I don't think there should be pressure on seniors for selling their homes if they don't want to, but there's definitely a lot of responsibility on retirement-age people for NIMBYism. There can be...
I don't think there should be pressure on seniors for selling their homes if they don't want to, but there's definitely a lot of responsibility on retirement-age people for NIMBYism. There can be legitimate reasons to put limits or constraints on new construction, but at the end of the day housing stock needs to increase in the places that people want to live and can find sustainable work.
Yeah this sounds a lot like the complaints about boomers not retiring so that millenials can have their jobs. Thats just not the issue we’re having, and even if it were, 2008 wiped out some...
Yeah this sounds a lot like the complaints about boomers not retiring so that millenials can have their jobs. Thats just not the issue we’re having, and even if it were, 2008 wiped out some peoples entire retirement funds. Sometimes people really cant retire, and thats still not their fault. Blaming the lack if jobs on old people working is noise.
The issue we’re having is massive corps buying up all the housing to rent it out. Massive corps building apartment buildings for rental instead of condos for purchase. Townships blocking new housing from being built because of nimbyism.
Blaming the housing issues in old people living in their houses is just noise.
If corps were able to build apartment buildings for rent we wouldn't even have this problem. Cheap housing is cheap housing, regardless of if it is an apartment or a condo. Maybe condos are...
Massive corps building apartment buildings for rental instead of condos for purchase
If corps were able to build apartment buildings for rent we wouldn't even have this problem. Cheap housing is cheap housing, regardless of if it is an apartment or a condo. Maybe condos are slightly better, but getting any form of housing is better than the alternative of building nothing, which is the state of many American cities right now.
I guess it makes sense to not build homes if housing is a business. With too much supply, profits will drop. But there will always be areas where demand is so high that supply will never be able...
I guess it makes sense to not build homes if housing is a business. With too much supply, profits will drop.
But there will always be areas where demand is so high that supply will never be able to catch up. You'd have to cover everything in skyscrapers to fit all the people who want to live in the trendiest districts, and then nobody wants to live there anymore.
Or... you just build up dense housing in other places so that they become desirable too. New York City isn't expensive because somehow people love the beautiful weather, or the unique waterfront...
Or... you just build up dense housing in other places so that they become desirable too.
New York City isn't expensive because somehow people love the beautiful weather, or the unique waterfront location. It's expensive because it's the only place in the country that has something approaching good public transit, it's walkable, its safe, and the city center actually has some vibrancy still.
Most places in the country where people want to live are places where people want to live for the same reason. The density isn't because of the desirability, the desirability is because of the density.
If cities stopped greenlighting every developer that wanted to build more parking structures, and started greenlighting mid density mixed use residential commercial development, you'd see a lot of the demand that's currently targeted towards places like new york, san francisco, DC, and Boston defuse to other cities, and those places would become more affordable as well. Much of the rest of the world has very desirable cities and areas to live in as well. Housing in most of them is far more affordable than in the US, because people have other options as well, and public policy hasn't made housing as scarce.
If you can build desirable cities from scratch, why is nobody doing it? It's not like investors don't have the resources. Imagine you could get New York rent profits, but your only costs would be...
If you can build desirable cities from scratch, why is nobody doing it? It's not like investors don't have the resources. Imagine you could get New York rent profits, but your only costs would be land and construction. Investors would be all over it.
Cities are complex systems. A small variable can lead to extreme effects. You can't design this, it has to grow organically, and it can fail at any time, because your city doesn't just have to be nice to live in, it has to generate enough profits to stay alive.
I don't know about other countries, but in Germany we have the same problem: Trendy cities are too expensive and nobody wants to live in rural ghost towns are dying. And I've heard similar things about cities like London or Paris.
The people building those cities seem to be building private city-states instead of places I'd ever want to live. A Peter Thiel-Backed Startup City Wants to Be Africa’s Delaware | WIRED Inside The...
The people building those cities seem to be building private city-states instead of places I'd ever want to live.
Investors don't have the resources. The reality is that a properly walkable city requires not just building an entire city - which costs somewhere from billions to trillions of dollars, but also...
If you can build desirable cities from scratch, why is nobody doing it? It's not like investors don't have the resources.
Investors don't have the resources.
The reality is that a properly walkable city requires not just building an entire city - which costs somewhere from billions to trillions of dollars, but also building railways in the meanwhile - both rail inside the city, and rail from the city to other cities. And building rail to other cities faces all the same problems that California HSR faces.
Once you're NYC-scale you don't need rail to other cities, but frankly building a NYC will take decades and the nascent city will wilt in the mean time.
I don't think it's possible to build at this scale without govt support - even if it's possible, it's just too risky.
It's definitely more risky than the Culdesac Tempe model of finding an empty 250m x 250m block with a light rail station nearby and just needing a passive OK from the local govt.
We have many, many cities in the US. Many of them are affordable, but that's because fewer people want to live there, since you're not allowed to build the types of property that makes the...
We have many, many cities in the US. Many of them are affordable, but that's because fewer people want to live there, since you're not allowed to build the types of property that makes the desirable cities desirable anymore.
Zoning in the US is generally fucked, and it stays that way because the people who vote on that stuff are paranoid about maintaining their property values at the expense of everything else in the world.
There is one serious attempt I know of in the US, “California Forever,” but it seems to be blocked by opposition. Looks like they’re still trying, though.
There is one serious attempt I know of in the US, “California Forever,” but it seems to be blocked by opposition. Looks like they’re still trying, though.
The people building housing don't really care about the price of the land they build on. They can take a 1 million dollar piece of land and build a 1 million dollar house, and sell it for 2...
The people building housing don't really care about the price of the land they build on. They can take a 1 million dollar piece of land and build a 1 million dollar house, and sell it for 2 million. Or they can take a $500,000 piece of land, build a 1 million dollar house, and sell it for 1.5 million. The profit is the same, and the latter option actually requires less capital investment.
If you restrict housing supply so that no new houses can be built except for where houses already exist, it doesn't really change the value of the house itself. What changes is the value of the land the house is on, and the only person that benefits is the landowner.
I wouldn't dismiss it all on noise. A lot of the zoning laws that makes it hard to build new houses came from them fighting to keep their home value going up and up. So it's not like they did...
I wouldn't dismiss it all on noise. A lot of the zoning laws that makes it hard to build new houses came from them fighting to keep their home value going up and up. So it's not like they did nothing and just happen to sit on valuable land.
Kicking out existing people from homes helps no one. But if they care about their future generations, they need to let them build.
And zoning is usually just one of many forms of obstructionism regularly performed by members of these communities. Some will go to any length required to keep places frozen in time and have been...
And zoning is usually just one of many forms of obstructionism regularly performed by members of these communities. Some will go to any length required to keep places frozen in time and have been responsible for the demise of numerous housing and infrastructure projects.
That is not the issue. Real estate companies are like any other seller and must clear at market rates, which are determined by demand and supply, which is affected by numerous factors like zoning,...
The issue we’re having is massive corps buying up all the housing to rent it out. Massive corps building apartment buildings for rental instead of condos for purchase.
That is not the issue. Real estate companies are like any other seller and must clear at market rates, which are determined by demand and supply, which is affected by numerous factors like zoning, permitting, construction labor supply, material costs (which depends on construction demand, tariffs, and other supply chain issues), and the general financial environment (like high interest rates increasing financing costs for developers).
