(Genuine questions, please don't misinterpret as negative judgement):
How much of this is actually new as far as income vs costs, and how much of this is unwillingness to make sacrifices that older generations did? For example, in my 20s (20 years ago), it was very common for 20somethings to live in shared housing with 2-3 roommates. They would share kitchens, fridges, everything. And these houses weren't even that great to begin with.
Is the younger generation less willing to do things like that? Or move further out, or move to a smaller town where the prospects are better? Are the prospects actually there in smaller towns? They might be more with remote work now.
Like I barely hear about families moving to different cities for a job anymore when that was more common growing up in the 80s.
> How much of this is actually new as far as income vs costs, and how much of this is unwillingness to make sacrifices that older generations did?
Considering that the costs of everything have not only skyrocketed but wages were stagnated for decades (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...) before declining (https://www.axios.com/2023/09/12/real-incomes-fell-last-year...) - the largest decline in real wages in 40 years, and that the standard of living for Americans has also been declining for years, long before the recent massive hike in inflation, I doubt it has much if anything to do with an unwillingness to make sacrifices. In fact, it seems like young adults today are being forced to make sacrifices left and right. In the 1980s young adults had homes, full time employment, cars, health insurance, babies, pension plans, $60,000 less debit from their student loans, and hope for the future.
It's pretty smart for young adults to live somewhat near family because they can get a lot of help and support that way, but the fact that they can't even afford to leave their parent's home is a very bad sign for our economy. When kids move out they pay for a ton of new things like furniture, cars, silverware, irons, vacuum cleaners, towels, streaming services etc. When they're at home there's no need at all to buy a lot of things because their parents already have them.
It makes me sad that “not making sacrifices” can be said with a straight face to the latest generations growing up in our never ending housing and affordability crisis. I’m really starting to get fed up with people in my own generation (Gen-X) who increasingly seem to be losing the plot.
If you chart Case-Shiller housing price index vs median income over time[1] you can start to see that housing as a proportion of income has increased. Versus the 1960s and 70s, housing costs today are twice the proportion of income they used to be.
In other words, all other things being equal, someone today is being asked to sacrifice twice as much with respect to housing.
If the goal is to get young people into houses, that line needs to go down substantially. That's much easier said than done when many people's wealth depends on that line being high.
The sale price isn't the full story though, as interest rates were much higher when the prices were super low. The relevant thing is monthly cost (mortgage payment or rent) over hourly (post-tax) wage.
That is the case in countries with both access to cheap food and free education: i've heard that Berkeley used to cost 100$/year in the 70s.
Also medical care costs are balooning everywhere (even where it's socialized). I'm not talking about huge cost you can read about US healthcare: when you're young, you will probably be lucky enough to avoid needing critical healthcare, but the price to do regular checkup and preventive care is higher than it was, everywhere in the world. That will have a cost on everybody in the near future imho.
> in my 20s (20 years ago), it was very common for 20somethings to live in shared housing with 2-3 roommates. They would share kitchens, fridges, everything. And these houses weren't even that great to begin with.
That's how people live in their 30s now. People in their 20s aren't developed enough in their careers to afford that sort of living.
> Are the prospects actually there in smaller towns? They might be more with remote work now.
The prospects in small towns are atrocious, that's why they're small towns. If you want to see what a post-apocalyptic world is like, just drive through a random small town in the midwest. There's a downright spooky vibe to them, they're sprinkled with abandoned and rotting buildings.
The dream of remote work is largely dead, or at least back to pre-pandemic state. Only top tier talent can get remote work, there's a ton of competition for those jobs.
> This place is like somebody's memory of a town, and the memory is fading.
That's a quote from the first season of True Detective. It's stuck with me because it's almost exactly how I've always described the small midwest town that I grew up in.
I started working part-time remote around 2010, and full-time in 2016 until June of 2023. I stayed close to tech hubs because I never felt like it was a particularly safe arrangement.
Small towns have fundamental economic problems that make living there a hard compromise. Third tier cities away from hot spot destinations can be comfortable places to live with much more affordable housing.
25 years ago, I was spending just over 1/3 of my take home pay on rent. That used to be a normal thing that people could do, only 25 years ago.
The exact same apartment is listed today for over four times what I was paying then. The same job I had then now pays 25% more. Rent for the same apartment is more than that job's entire gross pay.
