Downward Mobility (1982) | Hacker News Reader

Downward Mobility (1982)

nymag.com

53 pointsaniham29 comments

"The baby boom generation may never achieve the relative economic success of the generations immediately preceding it or following it."

"Members of the baby-boom generation were taught to appreciate the good life—the arts, books, good clothing, travel—and grew accustomed to it during a mass prolonged adolescence in which marriage and childbirth were delayed until after the magic age of 30."

Wow. This is startlingly familiar.

What once was an issue in Manhattan has spread out in the following generations across the country. Their contemporaries in, well, Westchester County, were doing just fine. Ask anyone who was working at IBM in the 80s.

I wonder how much of what this article describes (housing crisis, lack of spending power, inability to buy a home, etc) is due to demographic booms straining housing supply that doesn't react very quickly. The Millenials are another relatively large generation, and we have another housing crisis in almost every major city at around the time they're reaching 25-35.

Could your provide a source for your housing crisis in most major cities? If a look at the top 10 largest metro areas[1] only one is in the news often, Los Angeles. NYC and DC do not have the same issues as the west cost. Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston are not even close to having the same issues as SF or Seattle.

[1]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/popest-m...

As usual when looking at metro stats, a lot of it has to do with how you slice "city" and "metro". If you look at the top combined statistical areas, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area, I would argue that the top 6 all have serious housing affordability issues that I've heard about quite frequently, and the reason they're not as bad as SF/Seattle is that (a) they're not as geographically constrained and (b) most of these are older cities (e.g. NY, Chicago, DC) which were already bug on an absolute basis and thus could better absorb growth.

Every time this topic comes up I come back to some basic maths. My parents were, in the late 70s and early 80s, able to buy a detached house in a suburb reasonably near public transport to the CBD on their combined teachers salaries with a mortgage repayment at around 35% of their wages. My partner and I are, on paper at least, earning multiples of that even accounting for official inflation figures and we’re left renting around twice as far away from the city for around the same portion of income.

At some point the realisation has to occur that a house 50 miles from anything is not worth $1m and the only reason they can currently sell for that is existing home owners can leverage that asset to buy them. There will eventually be no more existing home owners to sell to and the market should logically come back to sanity, or at least I very much hope it will. That or I’ll be moving my family to a more affordable location overseas creating the same effect for their own first home buyers as I take up a property that would have been used by a local. What happens after a few cycles of that I wonder...

Where do you live that a house is $1m 50 miles from everything? The valley? You don't have to go overseas for affordable housing. Most of the Midwest is extremely cheap. Heck, I live about 20 miles from downtown Austin and 30 miles from the main tech area and my house is under $250k, and Austin has a booming tech sector. Houston and Dallas are some of the largest cities in the US, have a lot of tech, and are similarly affordable.

Having to live somewhere where you hate the culture, politics, climate, geography is soul killing. The Midwest is cheap because it doesn't offer the benefits the expensive places do. Most people are here because they were born here. I never met anyone who chose to move here for any reason other than economic or family obligation. They convince themselves its great for a time because their dollar goes a lot farther, but the reality sets in soon enough. People from amazing places don't dream of a grey/beige house in a suburb in Kansas, or having to drive hours into some Iowan "town" to get to even something terrible like strip malls and big box stores, they don't have post cards of these places on their walls and don't visit them on holiday. You can usually find a place that's cheaper than where you are, but it's cheaper for a reason.

It might be inconceivable to the HN demographic but some people truly enjoy the small town/ rural lifestyle

There is small town rural life within an hour of any big coastal city. You don't have to move to the homogeneous middle of the country for that. Suggesting people move from a popular place to middle America for a good quality of life is disingenuous in my view because its predicated entirely on the fact that it's "cheaper". Their lives aren't going to be "richer"...only their bank account for a time, but even that will fade as salary and opportunity are less as well. Yes some people enjoy being surrounded only by their race, religion, and politics so that outweighs the losses of accessibility, culture, and experience...and frankly most of the ones who have never experienced anything else don't even know what they are missing...getting away from that gave me the only good parts of my life personally. Once again...people don't put photos or postcards of Topeka or Little Rock or some town nobody knows of in the vast sameness of the Midwest on their dream walls. There is a reason for that.

I believe Branson, MO, Memphis and Nashville, TN, and Fayetteville, AR would like a word with you.

There are nice places to live that aren't on a postcard

My life is incredibly rich, but I measure it more by my physical/mental health, my community, and time I get to spend with my family

Hey, I'm one of those people. I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania that was rural until very recently, but it's still only about 20 minutes' drive west of Philadelphia. So it had the charm of rural life (at least when I was growing up–it's become a bit gentrified since then) and if you wanted to get your shot of urban culture it wasn't that far away.

The real trick nowadays is finding the "middle" small town America: places that have good infrastructure, public transportation, universities, libraries, public works, etc but aren't urban. Of course, it helps a lot if you don't have to commute, or you only have to commute to the office a few days out of the week.

That sounds nice. I'm convinced a mid-size college town has the best of both worlds

As a counterpoint, my reaction to big cities has generally been "Nice place to visit, but I sure wouldn't want to live there". And my vacation photos are way more likely to be landscapes than cityscapes.

I do like the ocean, though!

Are your landscape photos of endless flatness, strip malls, and pavement? Or are they beautiful mountains, forests, seasides? I am not saying liking rural places is "wrong". I am saying you give up a LOT to live in the "cheap" middle because it's the same everywhere you look in nearly all regards and is far from anything "different" in about every use of the word, including those beautiful landscapes.