We have an unhealthy housing environment where supply constraints causes prices to increase more quickly than inflation, causing real estate to offer a relatively high ROI and to become an attractive asset class. In markets for other goods, high prices are a signal for suppliers to increase supply, thus bringing prices down. But the housing market's supply mechanism is broken.
In parallel: AI is offering high ROIs as valuations skyrocket, so investors are pouring money in, and AI startups are springing up like clovers. Investment induces growth, when market mechanisms are healthy.
This is akin to blaming all white people for systematic injustices in society. There are/were some white people who are responsible, but a lot of people just exist in society instead of shaping...
This is akin to blaming all white people for systematic injustices in society. There are/were some white people who are responsible, but a lot of people just exist in society instead of shaping it.
There are boomers who are responsible for the current housing shortage, but Bill, the 70 year old who lives in a home they bought 40 years ago and still works in the grocery store to make ends meet, is likely not the boomer you’re looking for.
All of this finger pointing at specific large demographic groups for societal issues gets us nowhere because instead of being part of trying to solve the issues, the scapegoat group writes op-eds defending themselves.
A neighborhood that a house is in is part of a home IMHO. In a democratic republic ( for now ) people are allowed to advocate for the zoning laws that govern where they live. One solution I don't...
but there's definitely a lot of responsibility on retirement-age people for NIMBYism
A neighborhood that a house is in is part of a home IMHO. In a democratic republic ( for now ) people are allowed to advocate for the zoning laws that govern where they live.
housing stock needs to increase in the places that people want to live and can find sustainable work
One solution I don't see talked about very often when this subject is discussed is teleworking.
That’s true of just about anything. You’re allowed to advocate for the US to become a Christian theocracy or for the re-establishment of slavery. Being allowed to advocate for something is not...
In a democratic republic ( for now ) people are allowed to advocate for the zoning laws that govern where they live.
That’s true of just about anything. You’re allowed to advocate for the US to become a Christian theocracy or for the re-establishment of slavery. Being allowed to advocate for something is not exactly a high bar.
Other people also have the right to clown on people for what they advocate, and NIMBYs deserve it.
Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. States such as Texas have various State-level regulations which prevent cities from establishing too many zoning laws. On a completely unrelated note,...
people are allowed to advocate for the zoning laws that govern where they live.
Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. States such as Texas have various State-level regulations which prevent cities from establishing too many zoning laws.
On a completely unrelated note, rent in Austin is falling faster than anywhere else in the country, and housing is being built at the fastest rate of any large metro in the country. I'm sure all 3 of these facts are completely unrelated and we can draw no lessons from them when discussing housing policy in other areas.
If you allow homeowners to create laws which benefit themselves and prevent the majority of non-homeowners from ever being able to own a home, you will never solve this problem. And until now I've never heard it argued that people have an inalienable right to ban affordable housing being built in their general vicnity.
I was curious about this, and while this review of housing prices in US metro areas sourced from Redfin is a little light on content, it does confirm housing prices are down too. I recall people...
rent in Austin is falling faster than anywhere else in the country, and housing is being built at the fastest rate of any large metro in the country.
While home prices in Austin boomed over the pandemic, they are now down 12% in three years.
During the pandemic, home construction surged in Texas and Florida. But now, many of those homes sit empty. In Cape Coral, FL, sellers are cutting prices to attract buyers in a sluggish market.
I recall people being pissed about these homes "sitting empty" (in other areas) where they were actually owned by out of country investors who didn't even rent the places out. And it was hard for families to compete with these investors because they were paying with cash and no conditions (often not even an inspection). I wonder what's happened with those homes (if anything).
Anywhere where housing prices are falling you'd expect houses to be sitting empty to some degree. If there were no houses sitting empty, there'd be no reason for anyone to lower prices. That's not...
Anywhere where housing prices are falling you'd expect houses to be sitting empty to some degree. If there were no houses sitting empty, there'd be no reason for anyone to lower prices.
That's not some crazy, horrible thing, its literally what is required for houses to ever go down in price
Reduced prices can occur for other reasons too. Mortgage rates are a big one - we've seen some big percentage increases in the past few years, mostly tied to the Federal Reserve raising it....
its literally what is required for houses to ever go down in price
Reduced prices can occur for other reasons too.
Mortgage rates are a big one - we've seen some big percentage increases in the past few years, mostly tied to the Federal Reserve raising it. Pandemic years prior to that created some insane lows. And now there's been another cut by the Fed.
There also has to be a pool of capable buyers. Usually this means families have to be able to afford a mortgage. If they're priced out of everything, to the point no one can buy, there's a gap. Outside investors were filling this gap at one point. If no one is, then prices will go down.
And of course, everyone likes to talk about the housing crash of 2008. But I don't believe we'll see another event like that anytime soon.
Sure, people should be able to democratically advocate for themselves, but in aggregate, we also need to balance what benefits people on an individual level (here, property values) vs. society as...
Sure, people should be able to democratically advocate for themselves, but in aggregate, we also need to balance what benefits people on an individual level (here, property values) vs. society as a whole (reliable, affordable housing stock). In the past few decades, we've swung way too far in the direction of protecting existing owners' investment value over creating a reliable supply of new housing. By one estimate there is a a 4.7 million unit housing shortage in the US. Work from home or work from office, we need significantly more housing everywhere, and we need to be actively breaking down the barriers that have prevented new housing from getting built.
And I'm allowed to advocate for the govt confiscation of all boomer housing. And the death penalty for buying a Cybertruck. ...So? Your comment rests very heavily on an implied statement, so I...
In a democratic republic ( for now ) people are allowed to advocate for the zoning laws that govern where they live.
And I'm allowed to advocate for the govt confiscation of all boomer housing. And the death penalty for buying a Cybertruck. ...So?
Your comment rests very heavily on an implied statement, so I invite you to please explicitly state that statement.
That would go against many laws and ethics. People electing local officials for their stance on zoning laws, going to town meetings to advocate for zoning laws, etc does neither.
I'm allowed to advocate for the govt confiscation of all boomer housing
That would go against many laws and ethics.
People electing local officials for their stance on zoning laws, going to town meetings to advocate for zoning laws, etc does neither.
There's no law against lobbying for a law confiscating all boomer housing. And if your primary defence here is ethics, then boomer NIMBYism is artificially skyrocketing my cost of living for their...
There's no law against lobbying for a law confiscating all boomer housing.
And if your primary defence here is ethics, then boomer NIMBYism is artificially skyrocketing my cost of living for their own financial gain, it's absolutely unethical. If you condemn my own hypothetical advocacy for unethical stuff, then condemn boomers for their advocacy for unethical stuff.
IAMNAL, and no disrespect to you PuddleOfKittens, but that sounds irrational and I don't think it could work. I don't think people preserving their neighborhoods is done with the intent of...
There's no law against lobbying for a law confiscating all boomer housing.
IAMNAL, and no disrespect to you PuddleOfKittens, but that sounds irrational and I don't think it could work.
boomer NIMBYism is artificially skyrocketing my cost of living for their own financial gain, it's absolutely unethical
I don't think people preserving their neighborhoods is done with the intent of increasing anyone's cost of living. I think the primary motivation is to preserve their homes, secondarily to preserve their investment/property value.
I also don't think preserving neighborhoods is the cause of the housing shortage. One part of the cause is corporations buying houses. The rest of the causes are economic forces I can't remember enough of to talk about.
