This is actually worse than it sounds 1 year of salary can be paid off in 2.5 paying the same amount someone pays for rent on their apartment. In 2.5 years you wont pay much in the way of interest. Over a 30 year mortgage paying the median home price of 388k means paying almost 3x the face value or roughly 1.1M or roughly 17 years of median income.

I’m GenX as well and I will straight up admit that my wife and I got lucky, purchased a house in a “distressed” neighborhood in Portland because it was all we could afford, and now, 20 years later, the neighborhood is fully gentrifying and our house and property is worth way more than what we owe on it.

I’m conflicted as to how to feel about it. While on the one hand we very innocently bought the place because it was in a shitty neighborhood and was all we could afford, on the other hand I now know that we were what the urban studies people refer to as “bohemian colonizers,” meaning that without knowing it, we were, by moving into the neighborhood as poor artist types, part of a much longer process of gentrification.

Again, I am of several minds regarding how I feel about the whole thing.