The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting.
While it may be too doomer, it’s worthwhile to listen and understand the struggles of people who aren’t you to understand what’s coming. Certainly home ownership is rarer even for millennials and Genz is likely going to have even lower rates (its a little too early to compare since they’re too young for it)
Looking at the data, certainly not: https://x.com/noahpinion/status/1649492485968891904?s=46&t=C...
These aren't automatic, though. Who's to say they aren't produced by policy that's often done first in SF first?
A lot of people in the rest of the country tend to think "Oh, that's just dysfunctional California politics, we'll vote in different policies and things will go differently for us." Yes, you will vote in different policies. No, things will not go differently for you. California voted in different policies too - remember that it's the source of the Reagan Revolution, the hippie generation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, all sorts of policies that took hold nationally but are now the antithesis of what California stands for.
At the root of this is a misperception of the power of politics. Most ordinary people think that laws are laws and the people who make the laws have ultimate power. California (and U.S. history in general) proves that laws are reactions to specific social and demographic forces, and the laws reflect the shape of those forces. Economics drives politics and technology drives economics.
This problem isn't particular to the Democratic Party. Other states now have single party Republican governments with similar levels of dysfunction and corruption.
The top two system by the way was a popular ballot initiative championed by Schwarzenegger to remove the gridlock from the state and remove the power of individual parties.
Ironically Schwarzenegger came to power because of shenanigans the Bush administration and Enron were playing with California’s power grid to remove Gray Davis, a popular up and comer who could be a threat.
So in essence, your complaint that only democrats win in California and somehow that’s because of the Democratic Party is ironic because single party rule in California is due to direct efforts by Republicans to make it thus. It just turned out that the federal politics of the GOP shifted the state very solidly blue and turns out single party rule by Democrats seems to be quite popular given how the state flourished in the years following.
There was no complaint. I don't see the point in such a partisan way of thinking.
> single party rule by Democrats seems to be quite popular given how the state flourished in the years following
This doesn't seem to be the case now. Lots of people are leaving California, as far as I can tell[0].
[0] https://www.ppic.org/blog/whos-leaving-california-and-whos-m...
The migration data you cite says that the people leaving California are generally lower-income households without higher education. The people entering California tend to be highly educated and have very well-paying jobs [1]. California's housing stock is more or less fixed; actual housing construction is round-off error to the current population. What's happening is that high-earning immigrants are outbidding lower-income residents for the fixed supply of housing, and then faced with soaring housing costs, those lower-income residents are moving to states where their income places them higher on the social pecking order.
[1] https://www.ppic.org/blog/californias-highly-educated-immigr...
Basically the trend of pushing out lower income people is continuing because California still struggles to keep CoL under control.
Maybe shifts in housing dynamics happen first in cities then spreads to the suburbs, then the exurbs, then rural areas. Or maybe it's just due to how cities are governed, how many people live there, and how much new housing you get in any one year?
Bay Area in 2000 was complaining about illegal immigration, bilingual education, and the lights not staying on, all of which are contemporary issues facing the rest of America from 2015 onward. Bay Area in 2010 was in relative boom times from the tech industry, which again is spreading nationwide as tech jobs start getting more dispersed (though it may reverse thanks to RTO). Starting in 2012, housing prices became utterly unaffordable, which again started spreading nationwide around 2022.
Give it another 5-10 years and yes, people will probably be walking through a Walgreens in western Minnesota shoving everything they can into their bags.
hint: it doesn't
Texas is hardly the rest of America.
It was allowed because it was politically convenient - they were tied into Bush’s inner circle and the energy problems were convenient in making Gray Davis unpopular and causing his recall to then install a Republican governor by the name of Arnold instead. Ironically Arnold created reforms within the political structure of California to solidify Democratic control of the state.
If you’re not familiar with that, look up how Enron fucked with the California power grid and the Bush administration prevented California from discovering it nor making changes to stabilize the grid (or something along those lines - I may have gotten some of the details wrong).
There's a peculiar form of blindness that strikes the Urbanite, as if there are no other places to live.
The people who live in flyover country are barely even recognizable as human, so you might as well ask me to move to Mars! How the hell am I going to be seen in public drinking my $12 microbrews or pretending to appreciate the Moma so that other people know I'm the correct class of person? God, what would my parents think? I'd rather die than live there, so that place doesn't even exist for me.