I'm not actually advocating for that law. I'm trying to illustrate the absurdity of your statement. Political advocacy is an action with consequences that people can be judged by and reacted to....
I'm not actually advocating for that law. I'm trying to illustrate the absurdity of your statement. Political advocacy is an action with consequences that people can be judged by and reacted to.
FWIW, what I do advocate is for basically whatever it takes to relieve supply, including banning local govt from constraining development in any way by making development approval exclusively a state-govt domain (not just for political reasons but because it rarely makes sense for local govts to hire town planners, and thus local govt's town planning laws are frequently ignorant of expert advice).
I also advocate for more construction of public housing - because there's an argument that the problem may be contributed to by private developers constraining supply at hyper-local levels (i.e. if you're the only builder building new houses in the suburb of Whatsville and you've built a ton of housing all at once, then maybe you want to trickle those houses onto the market to avoid flooding the market in Whatsville specifically), and public housing can essentially act as a guaranteed competitor to discourage that.
I especially advocate for ditching restrictions on single-family homes and minimum lot sizes though, because the best way to reduce prices is for lots of small developers to e.g. buy a single 1-storey house, split it in half with two developers paying half of the house's price each, and build two 3-storey apartment blocks in the spot. Or split the housing lot into 3; I've seen it done.
I don't think people preserving their neighborhoods is done with the intent of increasing anyone's cost of living.
You're drawing a distinction between apathy and hate here, and you're not wrong but it's completely irrelevant. And I would push back against the 'intent' comment - as a parable, a literal scammer doesn't want their victims to lose money, they simply want themselves to gain the money, and the only available options to do so are for them to gain money at the victims expense, or for them not to. While they're primarily choosing to gain money themselves, they are simultaneously inextricably choosing for their victims to lose the money as a means to that end. NIMBYs want to benefit themselves at the cost of the rest of society, and if they don't already know it then they're just turning a blind eye. And at the end of the day, I don't care why they're harming me and most people I know.
Seriously, see this:
secondarily to preserve their investment/property value.
Investment value is the cost of housing. If someone wanted to make themselves wealthy by keeping the cost of groceries artificially high, you would obviously call them a ghoul.
The rest of the causes are economic forces I can't remember enough of to talk about.
I fully agree that the economic forces are extensive and hard to remember and talk about.
I also don't think preserving neighborhoods is the cause of the housing shortage. One part of the cause is corporations buying houses.
This isn't really the case, AFAICT. First up: there's no difference between corporations speculatively buying houses, and literally any other investor speculatively buying houses. If it's "the rich", it doesn't matter whether it's in your name or in your LLC's name. "Corporations" is a thought-terminating cliche here, honestly. It sounds like an explanation but it's not.
The number of corporations who own houses is IIRC ~1%, so it's still not a good explanation.
But far more importantly than all of that: speculatively purchasing housing is only effective if supply is constrained. Otherwise, speculators will dump billions into buying up an entire city's worth of housing, only for developers to come in and build another city's worth of housing. And housing speculation only works if housing prices are consistently going up! So more supply can cause a double-whammy of relieving demand and also bankrupting speculators who were hoarding supply.
The numbers bear out the fact that cities that are consistently building lots of housing, don't increase housing prices above inflation rate. IIRC I got that from a Construction Physics post.
The point is, if there is one thing that drives the housing shortage, it's constrained supply. And NIMBYism is the epitome of constraining supply (usually by driving up delays and costs so far that it's either unprofitable to build in the first place - and therefore nobody builds - or it's extremely costly to build, and so the housing construction can never reduce the cost of housing much, because those build costs need to be passed onto the customer.
I don't have this problem, thankfully, but as I understand it, young people already do all of this and they still can't afford a home in a lot of places (usually places with jobs).
We drove used cars until they died. We rarely ate out and cooked low-cost meals at home. We dined on a lot of hamburger meat and hot dogs. We bought a small townhouse when we got married (...)
I don't have this problem, thankfully, but as I understand it, young people already do all of this and they still can't afford a home in a lot of places (usually places with jobs).
Gen Z dines out and orders takeout far more frequently than older generations. My millennial peers already do it more often than our preceding generations, but Gen Z does it even more.
Ok, so looking at the numbers, they dine in at twice the average rate, and order delivery/takeout 50% more than average. Does that match up to the housing prices going up 326% in the last 40...
Ok, so looking at the numbers, they dine in at twice the average rate, and order delivery/takeout 50% more than average. Does that match up to the housing prices going up 326% in the last 40 years? Of course not. It's so incomparable that in this context it's a moral rather than practical critique.
EDIT: Even the article points out that rate of dining out is not matched by total cost. Gen Z is by far more price conscious than other generations, so while they may dine out/order more often, it's not saying they're spending more on it.
They spend fewer dollars, but they spend more of their dollars eating out relative to eating in. Source, which pulls from BLS (See the "Food Away From Home" part). The absolute dollar value will...
They spend fewer dollars, but they spend more of their dollars eating out relative to eating in. Source, which pulls from BLS (See the "Food Away From Home" part). The absolute dollar value will be less because Gen Z makes less money than Millennials. However, I think this is likely sufficient enough to show that Gen Z has markedly different habits from the seniors in the OP that were being compared to. Different enough that compared to how the currently-senior would have behaved at a similar age in time, although I'm unable to find anything for exactly that comparison.
I agree that it's difficult to know how to compare current Gen Z spending to Boomer spending during equivalent times of their lives, given that the data isn't there to show how they were actually...
I agree that it's difficult to know how to compare current Gen Z spending to Boomer spending during equivalent times of their lives, given that the data isn't there to show how they were actually spending at the time as opposed to their anecdotal statements about how they lived when they were young. I don't think I agree that there's anything to back up a claim about how a Boomer would or wouldn't have actually spent their money if their economic landscape was the one we currently have.
Equally, if the numbers just won’t add up either way, I find it hard to blame people for spending on small luxuries rather than saving. Short term enjoyment now over stability later is justifiably...
Equally, if the numbers just won’t add up either way, I find it hard to blame people for spending on small luxuries rather than saving.
Short term enjoyment now over stability later is justifiably seen as short sighted. Short term enjoyment now because the money wasn’t going to be enough for stability anyway so why make sacrifices you’ll see no payoff from? Yeah, I can understand that.
Someone with that mentality is probably not conscientious of other areas of their spending. It all adds up. Hey, if someone would rather make Uber richer instead of buying a home with that money,...
Someone with that mentality is probably not conscientious of other areas of their spending. It all adds up. Hey, if someone would rather make Uber richer instead of buying a home with that money, who am I to tell them what to do? But let's dispel the notion that Gen Z/Millennials are eating rice and beans for every meal and still unable to buy a home.
Let’s put aside “are eating rice and beans for every meal and still unable to buy a home”, plenty of people are in the position of “could eat rice and beans for every meal and still be unable to...
Let’s put aside “are eating rice and beans for every meal and still unable to buy a home”, plenty of people are in the position of “could eat rice and beans for every meal and still be unable to buy a home”. So what incentive is there for them to do so?
If they're in that position where they could eat rice and beans for every meal and not afford a house, but also use Uber Eats and DoorDash a ton, then I would say they should still cut down on it...
If they're in that position where they could eat rice and beans for every meal and not afford a house, but also use Uber Eats and DoorDash a ton, then I would say they should still cut down on it and focus their income on maintaining stability. Maintain stability in their situation or improve it. It doesn't mean never eating out, but it means eating out relative to what you can afford.