20 years ago in São Paulo I was spending 1/3 of my salary in rent to share a flat with a friend in a quite nice neighbourhood, the same place now would cost 2x my salary of the time adjusted for inflation.
10 years ago in Stockholm I was renting a small flat 3 stations away from central station for about 9-10k SEK, the same flat nowadays is almost 2x that rent.
It's insane and happening in every major city it seems...
Housing has had a real appreciation at a rate that far outpaces real median wage increases. This is fueled partially by incentives to buy homes, but largely by speculative real estate purchases by older generations. People over the age of 35 own nearly 85% of real estate in the U.S., with people over the age of 55 owning nearly 45%. In both of these categories, ownership is extremely overrepresented and trending up.
We need to stop bailing out the housing market and incentivizing home purchases — this is the only reason that it’s rational for people to do this.
You need to distinguish between the market for houses and the market for housing (which includes rentals). Speculative real estate purchases and home buying incentives have a much larger effect on the market for houses vs the housing market. But the housing market is what drives the cost of leaving home.
With zoning and building codes we've just made it a lot more expensive to build housing. Just building codes probably increase the cost of building an apartment by 1-2% per year, and with zoning added in that could lead to 2-3% appreciation above inflation and wages which over 30 years adds up to quite a bit.
NIMBYs are the reason housing prices don’t seem rational. When supply can’t increase any increase in demand will cause prices to shoot up. When an area is controlled by nimbys speculation becomes easy.
>How much of this is actually new as far as income vs costs, and how much of this is unwillingness to make sacrifices that older generations did?
Joking right ? Where I live, you cannot get a 1 bedroom apartment for less than $2000. When I moved out on my own, one year's rent was 10 to 15% of my yearly salary, and that was a 2 bedroom. In today's dollars, my salary was 50,000. I could have easily bought a single family house at the time.
Based upon those numbers, my rent would now be a bit over 50% of my salary for a 1 bedroom. Never mind even thinking about buying a house if you are young.
Also Medical Insurance in the US comes into play. Back then, my insurance contribution was almost nothing. Now it would be around 10% of my salary, if I even was allows to get Medical.
Twenty years ago the Case-Shiller index was 140. Today it's 312.[1] The index tracks individual home sales over time -- that is a single home sold repeatedly. I interpret that to mean someone purchasing a home today must have roughly twice the resources to purchase the same home as someone in the past. Which leads me to conclude it's harder to own a home today than in the past all else being equal.
> I interpret that to mean someone purchasing a home today must have roughly twice the resources to purchase the same home as someone in the past
Case-Shiller is not adjusted for inflation. In addition, it does not take into account interest rates. Until recently, mortgage rates were extremely low. It takes less resources to pay the mortgage on a $1,000,000 house at 3% interest than it does to pay the mortgage on a $250,000 home at 19% interest (which is where interest rates topped out at in the 1980's).
Inflation: according to several calculators online, $100 in 2003 is roughly $170 (rounding up) in 2023 dollars. So 70% over 20 years. Meanwhile Case-Shiller has grown 123% over the same period.
Interest rate: in 2003 the interest rate was in the high 5's. Today it's in the mid 6's. So let's call it a wash.[1]
What I'm saying is, today someone is buying the same house, at roughly the same interest rate as someone twenty years ago except that today 1) the house is twenty years older, 2) it's also about 30% more expensive after adjusting for inflation.
I grant that means the person needs fewer than 2x the resources, but my point still stands.
I'm probably as old as you, perhaps older. I got by an a relatively expensive city for a fraction of what it costs now relative to income. I went to school, worked part time, rented my own place, and had a kid.
That kid is now an adult and is highly educated, has 2 jobs, and can't reasonably afford to rent their own place. They might be married and have children of their own now if things were the same as when we were younger.
All the young people I know would gladly trade what they have now for the meager "sacrifices" of older generations.
My son found work last year in a seaside town, I helped him in finding an apartment over summer timeframe. I looked online in the usual places and there was near zero apartment inventory which I though was odd. Then I pulled-up AirBnB and there were hundreds of listings, all unaffordable of course. He did eventually find something, but only a 6-month off-season rental unit. Next summer will be same issue.
Sure I am still sharing my flat, but doing so since 20 years with no end in sight. Living in a metro area in Europe, barely any holiday travel, saving to buy a little flat someday. And my income is above average.
