Centralized finance and inflationary consumerist policies seem to be a major underlying contributor in all of this.
Credit is most available and most advantageous to those higher up that get new money first, and creates a moving target that makes long term stability artificially difficult for those with no capital.
Material poverty was much more prevalent in the past than now, but the kind of housing instability and moving goalposts people experience is I think relatively new for the US. I’m not entirely sure/my history is not good enough to know, but I think local ties and familiarity with neighbors used to be much more instrumental for housing stability. Local banks used to be way different/loans were much more about community buy in and local sponsorship than the kind of disconnected financial blob it is now. That came with all kinds of cons, but I think there were some unappreciated pros we’ve forgotten about; I think the different social dynamics when banking was local is part of why housing was treated like more like a commodity than an investment.
A lot of the problems we have now seem to be a consequence of scale and increasing disconnect. Modern access to cheap low interest credit seems increasingly political and disconnected from the real economy, and responsible for keeping old, creaky, dysfunctional behemoths from imploding and restructuring.
That kind of credit heavy policy made sense when there was massive growth opportunity, but it seems increasingly perverse and going to maintaining existing systems instead of investing in new systems, and is I think partially responsible for the amount of centralization of assets we’ve been experiencing.
Without cheap credit, it’s much harder to suck up as many assets as have been centralized the past couple of decades, and wage decreases are much more transparent and difficult to get away with. Cheap credit also severely distorts prices signals/makes it hard for both consumers and producers to know what is getting cheaper to produce and what isn’t.
On the other hand, without cheap credit, a lot of capital intensive research heavy startup companies would be much more difficult to start, which is essential to lowering production costs. The material advances due to production efficiency are under-appreciated in the US, which makes sense when cost of living and basics keep expanding, but are still extremely beneficial, especially on a global scale.
I wish it was easier to know what a good solution was to lowering the cost of living without hampering innovation. They seem somewhat inversely related right now. But this stuff gets complicated and is not my area of expertise.