Im an “old millennial” who travelled extensively in my 20s and chose to work in the arts. I got married late and had a child late and now I’m realizing I may never own a house. I dont have the down payment and i would never get approved as a freelance artist. To keep panic at bay, i’ve taught myself how to grow food, how to live on a very tight budget, and decided to use my small income to travel instead of saving for something that will never come and feeling penalized and hopeless. In south america, there is so much opportunity to build meaningful off grid properties, but already the amount of money required to make the move looks to be raising by the month. However, I am an eternal optimist! I loved that you spoke to this topic. It is the conundrum of my generation, for sure.
There's a path forward for this - it's what I and mi esposo are doing (both elder millennials, too) but you have to be willing to move to some very remote and inhospitable parts of the country.
The bomb is already going off. You just don't see it quite yet in your area. As someone who would be homeless if it wasn't for the help of certain people right now, I can tell you that things are getting UGLY up near me.
Suicide rates are climbing. Prostitution as a last resort (rather than a chosen career) is climbing. Theft? Oh god. My friend had his car's catalytic converter stolen. Gang affiliation is spiking. I saw a noticeable climb in heroin and crack addiction as of late, as well as people who just go buy fentanyl with the sole purpose of killing themselves.
In fact, up near my old apartment, literally down the street? A family annihilation. Money and impending homelessness was a cause.
Check out Linda Carol’s piece on Medium I published in Minds Without Borders —it’s at No. 1 today. It’s about poor and homeless boomers. The more we write about this, the better. I feel like I’ll be providing housing to older writers someday (as long as they’re willing to live in central Illinois.)
Oh god yes, I live in Central Texas in an upper middle class neighborhood and someone was murdered in their driveway a while back, so close I could hear the gunshots. Property crime is nuts! Feel like I live in The Twilight Zone!!
That's nauseating. I live in Central Texas, too, and I don't remember hearing about this. That's probably because I'm a HIFI (high income financially insecure - due to being highly technically skilled, but through alternative routes, and autistic enough to have been subjected to the usual neurodivergent intolerance and discrimination - in every job I've ever had) and I've spent half of my adult life unhoused as a consequence of ableist economic exclusion.
(Just fyi, though, murder is not a property crime, lol.)
Correct , I realized that right after I posted it. What I meant to say is violent crime and Property crimes are both up. A couple of years ago my wife read a book by an autistic author and repeatedly stopped and told me that I do some of the things that the book describes. Not news to me but I’ve kept it to myself, I guess I’m good at masking.
Nobody is good at masking, lol. Pardon me pointing it out but from what I can see, you're a white dude, therefore you get maximum latitude. Like Sheldon from Big Bang.
When I was 13, in 1994, I was the subject of a case study that proved that girls can be autistic. Back In those days, it was commonly believed that only boys were autistic. In reality, society's tolerance for neurodivergent behavior fron girls is essentially nonexistent, and girls learn to mask differently, etc. and that's how autism in girls was simply overlooked for forty or fifty years after it was first formally identified.
You speak truth. What people fail to realize, or overlook, is that dude (me) is really good at what he does but he can be freakishly focused on ONE thing for way way longer than most people.
That's why they want to make sure women end up pregnant as often as possible. They don't care about education, they don't care about the health of children, they just need widgets for the widget factory. We're not people to them.
They don't care, if we wanted housing then we'd be born wealthy enough to not work for them. Seems like it should bite them in the ass but it hasn't yet because they've us divided against each other
It sure is and I don't know how we can work to correct this. There are SO many people who benefit from at least one of the cultural wars that they are using to keep the working class and middle class (which I think is really more of an education based division than it is truly an income difference these days. There is barely a middle class. My personal separation line is "Do you listen to the stock exchange information on television or NPR?" If you do, you're probably wealthy. I realize this test is flawed but it's accurate enough to be pretty useful to me.
But bigots, grifters, private equity, zealots and more than I can possibly list benefit from dividing us into as many smaller groups as possible and blaming "the other" for the things the passive income class does.
