Thoughts like this is at the core of the problem.
Jason Gerbsman and his wife, Lauren, began thinking about buying a home just as the housing market began to slump two years ago. The couple, who were renting an apartment in the District, had saved a "substantial" amount for a down payment. But they wondered whether real estate was the best way to invest the money they had saved since college.
The average person should not consider a house an investment. The house should be thought of as a home. No matter how much you think the house is worth, your house is only worth the price at which someone is willing to buy it.
You also have a run up in home prices for areas with "good schools." This is definitely true, but it is not as pronounced as this opinion article states.
Hints of how things began to go awry appeared in "The Two-Income Trap," a 2003 book in which Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi posed this intriguing question: Why could families easily meet their financial obligations in the 1950s and 1960s, when only one parent worked outside the home, yet have great difficulty today, when two-income families are the norm? The answer, they suggest, is that the second incomes fueled a bidding war for housing in better neighborhoods.
It's easy to see why. Even in the 1950s, one of the highest priorities of most parents was to send their children to the best possible schools. Because the labor market has grown more competitive, this goal now looms even larger. It is no surprise that two-income families would choose to spend much of their extra income on better education. And because the best schools are in the most expensive neighborhoods, the imperative was clear: To gain access to the best possible public school, you had to purchase the most expensive house you could afford.
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The result was a painful dilemma for any family determined not to borrow beyond its means. No one would fault a middle-income family for aspiring to send its children to schools of at least average quality. (How could a family aspire to less?) But if a family stood by while others exploited more liberal credit terms, it would consign its children to below-average schools. Even financially conservative families might have reluctantly concluded that their best option was to borrow up.
At least, that's my opinion.
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