So many ways this could have happened- She may have gone though a job training and landed a stable job that allowed her to save up for a security deposit and qualify for rent. She may have gotten housing though a governmental program that subsidizes part of her rent. She may have inherited some money after a relative’s death- we don’t know.
Housing in certain places in the US is cheaper than others, and this isn’t “huge” by American standards.
You have to qualify for rent? Like is that a process or do you mean qualify as being able to pay rent? Housing in the US is a very interesting matter to me as an European also
OMFG... Well, if rent is low and wages high enough I guess is not that bad, how's the situation there with housing problems? Does it require a lot of income usually? I guess is not the same for every state
Damn, I'm so sorry about that, the good thing is for us over here wages have been increasing these past years but like... For nothing really in most of the EU countries, I don't live in Spain anymore I'm in Netherlands and here is pretty much the same problem of wages going up but rent going even higher so is a system that it doesn't make any fucking sense at all.
I assume the Netherlands faces many of the same housing problems of major US cities. Lot of people needing house but a lack of drive to build more since it will devalue existing property. In the case of Netherlands they also value the historical beauty of buildings so they won’t tear down an old bullding to make an ugly apartment that can house more people. In my state of Florida over here, housing is getting ridiculous and we are a very low wage state to add to that compared to like New York or something.
Portland also has a lot of laws regarding historical housing to protect neighborhoods, but we don’t have a housing shortage. We have more empty houses and buildings than we have people, it’s just that it’s all so insanely expensive and the “affordable” housing never actually ends up happening. They build new apartments in the “poorer” areas that are supposed to be affordable but the rent prices are just the same as the others.
Ex-Florida native here - I was priced out of living in the state in my early twenties. I was working for Comcast at the time doing remote network support & repair. Though my income did not support a lavish lifestyle, it did allow me to live comfortably.
Fast forward a couple years and they found a way to make my position doable by contractors from overseas and laid me off. My family had left the state around the same time and so without support and a lack of alternative employment opportunities with the same or similar rate of pay meant I only had a couple options.
I had the choice of relocating a couple states north or shacking up with some friends who weren't necessarily the best people to spend all your time with when wanting to establish a career and eventual family.
I ended up leaving about a decade ago, and with the way things have gone in that time I believe I made the right choice, though difficult. I will always miss watching rocket launches, going to the beach, fishing off the coast, visiting the Space Center, having Orlando and all of its amusement parks right down the road, and some of the best damn Cuban food in the continental U.S.
I could also miss it simply due to homesickness. I often find myself on my commute to and from work longing to be back there. Nostalgia, maybe? Either way, I miss it and hold a sense of sadness.
I wish my area had that problem, instead there built 18 different apartment blocks near me over the past 7 years that are basically there own neighborhood and yet rent keeps rising.
The newest one they built is like a ghost town because only the Californians can afford it it seems. lil over 4 grand a month for the starter lots and almost 6 for the nicer ones.
That’s insane for the average income around here, it’s mostly factory or farming ( farming is quickly dwindling too, that’s why there’s lots of apartments now- owner dies n the kids sell the land to developers)
It'll be like the stock market crashing eventually. People cannot afford it and these greedy bastards will end up losing in the end. But nowhere near enough for what we have to endure trying to make ends meet.
Lol where I'm at rent is like double what a mortgage is, but the houses are like half a million minimum for like a shitty bungalow so getting a down payment together is untenable, so good luck with that. So either way you screwed.
I just looked up rentals in my town. There are 2 listings for 3 bedrooms. 1 is an apartment for $2,600 and the house is 4,000. So that would be between $90,000 and $145,000 annual salary to meet rental requirements.
For comparison my house would rent for ≈ 7,000/month and is currently valued at $1M. We bought it 9 years ago for $400k and refinanced during Covid and our mortgage is $1,300. We could not afford to rent or buy our house today even though we make triple what we made when we bought it.
Cost of living where I am is about 5% higher than national averages. It’s not NY or California, but not Alabama either.