It's been a brilliant strategy in their minds to stay on top of, and safely away from, the unwashed and unimportant minions below them. But, it has allowed the apple to rot out inside from the bottom up, like the distribution of wealth here in this meat grinder capitalist deal. Soon the shiny apple skin that hides the rot below collapses down, at which time we eat them, like the song says. Out of the palace, and into the ditch!
Yes it’s all unsustainable and so inhumane. Private equity buying up homes has made it astronomically worse. There is no decency. I’m Gen X and as much as I worry about my own situation as I age I am most concerned about what is happening to Millennials and Gen Z
I only wish I'd had the foresight to buy in the 90s when it would have been doable! It wasn't a priority then, and by the time I wanted to, it was way too late. This Gen Xer will be paying rent until I die. 😥
I'm in my mid-fifties and sadly, I own nothing. back 2010, my wife and I were buying a house, when I lost my job and had to move in order to find another. Since then, we haven't been able to get the financing to buy another. You have to take out loans for houses, for cars, and for education. Kids today will never stand a chance. I was lucky enough to have a grandmother that believed in me and helped me pay my student loans, and I paid her back and on time.
If I could just ahead of things, I'd be okay, but every time I get a nest egg started, a car breaks, the water heater breaks, or the A/C.
Between all the crap, kids today will be broke and dependent on government for shit.
Thank you for seeing how lucky you were rather than assuming you somehow worked harder than folks younger than you! I'm on the border of Gen X and millennials and I had sisters to each side. My 1971 model sister just doesn't get it, but she doesn't want to. My younger sister totally gets it. As the family black sheep I actually didn't "settle down" until after my younger sister. (As the family black sheep I also didn't get any of the useful parental co-signing or loans) I feel incredibly fortunate and extremely lucky to have married someone who DID have access to these things, because it means we have a reasonable mortgage. We still almost lost our house during the pandemic, and again my in-laws saved us. It shouldn't be this way, I don't understand why more people regardless of how lucky they were to be born in a time where they earned pensions, or be born into a family with more wealth (because more privilege allowed them to do so) can't take a quick look at the housing prices versus wages and the costs of living and not see how profoundly broken this system has become. Yet it's relatively rare, so I salute you. ❤️
Oh, it's EASY for me to see because that's pretty much the only financially lucky thing I have going on. I've never made anything like the median income, and that's with a college degree. We eat beans and rice, hang up all our laundry and do absolutely everything possible for ourselves rather than hire anything done. Our cars are ancient. You get the idea. But I'll have housing, and I'm very grateful for that.
Yes, my parents both worked in local television news and neither had degrees but they have pensions. They switched to 401Ks about the time I was 17-18 and most of the jobs require degrees now. But the salaries are probably pretty close to the same. My husband got a degree in journalism and ended up at a newspaper. He never made as much as either of my parents and obviously that job is gone. I've always got a room in the house half deconstructed and I'm trying my hardest to DIY a fence, lol because we're never going to be able to afford one. And I'm fine with it but I'd like to be able to leave the state I'm in and I know it's just not going to be possible. His job has free tuition for our 13 year old and we can't walk away from that even if we could afford (which we can't) to move by selling the house. We'd never be able to get another one.
I agree very strongly with 2/3d or more of this article (most importantly - cause of homelessness) but quibble with the ease of the proposed solution. I’m in California and believe ardently that housing scarcity is the No. 1 issue in the state - if we could only fix it we’d be practically perfect (in my view.) But I don’t believe that “we simply don’t want to.” It’s genuinely difficult to steer that large ship - zoning is a huge contributor, and is being fixed slowly and painfully, but also building anything here is absurdly expensive and it’s genuinely difficult to figure out why. My area has been dumping millions and billions into affordable housing and it doesn’t make a dent - it’s just not enough. I don’t particularly object to banning investors from collecting housing but the evidence this does much to the price was weak last time I saw it. And I’ve seen some arguments that tax breaks to encourage homeownership actually contributes to high prices.
