For first time since 1880s, more young Americans live with parents than partner
citylab.com
citylab.com
For a young adult in the current economic climate, the only way you're living in one of these cushy homes is if you're living with your parents.
You can't rent one very easily, since they can't be divided up into multiple units or rented at all due to zoning and HOAs. Not to mention it's not typical to be a renter in these neighborhoods to begin with, so even finding a rental is nearly impossible in some areas.
Then of course, after the housing bubble crashed and the subsidies went away, a mortgage for one of these became a big challenge to achieve, and who has the savings sitting around for upkeep and emergency maintenance?
Boomer parents, and a handful of lucky gen-xers are pretty much the only people who could comfortably acquire and hold onto these houses, so it only makes sense that sticking to them like glue is the best strategy if you wanted one.
And there's also the fact that it's just not cool to live in the 'burbs, where you grew up, in the first place. The mental justification has to be "well I'm saving money at least". Saving money, means crashing with the parents. After all, it's "just temporary".
Those are at least my very subjective observations that might be overlooked in that study...
I gladly commute so I can come home to something more than an apartment or condo, because that is all that is available or affordable.
May I ask what city/neighborhood you're in? I'm looking to escape from San Francisco to do that exact list of things.
I can probably drive to all those places (work, school, grocery) faster than you can walk to them. Had I been willing to live on a street with cars passing by, I could have been within a few hundred feet of work+school or the grocery store. As it is, they are all within 3 miles without really any traffic. Getting to work is 3 minutes. Getting to groceries is about 7 minutes, and I can actually bring back enough stuff for a large family. School would be 1 or 2 minutes.
Oh, as a bonus, I never face the threat of personal crime.
http://www.nsc.org/learn/safety-knowledge/Pages/injury-facts...
If you're talking about being able to claim mortgage interest on your taxes then that hasn't gone away yet. I don't know what other kinds of home owner subsidies exist.
The reason is that this, like nearly everything else in this thread, only applies to the coasts or for houses that would be considered quite expensive elsewhere.
The median home value in St. Louis, for example, is less than $150k. The standard deduction for a married couple filing jointly is $12,600. The math is pretty simple from there.
It contributes to economic unfairness. Paying less taxes just because one owns a house is not optimal use of tax dollars when people who can't afford a house are doing pretty badly.
A homeowner pays less in housing costs (mortgages aren't subject to rent increases by a landlord) and pay less taxes than someone who rents who makes the same and they get to keep all the equity. It's incredibly unfair.
The historical reason for the subsidy is to increase home ownership. It's not really helping anymore.
This is a very coastal/urban-centric view, IME. The large majority of my social circle growing up in suburban Dallas (a) still lives in suburban Dallas and (b) found a detached home before age 30 (if not 25). I moved away from the suburbs, and to a big coastal city, and so did almost "everyone I know" out here (with a lot of selection bias), but judging from that and housing prices in those crazy markets doesn't work for extrapolating to the country as a whole.
Of the ones still living at home, I don't know anyone thinking "it would be just as cool to have my own place, so might as well save money." The causality is reversed: "I'm broke, so might as well save as much money as possible, and my parents' place is big."
"Not cool" starts being a lot less relevant pretty quickly after getting out of college for most people, IME. Suburban houses are bigger than apartments. They're less noisy. They're more pet friendly. You have a garage for storage/workshopping/whatever. You have more space for starting a family. All those reasons still apply as much as they ever did, the big change from ten years ago to today is economic, not around coolness.
In the greater Seattle area you'd be stressed to find a back alley condo for that cheap. My rent in the outskirts of Redmond for a 3 bedroom apartment is more than my mother's mortgage for her 5 bedroom house in Bellevue, which, despite being a 70 year old split-level home with low ceilings and a hill for a lot in a forgotten neighborhood without so much as one sidewalk, was appraised two years ago for over $750,000.
I can afford to live on my own, but hell if I can afford a reasonable down payment on a house within 25 miles of where I work.
What he's describing about Dallas is true for the nearly 200 million Americans who live in the Midwest and the South. Cheap housing is the norm in the United States. I'm not bothered by people on the coasts complaining about housing costs, but you look foolish when you make generalizations about your generation that don't apply to the majority of the country.
Rent in Brooklyn got them 12 acres 40 minutes away from Uptown Charlotte, and a house to boot.
You're getting 1.5x the income (usually with longer hours) and paying 5x for the house.
You're also paying more for other random stuff like groceries, eating out, gasoline, electricity, etc.
You're also paying lots more for taxes. Some states have no income tax. Some states have no sales tax. Some have neither!
I actually don't see what can be done about it. But it's a bit strange to project Google numbers to the entire generation.
Also, what's this nonsense about Decatur, Illinois? St. Louis and Cincinnati and Nashville and Pittsburgh and so on all have a bunch of pre-WWII, walkable, interesting neighborhoods, with little restaurants and bars and people putting on poetry readings and bands playing in basement clubs and jazz quartets playing at wine and cheese parties and concert halls that host national acts and major sports franchises and yuppies and hipsters and Python Meetups and comedy clubs and big pretty parks and coffee shops and whatever else you can think of.
No, they are emphatically not like San Francisco or NYC. But don't be silly. Millions of people live in those places. Did you really think they're all just skipping stones and waiting to die?
I'm quite glad I grew up here, because I think I'd be just the type of asshole who'd make jokes about Decatur, Illinois had I not. And you know what? I'd have been wrong.
And to really strain this metaphor, people who have all their wealth tied up in a Ferrari would be a lot better off if they sold it and used the gains to live a comfortable life.
It's even unclear how real the urbanization trend is as opposed to a preference for a small set of dense locations by college-educated people in a specific age range.
They're subjective but it's important to realize both scenarios and everything in between exist, and to acknowledge when you're only considering the extremities of that range.
Which is to say:
If you can't afford to live in a coastal state, then what you need more than anything else is a U-Haul.
The demand is there and it's not going away. Whatever you're hoping for, it's too late.
The solution is trivially simple: build a lot of public housing.
If you have a hard time imagining what any part of that plan might look like, take a look at Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
[1] https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-rise-and-fall-of-pu...
>Sure, build a bunch of concrete high rises for tech worker
I guess SF's bus drivers, restaurant servers, etc. don't deserve somewhere affordable to live because it might spoil the "aesthetic"?
"Cheap" housing only goes so far when your employment is 30 hours per week at the local Walmart for $9/hour. You're trying to pretend this is some "coastal" phenomenon, but you can't get there from here - you can't get the number of young people who have left the nest down from 60+% to just barely over 30% without it involving the entire country.
Young people in middle America can't afford to move out either.
But you'd need to earn 159k per year in San Francisco to match the spending power of that $55k in St. Louis. And even that wouldn't be nearly enough to reach parity in home purchasing. Housing is 790% more expensive in San Francisco!
I get that it's fun to joke about flyover country, but the numbers are what they are. People simply are not struggling to move out of the house in St. Louis in the same way that they are in the Bay Area, for example.
Which is to say, once again, that there must be other factors at play.
http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/st.-louis-mo/san-fr...
In California the median household income is $67,458, and the median house sales price is $405,000, or about 6x median income.
So no, it is not actually true that the lower housing prices in flyover states are offset by lower incomes. Housing in California is proportionally twice as expensive as it is in Ohio.
http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/25/1-in-2-working-americans-m...
If you look at per capita income instead of household, Ohio gives $135,500/$26,937 ~= 5, and California gives $405,000/$30,441 = 13 By that standard, California is 2.6 times more expensive instead of only 2.
Is that why the vast majority of "school decides to teach Creationism in science classes" type stories emerge from flyover country?
http://arstechnica.com/search/?ie=UTF-8&q=creationism
Sort by date, then check the states.
Ohio. Mississippi. Kansas. Idaho.
No sir, you do not have good schools compared to the rest of the country.
1. http://www.businessinsider.com/best-school-districts-in-amer...
What this is, more than anything else, is ignorant. I think I understand how it happened. The inner cores of the Midwestern cities that give large metros their names really have been gutted. They were literally ripped through by highways, intentionally segregated, their manufacturing base decimated.
They're crumbling.
And boy oh boy does this story have legs. It's sort of fun to flip through the destruction porn. Pictures of brick piles where houses once stood titillate.
So, it must sound as though entire regions are falling apart. But it's just not so.