High population density also (generally) means more social activities, which can be important for some people (like myself). Living in a rural area kinda scares me because I'm afraid I'd be quite lonely.
On top of that, for those of us who don't have the privilege to remote work, living in a city is often necessary to have a job.
And famously illustrated!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
“It’s those damn young people”. “It’s those damn urbanites”. “It’s those damn techies”. Replace that kind of thinking with religious or racial terms and consider how you’re looking at a very large and diverse group of people.
The trouble is:
1) no local jobs to speak of (unless you want to clerk at the farm & feed or assistant-manage the McDonald’s out by the highway)
2) nearest hospital that can do more than stabilize you before shipping you somewhere better, is over an hour away.
3) the schools are really, really bad
4) no local services or amenities. Hope the nearest state park (if any) is really good. But if it’s a midwestern one it’s probably not.
Remote work, being young and healthy and willing to take a little extra risk, having no kids and planning to have none, and being kinda a home-body (or being really into readily available rural midwestern outdoor activities like hunting and fishing), can make it a viable way to go, but that’s a lot of qualifiers.
In our medium-ish sized midwestern city there are smaller slightly-run-down houses in the low $200Ks, but universally in bottom-half school districts for the city. Solid choice if no kids, though. But also local tech jobs pay at most 50% of big-city equivalents.
Depends on the state and locality. Some rural schools have good opportunities.
But pretty much agree on the other parts.
I think that's a part that gets ignored in most school comparisons - the largest differences are due to the level of home support, which is highly correlated with better incomes. So we have a cycle of implicit financial segregation. Many schools (in my area) have similar scores and outcomes if we exclude the disadvanged group from the metrics (because unless your child fits that category, that metric doesn't apply to them). So most people end up counting the wrong metrics for their kids.
The algorithm has turned (some) people into whiners and doomers. It really sucks to watch them take defeatist attitudes on everything in life.
I see lots of these young 20-somethings on Reddit thinking their lives are over. It's absurd. They have their entire lives ahead of them, and all it takes is one break into a career.
They even think climate change is going to "kill all of us" before they're elderly. That's not even what the science says.
On the topic of having children, though - people aren't having kids because they're choosing to focus on themselves.
There are ten times as many forms of entertainment today as there were in the 1980s, and people can endlessly consume content in their hands. You can go glamping at a music festival, post it on Instagram, and hook up with new friends and romantic partners you meet. All incredibly easily. Our culture has become built around experience and consumption.
I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.
The gist of it is: There are worlds and circumstances into which people want to bring kids. We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark.
The rest is probably due to individualism. Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives. And the best live does not involve herding 6 kids, even if they are your own.
We created this world willingly, and the low birth rate is a consequence — and so is the need for migration if we wanna stay wealthy. The thing is: now that the genie is out of the bottle we are not gonna be able to force people to have kids. We can just create circumstances in which they are willing to.
I am in my 30s and I am unsure if I will ever be able to retire. I am sure however that I will have to change my job and career multiple times throughout my life. Despite me being financially well off, I am not sure if I would be able to support kids in the future. This is not about being whiny. I just think if I had kids it is my responsibility to throw them into a world that can sustain them. This one can't.
Thought experiment for all the unrestrained free-market folk: how can the free hand of the market can solve for low birthrates? Bonus points if the solution doesn't involve government-issued visas.
tax cuts for families, subisidies for child birth and care - none of these are contrary to the idea of a free competitive market
Moreover, a free market can benefit from regulation and certain socialist policies (eg. transportation and education).
This inner desire wasn't selected for strongly in the past because there were other mechanisms to nudge people to procreate (social norms, lack of birth control), but I expect it will play a much bigger role in the following generations.
What does free market have to with it?
Those countries all have a fertility rate [0] almost identical to the US - three of them are lower if you look at 2020 figures. All of them have been relying on immigration [1] to maintain their demographics, with various levels of backlash in recent years. The US is still ahead of all but Ireland on that immigration list.
In Ireland at least, the narrative around the "housing crisis" and people being priced out of starting families is far stronger than what I get from US media. So I think you need to look elsewhere.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_f...
[1] https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/net-migration-r...
Apparently (I can't find the source for this, but it stuck in my mind), faced with a glut of production after WW2, the US could either consume more, or work less. The choice was made to consume more, not least because the industrialists could cream off a larger slice of the pie that way.
