This isn’t new. I’m 43 so call me whatever you want, Gen X, Millenial, somewhere in between. I didn’t live on my own (meaning without roommates) until about 10 years ago. And even then, I bought a house with my wife. so still kinda roommates.
Would it surprise you to learn that the demographic most likely to be rendered homeless is Boomers because life got expensive around them? As best I can tell, they are also among the worst generations for having prepared for their retirement.
You’re not wrong, but at least they got a chance to prepare.
I asked my boomer mother why her generation wasn’t leading the revolt. I took the first job I remember her having when I was just a wee one, asked her that pay, extrapolated inflation on it and showed her that she’s making the same amount of money today as she was then. Inflation, as a tool to control the masses, has robbed her of every “pay raise” or advancement of her entire life.
Her story is not unique.
That doesn’t let them off the hook for the housing market tho, that shit, intentional or not, is literally just robbing their kids and grandkids futures for themselves.
We need a new deal, I mean a new new deal. Because this is getting ridiculous, I’m lying it was ridiculous 20 years ago, now it is just the reason why dystopian fiction is impossible to write, how can you top real life?
What kills me is when you go into the realestate subs and they talk about how they have to constantly increase every year because the cost of everything is going up.
Nah bruh, I’ve had my house for 4 years and nothing has increased at any noticeable level.
My father is in real estate and recently had a “talk” with me about how putting 15% into retirement won’t help me and that the only way to secure my future is through real estate. I didn’t have the reverse “talk” with him where I would have pointed out how he’s completely underestimating how much money it’s going to cost to change his diapers in a couple years and how that house will only offset the costs rather than repair them.
Yeah boy am I glad I pulled the trigger on a real estate purchase when I did. My costs (mainly HOA, and to a lesser extent taxes) have gone up very slightly in the last few years, but nowhere near the 30-40% increases I used to get smacked with renting over the same timeframe.
It’s like 1.5-2x as expensive as it was to rent in this (already expensive) area 3 years ago.
I’m determined to never rent again. Landlords are unbelievably greedy.
So? I’m Gen-X and I’ve only lived alone for approximately 1 year of my life combined, and most of that was in my mid-30s when I was already 15 years into an above-average-paying IT career.
Quick history of inflation in America. President Eisenhower started the US/Vietnam War, and JFK kept it going. Ike and Kennedy both wanted to keep it small, but LBJ made a major commitment of troops and air power to deliver a knockout punch. That turned into a quagmire where the US couldn’t pull out without looking like losers. President Johnson [LBJ] started printing money to pay for the War, rather than raise taxes. Nixon was elected as a peace candidate. Nixon’s Vietnam policy alone is worth several books, but we’ll just talk about the US dollar.
Nixon doubled down on Johnson’s bombing policy; the US factories were working 24/7 to make more weapons. Great, except the money was all paper. When the Arab Oil boycott hit the price of everything went through the roof. Suddenly stay at home moms were forced to get jobs to keep the family fed. In 1968 ‘middle class’ was one job to support a family, by 1980, two income families were becoming the norm.
Then came Reagan. Big tax cuts for the rich were supposed to make everything golden again. In 1980, $1 million was considered a vast fortune; by 1992 it was what a really rich guy paid for a party.
Suddenly stay at home moms were forced to get jobs to keep the family fed. In 1968 ‘middle class’ was one job to support a family, by 1980, two income families were becoming the norm.
This was not because of inflation, but because women were beginning to be seen as fully human
Frankly between this and “but the money was paper” just makes you sound like some kind of neotraditionalist goldbug.
I’m not sure what went wrong with your brain to not be able to distinguish between these two. You’re responding to someone who said the first version. You clapped back with serious attitude about the second version.
You funny. I never mentioned the gold standard or ‘traditional’ roles. If you’re going to put words in my mouth, I’d like them with an order of nachos and a fruit punch.
Direct spending on Vietnam starts to ramp up in the mid-60s and draws down in the mid-70s. Inflation, however, goes through a major shock in the early 70s and another one in the early 80s. None of this seems to match any kind of cause and effect we would expect. Further, the real cost of Vietnam was born decades later, as those veterans draw on benefits such as the VA hospital system. (Which, BTW, is expected to start happening about now with the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq; healthcare costs are a veteran issue.)
And then we have another big increase in military spending during the Reagan years, but no particular increase in inflation is seen. Not even if there’s some argument that it’d be delayed by a decade. Not like it had been in the 70s, anyway.
Oil costs are the main reason for these shocks. “Printing money” is a naive libertarian approach to inflation which largely serves people who use money to make money (i.e., billionaires) as opposed to people who use their labor to make money. I was just lamenting earlier today how leftists around here have started to absorb libertarian narratives on inflation, and it’s not a good thing.
Que the Iraq war part deux. Immediately followed by the Afghan invasion.
Paid for on credit card. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
Don’t forget the giant expansion of the government under Bush² either, the TSA, DHS, Medicare expansion
The aughties fucked over the entire upcoming century. Obama swaging the wall street plutocrats after 2008 with, not just the bail outs, but with relaxing corporate control of rental property is looking really, REALLY short sighted about now
Trump repealing Obama’s DoddFrankLite is gonna come back and haunt us too, when wall street implodes in the inevitable 2008 repeat, because if you can trust a banker to do anything, it’s to suck as much blood out as possible and let the public pay for life support. It’s gonna happen again. Guaranteed.
I got one in a niceish area for that. All you have to do is buy a small foreclosure and then spend literal years renovating while you live somewhere else and run up a bunch of high interest credit card debt paying for those renovations. 🥲
Man you just dashed my only last real dream of home ownership with your reality. I was like yeah I’ll just find a fixer upper and make it work. I know better now. Thanks for the heads up.
