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Young Homeowners
ResumeHome prices are down. Mortgage rates, rock bottom. If you’re young in America, does it, will it, make sense to buy a home?
It’s 2012, you’re a young American, and the U.S. housing market and mortgage rates are beaten down as low as we’ve ever seen. Is it time to buy a house? For twenty-somethings or young thirties with college debt and no job and living in mom’s basement, that may be the cue to start laughing.
But hard times don’t last forever, do they? Mortgage rates in the three percents. Rock bottom. Foreclosed houses going for a song. Rents, as the man says, “too damn high.” Is it time to do it? Somehow? Somewhere?
This hour, On Point: If you’re young in America, is it time to buy a home?
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests
Karl Case, professor of Economics Emeritus at Wellesley College and Senior Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. He is co-creator of the Case-Schiller index, which tracks housing prices.
Derek Thompson, senior editor at The Atlantic; oversees business coverage for their website.
Matt Yglesias, Slate's business and economics correspondent. He's also the author of The Rent Is Too Damn High.
From Tom's Reading List
The Atlantic "Richer couples! Cheaper mortgages! Millions of unwanted houses! Despite all this, young home owners declined for 30 years, even before the Great Recession. Here's how the American Dream shrank."
The New York Times "Like many young married people, Steve and Logan Kinney dream of owning a home. So after several years of diligent saving, the couple, both teachers, scoured the listings in Boerum Hill, the leafy Brooklyn neighborhood where they rented."
U.S. News & World Report "Young Americans, take heart; there is empirical evidence that your parents' "When I was your age..." diatribes are currently meaningless."
Playlist
Low on Cash by Eric Lindell
The House that Built Me by Miranda Lambert
Young Americans by David Bowie
This program aired on March 7, 2012.