Similarly regarding manufacturing and production glute, if the hard capital is fixed then so too typically is the hard production (not the case for many kinds of capital but it is for manufacturing) or at least capped. Just like with consumption, it’s a problem of what portion of capital is being expended on increasing production of things for children (housing, schools, kid stuff) or not. In both cases this is ultimately driven by the supply and demand stemming from parents themselves. But I don’t think there is a feedback loop because capitalism does not itself care whether capital goes to kids or not, only whether there is enough demand for capital expenditure to be profitable.
I know a lot of people who spend their money on experiences because they genuinely believe they won't get a retirement, so they might as well enjoy their life while they can. I'm part of this group. I don't think the world will literally be over by then, but the future looks bleak. We've also been drilled from birth that you should never have a child if you can't afford it, and people are taking that advice to heart. And because you can't afford your home on a single income anymore, more and more parents are having to rely on childcare, which is itself expensive.
The issues are just compounding. If you just want to believe that everyone is too enamored by their phones to procreate... that's your prerogative, but yikes.
Is a bad counterexample, as that's still a good, high-paying (union!!!) job. But aside from that tiny gripe you're not wrong about the rest.
In 1990 it was about 25k with prices about 150k
House prices are about 100k too high, they should be 300k not 400k
One reason for this is more people rely on two incomes to pay for housing, so more money is available for housing, so money transfers from future debt of millenials to existing assets of boomers and gen x.
But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care.
Maybe we're also stuck in something of a vicious cycle.
More people not having kids leads to more double incomes. More double incomes means more money to pay higher prices. The market seems to be bearing the higher prices just fine, so they continue to climb...
It’s not something an individual can change though. It’s a societal level problem.
to be fair it was unthinkable the day before yesterday too. in the history of human civilisation, that kind of setup has only been possible in a handful of countries, for a few skin colours, for a couple of decades. fueled by burning cheap fossil fuels taken from poorer countries
Expectations for quality of life were lower, sure, but the problem of not being able to find a place to live anywhere near your family or job, that is relatively new and getting worse.
> in a handful of countries, for a few skin colours, for a couple of decades. fueled by burning cheap fossil fuels taken from poorer countries
Also: I know it's trendy to make everything about skin colours these days, but that's a distinct USA-ian bias. The rest of the world doesn't work that way.
I won't argue against exploitation of poorer countries as that, indeed, was a big theme in the last century or two. However, note that whatever many hard problems people in those poorer countries have, affordable housing isn't one of them.
Europe's industrialized genocidal tribalism of 20th century, the modern islamic experience as an immigrant in Europe, 21st century genocide in Africa and the Middle East, Japan's war crimes in east asia during WW2. Where is this rest of the world you speak of?
The rest of the world is where we can distinguish these different reasons, motivations and patterns, instead of lumping them together with racial discrimination and calling everything "racism".
If we want to say "The US has been bad", I'm on board and wholeheartedly agree. But using "The Rest of the World" as the counterexample, I'm not sure that will hold up.
I imagine we broadly agree and would love to have a cup of coffee with you some day!
You can do that today in some parts of the US.
Was there a time when you could do that in NYC? Or San Francisco? Maybe. When the city was down in the dumps and housing prices dropped. Or if you were willing to buy in crappy neighborhoods or on the edge of the city.
It makes me think of my great grandparents. They have a beautiful house in a central location in a major Canadian city worth North of $2.0M. And they did it on the single income of a teacher! I weep for those times.
But oh yeah, when they actually bought the house, it was on the edge of the city where nobody wanted to live. Oh and my grandfather picked up extra jobs to make sure his family of 5 had everything they needed.
There was never a time when it came easy. When people say they can't afford a home what they mean is "I can't afford a house in this specific city that checks all my boxes".
Note that despite the above, in 1950 women did often have jobs. It wasn't the "ideal" and it was less common (and even less common if you had kids), but plenty of women had jobs.
"Typical" is doing some really heavy lifting there given the kind of housing stock available in, say, East Coast urban areas. Most of those remotely-affordable houses are a hundred years old in the Boston area, for example.
My son (in college) probably won’t be able to afford much of a house in the Bay Area, austin, etc. but originally he was going to become an electrician in Watertown, NY. You can get a house for $120k there, which seems doable on a 50k income.
I can't remember the last time I saw a dining room in a new house, anecdotally.