If you were to do a quick search for information about St. Louis, MO, you'd learn that the city has a paltry median income of about $30k, a dwindling population of about 300k, and a pathetic land area of only 66 miles squared.
But the City of St. Louis refers to a very small part of a much larger region, an area myopically bound by voters who in 1876 couldn't imagine much happening in the farmlands beyond those lines.
The region today -- much of it on those old farmlands -- has 2.5 million people and a metro-wide median household income of around $55k.
This is the true picture of the region, though most descriptions of it are drawn from only its worst parts.
The fact is that, for many people, the opportunity in places like California lags far behind the increased cost of living. Lots and lots of regular folks would be far better off relocating to places they've long-ago dismissed without a serious look.
Yes, we have winters. And no ocean. But, yes, there's actually culture (of the kind generated everywhere that two and a half million humans live). And good housing. And, most important: you can actually afford it.
1. Crumbling ghettos (as you describe) 2. Crumbling non-ghetto rust-belt that's still not pretty 3. Rural areas beset by meth and herion. 4. Vast-scale suburbs with indeed little to no culture and fairly thin on jobs. 5. Areas like the coasts but costing close to the price of the coast -
But I'm sure there's good stuff between that.
Also, the City Of St. Louis is certainly the limit of the broad St. Louis ghetto, as the Ferguson events clearly shows. The metropolitan area is basically the 2nd or third most dangerous city in the US (behind Detroit and sometimes New Orleans).
This is not only incorrect, it's perhaps the most notorious example of the problems caused by comparing cities at a level smaller than the MSA. The St. Louis MSA is, in fact, about middle of the pack on crime. See here:
http://www.bestplaces.net/docs/studies/crime3.aspx
And here:
http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bettencourt/urban_observatory/vio...
The division between St. Louis City and St. Louis County creates a lot of issues for this region, but the fact that you could make your comment with such confidence demonstrates that the area's primary challenge is image marketing.
To illustrate this, imagine one region where the baseline crime rate is not extreme, but above average all across the region. Now, think of another place where most of the region is pretty safe, but one pocket of the area has an extremely high rate.
These two regions might have identical crime rates. But which one would you rather live in?
This is why the FBI recommends against using its own numbers to make comparisons like the grandparent's:
"Each year when Crime in the United States is published, many entities—news media, tourism agencies, and other groups with an interest in crime in our Nation—use reported figures to compile rankings of cities and counties. These rankings, however, are merely a quick choice made by the data user; they provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction. Consequently, these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents."
Source: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/...
Also, the burbs (Grapevine, Colleyville, Arlington, Euless, Irving, etc.) are soulsucking tracts of aparments and housing subdivisions. Walking around is hard, biking difficult (getting murdered on large streets and highways), and the only non-chain stuff tends to be overly-face folksy town centers that people are moving towards (see Southlake, but even then it's a lot of big chains because of how much it costs to be there).
And that's before you even go into the shittiness of commuting around Dallas.
Amen! You get tired of living in basically a post-college dorm scene really quick, all the meanwhile paying 1000-2000 for the "luxury" when you can turn around and put that same money into 4x the space, and be actually building equity in the process.
I think they don't because then you get into multi dwelling zoning and if the property was zoned for single-family homes it could get complicated (probably not by much).
Fast forward to today and in all but a few very progressive communities, the fear of changing these zoning laws negatively impacting property value has essentially frozen them in time. So in a lot of suburban areas you couldn't build separate living units on one single family lot, even if you wanted to. Or at least it would be quite costly.
For instance my brother-in-law is a planner in a suburban California city, discussed this once with him... apparently in his city you need to add 2 additional parking spaces for every extra housing unit added to your property. Want to make an in-law unit for grandma? 2 parking spots please. Don't have room for an extra driveway? No permit.
Basically unless new construction was zoned to be a higher-density area, for apartments or townhomes etc, for a developer it doesn't make much sense to build with extra units in mind. Especially if the builder has to put up a fight for permits or spend that much more money to meet code. In that case, it's more profitable to just be building condos.
This is not a good development, even if they used to do it in England in the 18th century.
History should lead us somewhere. Is this already lost on us?
The world is certainly richer than it was in the 80s. We are vastly more efficient at producing all sorts of goods. So, then, why is the current generation of Americans unable to afford what was available to the middle class previously?
I believe that the answers to this crucial question are obscure and are unlikely to be found in conventional economic and political analysis.
I think it's that simple.
It's pretty straightforward actually. The change you're looking for starts in the 80s: http://eighty-thousand-hours-wp-production.s3.amazonaws.com/...
I wonder why rich people before 1980 wanted less money and had worse means of getting it.
Easy. It was harder and less acceptable to use international labor then, there were that many fewer college educated people, and that's 36 years behind the current level of automation technology.
You don't have to like unions to admit they benefited workers. In fact, the money spent on the destruction of unions points to it - why bother if they didn't help workers?
The post-WWII bargain, where productivity growth was split, is gone and not coming back. Whether there's a way to give workers a voice again or not is an interesting question.
Of course, if the class differential gets too big, there's always the pitchfork and torch route, which I don't think anyone (OK, most sane people) wants.
This is very true. I know the big US car unions ended up screwing both the employees and employers, but have you ever wondered what would have happened in the 60's or 70's, had the line manager come over and told his assembly line team that they were going to not only be fired next month, but if they wanted a severance, they'd have to train their replacement recently imported from the third world?
I can guarantee you that there is a good chance this mgmt. team would probably end up dead or severely injured soon afterwards.
Today, the same circumstances elicit, at most, a few angry comments on some online media forum.
We've been conditioned well by out masters.
I imagine the reasonable chance that someone snapping figured they could get away with it, particularly in a close knit group that routinely went fishing or hunting together and would say that's exactly where they were at the time something happened; was /much/ higher back then.
Also today everyone knows that someone else will just be hired to do the same thing. Today when some kind of correction does happen it'll either be approved from on high by those seeking to avoid an old-school revolution, or it will be a bloody zerg-rush.
Yes, but we have been told that international free trade benefits us all. Do you disagree?
> there were that many fewer college educated people,
Yes, but we have been told that education is the key to our future, and a more educated workforce should be able to produce more and better goods for us all. Do you disagree?
> that's 36 years behind the current level of automation technology.
Yes, but automation was what dragged us out of the stone age and through the industrial revolution. It has, at times, apparently made us vastly richer. Do you disagree?
I don't say all this to be a dick (well, OK, kind of) and I agree to some extent with each of your points, but I think there is a larger issue at the root: debt.
I find Steve Keens analysis compelling.
If you have 10 jobs paying people $10, and replace them with 50 jobs paying people $1, but keep the prices of the products the same; 10 people now don't have jobs, and 50 people each don't make enough money to buy any products. You've increased productivity 5x and cut costs in half but all of the gains go to shareholders.
> A more educated workforce should be able to produce more and better goods for us all.
Same as above.
> Automation...has, at times, apparently made us vastly richer.
Same as above.
> I think there is a larger issue at the root: debt.
It's the same issue. Debt is just another thing to rent to poor people.
On debt, you really should read Keen. He has the only predictive economic model I've seen that actually works, and debt is the crucial factor.
it is always government. from sucking too much money out of the banking industry to make available for business needs to government trying to pick favorites in new industries and distorting the markets. from playing rate games, backing securities, to inducing lending risk by pressuring banks to lend to those they would prefer not too
Even the ACA damaged the ability of those to earn a living by putting in place that infamous twenty hour rule. That wasn't done to benefit working people, that was done to benefit certain types of employers but more it was done to distort unemployment numbers by artificially raising the number of people needed to do that same amount of work each week. This ain't much different than pleads to make college free, keep able bodied people off the job lines.
Sure many of the rich are getting richer but they only do so because those writing the laws are in constant election and reelection cycles. Where they try to write laws prevent you businesses and such putting money into politics but slip in rules that allow PACs to take 350k from one person; provided "wink wink" its not targeted to a specific politician.
tl;dr. Government is the source of the wage stagflation.
It is never this simple.
TL;DR Productivity is kept by corporations, wages are stagnant because of it, and the US doesn't have a strong labor political party.
Raise the minimum wage and index hours worked per week to productivity. Productivity goes up? People work less but make the same amount of income.
This makes labor less valuable, and decreases labour's negotiating power, preventing an increase in wage from an increase in productivity.
That is, if your work is augmented by a machine, then it's a hell of a lot easier to replace you.
