They need stable, actionable futures. Homes they can afford to own, communities they can raise kids in, an environment that won't go up in flames; they need systems that have their back.
>Many of my staff and friends don't want to have kids, make no effort to find a partner and find all sorts of excuses
Is the lack of affordable housing and/or environmental disasters really responsible for people who lack the precondition (eg. having a partner) for buying a home?
When you make an offer on a house you're bidding against two-earner households. For a lot of us in tech the salience of this fact is diminished by the industry's high salaries, but for most folks this is a really big deal.
what does that matter aslong as your bank has approved the mortgage. I don't see why seller would care.
are you saying that ppl are bidding for mortgages that high that bank needs both of their incomes? wow.
[1] analogous to your comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29473019
[2] analogous to my reply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29473223
I don't know about the US but that has been the case in the UK for a long time now, especially for family sized houses.
We went from married women not being able to work to not being able to not work. I'm not sure it was an improvement.
If there was more supply, prices would stabilize somewhere lower. Given enough supply that point would be somewhere one income could support.
It's the constrained supply paired with high demand that drives prices up and requires multiple high incomes to compete (especially in places where this has been taken to the extremes because of NIMBYism and entrenched anti-build regulation/incentives).
Land is scarce so there will always be some constraints in highly desirable areas, but today we're way way below what the land can support because of bad policy.
We use historical standards to measure progress all the time. The thing we should be exploring is "why has home ownership become so expensive?" and "what can be done to alleviate that impact?" Anything else is a distraction.
https://awealthofcommonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/...
Our parents were single earners and home owners
I have peers who bought houses in the late 90s on a single income
You can use Dutch bank's mortage calculators to see you can't buy a shed on a single income
I read on a Dutch news site this year that even for double earners, home ownership is not feasible in some cases
Banks won't give out mortages for say € 700 / month, forcing these individuals to rent on the private market at € 1000+ a month.
However, the affordable rental market greatly mitigated that and allowed "delayed" home ownership until a suitable nest egg was constructed.
A devastatingly accurate typo
On the other hand, I do wonder how the economic outlook for work in the US looks once the deeper portions of the boomers retire and open up work. Not a lot of optimism though.
I for one am planning on moving onto a sailing yacht next year, while it's not exactly much cheaper that money is better spent on the inevitable maintainance than keeping the landlord's wine cooler full!
They want the dynamism of being able to change jobs and careers, they all want the opportunity for career progression which for the most part isn't there (it's always been competitive).
That means more risk and all the things that come along with it.
I think even 'remote work' will have a serious of consequences we're not ready to accept, which is that it will make workers even more fungible.
If someone literally can't show up for work ... then they're generally going to be seen as more easily replaced or changed around.
We need to fixing housing costs badly though.
It depends of the company culture.
Remote is the _only_ option for 90% of great jobs if you live anywhere outside a few big tech hubs.
This talk really changed my thought process on careers. Basically every corporation in America is fundamentally unstable to work for, where you COULD be laid off for essentially arbitrary fiscal goals. That instability makes it impossible to trust your leaders (i.e. the company) to actually support you. As long as the people who pay your salary don't think long term about organizational health, people will be forced to play games and constantly job hop.
*Not to complain about 5%. For the vast majority of workers that's an unattainable dream -- but that just furthers the point that the worker is not treated as an asset.
Why do people want this though? 50 years ago, you could be a mechanic, work 50 hours a week and own a house. The wife could be at home to take care of the kids. These days, both have to work 60 hours a week to afford a rental apartment.
in the 70's, a home cost about 4.5 times the median yearly household income. Right now it's about 7 times the yearly income. That doesn't seem like a massive increase (even though it's more than a 50% increase), but employment of married women also increased from 40% to 60%. So while we have, on average, more earners in a household, we pay more of our income on housing. It's a double whammy.
So people want careers in order to start earning a living wage in order to be able to actually raise kids and live a meaningful life in a nice home. People don't just want a career because they want a career, they want that because they don't want to be wage slaves who don't get to live a life. Also, they don't get to raise their kids, because they don't have time for that.
If two adults have to work full time to have a house with kids, then they also have to be making enough for child care and various other things that they might be able to do more cheaply if only one of them was working.
In Germany where I live home owners are in the minority (40%). In Europe on average homeownership is about 70%. Yet, we are one of the richest countries in Europe.
Furthermore, buying a house on credit does not mean you own it — since as long as you pay your debt it’s the bank that owns it really.
Finding a partner and maintaining a relationship got nothing to do with owning a home. I am saying that as a dad without owning a house.
Looking at this list:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_home_ow...
I am also not really sure I really would want to live in the top countries with the highest percentage of home owners.
Being a tenant in Germany is essentially as stable (if not more stable) as taking a mortgage on a home in the US. This is still the type of stability the state provides, which is quickly disappearing worldwide as all funds go into real estate due to a decade of zero (or negative) interest rates.
We have strong social security, but Germans have few assets and those aren't really equally distributed. I don't think financial problems are standing in the way of kids though.