My grandparents raised 5 kids in a 900 sq foot home. They weren't poor. That was the typical home being built in the working class suburbs of Detroit in the early 1950s. Average new home being built today is twice that size for a smaller household.
According to a internet search it seems about half of women had driver's licenses. So this is not accurate. Anecdotal, but I just skimmed The Donna Reed show episode descriptions and a 1961 episode has her fighting a parking ticket, another 1961 episode has her daughter learning to drive.
https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.php/pcharm/article/vie...
the US, and certain parts of Europe, were mostly spared this, and as a result could make crazy money because they were the only source of advanced labor around.
it wasn't like that in the Guilded Age or Roaring 20s or Great Depression -- there was a reason all of those labor movements and riots happened then; wouldn't have happened if a one-income mailman could buy a house.
that was a one-off, a time when half the world blew up a few years before.
That kind of thing, at least to me, seemed to get old pretty quickly. Probably more importantly though, is that we all get old at some point. When fewer and fewer people have children of their own, what happens when the bulk of people get past retirement age? I think it's a huge problem from both an economic standpoint (if there's no productive workers to keep things going, is the state really going to be able to support you in better than awful conditions as you age?) and from an individual and cultural standpoint.
Our house prices, North of Dallas and deep in the suburbs - far from the bay areas and Seattles, have doubled. That includes my home. People in our profession usually have to live by big cities, like Dallas. But the homes are ridiculously priced and it's insane. My juniors have no hope of owning a home that is big enough to raise a family without years of saving. And they're college educated engineers, some of them married with dual incomes.
$18k/yr is a lot to spend on anything when you're making $20/hr for sure, but if you've got two professional people making $75-100k/yr each it becomes a very manageable expense and nobody considers staying home to save that.
Once you get to that point, it gets harder to justify having someone work just to take home an extra $20k a year. It starts making more sense for one person to stay home (or work a part-time gig that lets them still raise their children) and the other person to try to make a bit more money on their end instead.
My parents got around the daycare cost problem by my mother running a daycare out of the home, so she was making money while still able to raise us. But I imagine that's become so much more risky nowadays (like legal issues, parental trust, etc) that it probably wouldn't be worth doing that anymore.
And as soon as we both graduated high school she stopped doing it and went back into the workforce elsewhere.
even then, I'm not crazy with the idea of random strangers raising my kids. being "qualified" to run a daycare is mostly paperwork. plus I work remotely, and that means I can see my kid 3 times a day, even if I can't really stick around to do serious parenting in between meetings.
my wife's people are also around, retired teachers no less, so having them pop in on the regular helps a immensely. they had 3 kids, several grandkids, and have educational backgrounds in early childhood development, and I trust them to do everything they can to take care of my kid, even if it means occasionally giving them extra ice cream (but, usually, it's grandpa reading books or working on basic math with them, etc.).
An extra $20k/yr is huge for most people. Median household income is around $80k. I've heard it's more like $100k for married couples with kids, but can't find that Stat. With either number(or even 75% of those after tax), that's a large bump (or subtraction).
And once you get to that level, the person keeping the job getting a new job for a $10k-$20k bump starts becoming feasible (I got a >$60k bump when I last switched jobs), and that can make up the difference right there.
Then you have one person who can take care of the children and have time and energy to help with cooking and cleaning (keeping those costs down, especially if you were getting a lot of takeout before), and can save even more money.
There's plenty of families making this decision nowadays, it's not a hypothetical. It doesn't always make sense for every couple, but the marginal increase of income doesn't always make sense for all the added stress of trying to raise children while having two full-time jobs and the house not completely falling apart.
We don't even have children, and we aren't able to fully keep up with cooking and cleaning on two full-time jobs, we just don't have the leftover energy afterwards.
And $10-20k isn't a huge bump between jobs. I've gotten that much of a bump, or more, at least six times throughout my career. And I wasn't always a software engineer, so it's not just because I'm in a lucrative career.
I haven't gotten it every time, but often enough that this shouldn't be impossible at least once in someone's career if they're extra motivated by switching to a single income household (unless it's a field known for low salaries, like maybe teachers can't expect that much of a bump, unfortunately).
I'd like to get less takeout. I'd be fine with just lunchmeat on bread or something microwaved for most of my meals, but my wife won't. She insists on a 'proper meal' every day, so on weeks we don't cook those (which almost always take me about 1.5-2 hours to cook) we tend to get a lot of takeout. I hate how much money we spend on it, but we can afford it.