Home prices and minimum wage not linked and linking them would cause a spiral upward in home prices, as available spending money would go up but supply would not.
More like “don’t offer suggestions that will make things demonstrably and predictably worse or someone might point out how much worse things will get”
Not all solutions are equally valid.
In our current situation, I can’t think of many ideas worse than “tie wages to home values” aside from maybe just burning down a fuckload of apartment buildings. It’s that bad of an idea.
Houses were smaller back then and priced more appropriatly because they weren’t being bought up for renting and as financial safe-haven by financial entities. The majority of new homes are 2,500+sqft, average new homes in the post-war era were around 1,000sqft. In the 70s average homes were around 1,500sqft.
There are a lot of homes in the 1,000-1,200sqft range that are under $150k. In my area there are about 1k homes under $150k(2/3 under $120k), there are about 3k priced $150-350k.
You referenced the adjusted price and I am talking about $150k homes because the homes under $120k tend to be houses that need $30k in renovations/repairs because the previous owners stopped doing maintenance and haven’t updated in decades which leaves first-time buyers holding the bag.
Home prices aren’t even the problem, stagnated wages are the problem. The size of homes increasing doesn’t help and people demoing reasonably priced homes to build 2.5+sqft homes doesn’t help. If builders had incentive to build sane starter homes and wages were where they should be, the housing market would be in better shape for people trying to start a life and own property.
'Adjusted for inflation ’ is kind of a joke. If inflation worked the way the adjustments would have you believe, the average home of today would be $120,000 apx. It’s about three times that.
I came in to say something similar. Don’t focus on the price of the rent. The problem is the salary. Rent to salary has been going up and someone is pocketing the difference.
Of course this isn’t universally applicable, but in my city there’s basically six large landlords that own and manage the types of large, multi-family apartment buildings where the majority of people live.
There’s no competition in housing and it shows in the pricing, which has been skyrocketing not coincidentally as the firms consolidate and then all “somehow” price align using the same software market rates.
So you’re saying solely blame employers for consistent rent increases that top 10% year over year in some markets?
Employers aren’t going to keep raising everyone’s salary 10% every year to compete with the amount of greed in housing markets. Small ones can’t afford to, and large ones will be punished brutally by their investors for doing so.
Two things can be true: salaries can have stagnated, and rents / housing prices can have skyrocketed as well.
Right, does no one remember the ubiquitous TV show of young, modern life: friends? It had two groups of folks living in threes. Now, yes, their apartments were mansion-sized for New York, but the premise was still there, and that was the 90s. Heck, my boomer mother talked about how it wasn’t uncommon for people she knew on the east coast of the US to live with parents until early 30s. ’
This isn’t a completely new phenomenon, but the percentage of the paycheck it costs to afford housing, even with a roommate, still seems to be on the rise.
Right? I had some kind of roommate every place I lived into my early 30s. And I’m GenX.
This is not a new situation, it’s rediscovering the wheel by this new generation. The boomers were probably the only generation that could graduate, grab a good Union factory job, and buy a small home in suburbia in their early 20s. Everyone else I know had a transitional period of working smaller jobs and sharing an apartment for a long time until they got a really good job or paired up and married.
In my father’s case, he worked part time pumping gas at Sears and had an apartment with three friends while still paying for all of college in cash. The early 1970s were the place to be, apparently.
Yeah no kidding – I moved out of my parents at 18 in 2006, and had a roommate all through univeristy and afterwards until getting married (and I couldn’t afford my current flat without my partner’s salary). Very few people I knew had a place to themselves, and if they did they were either scraping by, or they had help.
Yeah, not many millennials or gen X were able to afford to live alone before their 30s, stop thinking you’re the only ones who had it hard for years after being done with school.
Heck, my parents came out of university with unemployment at 12+% and interest rates at 18+%, sounds like fun, right? Good climate to think about owning a first house! I wonder what they did… Oh, that’s right, they rented an apartment from my great grandmother and lived right above her and my grandparents! A fucking dream, right?
They purchased their first house when they were in their early/mid thirties.
Wanna know how I managed to do better than them? I got 10k from my father’s life insurance after he hung himself when I was 26 and let me tell you, I would rather have continued renting.
I’m just tired of Zs acting like they’re the only ones who were delt a bad hand, it’s just a way to turn people of different generations against one another while the real issue is billionaires manipulating is into hating each other.
I don’t see you telling them they’re angry and should talk to someone and that’s it.
Because they know they’re angry and those that can afford to talk to someone already are. Hell most of my millennial friends are in therapy.
And if you really don’t want to see division between generations, well, you’re the impediment there. If gen Z says things suck, and your response is stfu everyone has always had it bad… you’re the problem.
It’s not an oppression-depression Olympics. Because someone else has something worse off or similar does mean you win. Because someone else has something better off than you does not mean you lose.
There is one thing you can do; Organize. Help people not ever have the same situation you and your family had. Make it so anyone who faced such hardships doesn’t need to, nor anyone else would again.
I’m sorry you had a rough life, and I hope you feel better soon, but the people who are struggling are not your enemy, they are compatriots in a similar mental struggle. They are not the ones who caused your family pain and strife, but feel it in a similar vein. They are not your enemy.
Sorry that’s how you interpreted it, my message was intended to make people realize that it’s not a gen Z thing, it’s a systemic issue that’s affected many generations.
The first 38K of my pre-tax income goes to renting a 500 sq ft efficiency. The change in the last 20 years is astonishing. I remember in high school, being exhorted to put aside at least $300/month for rent.