The truth is that not every person will achieve enough financial success in their life to reach all the goals they want. My grandparents never bought a home. Their kids did, but just barely. My generation are all homeowners and have solid careers. Maybe the generation after mine will be able to explore the arts. We're all stepping stones for the next iteration and we just hope that those who come after will do better.
If that's all too depressing, then it's raging against how humanity has always worked. We can attempt a social revolution, but those don't have great track records either.
Yeah, on that first part I do actually mostly agree with you. I’m not saying it’s a great idea to go all in on luxuries, just that it’s an understandable one given the circumstances. The bit I’m...
Yeah, on that first part I do actually mostly agree with you. I’m not saying it’s a great idea to go all in on luxuries, just that it’s an understandable one given the circumstances.
The bit I’m struggling with in the second half, and in your first couple of posts, is that it feels like the elephant in the room isn’t being acknowledged: it is much harder than it used to be to buy a house. Affordability has gone backwards while the rich have become exponentially richer. Focusing on people’s spending habits rather than on that widening chasm between housing costs and income seems like it’s badly misplacing the blame, and it seems odd to say “we just hope that those who come after will do better” when the opposite is what’s actually happening at a societal level.
It’s not how it’s always worked. There were a solid few generations in the 20th century where large numbers of people had the ability to live comfortably on a below-median income, and often even on a single below-median income for an entire household. That has now been taken away directly in the service of making the rich richer. Why focus on the behaviour of the victims rather than the perpetrators?
It's really not surprising to me that the generation who grew up right after the implementation of a federal minimum wage, that was explicitly designed to be a living wage, benefited greatly from...
It's really not surprising to me that the generation who grew up right after the implementation of a federal minimum wage, that was explicitly designed to be a living wage, benefited greatly from it. And that as time went on, and wages did not keep up with costs and now despite some efforts to improve it, minimum wage is insufficient to live on everywhere, that this generation is struggling.
Buying a home was a necessity for me, and it has not made me more financially secure. But renting would have probably been even worse.
We see the same articles about how Gen Z doesn't drink anymore and Millennials are killing the diamond industry, and so on. As if they're to blame for not participating enough in capitalism while simultaneously being to blame for going out to eat "too much."
Much harder is arguable. There are situations where it's harder by far, for sure, but on average, it's a little murkier. The cost of housing went up a lot. Household income did not go up as much....
Much harder is arguable. There are situations where it's harder by far, for sure, but on average, it's a little murkier. The cost of housing went up a lot. Household income did not go up as much. But interest rates went down so much that the monthly cost burden of a home might actually be less than it was 4 decades ago on average. When you're buying a home, it's not necessarily the ratio of income to house price. It's really the ratio of income to monthly payment.
The square footage of the average home and the amenities in the average home are also a lot higher now, which is another factor that is rarely considered. Yet, for the new homebuyer, it's not up to them in many cases if there are simply no small starter homes to buy. It's all quite complex but I think my peeve here is we're presenting it as this catastrophic anomaly where no one is able to buy a home, but there are still large groups of Gen Z that are buying homes and Millennials are just about neck-and-neck with prior generations, so the focus for me is how to get Gen Z fully caught up.
Why focus on the behaviour of the victims rather than the perpetrators?
Some of the lag with Gen Z is their desire to spend disposable income on eating out and travel rather than saving for housing. It seems like they value permanent housing a little less than prior generations. I do advocate loudly for more housing to be built. I'm sure I've had a few arguments on Tildes about increasing supply. But in terms of blame, I see it as too nihilistic to not let Gen Z take some of the blame themselves. We can do more as a society to make things better, but a person should always focus on what they can and just not using Uber Eats is not that hard to do. Like I'm the weirdo in my friend group because I drive to pick up food instead of having it delivered from a few blocks away.
Down payments and taxes both depend on the price ratio, not the monthly payment, and the interest rates in the link that flipped the monthly payment were only in play for six out of the last 60...
Exemplary
When you're buying a home, it's not necessarily the ratio of income to house price. It's really the ratio of income to monthly payment.
Down payments and taxes both depend on the price ratio, not the monthly payment, and the interest rates in the link that flipped the monthly payment were only in play for six out of the last 60 years. I think it's still fair to characterise as harder for most people, in most places, most of the time.
But sure, I take your point, there are a lot of variables at play - honestly, the one thing that's usually on my mind in these conversations is this graph, it neatly sums up what I see as the overall problem.
It seems like they value permanent housing a little less than prior generations.
Or see it as less attainable, that's my point. To take a deliberately absurd example, it's not that I necessarily value eating out more than a yacht or a private jet, it's that I know I would never attain either so they don't even factor into my spending calculations.
But in terms of blame, I see it as too nihilistic to not let Gen Z take some of the blame themselves. We can do more as a society to make things better, but a person should always focus on what they can and just not using Uber Eats is not that hard to do.
I dunno, I just see the entire social contract as broken. It's not hard to forego Uber Eats, but why bother? Where's it going to get you? There is no "put in the work and you'll be rewarded", if there ever even really was. And I'm saying all this from the perspective of a relatively high earner - I work far less hard than plenty of my peers, yet I'm rewarded far more; the highest paid jobs I've ever had brought the least positive impact to society; the trappings of "middle class" in my parents' and grandparents' generations are just barely within reach at a very-much-not-middle income nowadays.
The "every little helps" attitude genuinely bothers me because I feel like it obscures the fact that often those little numbers add up to... a medium sized number that doesn't close the gap. But even more, I think it bothers me because it's imposing a sense of fairness on a wider economic situation that's just so utterly nonsensical to me that I feel like surely we can't be collectively pretending that any of this is actually how we want the world to work.
I've gone pretty off the rails here, I know, but for me at least we've long since lost any semblance of economic sanity. I can't bring myself to blame people for not being sensible when the system as a whole feels like a cross between a casino, a Kafka novel, and a piece of absurdist postmodern art.
...I guess I probably fall squarely into your "too nihilistic" bucket, and you probably wouldn't even be wrong to say that.
When I talk about the challenges of buying a house my aunt talks about all the hard work they put in to buy a fourplex in the early 80s for what would be $200k in today's dollars, and how I should...
When I talk about the challenges of buying a house my aunt talks about all the hard work they put in to buy a fourplex in the early 80s for what would be $200k in today's dollars, and how I should do the same thing. It's now worth more than $5 million. How am I supposed to do that? Work 25 times as hard to do the same thing? It's not ageist to recognize the differences in the housing market Boomers had to work with as compared to the present day.
Some of those letters are just dripping with condescension towards people younger than them. Like Kathy Megyeri saying:
Above all, remember that the most important reason to buy any home is for the comfort and safety of your immediate family. Don’t buy a house just because you believe it will impress friends, relatives or co-workers. Thanks to owning simple homes during our working lives, my husband and I were able to afford to move into an old folks’ home now that we need assistance for daily living.
Is it possible to be more disconnected from the actual issues and challenges of the housing market as it exists today? I really don't think so.
Oh yeah, buying a house to show off is the perfect reason! Lemme do that with my $2.5 million home down the street from me. 🙄 not talking to you, just to the quoted person.