House upkeep has been a challenge. Both of us have been pretty low energy after work, so during the week not much more tends to get done besides dishes, sometimes cooking, and laundry.
And then on the weekend we might be out pretty much all day both days (I work from home, so I feel more of a need to socialize on the weekends to make up for it, but even just extended family social obligations can suck up a weekend) or trying to relax from a long week, so not much tends to get done there either.
And so slowly things that need doing start accumulating, until it becomes this big thing that takes a lot of work (and some proper time off) to tackle.
I know it's not just me either. I know several friends and coworkers that hire maids to keep up with housework. People I know aren't making a ton of money comparatively so I wonder how they afford it. We can afford it but we kind of need to get the house up to a certain level before it's even worth hiring a maid (have to do enough decluttering, for example).
Also doesn't help that I keep saying "Well next week let's do better." and it keeps not happening for one reason or another.
In my area, secondary ed teacher with similar education and and yoe make as much as I do.
But can we talk about how every single unit of time seems to be distorted like it was written in some relativistic hellscape? Any 30 minute recipe takes just over an hour, any "from scratch" recipe takes me half the day.
Some choose to stay home for other reasons.
I find it interesting how income tends to segregate with marriage, and how that exasperates some inequalities.
Having kids for those highly compensated dual income homes seems narcissistic when you get to the root of it. Like why have kids if we're outsourcing their raising to daycare and schools. The we only care about their accomplishments and leaving them with a large inheritance or paying for a fancy school. Then they go off to live mostly separate lives. Look at how well my kid is doing because I set them up in life, even though I barely raised them and rarely see them now. I don't know?
Ad hominem means "against a specific person". He made a general argument. Might be good or bad, but in no way it was an ad hominem. Arguing how a group of people conflate or tend to misrepresent this or that, is not an ad hominem.
I just drove by a new development [in TX], with brand new homes that start at 1800/mo for a 3 Bedroom. Financing by the developer.
So if you get out of Dallas or Austin you will find affordable housing.
If Dallas or Houston or Austin had decent mass transit out to those areas that'd be one thing, but they wouldn't be very "mass", and therein lies one of the problems. Car culture increases isolation and generally shits up the world ever further; somewhere like a YOLO development in the suburbs to exurbs is deleterious to human flourishing and saying "well just buy something where you need a car for everything", as opposed to like the one-off Home Depot run or something, is just trading problems.
The same narrative plays out over and over again. "I can't afford a house with an easy drive to a supermarket and library, and I want to be carless."
Well yeah, so does everybody else, which is why that type of housing is expensive.
The problem, fundamentally, is that we, collectively and as a country, need to create more good places, rather than to exile people to the bad but affordable ones. We need a concerted effort to have strong towns and to put cars at the edge and not the center of those towns in order to have a healthy community future, and just sneering that you can buy a house in the hinterlands is both non-responsive and cruel to boot.
That's the system - resource scarcity and preference. If you live in a densely populated area, prices tend to be higher because real estate is constrained. Zoning won't fix all of that because many people have a preference for SFH, larger sizes, etc. You end up with options and amenities, but it will cost more due to the consolidation. Or you end up with space, needing to drive to amenities, and cheaper prices largely due to less competition.
Worse than some places with public transportation, but better than a lot.
Point remains, that there is plenty of affordable housing in the US. It's just not where people want to live, thus supply/demand.
No amount of "fuckcars" ideology will matter here, some people actually prefer driving. I know I do, I don't want to be stuck in a subway or bus.
That is not affordable housing.
TX, too conservative for anything like Prop13 and tollways owned by very smart Spaniards.
the number of people working remotely, even now, is still comparatively small.
doesn't matter if the housing rates are 50% lower if your only options are minimum wage at some chain (dollar general, chik fil a, etc.), or scraping for one of the few non-wagie gigs.
that doesn't fix the problem, that just means you're getting paid less, while house prices may have roughly the same ratio of income-to-cost that you'd find in DFW or ATX.
and in exchange now you need a car, need to drive constantly, and have fewer amenities and choices (maybe save for access to churches or walmarts).
shit, even far flung burbs of Austin like Taylor and Hutto are getting pricy compared to when I was last out there. Hutto Hippo oughta make a reappearance and start eating the carpetbaggers who keep moving in around there.
Unrelated; what do you think "ad hominem" means?