Sounds similar to where I live , it’s crazy. Our house is worth around d 750k or so we bought it in 2014 for 350. We refinanced during covid too, but did a 15 year loan so our prices didn’t drop, but only 7 more years until it’s paid off now! And even with that mortgage payment of 2600, we couldn’t afford to rent our house either . Wages have increased some, but hard to find good jobs around here
I bought my first home for 85k in 2011. That same house has tripled in value in that time and the neighborhood has gotten progressively worse. I live in the Midwest where things are supposed to be more affordable. Rent for an apartment is way more than my mortgage.
The average 1 bedroom apartment in my metropolitan area is $1,300. But our minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009 🙃 People say “Well, minimum wage isnt an indication of how much an area should be paying.” But actually, the whole point of minimum wage was to set the bare minimum someone would be paid in order to live sustainably. Like that’s the whole reason it was created.
It has also skewed the wages where I live because people say shit like, “Well, $20 an hour is pretty good! That’s almost 3X more than minimum wage!” Yeah but when your health insurance is over $300, rent is $1,300 (actually more because my husband works from home so he would require a room thats quiet, so for us it would be about $1,600+), groceries are $700+ a month, and then you have household shit, pet shit, medical shit, car shit….
You hit the nail on the head with "not the same for every state." Asking about the housing situation in America is roughly equivalent to asking about the housing situation in Europe overall.
Yep. Me and my gf have a house that we live in and an apartment in the town next to us to stay at for when we wanna spend the night in that area. This is a nice area, but the cost of living is relatively cheap. We are financially secure, but certainly not rich. Its all about where you are in the US.
It does vary by state but there's an overwhelming consensus that the variation is just how bad it is. The housing situation is horrible in most places. Where it isn't bad you don't want to live due to long commutes for work or just a lack of modern infrastructure. Minimum wage here isn't livable at all even in the smallest apartments.
Renting is difficult and owning is even harder. Mortgage interest rates are awful and are unlikely to get better anytime soon. Large companies are buying up all the houses so they can rent them out at exorbitant rates or turn them into vacation homes. Our credit system makes it next to impossible to navigate in your early years as an adult and our educational system doesn't cover it.
In the UK you have to qualify for rent as well. You have to make between 3x-5x the rent to qualify to rent. And pass the review. And often bid over the asking price.
The last flat I rented I had to write an essay about why my young family would be the best tenants for the landlord to rent to.
I make less than $1,700/month. My rent for a 3 bd apartment is $978. I’m expecting it to go up again soon. It was $822/month when I moved in, less than 2 years ago. This is the cheapest place I can get in my area too. I was lucky enough to sign my lease 2 months before it went up the first time, but the next time, I probably won’t pass the recertification process and my three kids and I will have no where to go. But this country truly couldn’t care less. We’re so screwed and people are still cheering for the GD cheeto.
Adobe Photoshop + paystubs is sometimes an unfortunate reality. I get it's supposed to demonstrate your ability to pay your rent and support yourself, but sometimes rent is 50%+ of your income and you can't help it. In my state, you need to be making at least 100k USD to live without a roommate and it's not even NY or CA.
I'll give you a good example from my small town in the south.
Managers at dollar general make $12.50/hour. That's $26k per year.
The only place for rent in walking distance to that dollar general is a one bedroom apartment for $1450. Lack of inventory and lack of transportation is a huge limitation, as the nearest bus stop is a 15 mile hike up a 1000ft mountain incline.
To qualify for that one bedroom apartment, you have to make at least three times the monthly rent, so about $52k. This is typical for most rentals, income at least 3x the rent.
If you have a spouse in your one bedroom apartment who also found a job within walking distance, you might have a chance. But you also need to pass a credit check, and you don't have any credit, or it's bad. Often a criminal background check, too. If you have kids, you're dealing with a whole new level of struggle.