Oh yeah, buying a house to show off is the perfect reason! Lemme do that with my $2.5 million home down the street from me. 🙄
I have many thoughts on this but unfortunately am running out the door. Land is a zero-sum game: you can't make more of it. And land in valuable urban area is especially scarce. Young people don't...
I have many thoughts on this but unfortunately am running out the door.
I am sorry that families are struggling to find homes, but this should not be seen as a zero-sum game. I shouldn’t have to give up my home for young families to find theirs.
Land is a zero-sum game: you can't make more of it. And land in valuable urban area is especially scarce. Young people don't want to perpetuate suburban/exurban sprawl and live in the middle of nowhere and endure hour-long commutes, and older voters are stingy and vote against public transit and gave us our current car-hell.
All those empty bedrooms could be housing someone. All those cutesy urban cottages they bought 20+ years ago could be multifamily buildings housing 10+ people instead of 1 or 2.
I am living alone in a house that is much too big for me, on a piece of land that’s also much too big for me. But my mortgage payment is lower than the rent for a one-bedroom apartment in my town. I desperately want to downsize, but I can’t afford to do so where I live.
This is pretty much the endgame of NIMBYism: the housing shortage has resulted in a lack of housing liquidity. Housing is basically a game of musical chairs, and we don't have enough spare chairs enough.
Older people don't get enough flak for being selfish and trapped in nostalgia.
My husband and I are retired and have no children living at home anymore. Luke Seale in his Sept. 27 letter, “One way to persuade seniors to give up their large homes,” made it seem as if seniors are holding on to their homes because of money, but, in our case, we’re staying because we love our home.
Our house was a fixer-upper when we bought it, and we put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into making it our home. We love the area and our neighbors. We don’t want to move, and we don’t feel guilty that young families can’t find their perfect homes.
We were in the same boat when we were young and had little kids. We had trouble finding a house because the interest rates made it difficult to afford a mortgage. But things eventually worked out for us, as they will for today’s young families.
Blaming seniors for the lack of housing ignores the fact that we deserve to enjoy the fruits of our labor. Someday, we might be forced to move because of physical disabilities. But for now, we’re staying put.
This is very, very reasonable - a home is a whole lot more than bricks and mortar, it’s a whole lot more than just money, and it’s totally fair to want that taken into account as a genuinely...
we put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into making it our home. We love the area and our neighbors. We don’t want to move
This is very, very reasonable - a home is a whole lot more than bricks and mortar, it’s a whole lot more than just money, and it’s totally fair to want that taken into account as a genuinely important part of the conversation. Just because the invisible middle finger of the market treats housing as nothing more than a commodity doesn’t mean we necessarily need to do the same when we’re discussing solutions.
we don’t feel guilty that young families can’t find their perfect homes
Ehhh… I can give this one a charitable reading, but it’s tone deaf at best. The choice to say “we don’t feel guilty” (and talking about “perfect homes”, instead of just “homes”, for that matter) rather than acknowledging the difficulties people face nowadays reads as antagonistic and dismissive rather than being a justified call for empathy about wanting to stay where they are.
We were in the same boat when we were young and had little kids.
At this point I invite the author to fuck the absolute fuck off and go stare at the numbers until they feel sufficiently motivated to rewrite the article in a way that makes their legitimate points about wanting to stay somewhere they love and acknowledges that it is a very different world to the one they bought in, that the people complaining about that have very legitimate reasons to do so, and that the author is exacerbating a genuine problem that exists - even if it’s perhaps justified for them to be doing so, and actually pretty reasonable to point that out.
Site rules are that you link to the original article rather than posting a top-level archive link. Archive links can go in comments. I'm sure someone will be along to fix it shortly.
Site rules are that you link to the original article rather than posting a top-level archive link. Archive links can go in comments. I'm sure someone will be along to fix it shortly.
What are these quick blurbs meant to add to any discussion? It is mostly "we figured it out 30 years ago so you will figure it out too" with one or two paragraphs of fluff.
What are these quick blurbs meant to add to any discussion? It is mostly "we figured it out 30 years ago so you will figure it out too" with one or two paragraphs of fluff.
I find the blurbs to be incredibly don't-eat-avocado-toast-level out-of-touch and enraging, and they make me wish we could do what the ancient Inuit did and put these people on ice floes. They got...
I find the blurbs to be incredibly don't-eat-avocado-toast-level out-of-touch and enraging, and they make me wish we could do what the ancient Inuit did and put these people on ice floes.
They got in early and now exhort us to save and just buy a small starter home. I'm well-educated and work a very good job and I can just barely afford a starter home on my own — and I'm not splurging on avocado toasts. How the hell are normal young people without elite educations or careers supposed to afford anything?
It’s useful to summarize an article, can be a quick check on whether reading the article is worth it, and I’ll sometimes do point by point commentary on it.
It’s useful to summarize an article, can be a quick check on whether reading the article is worth it, and I’ll sometimes do point by point commentary on it.
It helps to start a conversation by giving someone an idea of what the content is. Too many people on Tildes just post links without giving anyone an idea of what the content is like. That content...
It helps to start a conversation by giving someone an idea of what the content is.
Too many people on Tildes just post links without giving anyone an idea of what the content is like. That content is often very long videos or very long articles.
I don't think there should be pressure on seniors for selling their homes if they don't want to, but there's definitely a lot of responsibility on retirement-age people for NIMBYism. There can be legitimate reasons to put limits or constraints on new construction, but at the end of the day housing stock needs to increase in the places that people want to live and can find sustainable work.
Yeah this sounds a lot like the complaints about boomers not retiring so that millenials can have their jobs. Thats just not the issue we’re having, and even if it were, 2008 wiped out some peoples entire retirement funds. Sometimes people really cant retire, and thats still not their fault. Blaming the lack if jobs on old people working is noise.
The issue we’re having is massive corps buying up all the housing to rent it out. Massive corps building apartment buildings for rental instead of condos for purchase. Townships blocking new housing from being built because of nimbyism.
Blaming the housing issues in old people living in their houses is just noise.
If corps were able to build apartment buildings for rent we wouldn't even have this problem. Cheap housing is cheap housing, regardless of if it is an apartment or a condo. Maybe condos are slightly better, but getting any form of housing is better than the alternative of building nothing, which is the state of many American cities right now.
I guess it makes sense to not build homes if housing is a business. With too much supply, profits will drop.
But there will always be areas where demand is so high that supply will never be able to catch up. You'd have to cover everything in skyscrapers to fit all the people who want to live in the trendiest districts, and then nobody wants to live there anymore.
Or... you just build up dense housing in other places so that they become desirable too.
New York City isn't expensive because somehow people love the beautiful weather, or the unique waterfront location. It's expensive because it's the only place in the country that has something approaching good public transit, it's walkable, its safe, and the city center actually has some vibrancy still.
Most places in the country where people want to live are places where people want to live for the same reason. The density isn't because of the desirability, the desirability is because of the density.
If cities stopped greenlighting every developer that wanted to build more parking structures, and started greenlighting mid density mixed use residential commercial development, you'd see a lot of the demand that's currently targeted towards places like new york, san francisco, DC, and Boston defuse to other cities, and those places would become more affordable as well. Much of the rest of the world has very desirable cities and areas to live in as well. Housing in most of them is far more affordable than in the US, because people have other options as well, and public policy hasn't made housing as scarce.
If you can build desirable cities from scratch, why is nobody doing it? It's not like investors don't have the resources. Imagine you could get New York rent profits, but your only costs would be land and construction. Investors would be all over it.
