There is a strong belief that everyone should be able to afford a place to live, alone, in some place with a convenient location (downtown or within walking distance of transit), and then after a few years you should be able to buy a house.
When I grew up, I had multiple roommates, and we’d carpool whenever possible. I scrimped and saved pretty hard to get a down payment saved up. By my day’s standards, it wasn’t crazy to cook 99% of your own food, brew all your coffee at home or the office (hopefully free), get any free food you can possibly convince your employer to give you, and have one TV everyone fights over. My dad made his own “furniture” (until my mom moved in and smacked some sense into him…). My mom grew up sleeping in an hot attic with 3 siblings, because the other 5 siblings took up all available rooms.
I’m not saying life shouldn’t improve each generation, but I think people are expecting it to improve way faster than it actually is.
It's the much quoted - boomers pulling up the ladder after them in action. In the oz market new home buyers can't compete with investors that are pushing up prices.
In the areas that rose the most, they dropped 50%.
Based on that article you linked a 50% drop in the hottest markets wouldn’t bring price to income ratios down to 1975 but it would be kinda close.
Especially when you consider house sizes now vs then.
Maybe there’s something unique to the Australian market that justifies 30 years of rising prices with no corrections.
Or maybe you’re overdue for a massive bust.
The problem, it seems, is the stratification of classes expanding.
My uncle worked in the GM plant for many years, owned a nice house and a car and a bass boat and is comfortably retired. His wife never worked. I remember my aunt telling us that we shouldn’t get him books for Christmas presents because he couldn’t read very well.
Now to do this you need both parents working. They both need degrees that need paying off, and they need to live in a major metro area, because they both need to have good paying, specialized jobs. In the old days you might move to some little town so the dad could work at some factory, but now the mom has to also find a job in her specialty, so you need to be in a big city to find jobs for both of them within commuting distance.
In this context, everyone is bombarded with social media telling them that they should have fancy cars and houses and vacation in Bali, and they’re stretched to the breaking point and can’t have any kids.
I remember as a degreed electrical engineer making $35k when the average auto worker was making almost $80k. That's an aberration and could never have continued.
I had a family friend that was a union boss and after high school he got his son into GM. The family friend though wasn't going to get me in.
It was huge money at the time but it is also why GM stopped being competitive. I think the union boss friend retired at 45 or something completely ridiculous.
Of course he also had the nicest sports car, a huge boat, a huge house for the time.
Not sure that is a heightened expectation, you're just out of luck if you don't already have a house. And people in their twenties just have it even worse.
Anyways, I dunno how things work in other nations, and real estate is so different that it can be difficult to compare. For example, there are ways to "rent" a home in Korea for an absolutely massive one-time deposit that you eventually get back. England has 14 trillion box homes slammed together with a quarter inch strip of land in the back yard. Japan has people knocking down their home every single time they buy a new property.
I'm not far out of my 20s, and really, all I did on a SINGLE income was (like I said) scrimp and save. We lived in a cheapo apartment until we could save up for a down payment on a condo. That appreciated (as homes do), and now I have enough for a sizeable down payment on a house.
I also didn't take any special routes of privilege, really. I joined the military as a college dropout, served for 6 years, got experience in a career, then left and got a job in the real world. Much of my saving was done while in the military, because especially when you're new, you pay for nothing. Not food, not housing, not work clothing, not healthcare, etc.
Plus, when compared with median salaries, US housing is shockingly affordable.
But let me talk about my parents. As a baby, my dad lived in a tent. (I believe it was brick walls with a tent roof, but I'm not certain of that.) They moved to an actual house, with an outhouse. (While he was still a child, they got indoor plumbing.)
My parents had their first child when my mom was 30. Before that, they both worked - both of them in tech, too! They rented until they were 39 and 36, when they bought their first house.
We look at the baby boomers and think that where we are now is abnormal. I wonder if instead, where we are now is normal, and the baby boomers were a temporary bit of extraordinarily good times.