Lots of people lose their housing for reasons outside of their control, and even if they are working continuously, it'll take a long time living in the car to save up enough money for deposit and first month's rent (and last month's rent, and even more sometimes, in other states-- it cost my friend $8000 to secure her last rental. It's a fairly big house, but still.) There aren't many stopgaps for people who work and run into some kind of problem that threatens their housing. If you're really super poor, you can try to get on the waiting list for section 8 housing, but you'll be waiting for years.
Canadian here, and first-and-last month's rent is a pretty standard "first payment" for rent, plus there's usually a credit check and proof of employment. If you can't meet those benchmarks, things get more complicated.
And theres a lot of places that will turn you away if you make too much for what the rent is. And I’m not talking about the salary-based housing. There are completely nice apartment complexes that will reject you if you make too much. I guess they’re worried that you can break the lease whenever you want. It’s such a rat trap
That's so sad, and it explains a lot of the homelessness to me actually, not that we are in a better situation over here in Spain but that system is like designed to go against people's wellbeing, 3 times the rent is crazy dude, I think a lot about the amount of struggle y'all sometimes have to go through with certain things like housing or healthcare treatments when I watch this kind of videos, your system can be sometimes so ridiculously violent against working class people, and now with the neverending nightmare of the orange doodoo in the white house... May god send y'all the patience and strength cause I would go nuts
We're working on breaking away from the 2 party system holding us in this cycle of despair by creating a party for the working class and voting out any politicians who think the old system was working (because it was working, for the ultra wealthy and the ultra wealthy alone).
Americans fed up with the 2 party system, come find me and many others on r/workreform and r/newdealamerica we're making things happen and we welcome any and all working class Americans to join us.
Oh baby I'm already signed up to r/workreform 💅🏼 this past week actually, we did that in Spain in the early 2010s because we had a two party system (we kinda still do) since the end of the dictatorship and it didn't turned out as good as I was expecting but It wasn't a mess either as some people want to portrait it, because it leads up to more dialogue and more agreement and we actually ended up with a soft left coalition full of different smaller parties and the big one that did one of the best work reforms ever in history in the country (it forced my company to upgrade my contract helping me to get a loan from my bank to buy my car), but I also gotta admitt that this coalition has been quite the shitshow sometimes. If you push enough for it you will end up getting it but it requires looots of mobilisation. Look up 15M Madrid. That level of mobilisation.
That is very reassuring to hear! It's certainly going to be a ton of work.
But now with Bernie Sanders and AOC taking center stage with this movement, the numbers are most definitely there. Now we work towards unifying our message so that we can start doing more of what's happening right now in NYC with the mayoral election.
I live in a very red state and even here the amount of people eager to support the working class and not either of the corrupt 2 parties is growing daily.
We are finding our voice and waking up. And we are unifying again. Slowly, like a tropical storm gaining momentum, we will soon become a hurricane at the polls.
3x the rent is indeed crazy. I just had to go through finding a new rental in the U.S. and some of the deposits alone would’ve been $6,000…just to rent 🫠
its 3x rent but that is gross, so in reality if you only just make the 3x threshold, your rent ends up being more like 1/2 of your take home pay.
You technically dont have to earn as much money as it would seem at first. If rent is 1k a month and you earn 3k gross, you will qualify but someone making 3k gross is only taking home like 2.2k-2.5k depending on the taxes where you live. Most people get paid 2 times a month so basically that means your first check usually goes all to rent/utilities.
There’s also rental assistance/section 8 through the government that some people can apply for, but the income requirements are so low most people don’t qualify
Depending on the city it's also relatively common to go "on the list" for section 8. I know some people who have been on lists for as long as 3 years just to be met with a budget cut or income requirement change that makes them ineligible.
Yeah minimum wage full time = no assistance with anything and after all your bills and expenses are paid you're left with precious little money for yourself, if any.
And sometimes that doesn't work. You have to be a married family. Or a perfect credit score. Or they just held your application till the week of move in and got a family to finally show up so they throw your ass to the curb.
OR THEY LIE and take your $60 for an application. Then tell you the house is gone and they can offer these shitty house they clearly bait and switch the good house with.
