My spouse and I bought our starter home (3bed 2ba 1107 sq ft) in 2017 for $130k. Now we’re trying to upgrade to bigger because we have since had a child and would like another. One bedroom is used as our office because my spouse works from home. But we have no ROOM. Our house is estimated to sell for $290k but we can only afford a mortgage on a $350k house now because of mortgage rates, even after more than doubling our income through job changes. The number of houses in our area in our price range is small, not much bigger than our starter house, and most of the time total gut jobs. We can’t go anywhere. There’s nowhere to go.