Buying a House Sucks | The Renegade Coder

Welcome to 2026, where cyberpsychosis is a real thing you can get from chatbots, PC hardware is unaffordable, and the housing market is a nightmare. Let's talk about my personal experience with trying to buy a house. The Desire to Buy a Home Once again, I'm breaking from my usual mold of ranting about AI to talk about something that has been frustrating me for the better part of the new year: house buying. I just turned 32 earlier this month, and I have a two-year-old with another on the way later this year. Right now, we're paying about $1,700 a month to rent a house in a suburb in the city. In other words, we do not own a home, and we have never owned a home. Obviously, we would like to own a home at some point. The house we're renting right now isn't quite big enough for the family we want to have, so we figured 2026 would be the year we finally go out to buy one. My rant about home buying hasn't really started yet, but you probably already get the gist: houses are comically expensive. In the area I live, a 3-4 bedroom house used to go for something like <$200,000 when we first moved here in 2018. Those same houses have doubled in price in just eight years, which is apparently a growth rate 2.4 times faster than inflation. So yeah, I was already not very excited to try to buy a home on price alone, but there is so, so much more frustration I want to share. Housing Options First, I've never been the type of person that wanted to live in a suburb. I grew up rural with a massive yard, and an old rundown house. My closest "neighbors" were football fields away. Now, as nice and quiet as rural living is, there are some major problems. For starters, you have access to nothing. You might have a few chain restaurants and some local bars, but there is nothing to do. Likewise, there are no jobs, so you're probably making very little money or traveling long distances for work. Neither of which are ideal. So, your primary option is to own nothing and rent high density housing (i.e., apartments). I did this for the last decade, and it's fine. I don't mind living in an apartment, especially if I can live close to amenities. But, I also don't love paying rent. It really does feel like throwing your money away. Also, with the way apartments are built with paper, I'm not trying to subject my neighbors to the screams of a baby for hours on end. Therefore, the only real choice is to move to the suburbs. That's just how this works in the US because we have horrible city planning. You are doomed to move your family out to the suburbs and drive into work with rush hour every day until you retire. Choosing a Suburb Assuming suburbs are the only way to raise a family in the city, there's another problem: choosing the right suburb. Where I live, there are dozens of suburbs to choose, but that choice requires you to reckon with your personal values. For us, we want to send our kids to as good of a school district as possible. Of course, so does every parent, so the most desirable neighborhoods are prohibitively expensive. For example, if I search up the top school districts in my city, the best neighborhood has houses with an average price of $545,184. A price like that is completely out of reach on my 5-figure salary and would still be unaffordable even if I made twice as much. To get a feel for how absurd this is, here are the average house prices for the top 20 or so school districts in the area: $545,184 $600,168 $496,376 $549,200 $603,932 $527,865 $457,606 $432,890 $361,602 $372,390 $409,103 $402,433 $530,070 $474,492 $197,305 $414,049 $422,429 $348,794 $396,751 $255,049 $373,668 If you don't have a feel for how much money this is, the absolute maximum we're willing to spend is $350,000, which is significantly lower than the vast majority of school districts. To further put this in perspective, a $350,000 house on a 30-year conventional loan with a 3% down payment (which is $10,500 by the way) puts you at around $2,800 a month for a payment. That's over a grand more than I'm paying now to rent. And let's not forget to mention that housing prices are still climbing, so any appreciation is going to cause property taxes to rise. In other words, what would start as $2,800 a month might balloon to over $3,000 a month within a couple of years. And I'm partially annoyed by this because I want to send my kids to one of these good school districts, but I worry about them growing up like "one of the poor kids" in the area like I did—which, again, is completely absurd when I'd be shelling out nearly $3,000 a month for a house. Making Offers For now, we've been hunting for homes in the lowest cost neighborhoods near the top of the list (i.e., in the $365,000 average range) and hoping homes pop up closer to our price point. While we've seen plenty of houses in the $330,000 to $350,000 range, we've had absolutely no luck with putting in offers. The very first house we looked at was listed for $340,000. We checked it out during a blizzard thinking no one would possibly be visiting it. That night, we put in an offer at asking price, thinking we would get it no problem. Unfortunately, we found out that someone else had put in a bid above ours AND waived the inspection, so we went all in: $350,000 and waiving remedies. The next day we found out that we lost, but so did the bid that waived the inspection. Apparently, somebody went in way over asking price, which even surprised the seller because they couldn't get the house off the market for the last six months. Then, we found another house we liked going for $350,000. We visited and put in an offer that very day. We figured we wouldn't get it as we were at our limit. That evening we found out our offer wasn't even good enough to be the backup. At this point, we have visited something like seven houses and put in offers on two without luck. Our timeline is starting to get tight because we would like to close on a house by April, so we have time to move in before I go off to Japan again. Also, did I mention my wife is pregnant? We absolutely do not want to be moving with a new baby. I can feel the time pressure starting to weigh on my wife as well because we've started compromising on a lot of our wants. For instance, today we were thinking about going for a house that had no basement, something we wouldn't have even considered a month ago. Likewise, I've stopped thinking at all about my work commute. Perhaps by next week, we'll be opening up our options to HOAs. Before long, we might even start accepting split-levels. It's crazy how demoralizing this process is. Is the Dream of Home Ownership Dead? Early this semester, I was joking with my students that I was going to be one of the last people to ever buy a home. It's obvious that we have a housing crisis in this country (apparently with room for it to get worse). After all, it's hardly surprising that the average age of a first-time home buyer is 40. That's how long it takes just to save up a down payment. As we keep getting beat on offers, I'm constantly wondering who the hell is putting these massive offers over asking. My initial gut reaction is that it's corporate buyers because it wouldn't possibly make sense for someone financing their home to be able to eat the appraisal gap (i.e., the amount you have to pay out of pocket because the bank says the house isn't worth that much). But, this article makes it seem like homeowners are making cash offers from equity in a previous home. If that's the case, it's somewhat comical to hear homeowners complain about interest rates. Houses have literally doubled in value in less than ten years, and people aren't moving because they're worried about 6% interest rates? Brother, you can probably buy your next home outright. What's the concern about financing? Anyway, I'm obviously frustrated because this whole process has been emotionally taxing. All I want to be able to do is buy a home that I can raise my family in, something my parents and their parents were able to do. I'm sure it will work out in the next couple of months, but boy is it frustrating. Hey, I couldn't quite find a way to wrap this article up cleanly, so I'll sneak my usual closing remarks below this line. For instance, here are some articles you might find helpful. They should all be life advice adjacent, so they should be relevant: Computer Science Career Advice in 2026? Your Guess Is as Good as Mine 31 Lessons Learned as a New Dad What It Takes to Throw a Celebration of Life Likewise, I'll toss out a Hail Mary here in case anyone wants to contribute to my down payment. Or if you'd prefer, you can always donate to my kid's college fund. Of course, you can just check out my list of ways to grow the site. Thanks again and take care!