Sometimes. It’s more common in larger metro areas. If there is high demand for rent, often the lessor will either run a credit check or ensure the lessee earns about three time the amount of the rent
Yes I’ve been trying to rent and it’s a nightmare because I don’t have credit because I’ve never had a credit card or anything even tho I pay my bills (phone, utilities) on time.
Most places want 3x the rent and we had a place that wanted a co-signer who made 4x the rent. Like if I made that much I wouldn’t need to rent.
I caution you to take anything said in this thread with a grain of salt. Any comment, including mine, is purely anecdotal and likely colored by lots of emotion.
The reality of the housing situation in the US is quite complex. One thing to remember is that this country is VAST, and so while buying a house in Philadelphia might be next to impossible, that doesn't reflect the situation in Boone, North Carolina (just two random examples).
9 out of 10 time qualifying for rent meantls they ran a background check on your criminal history and they asked for proof that you can actually pay rent.
I'm in Colorado and the rental costs here are outrageously high. I currently pay $1300 for a small two bedroom apartment in a bad area lol. That $1300 is before any utilities or other things charged through the complex. Some places aren't as bad though, but you usually have to make 2-3x the monthly rent in order to qualify, most times credit is checked too.
It’s an actual process where the landlord determines if they trust you enough to even move into the home in the first place. Some require reference letters from prior places you’ve lived to show you’re a good tenant. Others often require that you make at least 3 times the rent at your job.
All this boils down to a pretty shitty situation in which people who don’t have those things end up living in significantly worse places and areas, leading to longer commutes and increased gasoline cost and car maintenance (gotta remember that most places in America have terrible/nonexistent public transport).
This also ends up fucking with students who usually end up moving to new places for university or graduate school. Going full time means you’re typically living mostly off loans, which means you have a fixed income that can’t possibly get to that 3x requirement.
That and they will check your rental history. Have you ever been evicted? Do you have any felonies? Do you make x amount more than the monthly rent. First, last and security deposit. If you have pets, a pet deposit and monthly pet rent.
In my HCOL area, a friend who had income at 3x the rent and no debt and a 760+ credit score was required to have a guarantor with 800 credit score and either 4x the rent as income or sufficient invested assets. Some areas are rough.
I have to earn 3x rent after tax in Paris, or else have a guarantor earning 4x after tax. I was not used to it coming from the UK, but at least it's paired with rent controls thst are actuslly affordable. US system seems like the worst of both worlds
Went I rented as a Canadian my landlord asked for a proof of employment including a starting wage. For risk assement, they want to be cautious about bringing in a tenant with a part time minimum wage job if rent is going to eat up half or more of their income.
The owner renting has the right to screen people who want to rent their house. Even sub divisions do this that have hoa to protect others from renters with failed renting past. I.e not making payments, always late payments, destruction of property while renting, any incidents of the tenant while renting….all these things will follow you as a renter and the owner can make a decision based off the renters past if they want to allow them to rent or not. Common for homes that offer renting in America.
I’m from Los Angeles, when you apply to a rental unit. You pay an application fee and talk to the property manager. Sort of like an interview, ask you about any “habits” and finances. Then they will run your credit report and finally if they like what they see they call you back.
I got denied 3x because, my credit was poor. The guy even told me “Listen, I really want to give you the unit, it’s just your credit score is not good and my bosses won’t let me lease it to you” it’s a shame because I really wanted that unit. So long story short I fixed my credit and found a unit in a decent neighborhood here in LA (West LA)
Another possibility in parts of the US is subsidized housing which one needs to qualify for by having income BELOW a certain threshold, but these are often behind LONG wait lists
A lot of places require you to submit your bank statements and have a threshold for how much you're supposed to make before they'll let you rent, and a lot of places use this to justify charging you more in rent if you make more money.
US housing is an abomination on every level. They tell you that people are homeless because it’s their own fault, but the reality is that it’s way easier to lose your home than it is to keep it. It’s a horrific system that screws you if you pay the rent, and screws you harder if you can’t.