In my area, renting a room in a shared house is less expensive than renting an apartment. Most young adults I speak to that live independently have such an arrangement.
Mechanization of labor has destroyed the economies of small towns. My wife's father is a farmer, and the small town she grew up in shrinks every year as young people leave. The families that remain buy up all the available land and are able to farm it all. Their only limitation is availability of land. Those without land may eek out a meager existence dressing hair or something, but in general it's not necessary for humans to do anything.
The costs of housing prevent people from moving to other cities. I could earn double my current salary by moving to California, but that wouldn't cover the cost of living differential. This actually reduces net economic output, since I and many others are not working at places where our output would be highest. Please read the article "The housing theory of everything" by Bowman, Myers, and Southwood.
The unfortunate reality is that income is much lower now than when you were young. Rent seeking behavior has become the path to wealth, and rent seeking reduces net economic output. You should listen to Peter Turchin's discussion of wealth inequality and the wealth pump, it's very enlightening.
No, the vast overwhelming majority of people in major cities (where the jobs are) rent houses with roommates or live in small apartments. Moreso than in previous generations. Renting a house with roommates is increasingly the best long-term plan even many 30-somethings I know can ever hope to afford
The instinct to assume that trends affecting entire generations of people are "personal choices" rather than economic issues is a common delusion that usually comes from listening to the messaging of companies responsible for these problems when they are discussed
It's insidious. Here's a translation of something I just read today:
> Shared accommodation is on a roll. Traditionally aimed at students in search of cheaper rents and conviviality, it is now attracting young working people looking for flexibility and quality solutions to the increasingly restricted access to home ownership.
> Amandine Cloot and Paolo Leonardi are journalists with the Economy division. They came into the studio to talk about young people's current real estate real estate.
> Translated with DeepL.com (free version)
They make it sound like it's a choice.
It's getting clearer to me everyday that journalists are just parroting bullet points from "experts". Just like they call on temporary employment agency to talk about labor law reforms. We are fucked.
In my country they are trying to transform social housing (housing built by the state for low-income households or people who can't work anymore) into a investment product. They try to get deals with private investors to finance the buildings in exchange of interests on the rents or monopolies on services. Social housing can't bring in enough money to be an investment product. This won't end well.
> it was very common for 20somethings to live in shared housing with 2-3 roommates.
In my experience this is still the norm in high CoL west-coast cities. Single people living alone are the exception rather than the norm. Couples tend to rent a 1- or 2-bedroom.
Interestingly this seems to still be true for many highly-paid young people who could easily afford their own place but end up with roommates to save up money. No idea how representative my sample is.
I wonder about the moving further out part. I know my grandparents moved into a town that was way out there but as more and more people moved to the area it became less remote. Same thing happened with my parents. It was not uncommon for less desirable areas to be where starter homes where purchased. I guess the data that would disprove/prove this would be population size vs prices.
When I graduated and moved out -- mid 1980s -- I had no desire to share an apartment with anyone, and no need since apartments were still kinda affordable. They were not the majority of your paycheck -- maybe 30, 35%. When we got to the early 2000s rents started to climb and I started hearing a lot more about people needing roommates. Wages have not kept pace with rent, not by a long shot.
Well without a stable home to do so in we aren't comfortable trying to start a family. We (me and my partner) are genuinely trying to follow the same playbook my parents, grandparents and great grandparents did, but even with a household salary about 3x median we're not yet able, at 30 years old.
We're not "not starting families", like its a choice. It's not economically feasible.
With apps it should be very easy to find a room to rent in a shared unit, but there is no good way to do that. I've tried, and the system for long term rentals isn't as polished or usable as something like AirBNB.
There are co-living companies out there. like you said, they aren't as polished as Airbnb due to the nature of the market, because building a site as good as Airbnb is expensive as hell.
I wonder why AirBNB doesn't take the app they already developed and open it up to long term rentals. They've already done the work, it would be trivial to add in month-by-month agreements.
A pathological sort of comparison is much more common now. They assume that what their parents have (with 20+ years of work), or what they see on social media, is what they should have too. That they don't is perceived as a great injustice.
You can see someone that has what you want and either a) work towards it, or b) complain.
There's always a mix of both, but b) is very loud right now.
