Buy a Home? Not in This Economy. NewsWire

NewsWire: 5/7/22

• According to a new poll, a record low share of Americans say it’s a good time to buy a house. In just a year, this share has dropped from 53% to 30%. (Gallup)
  
• NH: When asked last month, just 30% of Americans said that it’s a good time to buy a house. Gallup has been asking this question since 1978, and the answer has never been below 50%. This figure has tumbled 23 percentage points since last year.
• Not surprisingly, people’s answers tend to track the state of the housing market. In the early 2000s, as U.S. homeownership climbed to an all-time high, fully 81% of respondents thought it was a good time to buy a home. After the Great Recession hit, only 53% agreed. But this was still 20 percentage points higher than the current figure.

• So why is Americans' outlook so bleak? They figure that housing prices already soared to record highs amid tight supply--but may not rise any higher. And worse, they've noticed that mortgage rates have climbed to their highest rates in over a decade. Meanwhile, inflation is eroding buying power.
• Since 2011, Gallup has also asked respondents to rank five investment options: real estate, stocks, gold, savings accounts, and bonds. The latest results for this survey reveal something of a gruesome paradox. That share of Americans who now consider real estate the best investment has climbed to a record high (45%).
• No wonder Americans are feeling dour. A record share think that housing is their best investment bet at the same time that a record share think this is a terrible time to buy a home. Conclusion: The prospects of all their other investment options must be looking dismal indeed!

Did You Know?

• Catholicism Declines in Latin America. Latin America has long been associated with Catholicism, and for good reason. In 1995, 80% of those in the region identified as Catholic. But in recent years, their numbers has been shrinking fast. Today, only 56% of residents identify as Catholic. As in the U.S., more people are identifying as religiously unaffiliated (see “Rise of the Religious ‘Nones’”); the share of “nones” has quadrupled to 16% over the past 25 years. Yet Latin America has seen an even larger surge in people who identify as evangelical Protestants--many of whom are former Catholics. Evangelicals’ share of the population has gone from 3.5% to 19%. Across the region, these trends vary wildly. Chile, for instance, has seen hardly any growth in evangelicalism, though a huge increase in the unaffiliated. But Guatemala has seen much steeper growth among evangelicals than among the unaffiliated. In Guatemala and Honduras, there are now almost as many evangelicals as Catholics.