By Charles Hugh Smith

The soaring costs of home ownership are changing the metrics of unaffordability in important ways.

We all know that buying a house is now unaffordable, but owning a house is increasingly unaffordable, too. Gordon Long and I have laid out the sobering explosion of the costs of homeownership, a rise that shows no signs of slowing, much less reversing.

It would be nice to attribute it all to one source or one villain, but alas, it isn't that easy. Costs are rising across the board for many reasons, none of which are reversible by enacting a policy tweak or two.

For context, let's start with inflation since 2020 and the cost of buying a house. Truflation pegs the aggregate inflation (a.k.a. loss of the purchasing power of the US dollar in our domestic economy) at 26% since January 2020. All else being equal, we would expect the cost of housing to have risen by about 25%.