This is cute, but not data. When you look at actual data, it shows that it actually has changed over time. There is a gradual rise in the labor force participation rate as more women enter the workforce, up until a peak in ~2001. It's been dropping ever since.
The largest drop appears to be the in 16 to 19 age group -- hardly the group trying to be independent. Outside of that group it again doesn't seem very different.
> unwillingness to make sacrifices that older generations did?
Ah yes the avocado toast theory. What makes you think that people have changed so much in the last 20 years?
The people didn't change, they are mostly the same. The cost changed. It's now no longer sustainable for many or no longer worth it. Renting with roommates means you will see 10%+ rent increases a year in major US cities now. The greed of the landlords cannot be satisfied. Over time this pushes people back home that cannot stay on the fast moving economic treadmill.
Reading comments like that, if they are not loaded questions or trolling in disguise, really saddens me. How out of touch some people are that even in the face of raw numbers and interpretations they come up with "but what if people are just lazier now ?". It's like reading climate change deniers routine.
It's the same as it ever was. I remember the same hand wringing about home ownership among Generation X in the mid-90s, and largely for the same reasons. This is nothing new.
It has been getting harder for each generation. So it is nothing new that it is harder for Generation N+1 than Generation N, but that doesn't make it not news.
I live a few blocks from a highly rated high school. The elementary school is next door. The middle school isn't far, either. Point being, this is an excellent place to raise a family. That being said, with one or two exceptions all my neighbors are retired with adult children or grandchildren. (Not living with them, to be clear.)
I can't fault my neighbors for deciding to stick around in their nice, large homes with bedrooms to spare -- especially if they've paid off their mortgages or renegotiated during the pandemic. That said, I can't help but feel something is wrong with this picture.
Why isn't the neighborhood filled with young families? And when these older folks do finally move, will young families be able to afford the increasingly expensive mortgages? Looking at the Case-Shiller index, it's scary -- almost double the pre-2008 peak![1]
Having more people without kids live in good school districts is probably why those schools are so nice. Perversely, filling them up with families whose kids would actually use the schools would have the opposite effect (this only applies to states where education is funded locally, in states that fund them state wide, not so much).
Every year for the last 5 I've thought "this must surely be the top of the market, I'll wait".. And every year they went up. Now interest rates have gone up too, to add insult to injury. Just going to leave for greener pastures, I think.
Home prices tend to decrease when interest rates go up so that monthly payments aren't that different. Unfortunately, there's a lag between rates increasing and sellers realizing their potential buyers can afford less.
Prices are affected by demand and supply. Supply can be constrained enough (through zoning, less construction) to still be less than demand in a high interest rate environment.
Demand is also an interesting one, the population continues to increase and every year a new, larger, cohort of people enter the housing market. Many are seeking to live in the relatively few areas that have strong, dynamic labor markets, and are willing to pay a higher share of income to achieve this.
A lot of housing markets have experienced this effect on both supply and demand and prices have not decreased in line with what the basic models predicted.
Even worse, most people, including politicians, are completely incapable to understand exponential processes and how fast population decline can occur and how difficult is to recover from it.
It would seem like there is a constant tug-of-war between supply and demand. Demand grows to meet supply. There is a finite amount of housing in desirable locations. What makes certain areas desirable also makes them expensive.
Well, that's where you're wrong (with respect to housing in the USA).
Municipal zoning laws mean that houses are not getting built. Apartment growth is not keeping up either. Nor is condo growth. In the places with jobs, there is no available housing.
This lack of housing is what is keeping houses at top dollar in spite of the mortgage rate tripling over the span of a year.
Oh in Europe politicians dont care that the local population is declining. The US tries to solve it by banning abortions, but that’s going to cause more issues than solve. In Europe they just welcome anyone and then put them on benefits. I am not against migration but those poor souls arrive in Europe to escape poverty and end up being poor here because they face the same challenges as the locals.
This is not why the US is, or more accurately some states in the US are, banning abortion. It is very much a moral thing for them: they want to punish sex before marriage, especially for young girls, or maybe they really do believe fetuses are sentient, but it definitely isn't about promoting population growth.
America has had a higher immigration rate than most of Europe for a couple of hundred years now.
