stations/companies keeping prices high. As I said before, I've noticed a lot of variation in my metro area, way more than usual, in how/when stations are adjusting prices. When oil goes up, the prices go up pretty uniformly all over the place. But as oil prices have gone back down, there's a huge difference in how much of that decline different stations/companies are passing on to the consumer and when they're choosing to do so. But it feels like a drop in the bucket compared to the underlying cost increases.