Cities are complex systems. A small variable can lead to extreme effects. You can't design this, it has to grow organically, and it can fail at any time, because your city doesn't just have to be nice to live in, it has to generate enough profits to stay alive.
I don't know about other countries, but in Germany we have the same problem: Trendy cities are too expensive and nobody wants to live in rural ghost towns are dying. And I've heard similar things about cities like London or Paris.
The people building those cities seem to be building private city-states instead of places I'd ever want to live.
A Peter Thiel-Backed Startup City Wants to Be Africa’s Delaware | WIRED
Inside The Rise Of Private Cities: ‘Priority Of Management Is Profit, Not The Needs Of Citizens’
Próspera - Wikipedia
Trump's weird new 'freedom cities' and the Network State cult
Investors don't have the resources.
The reality is that a properly walkable city requires not just building an entire city - which costs somewhere from billions to trillions of dollars, but also building railways in the meanwhile - both rail inside the city, and rail from the city to other cities. And building rail to other cities faces all the same problems that California HSR faces.
Once you're NYC-scale you don't need rail to other cities, but frankly building a NYC will take decades and the nascent city will wilt in the mean time.
I don't think it's possible to build at this scale without govt support - even if it's possible, it's just too risky.
It's definitely more risky than the Culdesac Tempe model of finding an empty 250m x 250m block with a light rail station nearby and just needing a passive OK from the local govt.
We have many, many cities in the US. Many of them are affordable, but that's because fewer people want to live there, since you're not allowed to build the types of property that makes the desirable cities desirable anymore.
Zoning in the US is generally fucked, and it stays that way because the people who vote on that stuff are paranoid about maintaining their property values at the expense of everything else in the world.
There is one serious attempt I know of in the US, “California Forever,” but it seems to be blocked by opposition. Looks like they’re still trying, though.
The people building housing don't really care about the price of the land they build on. They can take a 1 million dollar piece of land and build a 1 million dollar house, and sell it for 2 million. Or they can take a $500,000 piece of land, build a 1 million dollar house, and sell it for 1.5 million. The profit is the same, and the latter option actually requires less capital investment.
If you restrict housing supply so that no new houses can be built except for where houses already exist, it doesn't really change the value of the house itself. What changes is the value of the land the house is on, and the only person that benefits is the landowner.
I wouldn't dismiss it all on noise. A lot of the zoning laws that makes it hard to build new houses came from them fighting to keep their home value going up and up. So it's not like they did nothing and just happen to sit on valuable land.
Kicking out existing people from homes helps no one. But if they care about their future generations, they need to let them build.
And zoning is usually just one of many forms of obstructionism regularly performed by members of these communities. Some will go to any length required to keep places frozen in time and have been responsible for the demise of numerous housing and infrastructure projects.
That is not the issue. Real estate companies are like any other seller and must clear at market rates, which are determined by demand and supply, which is affected by numerous factors like zoning, permitting, construction labor supply, material costs (which depends on construction demand, tariffs, and other supply chain issues), and the general financial environment (like high interest rates increasing financing costs for developers).
We have an unhealthy housing environment where supply constraints causes prices to increase more quickly than inflation, causing real estate to offer a relatively high ROI and to become an attractive asset class. In markets for other goods, high prices are a signal for suppliers to increase supply, thus bringing prices down. But the housing market's supply mechanism is broken.
In parallel: AI is offering high ROIs as valuations skyrocket, so investors are pouring money in, and AI startups are springing up like clovers. Investment induces growth, when market mechanisms are healthy.
This is akin to blaming all white people for systematic injustices in society. There are/were some white people who are responsible, but a lot of people just exist in society instead of shaping it.
There are boomers who are responsible for the current housing shortage, but Bill, the 70 year old who lives in a home they bought 40 years ago and still works in the grocery store to make ends meet, is likely not the boomer you’re looking for.
All of this finger pointing at specific large demographic groups for societal issues gets us nowhere because instead of being part of trying to solve the issues, the scapegoat group writes op-eds defending themselves.
A neighborhood that a house is in is part of a home IMHO. In a democratic republic ( for now ) people are allowed to advocate for the zoning laws that govern where they live.
One solution I don't see talked about very often when this subject is discussed is teleworking.
I think it should be promoted.
That’s true of just about anything. You’re allowed to advocate for the US to become a Christian theocracy or for the re-establishment of slavery. Being allowed to advocate for something is not exactly a high bar.
Other people also have the right to clown on people for what they advocate, and NIMBYs deserve it.
Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. States such as Texas have various State-level regulations which prevent cities from establishing too many zoning laws.
On a completely unrelated note, rent in Austin is falling faster than anywhere else in the country, and housing is being built at the fastest rate of any large metro in the country. I'm sure all 3 of these facts are completely unrelated and we can draw no lessons from them when discussing housing policy in other areas.
If you allow homeowners to create laws which benefit themselves and prevent the majority of non-homeowners from ever being able to own a home, you will never solve this problem. And until now I've never heard it argued that people have an inalienable right to ban affordable housing being built in their general vicnity.
I was curious about this, and while this review of housing prices in US metro areas sourced from Redfin is a little light on content, it does confirm housing prices are down too.
I recall people being pissed about these homes "sitting empty" (in other areas) where they were actually owned by out of country investors who didn't even rent the places out. And it was hard for families to compete with these investors because they were paying with cash and no conditions (often not even an inspection). I wonder what's happened with those homes (if anything).
Anywhere where housing prices are falling you'd expect houses to be sitting empty to some degree. If there were no houses sitting empty, there'd be no reason for anyone to lower prices.
That's not some crazy, horrible thing, its literally what is required for houses to ever go down in price
Reduced prices can occur for other reasons too.
Mortgage rates are a big one - we've seen some big percentage increases in the past few years, mostly tied to the Federal Reserve raising it. Pandemic years prior to that created some insane lows. And now there's been another cut by the Fed.
There also has to be a pool of capable buyers. Usually this means families have to be able to afford a mortgage. If they're priced out of everything, to the point no one can buy, there's a gap. Outside investors were filling this gap at one point. If no one is, then prices will go down.
And of course, everyone likes to talk about the housing crash of 2008. But I don't believe we'll see another event like that anytime soon.
Any of those reasons you list will cause houses to sit empty, which will then cause prices to go down. They won't just pre-emptively go down
Sure, people should be able to democratically advocate for themselves, but in aggregate, we also need to balance what benefits people on an individual level (here, property values) vs. society as a whole (reliable, affordable housing stock). In the past few decades, we've swung way too far in the direction of protecting existing owners' investment value over creating a reliable supply of new housing. By one estimate there is a a 4.7 million unit housing shortage in the US. Work from home or work from office, we need significantly more housing everywhere, and we need to be actively breaking down the barriers that have prevented new housing from getting built.
And I'm allowed to advocate for the govt confiscation of all boomer housing. And the death penalty for buying a Cybertruck. ...So?
Your comment rests very heavily on an implied statement, so I invite you to please explicitly state that statement.
That would go against many laws and ethics.
People electing local officials for their stance on zoning laws, going to town meetings to advocate for zoning laws, etc does neither.
There's no law against lobbying for a law confiscating all boomer housing.
And if your primary defence here is ethics, then boomer NIMBYism is artificially skyrocketing my cost of living for their own financial gain, it's absolutely unethical. If you condemn my own hypothetical advocacy for unethical stuff, then condemn boomers for their advocacy for unethical stuff.