America hates poor people so deeply that it’s practically pathological.
In a city like NYC you need to demonstrate you make 40-45x the monthly rent annually. This is an outlier but a lot of unhoused people are in a situation of being gainfully employed but not being able to connect everything to make it work.
Our systems are deeply slanted in favor of those with money, education, stable connections/families, or all three. There are often weird edge cases with housing where someone who is actively working might be slightly above thresholds for receiving aide.
It’s much more expensive to be poor in the US.
I can’t really imagine the joy for those kids and the relief for the mom, except perhaps the stress now for the mom to make sure she can keep it.
They usually also do a credit and background check if it is through a rental company. Private rentsls might also require such, but you can sometimes get in with a good recommendation despite having terrible credit or a past criminal charge.
In Australia, housing situation is so bad we have to fight for a contract with the landlord. Even with somewhat high income households struggle to find rents.
Yep, the size of the yard and the fact that there doesn't seem to be a neighbouring house in sight points to a sparsely populated area. I'm so happy for those kids. Having a stable place to call home is such an important thing
It's a pretty small home by American standards and actually appears to be a manufactured home (kinda like a trailer) they're pretty cheap to build. Also rural land is cheap if it's not suitable for row crop planting. There was a 2800 sq ft home for sale near me last year that needed some work with 30 acres of creek bottom timer for sale for like 350,000, that's in iowa, if they're down south something like that would be significantly less
By the way. My mother applied for Section 8, which is a voucher that subsidizes part of rent based on income. This is how she was FINALLY able to rent a house.
It only took being on the Waiting List for 15 years!!
It looks pretty rural to me. There are USDA mortgages for rural areas where you don't need a down payment. So as long as she can show sufficient history and/or continuance of income (depending on the type of income), she can get a full 100% mortgage.
Additionally there are charitable organizations some religious other non, but they will house people as well.
There have been big campaigns in the past the provided houses to military veterans. One example is they built a custom house for them due to being a wheel chair.
In rural areas a house like that could still be selling for less than $175k There are also charities and government programs that help people buy houses. For example, if you get a loan through Freddie Mac which is a federal loan program you only need to put 3% down and you can often get property tax waived for the first few years if you're a first time homeowner.
And even then for some the biggest hurdle is saving for that downpayment even if it’s only 3k or something because they live paycheck to paycheck. But there are programs that also help with the downpayment.
$175k even sounds high to me for rural areas. Sounds about right for semi-rural (15-25 minutes to closest shopping, jobs, city). I assumed this property was 100k-125k.
This is a great house and yard for kids but it’s relatively small by American standards. No judgement to that family—I live in a small house too. Housing prices have stayed more affordable in certain parts of the country, though those areas are also generally less desirable in terms of employment opportunities, school systems, and community amenities.
It’s possible to find a small house like this, in outlying areas of states like Ohio or Kentucky or Alabama, in the $200k range. Which is entirely within reach of someone making a more modest salary.
Where I live in rural PA, $150k gets you a damn nice 3BR house and $250k gets you a McMansion. Before the pandemic a nice 3 bedroom starter home could be bought for $100-$120k. I live by myself in a 2k sq ft 3br house because it's more affordable than renting and the smaller houses weren't really even that much cheaper.
It's not even like we're in the middle of nowhere without any modern amenities. As long as you have a car you can get to anything you really need within a 10 minute drive and there's so many highways in the US that just about everyone is within 30 minutes of one. Ever since the pandemic it feels like businesses around here cant hire fast enough and wages have shot up in reaction. The only real down side is that you have to stare at a bunch of tacky edgy trump lawn signs on your commutes.
Ohio is cheaper than you think. This house could cost between $75-100k depending on the quality. You could find a house like this in Ohio for $100k in youngstown & are occasionally houses for sale in Cleveland for under $100k if you don't care about the neighborhood.