Everyone so quickly forgets, "Let them eat cake."
These will only be exasperated further by the onset of automation and robotics in the coming generation(s).
I don't have a doubt that we could easily turn around the benefits of automation and robotics towards favouring the middle and working classes.
My concern though, is that the few that are currently gaining wealth from reduced labour costs in favour of productivity have a stronger grasp on where this wealth goes, than the majority outside of socialist strongholds like Scandinavia and some European states. And that trend will continue.
Edit: grammar, shit pre\post-tense structuring.
I think the most likely culprit is what Steve Keen says it is: debt.
Do you believe in the Ricardian argument for free trade? If so, why did we not become richer as other countries became better trading partners?
We also profited greatly supplying the wars. We haven't had a "market" like that since then. The US was mostly its own customer during the cold war.
My question is: the standard Ricardian argument for international free trade assumes that as trading partners become more productive, all trading partners benefit. Do you think this is the case? Certainly the original post does, as confirmed in his response.
If that is so, why would other countries becoming better at making things make us poorer?
Young Americans are living with their parents instead of saving money rather than living with their parents to save money.
What happens when they have children? Where will their adult children live? In their parents tiny 2 room apartments?
Basically, the full effects of the declining net income of adult Americans is being masked by people living off the accumulated wealth of their parents (both consuming their houses and getting hand-outs). Which implies that there's cliff that the American lifestyle will fall off at some point and then things will be ugly even in comparison to now.
Does anyone have a break down of what percentage of people live in single-family homes, vs. an apartment/other?
Anecodotally, most of my mid 30's friends have either 0 or 1 child, a few that got started earlier have two.
On the other hand, the millions of legal and illegal immigrants, especially from Latin America, are keeping the birth rate up. They do, in fact, many times live in much more crowded conditions. I have met a few Hispanic immigrants in my area as I speak Spanish, and in each case, they lived in single family homes with multiple families / generations.
It's not obvious to me. Possibly only because I'm uninformed, though, so feel free to point me at any relevant data.
There are a variety of trends which could be happening and which might explain this particular cohabitation-with-one's-parents phenomenon without having to mean that the current young generation has less wealth than its predecessors.
[1]http://www.realtytrac.com/content/news-and-opinion/americas-...
What we need is not the creation of new houses, but new cities, or the dramatic rebuilding of the old ones. We need high density urban environments with low cost of living built around foot and public transit, no cars, and with mixed use building again, without the zoning hell that currently cripples growth in almost every corner of the US today.
Who is "we"?
Actual, real-world people vote against high-density urban environments with their feet, and pretty much always have. It's just that in past ages it was only the rich who could afford a country home. That's changed, thanks largely to modern transportation making it possible to work in the city and live in the burbs.
For the current upcoming generation, they do not have the means to afford those homes either. If you want to house them independently they need denser Urban living since modern transportation in the form of personal automobiles is also incredibly expensive.
Society at large has decided that it likes suburbs and McMansions just fine. You don't get to make that decision for other people, just because you use the word "we".
'And half the point of this article is that "young Americans" cannot afford those country homes with long commutes'
Well, then, that's the problem needs to be solved, rather than patching it by forcing people back into the crowded urban environments that they so obviously do not want to live in.
'denser Urban living since modern transportation in the form of personal automobiles is also incredibly expensive.'
1) Why does it need to be dense and urban?
2) No, they aren't. In 1950 a median-priced new car cost about $1,500, somewhat more than half the median annual wage. Today you can get a new Ford Focus for about $17,000, which is... somewhat more than half the $32,140 median annual wage for those over 25.
Also, most families in 1950 had one car, period. Most families now have at least two. That doesn't tend to support your claim that cars have gotten more expensive.
You don't have children, do you?
If that were true, then the prices in high-density urban environments would be much lower than they actually are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak
This coffee's claim to fame is that the beans have been eaten (and then excreted) by a cat-like animal called a palm civet.
Now, does that high price mean that most people want to drink this coffee? Nope. Most people would avoid it at all costs. There is a small group of connoisseurs who enjoy this coffee. The price is high because, as small as that group might be, the (tiny) supply is insufficient to satisfy their demand at any lower price.
Similarly, there's a subset of people (mostly, though not exclusively, young, single, and childless) who actually enjoy living in dense urban environments, and will drive up the price accordingly. Those people are not the norm.
I'm astounded by this comment. Are you saying that the obvious answers of asset based inflation caused by our monetary policy does not majorly impact real estate in a way that hurts younger generations and the middle class?
I can't see how. It's basic math.
If assets rise in price and two people are leveraged into assets the same amount, who gets richer, the person with a 100k asset or the person with a 500k asset?
I very much view this as an intergenerational financial war, the Boomers (and Greatest) on the Millennials and X.
It just so happens a lot of the 'rich' are boomers and not rich are millennials, but that's current happenstance.
To the extent that Baby Boomers foemented low interest rates and low inflation ( although that's arguable too - the 1980s were not exactly peak Boomer years - see the 1990s for that to really take shape ) you are correct, but it's really just collateral damage. When you make this much more money sitting on land for umpety years until its developed, that's the business culture you'll end up with.
Throw in the effect of 401k plans dragging everybody into the stock market and you get an even fuller picture.
A lot of Boomers are really boned. Like, poor. More than is commonly written about.
ObDisclosure: I am a cusp baby between the Boomers and GenX, early '60s model.
Our parents just didn't get to buy a house for cheap. They also got all the increase in value. We have to buy an expensive house that probably won't increase in value all that much.
Why is housing more expensive? I'm not totally sure, but I suspect it's the effect of stretching suburbia to the limits. When my parents house was built it was the frontier between rural Illinois and the Chicago suburbs. Now it's considered a middle rung suburb. There are suburbs an hour further away from Chicago. But we've hit the limits on what a person can tolerate re:commutes. You just can't commute for over 2 hours each way.
We should be rezoning inner rung suburbs and cities for increased density housing.
Then again telecommuting and/or autonomous cars might destroy all the downsides to commuting.
Probably because land area is zero-sum and population is twice the size it was in the 60s.
Also rent-seeking, foreign investors buying houses with cash, etc.
It's a combination of factors.
> We should be rezoning inner rung suburbs and cities for increased density housing.
Agreed. Most of the suburbs are hideous, inefficient (most houses built before 1973 have marginal to no insulation) and in many places crumbling from age.
We've been kicking our earnings up to the top more and more.
The answer is multifaceted, but part of the problem is that some of the major reasons are extremely politically inconvenient. For example, what are the economic consequences of women entering the workforce in large numbers in recent generations? Increased labor supply drives down wages per employee, then more two income families increase price inflation (especially real estate prices). Together they transfer most of the economic value of women working into the hands of employers and existing land owners, when the economic value of the domestic labor it displaced had previously gone primarily to the woman and her family. And people who remain single are extra screwed because they suffer the same wage and price consequences without the second income.
But for cultural and biological reasons when one spouse is a homemaker it will almost always be the wife rather than the husband, so policies that would increase the standard of living by reducing the number of two income families have consequences anathema to the left (fewer women working) and the right (less value captured by employers and land owners). So we don't talk about it.
According to conventional economics, quite the opposite: it makes the economy bigger and creates more jobs.
(If growing the workforce increased unemployment, then bigger countries would have high unemployment and population growth would also increase unemployment).
It's debatable. I was in my 20's in the 80's. I was able to buy a 3br/2ba, 1500sq ft. house when I was 26. I had my school loans paid off a couple of years after I graduated - that's not happening for 20-somethings now.
> I believe that the answers to this crucial question are obscure
I don't think they're so obscure. If we are wealthier now, then it's likely that the wealth is in much fewer hands than it was in the 80's and before. Income stagnation. Wealth accumulating in fewer and fewer hands. Back in the 1860's Marx told us this is what happens in Capitalist economies. While you may not agree with his prescription (and I certainly don't agree with most of it) his diagnosis was pretty much spot on.
This chart [1] seems to imply that 21% of people under 25 own a house, which is higher than the 14% of under 25's who owned a house in 1994.
http://thereformedbroker.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Scre...
...maybe someone can check this against another data source.
No, it's really not debatable the world is richer than in the 80s. Much of that wealth has been accumulating outside the US, though, particularly in India and China.
With interest rates as low as they are you could definitely get into a 1500 sq ft. house by age 26 today. You just can't do it in the places many 26 year olds want to live.
https://www.discover.com/home-loans/blog/how-expensive-is-yo...
