Bitterness is a New Homeowner

Countless stories have lamented how the average Californian can no longer afford a house. Last Sunday the Daily News wrote about the impact of high prices and low affordability on middle-class families -- and " the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots":

Record-breaking home values have jeopardized the American dream for more and more Southern Californians who aspire to the security and stability of homeownership but find the prices and sacrifices too much to bear.

The hot real estate market has generated unimaginable wealth for homeowners but has left others priced out of the market, feeling they'll never get their piece of the dream

One in five new homeowners in the state spends more than half of gross income on a home loan. Half of new homeowners spend more than the federally recommended limit of 30 percent of their income on the mortgage.

But here's an angle I haven't seen anyone report yet: There's a whole generation of us younger folk -- call us Gen X, Gen Y, whatever -- who missed the gravy train simply because we weren't ready financially to buy a house until the last year or two.

At that point, for those of us who were still able to buy a house, it was for a smaller home with a much larger pricetag. In most of the country, a "half a million dollar home" means something. Here, that's a shack in the Valley.

Since then, I think many of us new homeowners have been struggling to swallow this bitter taste: That nagging feeling we get every day when we pass by homes twice the size as ours, knowing that those owners pay half the amount we do in mortgage.

The bitterness especially stings when it comes to property taxes. Thanks in part to Prop. 13, I pay much more in property taxes than homes four to five times the size of our residence. That's right -- I'm writing larger checks for my little Glendale home than many of the mansion owners in Hancock Park. Huh?

More from the Daily News:

"Owning a home is closely tied to the American belief in social and economic opportunity," said Mara Marks, a professor of urban studies and senior fellow at the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.

"We've got this belief, this kind of social contract, that if you work hard and have big dreams you can have a piece of this American dream. As more and more people begin to sense that that dream is out of reach and not a reality for them, that's a dangerous situation."