In California, there are only developers who bribe the local governments (City Councils) with their "affordable" housing scams. Tiny percentage goes to a slightly lower than astronomical rent. Affordable housing is very easy to build. The United States just doesn't want to do it. Also, equity groups snap up the middle class houses and rent them out, but no maintenance. I lived in one during COVID in Orlando. Beautiful home in a lovely neighborhood where everyone owned except us. American Homes for Rent out of Nevada. What scam artists. It’s the American way. I am grateful for my dual citizenship with Canada.
We essentially agree -- but my point is that we COULD change zoning and the other things you mention. I do not live in California but apparently there are extra hoops to jump through that do not exist everywhere. Some hoops need to be there but others could likely be eliminated -- if political will exists. However, if you already own a lot of property there, it's probably not in your best interests to lower barriers. You would know better than me about specifics in California. I live in Cheaphousinglandia. :)
We could be using 3D printing for really good quality homes right this minute but we don't want to. The NIMBY effect is really powerful. The people who own homes in nice places absolutely do not want affordable housing near them. They don't!
I am always reading about various deregulation that will "free up the market, and make blah blah blah easier and then the regulation is gone permanently and whatever problem they were supposed to solve is not solved but made more complicated. Someone makes money but nothing else changes. I'm not talking about housing specifically they've tried this type of argument on so many things. California does have more barriers than needed. The problem is that I don't trust the people who will benefit from deregulation regardless of whether they help the unhoused to be honest about what regulations need to be changed.
All so true. I read a couple of weeks ago that the numbers of accounted for homeless people is now over 650,000 now and growing larger every month. And all the government wants to do is keep them off the streets and out of sight. That amount is about 25% larger than our current military strength now. What happens when they become over a million strong? A march on Washington? I can just see the D.C. cops and local national guard try to control a crown that large. They couldn't control the few hundreds that raided the capital building on January 6th.
They didn't want to control the crowd on January 6 (I'm saying there should have been more security in place, not that the officers didn't try to prevent it because some did). I'm pretty sure if a mass of the unhoused attempted to organize a peaceful march but was that size they'd be met with the brutality we see every time people speak out against actual injustice. It boggles my mind they let those people break into the Capitol and then walk back to their hotels, sleep it off and go back to their home states.
It was all about who was in charge and your right, the recent college campus brutality against students peacefully exercising their first amendment rights is an example of what would happen on a huge scale if such a protest were to be organized. The land of the free is a fallacy and now, just media propaganda for enticing rich foreigners to immigrate or invest in the U.S. Which is also failing on a massive scale. Corporations are leaving, people are leaving and investors are taking their money elsewhere. The United States is fading away into a second tier country and the rich, elitist politicians are fighting this tooth and nail. I am afraid for our future right now.
Those early home prices you're listing blow me away. As a young Gen Xer I guess... I'm new to my 50s. My first house in 2001 was 'cheap' for the area, but still $120k in Colorado. My second house, a decade later, was $100k more, and somehow it's worth more than 3x that purchase price 14 years after we bought it.
This does all hit very hard, though. I have a 17 and 19-year-old and I have no idea how they will ever be able to retire or buy a house. I am somehow a millionaire on paper (because of ridiculous housing markets) but can't do anything to really ease their burden.
I don't really like to imagine the future for my children, it scares me and makes me sad.
We are eating our young in this country. I don't think you're alone in worrying about your kids -- my daughter has what you might call a starter house and it cost more than my fourth house! She and her partner want to purchase a house and the amount they plan to spend is enough to give me heart palpitations. They aren't wealthy, but will have to pay rich-person prices anyway because that's just what houses cost now. How can everything necessary to life now cost more than ordinary people can afford?
Also, one option would be to sell your appreciated house and move to someplace like central Illinois and buy a house for like $1K or so. Your kids could do the same. Not a perfect plan, but a possibility.
Or move to west Texas and buy an acreage where you can build whatever suits you - literally. Zoning shmoning. County building permit is a single page - one sided. We pay $137 a month for 20 acres an hour east of El Paso. Property taxes are $300 a year.
We could fit 1264 tiny houses on 20 acres (I did the math.) The soil composition is correct for on-site adobe.