At current interest rates you can make payments on a $150k home if you make $15/hr.
http://michaelbluejay.com/house/howmuchhome.html
Where in the country can you not make $15/hr by age 26?
Any town where the only jobs are at Walmart and the feed-and-seed store. Walmart doesn't pay those kinds of wages in rural locations (or probably anywhere else, unless you're a manager).
But from a US perspective we seem to be poorer now.
> With interest rates as low as they are you could definitely get into a 1500 sq ft. house by age 26 today. You just can't do it in the places many 26 year olds want to live.
I bought that house in a place where 26-year-olds want to live (a West Coast city). Interest rate was 10%, but I was able to pay off the mortgage in 9 years. I don't think a lot of 26-year-olds are in that position these days. Too much student loan debt and houses much more expensive as compared to incomes.
My uncles lived with their Mom until they got married. They are roughly Silent Generation or WWII. Its just The Way It Was. We had a massive housing boom; now it's over.
What should be done is that market should be encouraged to provide enough housing that young people can afford when they need it. Same way Ford did with cars.
Is there an ethnic variation to this, or does this apply to all groups?
The college industry is big money and they are incessant in their message that if you spend tens of thousands you will be a success. This implies that those who don't are not trying or worse.
My impression is that most Americans look at it and say "that's different", but don't look down on it.
This is a BAD sign. It is indicative of an economy that is not working for most Americans. Making excuses and disregarding these proxies for American quality of life does no one favors except for the 1%.
You are also not allowed have sex in these countries. Sexual repression sucks ass. I would take poverty over sexual repression. As someone who has experienced this; it has had major psychological impact on my life that I feel the effect to this day. And I am not alone, millions of youth in my country experience this. Imagine what kind of society that breeds, imagine living in a sex segregated society.
It sucks if it not the case with your country, but do not make it a general case.
Its quite common in America, too.
You will notice the important of the individual in these countries, getting out on your own, supporting yourself. being your own person, not what your parents want to be.
This is a good thing.
Perhaps this trend could be explained to some extent by the fact(?) that mommy & daddy have a lot more space at home nowadays than daddy's parents did when he turned 18, making living with the parents more attractive to today's young adults than it was to prior generations.
Not at all suggesting this would be the only likely factor, of course.
Sources:
- https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf
- http://www.statista.com/statistics/183648/average-size-of-ho...
Also, I strong suspect this varies by region and suburb versus city.
Actually looking at your data, it's the size of newly built houses. So definitely the houses themselves are getting bigger.
But with the occupants of all the houses, old and new, getting on average poorer, I'd be most interested in the average and median square footage that Americans live in and I don't think your data really gives data on that.
There are some caveats there: these data are for new, single-family houses only.
In many urban job centers, people tend not to live in new housing, or in single-family homes -- particularly not people between 18 and 35.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/families/files/graphics/HH-3.pdf
So lots of people are living in newer homes.
The graph only accounts for 45 million houses in the US, including only the houses owned by the young and the old. But that is a small fraction of US homes. (If those were all homes, the average household size would be 7 people.)
http://www.statista.com/statistics/183635/number-of-househol...
Obviously the standard of living is in decline. An article such as this provides some evidence, as does the well known fact that the male median wage has been in decline since 1973.
Well sorry, the exact same 1200 ft^2 brick home built in the 50s, that you bought for 2 year's salary (with a high school education) in the 70's, NOW costs 6 times my salary (or 12 times the median salary for the area).
The $600 iPhone which I absolutely need for any modern job (thanks to BYOD) isn't gonna make a dent in the cost of housing, health care, and college these days.
I agree with your overall point that things like housing, healthcare, and education are much more expensive today and are much more difficult to acquire, securely, on a median income. However, when you say things like "I absolutely need a $600 iPhone for any modern job", it comes across like out-of-touch whining. No, you do not need the latest iPhone for any modern job. You want the latest iPhone. You can get a very capable, brand new Android phone for around $100 bucks.
If part of your job is conveying status, bringing an Android to work conveys a completely different kind of status than an iPhone. It may not feel good, but that doesn't mean $600 for an iPhone, even when you can barely afford food/rent, is poorly spent.
Functionally you don't need a smartphone to do most work. And that's coming from someone who works with the devices at a major telecom...
Location. Location. Location.
1,480 sq. ft., $23,000 http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/113-Bernal-Ave-Hickman-KY-...
918 sq. ft., $18,000 http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/309-W-B-St-Ramona-KS-67475...
1,056 sq. ft., $24,999 http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/943-Wisconsin-Ave-Beloit-W...
1,134 sq. ft., $27,000 http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4751-Bellm-Dr-SPC-20-Klama...
2,064 sq. ft., $28,500: http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/908-Lelia-St-Newport-AR/10...
Everyone else who's not in this small minority still has a right to complain about coastal/urban housing prices.
I can't fathom how anyone can claim that virtually any American is better off than his counterpart from any time in the past. So let's do a thought experiment: can you pick a past time in USA history where you'd like to be transported, keeping everything else (such as your economic quintile) equal, where you'd be better off? Or forget about keeping things equal, would you rather go back a hundred years and be in John Rockefeller's shoes? There's a good argument to be made [1] that you're better off than he was.
I don't much care for safer cars, longer life expectancy, instant world wide communications compared to the freedom of living a much better life during one of the most prosperous times in US history. Quality of life experiences feels like it was much better before the 21st century race to the bottom. What's the point of living "better" if you're going to be chained to a desk or job for 50-60 years, or constantly have to retrain decade after decade?
Does anyone have statistics on how many "traditional" single-income households there are in the U.S.? I live with my wife and four kids (home schooled) in a fairly large house, with a single income under that is apparently under the starting salaries for newly minted software-engineering graduates in the big urban areas.
You can still do that if you're willing to make sacrifices. A colleague of mine gets by on one income - I don't know what he makes now, but he started at $35k about five years ago. And this is in the SF bay area.
When you do the math having both spouses working doesn't increase your standard of living very much because of taxes and child care.
It provide an interesting view on the late 60s to mid 70s in the US.
I don't know if there's any reasonable way you can actually measure "standard of living", since it arguably includes "happiness" which is difficult to quantify.
John D. Rockefeller also did live to a rather old age. Not everyone in that era was as fortunate.
Maybe you missed the sub-title, which is "For the first time since the 1880s, more young Americans are living with their parents than with a romantic partner."
"I can't fathom how anyone can claim"
I can't fathom that you mean this literally so I assume you offer this in the rhetorical sense. You may wish to consider "Don't Get Offended":
"One oft-underestimated threat to epistemic rationality is getting offended. While getting offended by something sometimes feels good and can help you assert moral superiority, in most cases it doesn't help you figure out what the world looks like. In fact, getting offended usually makes it harder to figure out what the world looks like, since it means you won't be evaluating evidence very well."
http://lesswrong.com/lw/gux/dont_get_offended/
I am guessing that, in reality, you do have the power to fathom such a thing. If you need help, there are thousands of well-reasoned essays on the web, which make the point that you claim to have difficulty fathoming. Google will steer you to them.
Or you can play Devil's Advocate to your own mind, and make the case yourself, to yourself.
[1] - http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...
"If the median price of a house has increased by 75% but the house is 50% bigger, the effective price increase is barely above inflation."
can be reconciled to this:
"For the first time since the 1880s, more young Americans are living with their parents than with a romantic partner."
People are angry about the decline in the standard of living, and for most us, the justification for that anger is obvious.
There is no need to be rude. I posted twice in this conversation and linked to sources both times. I'm not sure how that gives the impression that I am being unreasonable.
>ask yourself whether this...can be reconciled to this...
It certainly can because they are measuring two separate things. Housing costs are up, but on a rate basis they are not as far up as most think. More Americans are living at home. The former is likely partially responsible for the latter, but it is unlikely that it is the only cause. As the article suggests, another cause is likely that younger people simply aren't living with romantic partners as much as the number of people living alone is also higher.
Inflation adjusted wages have been quite stagnant while measures of inflation are rather dubious to say the least. My old car is indeed a bit more reliable than my previous old car but both were reliable - I can't see that compensating for more or less everything costing more relative my relatively fixed income.
Not that I think white Americans deserve some extra-consideration but the recent decline in the life expectancy of white Americans [1], coupled with indeed further medical discoveries, seems like a demonstration that the effective decline in wages is able to outpace even these better medicines.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/health/life-expectancy-dec...
