What Do the Real Estate Migration Statistics for Maine Tell Us?
Units for workforces, homes for people, and the geography of a wealth-divided state.
On Medium, one can read stories by Atlantic Magazine and stories by a single mother.
Atlantic Magazine published a story on the unprecedented housing market boom titled “Will the Housing Market Ever Be Normal Again?”. Single Mother, Jessica published Indie Bloggers Deserve More Respect Than We’re Getting and Tim Denning, phenomenally productive blogger with a large following, who recently quit his “quality job”, published 7 Things I Wish More People Knew About Productivity.
Atlantic Magazine writes that “On the demand side, demographics are the big, invisible engine driving the machine. Millennials are the largest generation in American history. Having been too financially constrained to buy houses at a normal rate in the previous decade, many of them are now storming into the housing market. “ (emphasis mine)
The link in the quote leads to CoreLogic and an analysis based on all home-purchase mortgage applications, accepted or not, from January 2014 to December 2020. The quoted percentage counts only those who applied for mortgages and does not account for what is transpiring within a whole generation that is the largest in American history. Mathematically, it is not surprising that millennials are also the largest group among those applying for mortgages because they are the largest demographic group of all.
Medium’s indie writers are reporting that most millennials do not expect to ever to be able to afford to own a home and so I googled “percentage of millennials applying for home mortgages”
First to display on the search list is once again CoreLogic reporting the same as above:
“About 79% of all the FTHB home-purchase applications was comprised by the millennial applicants in 2020, up by 5 percentage points from 2019.”
That doesn’t answer the question.
The most immediately accessible data available on CoreLogic is stated as “applications, accepted or not”. A deeper exploration did not reveal the percentage of the applications accepted. The data is stated in qualified terms, designed to give an impression that the number of millennials able to afford to buy a home is higher than it actually is.
The percentage of millennial mortgage applicants, accepted, is unknown but it is clearly stated that millennials favor affordable markets.
The good news for Maine is that the millennium percentage indicator on the CoreLogic Map is dark green- which represents the highest number of millennial buyers. However, the indicator is entirely located inland and does not include the coast. There is a hot buying market on the coast, so does that mean that millennial buyers on the coast are below 40%, where the reported CoreLogic percentages start? That is how it appears since there is no data on the CoreLogic map for coastal Maine while inland Maine has the highest percentage of millennial homebuyers that is shown on CoreLogic’s national map.
Could the reason that there is no millennial data reported for the coast have anything to do with lack of regulations over Airbnbs?
Airbnb is shattering communities. Locals can no longer afford to live in their home cities, with workers forced to move further and further away from their jobs, adding billions of hours to their collective daily commutes. Not only are renters paying unnecessarily-inflated rent prices, but would-be purchasers — individuals, couples, and families — are now competing in bidding wars against capital-armed investors. Airbnb Is the Next Groupon (It Just Doesn’t Know It Yet)- Medium, Jason A Brock
Below that listing is “People Also Ask”. One of the questions is “How many Millennials can afford homes? “ and below that is a quote from a CNN article titled Millennials have almost no chance of being able to afford a house. This is what can be done
The quote from the opinion (above) by Annika Olson says:
Nearly 70% of millennials, according to a 2019 study from the rental platform Apartment List, say they cannot afford a house due to rising prices, and a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St.Mar 23, 2021
In 2019, millennials composed about 22% of the total population.
The solution advocated y Annika Olson is the comprehensive affordable housing plan at the start of 2018 from Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposing the construction of three million new housing units, a down-payment assistance program, and limits on investor purchases of single-family homes.
I haven’t studied that bill so I have no comment about it, except that the limits on investor purchases of single-family homes would stop the practice of investor groups buying residences to turn them into Airbnbs. My own knee-jerk response is that it is another case of massive production housing, which is how central management envisions everything, but there is room to hope that the term “unit” is just the language used, as it conjures up images of forests of skyscraper apartments in Chinese ghost cities, tall rectangles with many windows and perhaps some balconies but no individual characteristics, just a dreary, ubiquitous sameness repeated over and over again as “workforce housing”. The cities, constructed all at once, practically overnight, include individualist design only for the executive townhouses, government buildings, and other public spaces, all surrounded by the grids of ubiquitous units for the working classes.
Remember the old days when the language used would not have been “units’ it would have been “homes”, a term more appropriate when talking about humans.
We should count ourselves lucky in Maine that we have managed to avoid that scale of production housing development, as is being proposed at scale for the Boothbay Peninsula, #1 Baby-Boomer region in the USA, by the new real estate-agent-managed “affordable workforce housing trust”. aka, The Boothbay Region Housing Trust (to date no website). Now that once affordable first homes are unaffordable to folks of ordinary means, the faction that profited from turning middle-class homes into unaffordable homes is advocating for changing the zoning ordinances so they can build residential city blocks in what today is a historic New England rural village and choose not to consider the sustainability of our water supplies or any cultural values of a traditional quality rural lifestyle.
Do the people who compose the workforces want to live in urban grids when they move to the country, or might they be looking for a more organic lifestyle? I heard that there are starting to be apartments built without kitchens, radically denigrating the organic quality of urban-dwelling even more than the fact that the inhabitants are excluded from an individualistic relationship to the land. I first heard this from an Australian woman with whom I am acquainted on Facebook who reports it has become a thing in Australia for developers to save money by omitting the kitchen. Later heard, through word of mouth, a similar occurrence in the United States
Could a reason why inland Maine is seeing a high national average of millennial buyers be that one can still buy individual houses in inland Maine at an affordable price?
National articles about the real estate boom do not talk much about Maine but a story from Bloomberg titled More Americans Are Leaving Cities, But Don’t Call It an Urban Exodus displays a map titled Where Manhattan Residents Moved in which the coast of Maine is colored in mostly medium shades of green, and if you look closely you can see a very pale shade of green inland and stretching far up north.
So Maine is seeing an inbound migration of older folks on the coast and an exceptionally high percentage, by national standards, of millennials migrating to inland Maine.
All I have been reporting thus far are the kind of statistics that data compliers deliver. To understand the human side of the story, one goes to places like Medium. I was intending to include what Jessica Wildfire and Tim Denning are writing about in this post as it ties into affordable housing and productive work environments, but I will leave that for another post, noting today that when people like Tim Denning and Jessica Wildfire make much to do about productivity, they are recognizing that work creates greater value in life than can be measured by mere income status. This is the humanistic side of the story that data compilers do not compute and may be a key to innovating a thriving youth culture environment in Maine, the grayest state in the USA.