I am going to work hard to buy a new house for my family!
Wait, I can't afford the house. And i don't have a family.
Oh well, at least I have my video games.
Wait, I can't afford the house. And i don't have a family.
Oh well, at least I have my video games.
We can’t fix the cost of housing because so many people own houses. If 10% of people owned their own homes and the rest were owned by corporate landlords we would not have politicians climbing all over each other to make sure that homes values are a one way bet.
Or that wealth is better held by corporations than by individuals?
Pissing off large numbers of voters is a daily occurrence by virtually every politician in the US. Politicians don’t care about that. They only care about pissing off certain voters and certain political leaders.
Politicians in your world would never see any community voter permanence, because if everyone is a resident, everyone is effectively a transient voter to them. You would only need to kowtow and keep them happy for the 6 months prior to the election.
The communities have no anchors…except for the corporations that own all the property. They would have all the power and that sounds horrible to me.
In the US FHA loans are available with relatively low 3.5% down payments even with mid-level credit. The problem driving affordability for some people is excessive debt to income ratios much more than housing prices.
If you can save $10k, and are not saddled with excessive debt you can afford homes in most places in the US.
It feels like less of a mistake than packing people in to corporation owned apartments forever.
The role homeownership and single family houses more generally plays in our culture is not a fact of the universe. They can and should change.
The job that takes the longest is the one you don't start. Don't want to be successful? You're on the right path.
EDIT:
Since HN won't let me respond, here's my response:
When I first graduated, a house was definitely out of reach. It all seemed so unfair.
Instead of dwelling on that, I got to work. I now own (completely) my house and am in a profession that is rewarding.
You can either hold yourself back with cynicism and blame others for your problems, or you can get to work and solve them. No one else is going to.
A rational observer would remark on where this 10-15 years of surplus went? A Luddite would argue that one should simply do nothing
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/09/16/china-youth-reject-hustle-cu... unemployment-economic-uncertainty.html
Having to move to a city isn't the same as having to stay in a city.
None of these are insurmountable. Not at all. But the more barriers in place, the more likely it is that our hypothetical person will be stopped by one.
These people should not be confused, though, with those who could not wait to get away from home and were beyond glad for an excuse to move to the city. Their motives and relationships are completely different.
I'm only talking here about the ones who "had to" move to a city to get started--the folks middle-American companies depend on for the long haul after they cut their teeth on the coasts.
Very few degrees are worth taking on that kind of debt. Also, doing the first 2 years in community college with basic FAFSA is very affordable. And since when do college students not work while going to school? My nephew finished his mechanical engineering degree a couple years ago (State University system with first 2 years in community college) and he ended up with under $12k in debt which he already paid off.
Then again, he didn't decide he just had to go to an out of state private university for all 4 years while not working at all. Vastly different approaches will deliver vastly different results.