- Housing
- Education
- Quality of jobs
- Career growth
- Job security
These are less accessible than 30-40 years ago, while surely you can enjoy the magic of Facebook on your shiny iPhone, which were admittedly unavailable then.
Robert Gordon makes the point in his book, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, that life expectancy improved twice as much from 1900 - 1950 as from 1950 - 2000.
> And our standard of living is obviously far higher than at any time in the past
Human health declined beginning with the agricultural era. I mean, you don't even have any knowledge of every time in the past, yet you are so confident in claiming our lives have never been better.
> the access to more and better medicines, having at our fingertips
You do realise that the extreme majority of illnesses experienced today are caused by the modern world and lifestyles? These medicines are designed to fix problems that didn't exist previously. The most commonly sold medicine is probably heart medication or something like that. These were things people did not experience 50,000 years ago, or even 500 years ago.
> safer and longer-lasting cars
Do you realise that most people just use cars to sit in traffic for hours going to a job they hate? You consider that a sign of how great things are?
> longer life expectancy
Well it is now declining, but quality over quantity. Sitting around at 90 years old watching tv isn't something I would count as life.
> ubiquitous and free to nearly-free instantaneous communication
social media and communication over the internet is a terrible replacement for real-life communication. Social media is actually really depressing. There are even recent studies that link time on social media with depression.
These forms of communication are usually just a sign of isolation.
> refrigeration
great for ice-cream
> lower pollution
lol? Climate change?
> I can't fathom how anyone can claim that virtually any American is better off than his counterpart from any time in the past
I can't even fathom how someone who hasn't lived in any time but now can make that statement. Literally any time in human history? How was it like, I don't know, 200,000 years ago? Tell us. You will mention lower life expectancy. That is mostly due to infant mortality rates. Many people lived until they were 70. They had actual lives, not sitting at a computer typing shit all day.
Everything you say is complete propaganda of a corrupt capitalist society and you don't even realise it.
For an account of living in agricultural (pre-industrial) society, I wholeheartedly recommend "The Peasants" by W. Reymont - the Nobel prize winning, extremely realistic account of how life was in a small village in central Poland around year 1900. In short: everyone was working pretty hard, but only the peasants who owned land were living a decent life. The others (a majority) worked on farms owned by the village's "elite" and always feared about their future (not to mention they sometimes didn't even own homes so they slept in for example their master's stable, next to the piles of horse shit). On the other hand, the work was more varied that most jobs today and there wasn't that much to do in the winters so everyone rested then.
We're talking going from ~2000 sq. ft. to ~1100 sq. ft., old construction, no insulation, etc.
If you really wanted to make a comparison between equal houses, the difference is more like 20x ($3M for a similar house in the Bay Area).
If you're comparing NYC to St. Louis and desire a 60th floor apartment in a high rise, then the COL difference is infinity or mu or NAN or something. You simply can't make the comparison.
The same is true when comparing the average detached home in the Midwest to San Francisco. For most people, the answer to, "how much more would I have to make to buy the same house out there?" is "it doesn't matter, because you'll never make that much."
This country has a housing problem and this is the root of it.
I say this as someone who lived with his parents for two years during college, and would gladly pay the $12k/year it would have cost me to get those two years back, so maybe I'm biased, but nearly everyone I've talked to who's been living with their parents has had negative ramifications from it. Some romantic, some social development, some just general annoyance re: dealing with their parents quirks.
And I mean as a parent, my goal is helping my child develop into a fully autonomous adult. Fully autonomous does not mean 'depends on me for housing.'
I very much prefer a simple "check-in-mailbox" relationship with the person who owns my dwelling. I actually like my parents, but I sure don't want them as landlords!
I moved out when I was 18 and never went back.
>This country has a housing problem and this is the root of it.
This country has practically unlimited space for housing. We do not have land short; much less a land shortage caused by people living in comfortable houses.
But now jobs pay badly and housing is expensive. And in the few places with high paying jobs, housing is so expensive that it makes up for it easily.
It has always weirded me out how easily people discount the benefits of learning from their elders in the states. We feel lucky to give our daughter a lot of exposure to decades of life experience and wisdom.
If you moved back with your parents, I assume the problems would be as much yours as theirs. As if they would expect to still be treating you as a child. I've seen that with all my American friends and relatives and that's the reason all of them hate being home: they cannot stand their parents treating them as kids. It's a really weird thing.
In other cultures I have experience with (South America), the kids' individualism and freedom grow as they grow, even if they're under the same roof. In other words, their identity comes from their own growth, not from being sent away. It's common for people to still live with their parents well into their 30s -- normally, until they get married, although it's common to just move your partner in. And when that happens, they normally share (and gradually take over) the costs and burden of living in the house.
If everyone in the US was poorer and had to live with their parents, then it wouldn't be correlated with codependency at all, just "not being rich" - or "being normal". Certainly you'd rather be rich, but in this case it'd be normal to live with your parents and you wouldn't make assumptions about people over it.
I certainly hope I'm dead before we get to that point though...
The rationale goes that grandparents can look after the children while the parents are out earning money and in turn the parents can eventually take care of the aging grandparents as long as they don't need intensive care.
The argument being that this arrangement was historically the norm and worked out favourably for everyone compared to the modern "everyone for themselves" model where overworked parents neglect their children and the elderly can't age in grace because nobody has the time to look after them.
I'm not saying whether this argument is valid or realistic, but "let's rethink best practices" certainly isn't as exotic as you may think, even if this proposal seemingly runs counter to the individualism that is presently the cultural norm.
EDIT: The model projects in Germany also aren't cases of economic desperation either. These are middle-class families who think doing this is beneficial for their children. Maybe one should point out that "living together" in this case doesn't mean the same thing as "sharing an apartment" -- it's more of a "close neighbour" thing. So you could argue it's a bit hypocritical.
I don't think this arrangement was "historically the norm" for city dwellers. There, you had either nuclear families, or singles, or wealthy families complete with servants and maids.
In countryside, where you live is not important as long as you have land to grow food on and there's no drought.
But surely everybody in your family have their own idea what city they want to live in. It's sufficiently hard to negotiate this with your partner in nuclear family! Good look doing it with all those grandparents.
On what are you basing this?
What does bone the younger generation even mean and how does that manifest?
See my comments elsewhere in this thread. I have one and soon two older children living with us and the circumstances are in that comment. There are no excuses used in my house.
I don't see society saying kids need to live with their parents or saying they don't. I see individual families with circumstances that make the multi-generational living arrangements advantageous or even necessary. However it is not all positive. There are pluses and minuses.
Is there any reason to think that the romantic cohabitation trend of the 1960s might be unsustainable? Given how many people still dream of till-death-do-us-part, yes.
The normalness of living with parents correlates with the country's wealth per capita. Since most people in poorer countries cannot afford to own houses, they end up sharing houses their families own. Over time, the commonness of this occurrence becomes accepted as the norm.
It is NOT a good thing that the phenomenon is becoming common in America, because it indicates stagnating or declining wealth levels among the middle class.
Does collectivism correlate with a country's wealth per capita? Maybe it does!
Just look at other developed countries where living with parents is normal. Could this just be the US lifestyle evolving? It looks like a pretty regular trend over the last ~50 years.
It was supposed to be the other way around but urbanization seems to be a major factor for why that doesn't happen mostly because of the increasing value of real-estate that comes with urbanization.
In German we have Silvio Gesell and his Freiwirtschaft.
http://www.zillow.com/homes/18-Ferdinand-ST-Worcester-MA-016...
Companies no longer offer pensions, so better start your rental empire now.
I'm not being dismissive though, I agree with you. In a handful of affluent metros, directing some of your disposal income in the rental market is just a non-starter. In the majority of the country, you at least have that option.
I don't have any numbers to back it up, but my experience (I think we're of a similar age) was that this was true mainly for "white people with an English speaking background".
Most of my friends with an ethnic background did not have any stigmas related to living with their parents prior to marriage. This includes people who might otherwise be considered white but whose parents spoke a different language at home (Italian, Greek, Portuguese), etc. Granted, I live in Canada - there seems to be much less pressure for immigrants to assimilate vs in the US.
I live in Spain now and it's normal here to stay with your parents until, what is in US tv shows referred to as, far beyond serial killer age.