IAMNAL, and no disrespect to you PuddleOfKittens, but that sounds irrational and I don't think it could work.
I don't think people preserving their neighborhoods is done with the intent of increasing anyone's cost of living. I think the primary motivation is to preserve their homes, secondarily to preserve their investment/property value.
I also don't think preserving neighborhoods is the cause of the housing shortage. One part of the cause is corporations buying houses. The rest of the causes are economic forces I can't remember enough of to talk about.
I'm not actually advocating for that law. I'm trying to illustrate the absurdity of your statement. Political advocacy is an action with consequences that people can be judged by and reacted to.
FWIW, what I do advocate is for basically whatever it takes to relieve supply, including banning local govt from constraining development in any way by making development approval exclusively a state-govt domain (not just for political reasons but because it rarely makes sense for local govts to hire town planners, and thus local govt's town planning laws are frequently ignorant of expert advice).
I also advocate for more construction of public housing - because there's an argument that the problem may be contributed to by private developers constraining supply at hyper-local levels (i.e. if you're the only builder building new houses in the suburb of Whatsville and you've built a ton of housing all at once, then maybe you want to trickle those houses onto the market to avoid flooding the market in Whatsville specifically), and public housing can essentially act as a guaranteed competitor to discourage that.
I especially advocate for ditching restrictions on single-family homes and minimum lot sizes though, because the best way to reduce prices is for lots of small developers to e.g. buy a single 1-storey house, split it in half with two developers paying half of the house's price each, and build two 3-storey apartment blocks in the spot. Or split the housing lot into 3; I've seen it done.
You're drawing a distinction between apathy and hate here, and you're not wrong but it's completely irrelevant. And I would push back against the 'intent' comment - as a parable, a literal scammer doesn't want their victims to lose money, they simply want themselves to gain the money, and the only available options to do so are for them to gain money at the victims expense, or for them not to. While they're primarily choosing to gain money themselves, they are simultaneously inextricably choosing for their victims to lose the money as a means to that end. NIMBYs want to benefit themselves at the cost of the rest of society, and if they don't already know it then they're just turning a blind eye. And at the end of the day, I don't care why they're harming me and most people I know.
Seriously, see this:
Investment value is the cost of housing. If someone wanted to make themselves wealthy by keeping the cost of groceries artificially high, you would obviously call them a ghoul.
I fully agree that the economic forces are extensive and hard to remember and talk about.
This isn't really the case, AFAICT. First up: there's no difference between corporations speculatively buying houses, and literally any other investor speculatively buying houses. If it's "the rich", it doesn't matter whether it's in your name or in your LLC's name. "Corporations" is a thought-terminating cliche here, honestly. It sounds like an explanation but it's not.
The number of corporations who own houses is IIRC ~1%, so it's still not a good explanation.
But far more importantly than all of that: speculatively purchasing housing is only effective if supply is constrained. Otherwise, speculators will dump billions into buying up an entire city's worth of housing, only for developers to come in and build another city's worth of housing. And housing speculation only works if housing prices are consistently going up! So more supply can cause a double-whammy of relieving demand and also bankrupting speculators who were hoarding supply.
The numbers bear out the fact that cities that are consistently building lots of housing, don't increase housing prices above inflation rate. IIRC I got that from a Construction Physics post.
The point is, if there is one thing that drives the housing shortage, it's constrained supply. And NIMBYism is the epitome of constraining supply (usually by driving up delays and costs so far that it's either unprofitable to build in the first place - and therefore nobody builds - or it's extremely costly to build, and so the housing construction can never reduce the cost of housing much, because those build costs need to be passed onto the customer.
I don't have this problem, thankfully, but as I understand it, young people already do all of this and they still can't afford a home in a lot of places (usually places with jobs).
Gen Z dines out and orders takeout far more frequently than older generations. My millennial peers already do it more often than our preceding generations, but Gen Z does it even more.
Ok, so looking at the numbers, they dine in at twice the average rate, and order delivery/takeout 50% more than average. Does that match up to the housing prices going up 326% in the last 40 years? Of course not. It's so incomparable that in this context it's a moral rather than practical critique.
EDIT: Even the article points out that rate of dining out is not matched by total cost. Gen Z is by far more price conscious than other generations, so while they may dine out/order more often, it's not saying they're spending more on it.
They spend fewer dollars, but they spend more of their dollars eating out relative to eating in. Source, which pulls from BLS (See the "Food Away From Home" part). The absolute dollar value will be less because Gen Z makes less money than Millennials. However, I think this is likely sufficient enough to show that Gen Z has markedly different habits from the seniors in the OP that were being compared to. Different enough that compared to how the currently-senior would have behaved at a similar age in time, although I'm unable to find anything for exactly that comparison.
I agree that it's difficult to know how to compare current Gen Z spending to Boomer spending during equivalent times of their lives, given that the data isn't there to show how they were actually spending at the time as opposed to their anecdotal statements about how they lived when they were young. I don't think I agree that there's anything to back up a claim about how a Boomer would or wouldn't have actually spent their money if their economic landscape was the one we currently have.
Equally, if the numbers just won’t add up either way, I find it hard to blame people for spending on small luxuries rather than saving.
Short term enjoyment now over stability later is justifiably seen as short sighted. Short term enjoyment now because the money wasn’t going to be enough for stability anyway so why make sacrifices you’ll see no payoff from? Yeah, I can understand that.
Someone with that mentality is probably not conscientious of other areas of their spending. It all adds up. Hey, if someone would rather make Uber richer instead of buying a home with that money, who am I to tell them what to do? But let's dispel the notion that Gen Z/Millennials are eating rice and beans for every meal and still unable to buy a home.
Let’s put aside “are eating rice and beans for every meal and still unable to buy a home”, plenty of people are in the position of “could eat rice and beans for every meal and still be unable to buy a home”. So what incentive is there for them to do so?
If they're in that position where they could eat rice and beans for every meal and not afford a house, but also use Uber Eats and DoorDash a ton, then I would say they should still cut down on it and focus their income on maintaining stability. Maintain stability in their situation or improve it. It doesn't mean never eating out, but it means eating out relative to what you can afford.
The truth is that not every person will achieve enough financial success in their life to reach all the goals they want. My grandparents never bought a home. Their kids did, but just barely. My generation are all homeowners and have solid careers. Maybe the generation after mine will be able to explore the arts. We're all stepping stones for the next iteration and we just hope that those who come after will do better.
If that's all too depressing, then it's raging against how humanity has always worked. We can attempt a social revolution, but those don't have great track records either.
Yeah, on that first part I do actually mostly agree with you. I’m not saying it’s a great idea to go all in on luxuries, just that it’s an understandable one given the circumstances.
The bit I’m struggling with in the second half, and in your first couple of posts, is that it feels like the elephant in the room isn’t being acknowledged: it is much harder than it used to be to buy a house. Affordability has gone backwards while the rich have become exponentially richer. Focusing on people’s spending habits rather than on that widening chasm between housing costs and income seems like it’s badly misplacing the blame, and it seems odd to say “we just hope that those who come after will do better” when the opposite is what’s actually happening at a societal level.
It’s not how it’s always worked. There were a solid few generations in the 20th century where large numbers of people had the ability to live comfortably on a below-median income, and often even on a single below-median income for an entire household. That has now been taken away directly in the service of making the rich richer. Why focus on the behaviour of the victims rather than the perpetrators?