Bonus combo: it would only take a couple hundred people doing this in the right locations to flip rural and remote Texas gerrymandering districts blue.
Love what you wrote and your smart and lucky trajectory. Your thinking and points are all valid, but respectfully a bit too narrow or only exposing some parts of the puzzle.
So all is not as bleak as you are projecting IF people —young, middle age, and older— think not only “outside of the box”, but also look to the past, combine the two, and then “go beyond”.
Young, middle-aged and older will be fine and “homeowners “ if they are not wedded to only the idea of “starting small and moving up to “large single family homes or condos to own” AND most crucially, if governments and people and developers cooperate and think beyond racist exclusionary housing as they have been doing formally since 1925.
(I won’t bore right now, but that’s the year a racist a US Supreme Court got involved in racist exclusionary zoning— and including the racist “redlining” period sponsored by the US Government and banks.)
I know about this all as a lawyer and author of a chapter about “Cluster Housing and “Planned Unit Developments” in 1978 as
part of a law school class project and as one one that came from —among other things, a “very wealthy developer and commercial land investment family”— and as one that whether with my family or on my own has been “up and down over and over, has been through the gamut of “middle-class /genteelly poor to very wealthy.”
In short, the affordable and acceptable housing problem not just an economic problem but also a sociological “Us vs. them” /NIMBY problem.
I’ll not only explain a bit here, but these subjects /concepts will be some I’ve been exploring conceptually* for 70+ years and will be further writing about in my Substack I’ve been preparing behind the scenes.
* As a child that was moved VERY often by parents, as a teenager that lived in France for 3 months while going to school /touring, as a college student, as a renter, and now homeowner from 1978-present of a variety of homes, I have lived in, rented and owned, and been exposed to “the gamut” of housing. I can personally compare the pro’s and con’s among all.
I have had the luck to be able to experience and compare also a variety of lifestyles in all of that time through all of those different types of housing so my thinking has been shaped by direct exposure.
I have also personally lived in or exposed to —whether as part of a family or on my own—everything from small rental apartments, to boarding houses in 2 countries, to town houses, to basements, to “retirement housing” to “starter homes”, to luxury small villas, to giant (5,600 square feet 1969-1997 where my neighbors were “Ray and Joan Kroc of McDonald’s fame whom I had known since 1959**) to my current 2,700+ square foot home.
**I was exposed to and lived like the 1% “through Mr. Kroc and my parents, including a step-father, who had been realtors for McDonalds and ultimately early franchisees in 3 states and my Dad and his family that had been “retailers and clothing factory owners and developers in 3 states owning department stores and as many as 90 womens’ clothing franchises to my in-laws that were small very successful retailers in 2 states, to my own 13 years as an Assistant County Attorney for Miami-Dade County and other commercial and residential real estate developer experience and before that as a law clerk to two law firms representing developers, bank, governments for bond counseling, zoning, high-end divorces, I learned and further learned about planning, zoning, politics, economics, profit, and lobbying.
[And since 2010 I have been intensively studying the “tiny house” —and every now and then—the “co-housing” movements.]
In short and again, the problems you raised are not just economic, but sociological and even involve, of course, personal “snobbism, classicism, keeping up with the Jones, of course, personal self-images and “striving”, and even if not overtly racist or racist*** at all, “I want to live with my own kind for comfort and acceptance”.
*** “Classism” and even “religious racism, including in and out of the same religions, such as “orthodox v. reform” Jews are also issues as have been the “urban v. rural v. suburban” involved, as are such issues as “traffic”, commuting, mass transportation, child care and consumer and retail shopping and services, religious institutions and medical care, schooling from home to public to private to “distance learning”, to politics to “lifestyle”.
And I further saw the economic residential ups and downs of the uber-wealthy, including of local and international celebrities you’ve heard about or haven’t by way of the private but international religious and political boarding school I went to for 1 year, and the local private day school and international boarding school my kids went to. (And I learned about yet other residential life styles from my Dad, a “boat kid” from Pennsylvania to Miami Beach during the Depression.)