So I'm not sure the degree to which I'm inclined to read this study as "young people moving in with parents" so much as "young people not moving in with partners."
I haven't heard of anything resembling an extended family house occurring in North America.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-fa...
I'd rather see a society where polyamory became normal, so people could put together their own families by choice, rather than having it forced on them by genetics. There's very few of my family members that I could stand living with.
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2016/05/ST_2016.05.24_y...
wish they had better graphs.
The headline here should be that married or cohabitating has dropped and all the other categories have increased.
[1]http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/05/24/for-first-time-in-...
Part of the problem is gynocentric family courts and no-fault divorces with alimony. It's essentially a second mortgage with no tangible benefit.
Yes the quality of life is better, but now we have generation that just wants to coast along and ride off the successes of parents and forefathers/mothers. "I don't care if I have a shitty job and live in my parents basement, I have a smart phone and a car my parents gave me. I won't fight for better wages a better world, or my country because I'll miss watching survivor tonight. Hopefully someone gets elected to fix everything because I am too busy on facebook to vote and refuse to fight to have a life I want and can respect since it brings up uncomfortable feelings and takes effort."
I know I'm generalizing, but I'm disgusted in general with the lack of effort and spirit people in my generation seem to be putting into doing something about changing this shit. Let's just go back to our comfort cave at mom's and chill instead of giving a fuck.
1. A rise in the number of grandparents raising the kids rather than their own parents.
2. A decrease in the number of students that had any kind of plans or ambitions for post-high school life.
Your comment places you likely in your early 30s, meaning you probably entered the job market before the recession when there were more jobs. If you went to college, you went before the next 7-10 years of continued tuition increases.
The realities of the economics facing young people today aren't so simple as your comment suggests. Most of those young people are living at home to be frugal. And no young person worries about missing a show, its all streaming anyways.
Smartphones are the new TV; what is the statistic of how often millennials unlock their phone each day? 200+ last year. Was ~130 in 2014.
The reason this surprises me is that college attendance (and, thus, living in dorms) was much lower then. What were these other living arrangements that so many people were living in?
ADDED: Maybe boarding houses. Not sure how those are counted.
A new living space to heat, cool, light and manage just to live up to our culture's view of success is incredibly wasteful.
So it depends on the spaces in question. Urban living is typically compact and economical. Suburban living is expansive, what with the yards, cars and multi-mile trips to the store.
Living alone is expensive, yes, but living with your partner shouldn't be much more expensive than living with your parents.
Deposits to move out, needing a bigger emergency fund, you have to go grocery shopping/chores all on your own instead of splitting them with others. Time is money. On top of all this, most people I know in the early 20's are shit at money management, so they can't save up.
For many people, the options are: leave my parents large house, with nice amenities, and pay a lot of money to live in a crappy, small apartment for more money.
Doesn't seem like rocket science to me.
You're right, that's a very easy choice, but I think we reached different conclusions.
You have to consider: your parents' house almost by definition of them being parents, has excess space outside of your parents' needs. Why? Because you had to live there as a kid, potentially with your siblings.
So that's pretty much free housing if you live there. Of course there's an opportunity cost to giving you that space, but it's rarely actually priced. i.e. if you didn't live with your parents, they'd rarely rent out the room to some stranger. So it can virtually always be seen as free housing.
Compared to that, an entire extra apartment for you and your partner, is not free.
Then you figure in some extra factors, like rent control keeping your parents' contract prices way below what you'd have to pay. (my parents have a bigger house, same city, nicer neighbourhood, and pay half of what I pay for my studio). Or conversely, if they bought, their mortgage payments by now are probably low or non-existent, and property taxes are much lower than the would-be rent.
And finally if you look at things like having to buy new furniture vs parent-living, a more sober or less exotic lifestyle of parent-living, and all kinds of tiny economies of scale of living with more than 1 person (partner), plus the likelihood of getting heavily subsidised by your parents left and right when it comes to rent, groceries etc, and yes, for the child, living with his or her parents is generally much cheaper.
Somehow the only person I know that still lives with his parents is the brother of my girlfriend, he's 30.
Most people I know don't want to do this and leave early, between 18 and 21. And the rest left for university (or after if their parents lived where they studied)
I had a "single mom" and we we're rather poor. After she heard that I want to leave, which I told her 5 months before I actually left, she searched for a smaller home and got it after 2 months, so I had to live in the living room of the new home for 3 months.
When I was 21 some old teacher (>50 years) told me he was living in a shared flat with friends and not with his girlfriend and I was baffled. Now I'm 30 and still live in a shared flat with a friend.
Of course no politician is going to advocate driving down housing prices because, in lieu of an adequate retirement system, vast swathes of the populace are entirely dependent on that housing Ponzi scheme for their old age. Its disruption is unthinkable to them. That and the inordinate influence of the mortgage industry.
So loudly blaming rent control and zoning is the prefect way to do absolutely nothing about the problem as neither of these have any but the most minimal impact on the situation. If you wanted to guarantee the next generation has it even harder, limiting the conversation to these essentially irrelevant points would be the perfect way.
We can only hope that the Great Recession created another generation that will fight for the economic reforms necessary to regain our dignity.
Not so far, it hasn't.
It hasn't even been a decade since the crash, and people don't easily forget.
We are now eight years after 2008. What's happened? Not very much, from my view.
> people don't easily forget.
I think that 2008 wasn't nearly as bad as 1929, and people therefore forget much more easily.
It could have been a lot worse.
My oldest is 23 and graduated in May of 2015 from a 4 year liberal arts university. She is working part time in our local library system. She wants to be a librarian which requires a Master's of Library Science (MLS). So she will attend an online program at Florida State for an MLS next fall.
In the library system she works in, library associates are expected to give 2 to 5 years of part time work before they can go full time. The pay is okay, not great. None of her peers live on their own. At 20 to 24 hours a week they just can't pay for a place of their own (renting or buying). Full time work comes with a MLS.
We think the library system is taking advantage of minimal benefits for part timers and are taking advantage of these youths. But the passion of people that want to work in libraries have them working part time and making the sacrifice of living at home.
My daughter pays minimal rent to us, her auto insurance, gas, and medical co-pays. She saves everything else and when she starts graduate school her savings will start to evaporate.
We have a few friends that have children living at home. The reasons are varied. One is because of some mental health challenges. Some for living at home and attending a local college full time to save money on room and board. Some because they work part time and go to school like our child.
Her mom and I are 100% comfortable with this. We have some pseudo empty nester rules in place to help us have more freedom from our children and the same for them. However we still try to eat dinner together most nights. This is the together time that binds us as a family.
Ten years ago I would not have imagined this situation but it is what it is.
For the record we live in a coastal state in the US (Virginia) but in the center of the state (Richmond).
[0] http://olin.edu/
Edit: fixed typo
Also, baby-boomers didn't happen until after WWII, and there are a lot more social services [welfare, social security, medicare, Obamacare, more trust in banks thanks to FDIC] and regarding social advances, women are freer, the civil rights movement happened, the sexual revolution happened, and homosexuality is socially accepted [I, personally, don't think the latter two are positive developments, but I mention them because I am in the minority]. You have baby-boomers to thank for a lot of that. Social advances since WWI? Yep, lots! "Dismantled" is hardly the word to use for the 20th century.
Our infrastructure is crumbling, our young are getting poorer and poorer education and we are told we can not afford these public services as tax receipts go down. The babyboomers have been at the wheel for the last 30 years, and they have left us a mess to clean up from their greed.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/10171591/10-Bab...
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/who-dest...
https://www.ced.org/blog/entry/are-we-about-to-let-all-of-th...
The babyboomers did not start running things until the 1980's, and they are definitely not responsible for very many social services, but I would agree that they did help facilitate a more tolerant view of minorities, and that is something to be commended, but that doesn't negate the their overarching negative impact on just about every other social program: housing, education, healthcare, immigration, out-of-work benefits, disability benefits. All of these have been massively cutback over "their" tenure, so they could cut taxes for themselves, during their most productive and prosperous years, so they can continue live their extravagant lifestyles.
The babyboomers are a disgrace to what their parents and grandparents did and stood for.
Obamacare is a positive development in the USA, but there have been massive (public) healthcare cuts (in relative terms) in every other country with a modern economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Daiches
A couple buying a house during our current period of declining wages is hard enough. Doing it yourself is even more difficult, especially without a college degree or other marketable skills.
1. Over years American cities have built their specialties. It is much easier for children to find job in same field as their parents and settle in the same city as their parents.
