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Comment by panaffa | Hacker News Reader

Good point on agency. Throughout their lives GenZ has either had less agency or felt like we have less agency to do what we want. Certainly true for some financial goals like buying a house

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The oldest gen z are just out of college though. I think it’s the younger millennials you might be describing (people a decade into their career with little prospect of home ownership).

Back in the 60s, people were buying homes in their early 20s or even late teens because it was that affordable. Obviously that is a bit of a historical anomaly, but it's almost a necessary complement to the idea you're supposed to become an adult and mature and grow up after age 18.

They also had things a lot harder in many ways than we do. The 60’s is over 50 years ago now. The world changes a lot in that time. Basing your expectations on the 60’s is unrealistic.

Yes you're right. We do have many modern conveniences and information they didn't have. So why would we go backwards on this key metric of home prices and rent? Or housing as a percentage of household income? It is an economic, social, and moral failure (see the situation in Los Angeles)

> Basing your expectations on the 60’s is unrealistic.

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.

Up to the 1990s it was possible to buy a home on a single income in NL.

Source? At least in the US mortgage payments (adjusted for interest rates and inflation) have been trending down since the 90s.

https://awealthofcommonsense.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/...

No sources, purely anecdotal :

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.

Perhaps we ran in different social classes but in the 60's most believed that you had to save a good portion of one's life to afford a home and worked towards that end. Home ownership was not a given - it was considered an enormous investment that took much of one's life to prepare for.

However, the affordable rental market greatly mitigated that and allowed "delayed" home ownership until a suitable nest egg was constructed.

> little prospect of hope ownership

A devastatingly accurate typo

Haha oops :) Fixed it now.

As someone who graduated college into the Great Recession, I was told and shown no path to work for the better part of a decade after college-despite going back to college to become more marketable in that period. And seemingly nobody cares about people like me because we don’t get the ink that the people slightly older or younger than us get.

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’m the same age (although skipped college). Lots of friends in the same situation needing to get multiple degrees before finally finding their way into unrelated careers.

I think a lot of this lack of agency is what's driving the current interest in things like van life and digital nomadism. Whichever way you sell it, the idea that people ought to live every year until their 40s spending a huge chunk of their wages paying off some random Baby Boomer's mortgage through extortionate rents rather than their own is a bleak thing to face, especially when you can't even hang up a picture or adopt a pet in a lot of cases.

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!

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