So I will close here for now, but if the issues you raise are coupled with the issues other commenters and I raise are explored comprehensively, politically (through activism, lobbying, legislation, “thinking ahead and outside the box”, proper zoning and planning involving ALL “stakeholders”, etc.), the problems you raise CAN be solved, but there is no one easy solution.
And because human beings and thus “life and
“s…t”, Acts of God”, greed & capitalism, and local, national and global politics happen”, above all, “patience” **** is needed at the same time as “deliberate urgency”, and “all deliberate speed” [from ‘Brown v. Bd. of Education’] as well as people skills, legal and even “warfare strategies & tactics” are also needed.
(****For example, it took my family and I twenty years and an “FBI /Mafia-like chart exploring relationships among people, including ‘Wayne Huizenga’ of Blockbuster, Waste Management, Dolphins fame, to sell 1 piece of commercial land between 1985 and 2005. The land could have been commercial or residential or both.)
And between my now deceased husband and his first wife in 1969 and I jn 2024 it’s been all of that time watching cows and tumbleweeds on our New Mexico land zoned for both commercial and affordable multi-family in a situation that famously started out as the bait in a land fraud scheme written about in the NYT in the ‘70’s.
[Look up “Horizon Corporation”. There’s still no municipal services, “Tiny Houses” may be an answer. Also look up “Rio Communities”. My kids will likely get the land and maybe can live “off grid” and VERY cheaply.]
Signing off for now: let’s all “talk” again and try to be part of the solution. At 72, I think /hope I have a few more years to study and work at it. I also need to anyway: Miami and a large home are way too expensive!
Interesting. Mi esposo and I are already doing this. We have a total of 40 acres less than an hour from a major city. I'd rather not deep dive it in the comments but the short and skinny is - if you know what to look for, it's not nearly as hard as you'd expect.
To purchase 40 acres is something few people can do while they’re still young enough to develop the land themselves. I always dreamed that but it was unrealistic. I could do it now, possibly, if I sold everything I own, but I don’t see myself planting orchards and building a straw bale house now.
Incidentally, my point here is two-fold: that yes, it *is* possible, still, to obtain land - even vast acreages - for almost comically small amounts of money, but in order to do so and also to execute on owning that land (just getting out to your property may require hiring a guide - it did for us) you need to be both physically capable of and mentally prepared to become a fucking pioneer. Literally.
If there is any other actually viable path forward, in twenty years of searching, I haven't found it.
My first 20 acres costs me $137 a month and $300 a year in property taxes. My second 20 acres costs $280 a month and I don't yet know what the property taxes will be. Probably around the same as the first. Two different companies, in-house financing, $200 down on the first piece. $1500 down on the second.
And mi esposo and I are young enough to develop the land ourselves. (The soil composition is well suited to on-site adobe.)
It's hardly unrealistic. Where there's a will, there's a way. What is actually necessary is a willingness to go somewhere unpopular - because all the places that are any kind of popular are either teeming with people already, or priced like a timeshare on the moon. Most people aren't prepared to consider these kinds of places, is what eliminates it as a solution for most people.
Im an “old millennial” who travelled extensively in my 20s and chose to work in the arts. I got married late and had a child late and now I’m realizing I may never own a house. I dont have the down payment and i would never get approved as a freelance artist. To keep panic at bay, i’ve taught myself how to grow food, how to live on a very tight budget, and decided to use my small income to travel instead of saving for something that will never come and feeling penalized and hopeless. In south america, there is so much opportunity to build meaningful off grid properties, but already the amount of money required to make the move looks to be raising by the month. However, I am an eternal optimist! I loved that you spoke to this topic. It is the conundrum of my generation, for sure.
There's a path forward for this - it's what I and mi esposo are doing (both elder millennials, too) but you have to be willing to move to some very remote and inhospitable parts of the country.
Oh I would be interested to hear more about your journey! xo
I can DM? It would be a lot to put in the comments
The bomb is already going off. You just don't see it quite yet in your area. As someone who would be homeless if it wasn't for the help of certain people right now, I can tell you that things are getting UGLY up near me.