I think that’s the popular narrative, but the real reason is population decline. Someone somewhere must understand the implications of a small number of people in the US. Not just because there are fewer taxpayers but there also fewer people to support the logistics of war. I dont like the idea but I think that is part of the reason.
Europe is not the US, it’s not a country, and is not made of non European immigrants - though all Europeans are closely related. And that means that population decline is already causing political and social tension. Because to maintain the economy people from the outside are coming in and locals dont like it. There is no European country without tension. Not something I like either.
The only way to solve these issues is to make it possible for people to have children and family life - traditional or not - of their own accord.
Corporate capitalism doesnt allow for that. It causes market anomalies - ie people unable to even dream of owning a house, it causes mental health issues due to forcing people to sit in office settings with office politics, and it damages small businesses. Corporatism is damaging to national security and social cohesion.
I think the way to solve many of the population and independence of the younger generation is an aggressive development of small to medium sized businesses. Free people are more likely to want a family in my view. Basically, we need a return to actual capitalism.
I think it will actually increase fertility rate. Not leaving so soon and investing into your career and saving up money will eventually enable more people to choose parenthood. Multi-generational households are a nice thing and much more common outside the USA. Staying at home longer and leveraging American incomes and opportunities to grow more intentionally and sustainably will in the long run increase American fertility rate quite a bit as long as we can otherwise keep employment solid.
Not parent commenter, and no offense intended, but some things one should be able to mentally walk through on your own without someone feeding you a link. In this particular case, for example, there’s an upper bound on how late in life a couple can conceive. Take it from there.
Likewise, it doesn’t hurt to take your own advice - an aspiring young man does not need to rush when he has offspring, and can plan to successfully have healthy children for most of his life even into his 50s. I ask questions to lead people into challenging their own assumptions.
> Housing prices have a significant impact on a family's decision to have children, according to a new study by Lisa Dettling and Melissa Schettini Kearney. In House Prices and Birth Rates: The Impact of the Real Estate Market on the Decision to Have a Baby (NBER Working Paper No. 17485), they find that a 10 percent increase in home prices leads to a 1 percent decrease in births among non-homeowners in an average metropolitan area. However, the negative effect among non-owners is offset by a 4.5 percent increase in births among current homeowners, who are now wealthier. The total fertility effect of an increase in house prices varies across demographic groups, largely because their rates of homeownership differ. The authors conclude that "house prices are a relevant factor in a couple's decision to have a baby."
(look to South Korea if you want to see the future: https://time.com/6488894/south-korea-low-fertility-rate-tren... ["The number of babies expected per woman probably dropped this year to 0.72 and will continue to fall through 2025, when it’s expected to reach 0.65, the statistical office said Thursday in its latest population forecasts. South Korea already has the world’s lowest fertility rate at 0.78 as of 2022."])
The longer total fertility rate is held down, the firmer the trajectory becomes. Even countries with robust natalist subsidy policies cannot materially lift the TFR.
> Even countries with robust natalist subsidy policies cannot materially lift the TFR.
So we are told, but this reeks of pretend-helplessness, an excuse not to even try. The Czech Republic raised its fertility rate from 1.1 in 1999, to 1.8 in 2021 [1,2], so it is empirically possible.
Would you bet on political will and a supportive electorate? Any other similar outcomes to the Czech Republic? Or are they an outlier perhaps unable to be reproduced?
40%-50% of global pregnancies are unintended annually. When contraceptives are readily available and women are empowered, the fertility rate falls. Is there enough fiat to change that? There is a light cone based on aggregate productive labor participation, and it shrinks as the population shrinks.
> Any other similar outcomes to the Czech Republic? Or are they an outlier perhaps unable to be reproduced?
"We shouldn't try because it won't work. We know it won't work because there are so few examples of it working."
Most countries used to have above-replacement fertility. At least some countries that implement natalist policies recover fertility. While not exactly a reversal of low fertility, Israel is an example of an advanced economy with above-replacement fertility.
Evidence points overwhelmingly towards this being a fixable problem, if only we try. Certainly few other problems are approached this way - we don't give up on reducing CO2 emissions or plastic pollution just because we've so far not succeeded. One only approaches a problem this way if one doesn't want to solve it.
I don’t think attempting to outbreed each other out of some concern about replacement is a rational or logical course of action, but alas, such is the human condition. A concern for someone else.