It's really not surprising to me that the generation who grew up right after the implementation of a federal minimum wage, that was explicitly designed to be a living wage, benefited greatly from it. And that as time went on, and wages did not keep up with costs and now despite some efforts to improve it, minimum wage is insufficient to live on everywhere, that this generation is struggling.
Buying a home was a necessity for me, and it has not made me more financially secure. But renting would have probably been even worse.
We see the same articles about how Gen Z doesn't drink anymore and Millennials are killing the diamond industry, and so on. As if they're to blame for not participating enough in capitalism while simultaneously being to blame for going out to eat "too much."
Much harder is arguable. There are situations where it's harder by far, for sure, but on average, it's a little murkier. The cost of housing went up a lot. Household income did not go up as much. But interest rates went down so much that the monthly cost burden of a home might actually be less than it was 4 decades ago on average. When you're buying a home, it's not necessarily the ratio of income to house price. It's really the ratio of income to monthly payment.
The square footage of the average home and the amenities in the average home are also a lot higher now, which is another factor that is rarely considered. Yet, for the new homebuyer, it's not up to them in many cases if there are simply no small starter homes to buy. It's all quite complex but I think my peeve here is we're presenting it as this catastrophic anomaly where no one is able to buy a home, but there are still large groups of Gen Z that are buying homes and Millennials are just about neck-and-neck with prior generations, so the focus for me is how to get Gen Z fully caught up.
Some of the lag with Gen Z is their desire to spend disposable income on eating out and travel rather than saving for housing. It seems like they value permanent housing a little less than prior generations. I do advocate loudly for more housing to be built. I'm sure I've had a few arguments on Tildes about increasing supply. But in terms of blame, I see it as too nihilistic to not let Gen Z take some of the blame themselves. We can do more as a society to make things better, but a person should always focus on what they can and just not using Uber Eats is not that hard to do. Like I'm the weirdo in my friend group because I drive to pick up food instead of having it delivered from a few blocks away.
Down payments and taxes both depend on the price ratio, not the monthly payment, and the interest rates in the link that flipped the monthly payment were only in play for six out of the last 60 years. I think it's still fair to characterise as harder for most people, in most places, most of the time.
But sure, I take your point, there are a lot of variables at play - honestly, the one thing that's usually on my mind in these conversations is this graph, it neatly sums up what I see as the overall problem.
Or see it as less attainable, that's my point. To take a deliberately absurd example, it's not that I necessarily value eating out more than a yacht or a private jet, it's that I know I would never attain either so they don't even factor into my spending calculations.
I dunno, I just see the entire social contract as broken. It's not hard to forego Uber Eats, but why bother? Where's it going to get you? There is no "put in the work and you'll be rewarded", if there ever even really was. And I'm saying all this from the perspective of a relatively high earner - I work far less hard than plenty of my peers, yet I'm rewarded far more; the highest paid jobs I've ever had brought the least positive impact to society; the trappings of "middle class" in my parents' and grandparents' generations are just barely within reach at a very-much-not-middle income nowadays.
The "every little helps" attitude genuinely bothers me because I feel like it obscures the fact that often those little numbers add up to... a medium sized number that doesn't close the gap. But even more, I think it bothers me because it's imposing a sense of fairness on a wider economic situation that's just so utterly nonsensical to me that I feel like surely we can't be collectively pretending that any of this is actually how we want the world to work.
I've gone pretty off the rails here, I know, but for me at least we've long since lost any semblance of economic sanity. I can't bring myself to blame people for not being sensible when the system as a whole feels like a cross between a casino, a Kafka novel, and a piece of absurdist postmodern art.
...I guess I probably fall squarely into your "too nihilistic" bucket, and you probably wouldn't even be wrong to say that.
When I talk about the challenges of buying a house my aunt talks about all the hard work they put in to buy a fourplex in the early 80s for what would be $200k in today's dollars, and how I should do the same thing. It's now worth more than $5 million. How am I supposed to do that? Work 25 times as hard to do the same thing? It's not ageist to recognize the differences in the housing market Boomers had to work with as compared to the present day.
Some of those letters are just dripping with condescension towards people younger than them. Like Kathy Megyeri saying:
Is it possible to be more disconnected from the actual issues and challenges of the housing market as it exists today? I really don't think so.
Oh yeah, buying a house to show off is the perfect reason! Lemme do that with my $2.5 million home down the street from me. 🙄
not talking to you, just to the quoted person.
I have many thoughts on this but unfortunately am running out the door.
Land is a zero-sum game: you can't make more of it. And land in valuable urban area is especially scarce. Young people don't want to perpetuate suburban/exurban sprawl and live in the middle of nowhere and endure hour-long commutes, and older voters are stingy and vote against public transit and gave us our current car-hell.
All those empty bedrooms could be housing someone. All those cutesy urban cottages they bought 20+ years ago could be multifamily buildings housing 10+ people instead of 1 or 2.
This is pretty much the endgame of NIMBYism: the housing shortage has resulted in a lack of housing liquidity. Housing is basically a game of musical chairs, and we don't have enough spare chairs enough.
Older people don't get enough flak for being selfish and trapped in nostalgia.
This is very, very reasonable - a home is a whole lot more than bricks and mortar, it’s a whole lot more than just money, and it’s totally fair to want that taken into account as a genuinely important part of the conversation. Just because the invisible middle finger of the market treats housing as nothing more than a commodity doesn’t mean we necessarily need to do the same when we’re discussing solutions.
Ehhh… I can give this one a charitable reading, but it’s tone deaf at best. The choice to say “we don’t feel guilty” (and talking about “perfect homes”, instead of just “homes”, for that matter) rather than acknowledging the difficulties people face nowadays reads as antagonistic and dismissive rather than being a justified call for empathy about wanting to stay where they are.
At this point I invite the author to fuck the absolute fuck off and go stare at the numbers until they feel sufficiently motivated to rewrite the article in a way that makes their legitimate points about wanting to stay somewhere they love and acknowledges that it is a very different world to the one they bought in, that the people complaining about that have very legitimate reasons to do so, and that the author is exacerbating a genuine problem that exists - even if it’s perhaps justified for them to be doing so, and actually pretty reasonable to point that out.
Site rules are that you link to the original article rather than posting a top-level archive link. Archive links can go in comments. I'm sure someone will be along to fix it shortly.
Then I will leave it alone. Thank you.
Archive link: https://archive.ph/JYUuV
Thank you for the archive link!
What are these quick blurbs meant to add to any discussion? It is mostly "we figured it out 30 years ago so you will figure it out too" with one or two paragraphs of fluff.
I find the blurbs to be incredibly don't-eat-avocado-toast-level out-of-touch and enraging, and they make me wish we could do what the ancient Inuit did and put these people on ice floes.
They got in early and now exhort us to save and just buy a small starter home. I'm well-educated and work a very good job and I can just barely afford a starter home on my own — and I'm not splurging on avocado toasts. How the hell are normal young people without elite educations or careers supposed to afford anything?
It’s useful to summarize an article, can be a quick check on whether reading the article is worth it, and I’ll sometimes do point by point commentary on it.
I mean the entire article is just quick blurbs.
It helps to start a conversation by giving someone an idea of what the content is.
Too many people on Tildes just post links without giving anyone an idea of what the content is like. That content is often very long videos or very long articles.