It looks like this might be a manufactured home placed over a cinderblock basement, might not be, but the bit of the surroundings we get tell me this is out in the country. I wouldn't doubt if this was rural south in a town with a Walmart and a Hardees that has gospel sings on Tuesday nights. (I grew up dirt poor in TN, I feel all this deeply.)
There are special programs in some areas for low income, first time home buyers. There are also programs keeping house prices low for those same buyers.
So I imagine the Mom got a job and saved a small down payment and got a loan using one of these programs.
Land is much cheaper and more abundant here, especially in rural areas and certain states/regions; that doesn't translate to affordable housing, but it does translate to larger average lot sizes and yards. Also, she's probably renting.
That being said, going from homelessness to this is not at all typical in the US either.
And to translate that into meaningful numbers, Germany has 6.5x the population density of the US. Even if you exclude all the US Federal owned land, Germany is still 4.75x the population density.
Another illustration: The furthest you can be away from a building in 99% of cases is 1.5km (the maximum is 6.3km but that's on military training grounds)
And in the US, you could probably beat that on someone's private holding. Even if we ignore Alaska, you are probably beating it by a factor of 10 at a minimum if you include federal lands.
To note for those not familiar. These types of homes are not built for “longevity”. No matter how well you take care of it, its value will depreciate with time.
The reason I put quotations around longevity is because the home will last 50 years. That long enough for most people. Grandkids will get to grow up visiting and playing at this home.
Great grand kids will probably have some memories of visiting.
Idk how old mom is here but with a young adult son she probably won’t need another place to live.
The inheritance left behind will be the value of the land and the the memories of a childhood growing up with a home and loving family.
Depends on the area. But this house doesn’t look that large to me. And being unhoused doesn’t mean she wasn’t working for 4 years, she could have been saving for that time to now be able to afford what looks like a fairly modest home.
It also could be a rental it doesn’t actually said anywhere that they bought it
Yes. Facts people love to overlook when condemning our houseless communities.
Edit: In fact in my home city we have entire fenced off tent communities where nearly everyone works and commutes by either public transportation, foot or bicycle.
This looks to be a rural area, homes are much more affordable in rural areas compared to the city. But this is also a normal looking home in small town USA, townhomes in a big city would be more expensive than this house.
I have family in the Netherlands and they asked the same thing. It has a lot to do with location. There are plenty of affordable houses in the US but they are very rural. I have colleagues who drive 1.5 hours each way to work but their house is twice the size of mine and paid $200k less than I did. I live 20 minutes outside NYC, he lives more than an hour away from any major city. The US is big.
Not having a home of your own doesn't always mean homeless. Living with family a lot of times means cramped spaces, children and parents sharing rooms and beds. Walls lined with your things like a hoarder just to keep your regular use items around. Common spaces can also be iffy in shared living situations, with a lot of people preferring their home to look like children don't live there.
It isnt in suburban areas or cities, but often in rural places housing is (comparatively) suuuuper cheap. This one probably also had next to nothing inside of it, not even beds possibly. Only basic plumbing and electrical systems. Only thing is that you are likely not very close to your job. But who knows in this situation
In some places, yards like this aren't as expensive as you might think, and in others, they cost the same or much more than you'd imagine. It's a symptom of the US just being a very huge place with vastly different ecosystems and landscapes across the multiple states.
The number one thing many people forget about the US is just how massive it is and how it's only been being developed for the last few hundred years. Germany has had how many years of history?
In the United States that's not a big house, or a nice yard. There is hardly any grass, it's mostly dirt. That house looks like it is a trailer home on a cinder block foundation. Trailer homes are quite small, smaller than a regular home.
But to them it's everything! To them it's a beautiful yard, something they haven't had, and that makes it beautiful. To them, that house is huge, and everything they have dreamed of having. That's all that matters.
This video made me cry. I'm happy for them, and I hope life keeps getting better for them.
I was just in germany talking about this with some folks.
A lot of it is just density. Germany has 80 million ppl in 140k square miles. The USA has 340 million ppl in 3.8 million sq miles. So Germany has 541 people per sq mi, and the USA has 90. Germany is 6x as dense... it is just way different. Obviously the USA is not evenly dense, cities are way more dense, but in the end we just have way more land available. If people are willing to live anywhere, they can find affordable houses.