People have decent enough access to fiat already. Certainly better than what our parents and grandparents and so on went through. What’s absent is the foresight to think about the future with wisdom. People are in party mode for too long and think life is just about single life living or an endless consumption-based vacation type of experience.
We require a return to maturity and responsibility and clear, focused thoughts across the board. We need to have higher standards for truth and accurate information and accurate statistics. We need less climate fear-mongering and doom-scrolling. The world and civilization are not ending yet many youth are blasted by endless propaganda and negativity from a young age.
We need to be smart and fixated on what’s true again, in all areas. Truth over lies and truthful statements and processes over half-truths or lies.
So it’s a values and wisdom thing, which has been absent or pulled out from beneath people by the sudden subversion of reasoned and nuanced thinking by easy access to qualitatively cheap information and sound bites.
I think the appetite for nuance will come back and this will represent a return to truth and consequently to more emphasis on family and especially the nuclear family.
I suspect wisdom is not having children when you can't afford to take care of them. Just ensuring that my own medical care is met is a challenge - to add a couple kids to that equation is a terrifying notion. School and housing certainly haven't gotten any cheaper either.
There are always exceptions and it’s fine if wisdom leads someone in this direction.
I believe those costs will decrease in real terms with time. Note that we were also higher up discussing staying home longer precisely to facilitate more affordability for the individual, an additional 3-5 years saving and investing into career and skills will help most individuals in this area significantly if they can do it.
I don't believe costs will decrease because they never have in my lifetime, and I don't think I can be called a young adult any more. I'd be happy if they did though.
Consider the implications of advanced robotics and materials science on the cost of producing anything. The trend is an exciting reduction to $0 marginal cost. It will still take time but one can see it starting to unfold gradually already.
I believe the implications are mass unemployment, but given that I've seen approximately zero progress in robotics in my adult life (I guess the robot vacuums are a bit better than my Bush-era Roomba), I suppose the burger-flippers will be employed a bit longer. I don't really know if that's a win or not. While Star Trek was indeed an interesting exploration into a post-scarcity society, the more I've grown up, the more I've realized it's just nerdy fantasy; there's little grounding in actual science there.
This 2018 paper is quite clear [1] that, for example, immigration reduces native fertility. Yet immigration continues to be sold as the solution to ailing fertility. One can only conclude that society, or rather its rulers, at best do not care.
The paper was very careful to describe the mass increase of Cuban immigrants as "immigration shock", not just immigration. I don't think the conclusions of this paper can say any one thing about the effects of our (I'm assuming you're American as well) standard levels of immigration. Also..
These results suggest that immigration shocks do have implications for the fertility decisions and outcomes of natives, though these tend only to be temporary and short-lived. There therefore appear to be little long-term or sustained consequences for the fertility of natives from governments pursuing labour augmenting strategies through more open immigration policies.
From the conclusion. I only really skimmed the abstract and the conclusion, please tell me if I'm missing something.
I wonder how much of this is also due to either an unwillingness to live with someone or difficulty making friends? I know that where I live the rent on a 1 bedroom apartment would be difficult for most young people, but half of a 2 bedroom apartment would be do-able at minimum wage. For reference, I am thinking 1500 and 1800 per month respectively for rent on 1 and 2 bedroom apartments, which seems to be the going rate locally for a decent but not luxury place.And local minimum wage is 15 an hour
If you're trying to save for a downpayment (as many professionals care to) then staying at home certainly helps accumulate that faster, but I expect much of this demo staying with parents are making the median wage or lower. They have the same dream.
I recently talked to a bay area parent whose child graduated with an engineering degree from a top liberal arts college and has a job as a research scientist. The parent said that thanks to the housing crunch, they get to have him at home for a while longer. It is a silver lining for these parents, but of course it's not so great for families that don't have the extra room, or who live in an area where jobs are not available.
My wife is a biologist, and I am a software engineer. We live in the midwest.
We could afford a house, but the more we look at it, the worse a financial decision it seems. The homes are way more expensive then they are worth. The mortgage would be more than double our rent.
The issue, as far as I can tell, is that people treat their homes like investments and want investment-like returns.
I don't think most kids leave because they are being kicked out. They leave because the want to assert their independence from their parents and enjoy the freedoms that come from living on their own.