2. More Americans now own housing makes sense to stay with parents.
3. Millennials have invested more in education and other things than spending money on rent.
Very likely these millennials would end up saving more and form the backbone of american middle class over next 20 years.
I can't even rule out them getting married and still having to live with us.
Can someone please explain to me how this works -- if there is an approx equal number of women and men, then at least (35%-28%) = 7% of women are living with a spouse or partner who is NOT a man. If we account for gay couples, assuming there are the same number of female and male gay couples (and in reality there are more gay men couples than lesbian couples), then this difference is still 7% (or greater). So 7% of women are living with a partner who is not a man nor a woman?
Not sure I follow this research.
There's a rise, however, in the number of seniors who reverse-mortgage their house and sign away the title to it in exchange for a monthly income until they die. If that continues, I imagine the banks and private companies will own all houses in about 50 years, because the previous generation decided to further screw their offspring in the name of having a slightly cushier final days.
This statement can only be made with a straight face by someone who has never been off the coasts. There are 65 million people in the midwest and another 119 million in the South. A majority of those are in areas where cheap housing is the norm.
The difference in housing is so huge that it sometimes feels like it swallows everything else. But, make no mistake, everything is cheaper here.
Use a tool like this for some comparisons:
http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
Walmart or any other nationwide retailer isn't going to give you lower prices on TVs or clothes or groceries because you're in a low cost-of-living area. It all costs the same, nationwide. Same goes for anything online. ISP/telecom costs are not any lower in the midwest. Gasoline is not significantly cheaper. Cars cost the same no matter where you buy them. What else is left? I suppose you can get away with paying someone less to mow your lawn there, but that's about it.
You're right about online, obviously, but the evidence for the other stuff is abundant.
Edit to add: Of course big retailers set their prices based on the local economy.
https://www.quora.com/Does-Wal-Mart-charge-different-prices-...
I don't think people on the coasts really understand this. My girlfriend moved here from Boston by way of NYC. She still can't believe the apartment we rent Downtown. In her mind this is an apartment for people much wealthier than we are.
And, no, it won't be in a place that's as nice as Palo Alto, but it will be in a perfectly reasonable working-class neighborhood. It's up to you to decide if that tradeoff is worth it.
One way to clarify your own thoughts on this is to imagine the reverse. If you were from St. Louis and somebody gave you a million dollars, would you spend every penny of it to buy a house in Palo Alto?
A better comparison would be someplace like northern New Jersey, or any such suburb, where you can be an hour away from a big city and you can get a house for ~$350k or so. Then you can enjoy having decent access to the big city, and also having lots of nice amenities very close by, enjoying a much prettier environment (there's a reason it's called "the garden state"), and there's better-paying jobs than anything you'll find in the midwest.
If I were stuck in STL for some odd reason and someone gave me $1M, I would not stay in STL, I'd move to someplace where houses cost $300-500k most likely.
But, to further the point, the same would obviously apply to houses in higher price ranges. $500k can buy a house in the Midwest that could fairly be described as luxurious.
It wasn't meant to be "clever". Maybe you think it's a great place, but if you're offended that not everyone thinks STL is some great place to live, that's your problem. STL does not have a reputation as a nice place to live. Proof: Ferguson. And Midwest weather is generally very bad (temperature extremes, tornados, etc.). And the crime rate there is known to be very high. If I was forced to live in some Midwest city, STL is probably the last place I'd choose. There's plenty of other Midwest cities that have boring but safe reputations.
Yes, $500k can buy a luxurious house in the Midwest, but the salaries there are much lower so you're not going to be able to afford that house there anyway.
The fact that you think "Proof: Ferguson" is a complete thought demonstrates this beyond doubt.
But you're definitely right about the weather. It sucks.
Edit: Just one thing I wanted to point out, not so much for you, but for anyone else reading this. Saying that, "And the crime rate there is known to be very high" about St. Louis is equivalent to suggesting that the South Bay isn't safe because the crime rate is very high in Oakland.
The only difference is that nobody measures the safety of the South Bay against Oakland. But in St. Louis, the whole region is referred to as "St. Louis" even though only the inner core -- St. Louis City -- is included in those crime stats.
You're right about one thing: that's a huge perception problem. The crime rate is "known" to be high here due to ignorance about how the region draws its political borders (which affects how crime stats are collected) and wildly mistaken impressions about Ferguson.
But, I guess as long as you "know" it to be true, it's not worth trying to better understand it.
So you can easily afford to buy a house, but when you have to move for a new job 3 years later, your equity may just be eaten up by closing costs and market fluctuations, and you might as well have been renting the whole time.
There's just nowhere in the US where I feel like I might still be in the same spot 10 years from now. And even if I did inherit a house from my parents, I'd just have to sell it, because their city--my hometown--is absolute crap for tech jobs.
SF, NYC, and Boston aren't the only places you can get a job.
It might be cheaper than NYC, SF, & Boston - but we're not pulling down 200k+ Salaries for Sr. Engineers here either, its all relative.
It used to be the case that all of those jobs were at MEGACORP, but that's no longer true. You can find just about whatever you're looking for.
Yet, funnily enough, the justification one hears frequently for enduring the housing premium of the Bay Area is the number of nearby jobs that make it easy to switch employers every 18 months or so.
Step 1 is to get a job. There are jobs all over the country. The concentration may be highest in the tech hot spots, but most of the jobs are elsewhere. Pick some place like Melbourne, FL. Pick a job that has long-term potential.
Step 2 is to fly out there and look at rentals. Pick one. Move.
Step 3 is to start looking for a home, casually at first. You want to learn about neighborhoods and traffic jams. Meanwhile, see how you like your new job. If the job doesn't work out, go back to step 1. If you need more time to figure out the local housing situation, rent for another year. Also, if you own a house in a different part of the country, get it sold.
Step 4 is you buy the house. Move.
Hopefully you can work there for decades. I've done a decade already. When things start to go sour, go back to step 1.
Sometimes you may lose on the "closing costs and market fluctuations", but remember that it's no big deal when the houses are cheap.
There are several statements that elide over critical details. You could literally write entire books on these topics:
- Pick a job that has long-term potential.
- If you own a house ... get it sold.
- When things go sour, go back to step 1.
- It's no big deal when the houses are cheap.
Remember 2008? I do. There's nothing quite like dropping $50k as a down payment and then being unable to sell when you really need to, because your note-holder won't even consider taking a little haircut with a short sale--which you would have to do, because all your equity is gone.
Step 1 is BS. How many articles pop up on HN about how broken tech hiring is? I would literally rather help my current boss bury a dead hooker in the woods (for the paying customer, of course) than deal with more whiteboard interviews and homework assignments and sudden ceasing of all communication.
When houses are cheap, usually rent is, too. But even where houses are "cheap", they are often still an over-unity multiple of the local median income, and require a lot of long-term debt to purchase. For most people in the US, a house is the most expensive thing they will ever even aspire to owning.
On top of all that, in the current era of women having their own professional jobs, that makes it even harder to settle down and have a family, since one of you losing a job means you have to move someplace, and that screws up the other's career. That means there's really a big disincentive to even date seriously and get married, because everyone's constantly moving around from city to city. I'm somewhat newly divorced and most of the professional women I see on Tinder/OKC in the metro area I live near (DC) have a string of characters in their profile indicating all the places they've lived: Boston, Philly, NYC, Seattle, etc. It's gotten to be a cliché. One woman I briefly dated complained that every time she made a new friend in the city, she (the female friend) moved away.
Could you get a security clearance? There are many government agencies near you.
Can you do low-level stuff like assembly? If so, my employer might want you. It's been 11 years, with growth, and we've never laid off a technical person.
Sadly, the Beltway Barons can easily afford the differential. The least you can do is demand that they pay it.
Government contractors are generally also private companies; those aren't really separate groups.
However, working there isn't like working at a company in the commercial sector either. You have to get a clearance, you might work with classified information, you'll frequently work with government workers, you might work at government facilities even. And you'll be exposed to a lot of nonsense, as you said, because it is government work, even though you're paid differently.
Basically, being a contractor has two big differences from being a government worker: you generally get paid more, but you don't have the job security and can be furloughed at any time (without pay) if there's a government shutdown or if the contract you're working under ends. (Government workers get furloughed too when Congress doesn't pass a budget, but they usually get back pay after it's over.) The big advantage with government work (government or contractor) seems to be that you can be a worse-than-mediocre worker and still have a job with decent security.