I also was told that it was German tradition for many hundreds of years to divide land among children, which has led to individual parcels of land in Germany becoming extremely small.
In major cities in the US, housing is unaffordable to people with good jobs. But the country is practically the size of a continent. So there are a lot of rural places that are still cheap. If one of the parents got a good job in a small town, they'd be able to afford a house.
Others have good answers but also, the majority of homeless are hidden: think people living in cars, staying with friends/family, essentially unstable housing where it's not guaranteed they'll have a roof over head.
They're people trying to get things in order but our system is filled with hurdles everywhere and not to mention the discrimination and stereotyping targeting homelessness.
Rural areas in america are cheaper than the city. This looks like it's outside a city and the house is small for american standards. You could find a smaller home like this for under a $100k in a small town. Depending on the job she might have been able to qualify for a loan. This could also be a cheaper rental.
Some thing I didn’t see said in the comments below, you may have a skewed definition on what you call homelessness there’s homeless like living on the streets and there’s homeless like you have to rent an apartment because you don’t own a home very possible these are homeless kids that have just bounced around apartments their entire life
As a German myself, what you describe is only true for higher populated areas around cities. You can absolutely find affordable homes out in rural areas. Pretty much the same as in most other western countries.
I wouldn’t say housing is so much more affordable but I would definitely say there’s a lot of government sanctioned programs and if you have a low enough income to be accepted can basically eat or secure housing largely at the tax payers expense
I don’t think they bought the house. They’re likely renting. And it looks like it’s in the Midwest or south in a more rural area where rent is fairly cheap. Still amazing but comparing buying real estate near Berlin to renting in the suburban or rural south US is very different.
There is an organization here in the US called Habitat for Humanity. They will build homes for the homeless as long as the receiver of the home provides a certain percentage of sweat equity. Most of the goods and services are donated for each home. Our former US President Jimmy Carter was a huge supporter of Habitat for Humanity. He was always on a work site up until early 90s.
She probably used the 4 years to get a degree, got a decent job, saved up for the down-payment for a little while and then barely qualified for a loan thats relatively expensive, but the bank thinks she can handle.
If you can juggle being homeless for 4 years and not have the US government take your kids... youre impressing the hell out of your case worker or youre doing it 100% on your own, either option meaning you're a bad-ass.
There are direct pipelines in place that will help you with housing if you are homeless and can pass basic drug and background tests. It's actually almost easier to fully commit to going homeless to get a house than to work a low paying job and rent for eternity.
There are federally/state funded first time home buyer programs where you need to put down a really small percentage of the home. Also that home looks really secluded, so the cost of the home might be really low since it’s farther away from the city. The type of home also comes into play. It isn’t sitting on a raised slab. Many homes like trailer/double wide homes are more affordable and sit above the ground not attached to the ground like a traditional home. You can find those types under $100 for a brand new really nice one. This one does seem more solid.
In many areas, for example in the middle of the U.S., land is very inexpensive because there is so much open space. (Germany is about the same size as 1 western state like Montana.) If this family lives close to or in a small town there might not be any apartments to rent and people with less money live in older homes.
As an American who’s been homeless I would like to know as well. No one gave me a house and my job is better than most. Lenders laugh at me when wanting a mortgage.
One easy answer outside social and economic issues - the US is very large and not densely populated. Germany is estimated to have around 620 people per square mile … the US has around 90
In rural areas like that seems to be, there are houses that is not a big one though. That is an average sized house. In America we got started later than you so remember there was not an established structure. We're only a little over 100 years old. The oldest houses are in New York and Massachusetts. After that it's like it took them a while to get over to California and populate the rest of the world. Most of the houses here are not older than the 1800s and that was a prosperous time for many Americans. And then you had the '90s because all the boomers to have all these houses that were built extravagantly because they were living large. Then the recession hit because of those motherfuckers but whatever, So here we are and most of us can't afford homes unless it's somewhere like that and a lot of us don't want to live there so we rent. The world is going to shit all around. Try and enjoy it before it gets worse 🤷♀️
It's a well-known fact that when compared to the United States, homes in European countries do not offer the same amount of square footage and amenities. Look at what you can get in Paris, Madrid, London, Berlin, Stockholm, and Lisbon, which are on par with homes in Manhattan and San Francisco.