I'm skeptical of the idea that housing costs are the primary reason young adults live at home longer. First of all, the trend was present before interest rates started rising, and before that housing costs as a percent of income were not higher than previous generations. And Gen Z are growing up slower than previous generations in other ways as well:
> "While the majority of 8th grade Gen Xers in the 1990s had dated, tried alcohol, and worked for pay, only about one in four 8th grade Gen Zers had done the same in 2021. The number who had had sex by the spring of 9th grade went from nearly 40% in the Gen X era to less than 15% among Gen Z".
That is not related to housing costs. Previous generations seemed to grow up quicker, Gen X certainly did.
> within an hour of a bigger city, but small enough where the real estate is still reasonably priced
This is more rare than you would think, depending on your definitions of "bigger city" and "reasonably priced". It's definitely more rare than it used to be.
Part of that is the increase in housing prices, as detailed in this and other articles. But part of it is a contraction of what's "within an hour", due to crumbling public transit infrastructure.
We were recently considering moving closer to "back home" from our metro area - the biggest problem is that there's just not much going on back there, and the schools are substantially worse. That said, a pretty nice and big house that we were looking at in our "home" area was actually something we could afford - the same house here in the city would probably cost close to double.
> what they are really measuring is student quality for the most part
That doesn't make sense to me. What sort of forces do you imagine will cause one school to have better students than another, consistently for decades?
Not, mind you, because poor kids are exceptionally poor students on their own, but because their parents tend to have less time and money to support them.
Schools serve a particular geographic area. Geographic area predicts your economic class. Economic class predicts if you went to preschool, if you were read to, the quailty of nutrition you received, the probability that you had lead windows in your bedroom, if you live in a single parent household, etc.
> Towns within an hour of a bigger city, but small enough where the real estate is still reasonably priced.
Haha. In my EU region those towns, and even villages around those towns are outpriced. What you can afford with a garden, 2-3 rooms you need to look in end of world villages, and those building are from the 60-70s.
Here's an easy carrot. Percentage of food budget spent on restaurant meals vs Home Cooking.
Look at some of those pie charts over time and you'll see how often our parents generation went out, or their parents generation went out for dinner
Funny, I actually prefer my own carrots, or home-cooked meals for the matter. Thanks for the idea. Probably there are several further aspects that are “better” today: cheap electronics, access to information, etc. To me, these amenities however seem rather optional compared to having a roof over the head.
I went to an alumni gathering in Palo Alto in 2007 and talked with a middle-aged dad about this. He was very clear-eyed: kids who grow up here do not have a right of return. The people who can pay for property here — largely due to jobs at fast-growing companies — will be the ones who live here in the future.
There is some level of parental wealth that will allow children to live here, even in the absence of a job that can pay the mortgage. This tends to be Atherton- or Woodside-level wealth.
> He was very clear-eyed: kids who grow up here do not have a right of return.
The USA doesn't have a residency system, so this is true throughout the country. Some form of rent control (inheritable) or a hukou system could change that, but I don't see it happening for awhile, and kids who didn't grow up "here" would complain that they weren't allowed to live in that place (either via a legal restriction or a system that raises the barrier of entry for new residents like rent control).
This sort of exists in NYC, and I mostly hear about abuses. For example, people inherit a rent controlled apartment and sublet it to someone else at market rate.
My observation has been that as long as basic human needs are easily obtained there is a natural tendency to become complacent and go with the flow.
Another perspective could be: what’s so bad about people taking longer to mature? In a way it points to the possibility that we have evolved to a society that allows children to be children for longer. The real problem is that biologically their bodies are screaming for reproduction which becomes confusing and stressful. Perhaps in the future we will deal with this in creative and healthy new ways
Housing unaffordability has been a Reddit/Twitter meme for a decade, now getting a lot of MSM attention. Just another example of the 'internet culture' being ahead of the times.
How much of this is actually new as far as income vs costs, and how much of this is unwillingness to make sacrifices that older generations did? For example, in my 20s (20 years ago), it was very common for 20somethings to live in shared housing with 2-3 roommates. They would share kitchens, fridges, everything. And these houses weren't even that great to begin with.
Is the younger generation less willing to do things like that? Or move further out, or move to a smaller town where the prospects are better? Are the prospects actually there in smaller towns? They might be more with remote work now.
Like I barely hear about families moving to different cities for a job anymore when that was more common growing up in the 80s.