It's been 11 years. During furlough stuff, most of our contracts were exempted due to high national importance. For the few people on contracts that had to stop, we found other work for them to do. It would be nuts to lose a good employee to a competitor because of a work stoppage.
The crummy people do get fired.
2008 would've been bad if you had to sell. I still think you ought to have been able to cover the loss in most places. There were places around here that dropped by 70%, which is horrid. You ought to be able to cover a large portion of that, and certainly anything outside 2008. That year was special.
I guess I don't see the complaint about tech hiring. Except for the time sink and the fact that you might really really need a job, it's kind of fun. You get flown out somewhere, see the place, and talk about nerdy stuff. What is not to like?
Being in tech, you're probably 2x the local median income. If you can tolerate a normal house, the situation isn't bad. You could be looking at 2x your income. You can get that paid off in less than 5 years.
I just found out this week that my current employer is being sold. Again. That's 6 times in 16 years, and 4 of those times resulted in layoffs for me and my least-connected co-workers. 2 of those layoffs resulted in changing cities, mostly due to the need to keep paying the mortgage or risk losing all the equity. That's a grand total of 12 different corporate overlords over 16 years, for 7 different jobs. Not one of them lasted more than 3 years, even for the few I wanted to stick with until retirement.
So I'll be dusting off the resume again, just in case. I just can't wait to immerse myself in the sheer idiocy that is the tech hiring ordeal once again.~ And this time, I'm even older and less "culturally fitting" than all the previous rounds.
The two times I bought houses during that time burned me badly. I lost all the equity anyway, even after keeping up the payments while trying to sell, and paying rent in a different city. Tyler Durden might have a better opinion of the credit/banking industry than I do.
I'm only bitter and pessimistic because the real world is an awful place that doesn't care whether I live or die, so long as the checks continue to clear. There are few people on this planet that can take a $100k kick in the teeth and laugh it off. We're not ruined, no, but I don't exactly appreciate the setback to the college and retirement funds, either.
I made $50K per year when I graduated and bought a house about a year later. $170K for a new house in a nice neighborhood. The total house payment was sub $1000. That's typical when you get out of the big cities on the coast.
The vast majority of my peers actually do NOT make $50k - and we are all on the East coast, where a house would cost you ~$300k minimum for something that wouldn't require extensive repairs.
Sometimes people need a good kick up their arse to be able to see outside of their bubble.
If parents decided to reverse-mortgage, sell, or otherwise not bequeath their hard earned property to their children they are acting completely within their moral rights. It doesn't matter if the parents hold on so they can continue to buy food or so they can cruise the world: it's their stuff. The child is not "screwed" out of anything because their parent's property was never rightfully the child's in the first place. If the parents decide to be generous and give their kids the house, car, bank accounts, etc.... lucky kid.
The only case when this above is not true is when the child is not yet an adult or was born with defects which impair proper functioning as an adult.
I agree that inheritance shouldn't be a natural right. I don't really expect to receive anything from my parents.
However, things like rampant anti-development attitudes are an untenable example of screwing their offspring. The older generation already owns houses, so they love opposing any new development without regard for the fact that it's making home ownership impossible for all but the wealthiest or luckiest of my generation.
I doubt very much that the effect it has on price of existing real estate and how it limits the market is something that the decision to oppose growth is made "withour regard for".
The cognitive dissonance is when they then turn around and wonder why kids these days (including their own) can't afford to live on their own.
But then he pointed out that these same parents kick their kids out of the house at 18 without much compassion.
I guess parents do have the right to do what they like with their wealth and to force their kids out to fend for themselves, but they need to accept the consequences.
One of her last statements to my spouse was, "They're in cahoots against you."
Some people should have died alone.
I think the most appropriate way to approach an inheritance is that your job as the inheritor is to be a custodian.
Sure, you can absolutely blow the money on scratch-tickets or throw it into the wind but I don't consider that to necessarily be very moral or ethical.
Moreover, if you refuse to help your descendants and expect them to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps" like you did because (ultimately) "it builds character," you shouldn't be surprised when they get their asses handed to them in life by the multigenerationally wealthy that were playing the game from the start.
My parents have inherited a little bit of money - it'd be a fortune where I grew up, although you couldn't buy a house in SF with it - but that money isn't really theirs, just like it won't be mine when they are gone. It's the slowly, painfully built fortune of the entire lineage, going back to before 1900, and it's something to be carefully grown and protected. If any generation blows it, there goes the cushion that we've worked for decades to climb out of subsistence farming to the middle class.
That sounds like a perspective limited to a handful of major coastal cities. Go buy a house in Des Moines for $150K or something.
You can get a house for that same price almost everywhere on the east coast.
I just don't get how the central banks think they can spur inflation with prolonged periods of 0 or negative interest rates. Have you seen what's in the CPI basket? It ain't stuff HF managers are gonna buy more of if they make $50MM instead of $10MM a year.
My estimation is that the oligarchs have already exploited the third world as much as they can, and now the only place left to exploit is to turn inwards an cannibalize their own populace. This is primarily happening in the banking center countries, Germany, USA, and the UK.
Personally, I have been expecting a crash that is used to push a globalist currency move, my guess with cybercrime as the scapegoat.
Globalism is the enemy. I am so tired of hearing about how globalism is just here to stay and Americans are just going to have to get used to a lower standard of living. It's just a talking point for collectivists who want to push the global government model, but I think that a return to protectionism is what is called for. Tax imports, subsidize exports, lower or abolish income taxes, reduce corporate tax rate but make less loopholes so they actually have to pay something. Do not misconstrue protectionism for isolationism, which is a common but false retort.
Inflation is much higher than measured, because they have figured out how to manipulate the numbers. The same with wages... and unemployment,.. and all the other things we supposedly use to measure the macro-economy.
We need to stop speaking of the branches of the evil and get to the root, and I am convinced that the central banks are the root that is rotting this country. The fiat, fractional reserve system is farcicle enough, but decoupling it from gold and turning it into the petrodollar has forced us into realpolitik geostrategic moves that are going to do nothing but bite us in the ass.
Andrew Jackson may have been a son of bitch, but he was right in how he attacked the banks.
"It is maintained by some that the bank is a means of executing the constitutional power “to coin money and regulate the value thereof.” Congress have established a mint to coin money and passed laws to regulate the value thereof. The money so coined, with its value so regulated, and such foreign coins as Congress may adopt are the only currency known to the Constitution. But if they have other power to regulate the currency, it was conferred to be exercised by themselves, and not to be transferred to a corporation. If the bank be established for that purpose, with a charter unalterable without its consent, Congress have parted with their power for a term of years, during which the Constitution is a dead letter. It is neither necessary nor proper to transfer its legislative power to such a bank, and therefore unconstitutional."
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/ajveto01.asp
In other words, congress should abolish the sneakily passed Aldrich bill... cough Federal Reserve Bill, and reclaim it's constitutional authority to regulate money. (Please note, I do understand that too drastic a change away from a fiat fractional reserve system would cause too much instability, which is why I think at first the structure should be maintained, but instead of an unaccountable board of governors and open market committee, it would be congress. The real danger is that congress is bought and paid for, so we need a simultaneous movement to kick out all the incumbents.)
Some relevant documentaries for anyone interested:
http://www.informativevine.com/2016/04/the-untouchables-2013...
https://archive.org/details/cpb20120505a
In case of doubt check if these are growing: Regional inequality, Wealth inequality, Bureaucracy, Tax system complexity, Corruption, Importance of social networks in business, Education inequality, Youth unemployment, Living with parents longer
You could continue the list forever...
"Yep. Just the sort of thing you'd expect to see from a healthy, booming Obama economy. But #NeverTrump. Because we need more great news like this."
It's not like the US would be better off with cheaper housing prices but higher percentage of people without a job due to recession.
Not in the US at the moment, so maybe Trump announced a plan for solving that issue, but the economy is far from the issue.
Although, there have been frequent instances where he claims to have a plan for something, but doesn't want to say what his plan is because he doesn't want to give anything away to his enemies. It would be kind of endearing if it was someone asking a little kid how he's going to prank someone, not so much when it's a grown man responding to questions about the potential use of nuclear weapons.
I think parrot is the word you're looking for. Had you read the article you'd have seen this is a trend that started in the 60s and started accelerating in the late 90s.