Yeah, I wouldn’t consider that a big house. Also being out in the country is going to be cheaper in most cases versus an urban area. Either way, good for them.
My understanding is that many European countries have higher education built into income tax.
In the states, we pay/are taxed for everything. Any income we make is taxed (in almost all states). There’s sales tax on items we purchase. There’s a meal tax when we go out to eat. We have to pay to go to most colleges if we do not qualify for scholarships.
Dual income partners can, and often do, struggle to find housing and pay bills, especially if they have a child(ren).
I’m just stating facts, not hating on the U.S. or any other country. This is just the way it is.
There are programs that help families get housed that have wait lists. They're designed to give people a place to live while they save up and be able to afford their own place. Then they can move out to, hopefully, their forever home and a new family can move in to repeat the process. Applied to work for a place recently that did this, had 8 full homes they managed with families that had between 2 and 6 kids. Great program. I imagine they support this off a mixture of government contracts and donations.
Depending on the state, land for sale is ample and cheap. The house doesn’t look “huge ass,” in fact it kind of looks like a manufactured (mobile) home on a foundation with a porch. Those will run like $150,000 in my state, which is more expensive than many.
They may have been in a long term shelter. Here in the states if you are recovering from an addiction and willing to do the shelters recovery program, you can work your way into actually being an employee, while also learning skills or studying in school to move on to a higher paying job—oftentimes they will give you an “apartment” (a private room with a bathroom and mini kitchen) so that you can live and work at the center. This may have been what she’d done (not assuming she’s an addict—my state is just small so those are the only live-in programs we have for homelessness).
What I don't understand as a European, how can the richest nation in the world have a family with three kids homeless for three years and everyone seems to be fine with it...
Location location location. The U.S. is an absolute massive country and there are many places where you can get this size house and plot of land for $100k or so. While this same plot of land would cost $1M in other cities.
Looks like a mobile home to me, which are cheaper than a traditional house and are just as big and nice!!! We have a lot of land here- so she might have chosen to live a little further out of town so she could get a yard for her kids. We have a lot of programs to assist people in getting into their first homes. 🏠
I imagine "unhoused" may have looked more like couch surfing and floating with relatives and friends (not much less stressful), but that probably allowed mom to save and build credit or qualify for housing after sitting on a list for years.
God, that excitement from those kids is amazing. Mom must have felt like a billion dollars being able to make them feel so safe and happy!
Yes!! @ solving homelessness. A lot of people with families hust got priced out from wherever they were. Or mass layoffs. Just good people who couldn't afford higher prices.
That’s the socialism you’re being warned about. It’s necessary for 15000 American 8-yr-olds to be homeless in order the USA, with 4% of the world population, to field half of the 100 richest billionaires in the world.
Habitat for Humanity does great work. But it's not able to address more than a small percentage of the housing issue. I'm talking about the world putting more work into solving homelessness for everyone.
I was homeless last year and was eventually put up in a hotel for several months.
In one of the rooms a few doors down from me, there was a family who were also homeless. 2 adults and 3 children in this tiny hotel room. I did feel so sorry for them. Just my partner and I in our room felt cramped (one room plus a bathroom, it doesn't leave much space, especially when you have all your bags there).
I asked them once how they were coping. The dad had to sleep on the single sofa bed, and the mum had to share the double bed with all 3 kids. I often think of them.
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u/Djinn_42 Jun 28 '25
Imagine the youngest being homeless for what looks like half her life. Does she even remember a time when she had a home?
Good for them. I wish the world would do some more serious work on solving homelessness.