That’s a very US centric view though. If you live in France in a lot of middle-size cities, it’s both cheap and cute. And don’t pretend like California is void of strip mall either, most of the Bay Area is boring-as-fuck strip malls and single family houses.

I don't know, as someone who's visited Kansas I honestly think that it's some of the most beautiful country in the US. You can see pretty much everything for miles around. But to each their own I guess. :)

Sounds like you have a lot of hostility for "the culture, politics, climate, geography" but I'm not sure you've ever actually been to these places you detest so much. Maybe try getting out and meeting and talking to people that don't think or live the same way you do?

Let's see what the internet can show us:

Kansas: Monument Rocks - totally postcard worthy. https://www.thecrazytourist.com/most-beautiful-places-to-vis... And the Cheyenne Bottoms, largest wetland in mainland US? Even beats Florida & Everglades, wow. And Geary Lake Falls are very nice https://www.thecrazytourist.com/most-beautiful-places-to-vis... And the lavender farms of Topeka https://maps.roadtrippers.com/us/topeka-ks/nature/ingwerson-... OK, I've got things I'd like to see in Kansas.

Little Rock: https://s3.amazonaws.com/assets.inarkansas.com/10757/fall-in... that's lovely, and a candidate for a monitor background. (from http://www.metrolittlerockguide.com/post/21127/little-rock-p...)

Endless strip malls and pavement are much more prevalent in and around big cities - and you have lots of traffic to ensure you have plenty of time to enjoy them. And for what it's worth, Florida beats Kansas for flatness by a long shot (and for strip malls and pavement, too, come to think of it).

"the vast sameness of the Midwest"... Just because you haven't heard of landmarks and variation in a place, doesn't mean it isn't there. Many people think of Africa as mostly flat - maybe because we largely see flat maps, and we hear of Kilimanjaro in Africa, see pictures of savannas, and know of the Sahara, and tend to think that's all there is, but there is so much variation.

I mean besides issues like climate or geography I think cities like Chicago, Minneapolis or even college towns like Madison or Ann Arbor certainly offer a lot more than "a grey/beige house in a suburb" or "strip malls and big box stores." This is from someone who's lived in these places in the midwest as well as in San Francisco.

The US is a big place with lots of metropolitan areas where you can buy a house in the near suburbs for much less. I’m in Atlanta and our 5/3-1/2 3100 square foot house brand new build in 2016 was $330K. We both live and work in the burbs. Depending on traffic, it would take us less than an hour to get to downtown/midtown/Buckhead if we needed to.

It’s just so many people on HN think that they have to live in the west coast or NYC.

> the only reason they can currently sell for that is existing home owners can leverage that asset to buy them.

Yes, stuff sells for what people are willing to pay for it. The main reason housing is so expensive is that supply cannot meet demand because of onerous government policies. Height restrictions, zoning rules, building permits, NIMBYism, etc are not allowing the market to respond to demand.

The problem is that your example is anecdotal. I am 31 and have no problem buying the exact same house my parents did at 31. On a single income, just like my father.

After a lifetime of homes filled with endless physical books, I got rid of all my books to accommodate my health issues. I currently live in a small space that would likely constitute serious deprivation if it weren't for the internet.

My cheap smartphone gives me endless reading material and games and conversation and banking in the palm of my hand.

My sons and I have more than a hundred free or cheap games stored in the cloud instead of in endless shelving units intruding into our limited space. It's a very large part of why our lives work at all in such a cramped space.

I wonder how much this feeling of deprivation talked about in the article is due to people generally making that swap -- of physical goods for virtual ones -- and failing to consciously recognize it. If you feel a proper home has a big living room where every wall is covered in tall storage units to hold your books, games and software, it's easy to not recognize that you actually have more games to play and more stuff to read with the incredible bonus that none of it needs to be dusted. It's easy to feel like you simply have less and infer that you must be deprived.

I'm not saying there aren't real problems. I have real problems with not making enough money and not having certain important elements of a middle class life.

I'm just saying that virtual goods make it difficult to compare our current lives to lives before the internet.

How much does your Kindle library weigh? Practically nothing in some sense.

Yet you may still have reading material equivalent to many bookshelves worth of physical books. You may even be holding more books in the palm of your hand than you ever physically owned back when owning dead tree books meant buying bookshelves and dedicating valuable living space to it.

Was it really true that middle class families could afford 2 houses, private schools, etc in the 50’s and 60’s? Or is this just another case of all socioeconomic classes in America calling themselves “middle class,” and some of the profiled individuals came from upper middle class families in the top 20% of wealth/income.

I’d also find it interesting to see how some of the profiled individuals made out over the ensuing 30 years. My guess: pretty damned well.

I know that at least in the midwest, areas like Detroit and Ohio had factory jobs that supported that kind of income level. This was without a college degree. I know this because I have family members from the midwest. They also retired quite early, with a very good pension, low stress, etc. But that was a blip in time, not something could have lasted forever. But then again, could certain economic policies have extended that economic period? Its a contentious question

Growing up in the 80s I lived in a middle class area and many families had a 2000 sq ft house and a summer home as well. I'm not sure how things were in the 60s, but I also think there were fewer middle class people then. The article is profiling some of the children of the upper middle class, who were already living in Manhattan before school and who either are surprised that they don't have the same purchasing power or unaware that their parents may have been in the same position at the same point in their careers. It's hard to tell because the article isn't putting anything in perspective.

My grandparents arrived from Europe in the 1920s, young and desperate for work, and by the late 1930s they had a huge apartment in Manhattan and they’d bought a cottage upstate that they could go to on the weekends. They definitely were not rich, and they had to contend with the Great Depression. But things were easier back then, in many respects.

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