Suicide rates are climbing. Prostitution as a last resort (rather than a chosen career) is climbing. Theft? Oh god. My friend had his car's catalytic converter stolen. Gang affiliation is spiking. I saw a noticeable climb in heroin and crack addiction as of late, as well as people who just go buy fentanyl with the sole purpose of killing themselves.
In fact, up near my old apartment, literally down the street? A family annihilation. Money and impending homelessness was a cause.
That’s horrifying. And you’re probably right that it’s all coming everywhere sooner or later.
I should really write about this from the perspective of someone watching it.
Check out Linda Carol’s piece on Medium I published in Minds Without Borders —it’s at No. 1 today. It’s about poor and homeless boomers. The more we write about this, the better. I feel like I’ll be providing housing to older writers someday (as long as they’re willing to live in central Illinois.)
Not probably. Definitely, absolutely a present tense thing and it has been since I graduated from high school in 1998.
Oh god yes, I live in Central Texas in an upper middle class neighborhood and someone was murdered in their driveway a while back, so close I could hear the gunshots. Property crime is nuts! Feel like I live in The Twilight Zone!!
Oh yea, they caught someone stealing their Catalytic converter, so they paid with their life!
That's nauseating. I live in Central Texas, too, and I don't remember hearing about this. That's probably because I'm a HIFI (high income financially insecure - due to being highly technically skilled, but through alternative routes, and autistic enough to have been subjected to the usual neurodivergent intolerance and discrimination - in every job I've ever had) and I've spent half of my adult life unhoused as a consequence of ableist economic exclusion.
(Just fyi, though, murder is not a property crime, lol.)
Correct , I realized that right after I posted it. What I meant to say is violent crime and Property crimes are both up. A couple of years ago my wife read a book by an autistic author and repeatedly stopped and told me that I do some of the things that the book describes. Not news to me but I’ve kept it to myself, I guess I’m good at masking.
Crime is down overall, even if f up in some places.
Nobody is good at masking, lol. Pardon me pointing it out but from what I can see, you're a white dude, therefore you get maximum latitude. Like Sheldon from Big Bang.
When I was 13, in 1994, I was the subject of a case study that proved that girls can be autistic. Back In those days, it was commonly believed that only boys were autistic. In reality, society's tolerance for neurodivergent behavior fron girls is essentially nonexistent, and girls learn to mask differently, etc. and that's how autism in girls was simply overlooked for forty or fifty years after it was first formally identified.
You speak truth. What people fail to realize, or overlook, is that dude (me) is really good at what he does but he can be freakishly focused on ONE thing for way way longer than most people.
Where do you live?
Bergen County. We had a drive-by shooting at our last apartment, a luxury venue. We left and are now staying in an undisclosed area.
Gibney speaks to your point about having supports pulled out by the more powerful and moneyed .
I wonder who these folks think are going to do all the work we do when we are too broken to do it.
The fastest growing demographic the homeless are folks over 65. Quite something ‘eh?
That's why they want to make sure women end up pregnant as often as possible. They don't care about education, they don't care about the health of children, they just need widgets for the widget factory. We're not people to them.
Where are the widgets going to live though?
They don't care, if we wanted housing then we'd be born wealthy enough to not work for them. Seems like it should bite them in the ass but it hasn't yet because they've us divided against each other
Psychological warfare roadmap right there. And, it's working.
It sure is and I don't know how we can work to correct this. There are SO many people who benefit from at least one of the cultural wars that they are using to keep the working class and middle class (which I think is really more of an education based division than it is truly an income difference these days. There is barely a middle class. My personal separation line is "Do you listen to the stock exchange information on television or NPR?" If you do, you're probably wealthy. I realize this test is flawed but it's accurate enough to be pretty useful to me.
But bigots, grifters, private equity, zealots and more than I can possibly list benefit from dividing us into as many smaller groups as possible and blaming "the other" for the things the passive income class does.
It's been a brilliant strategy in their minds to stay on top of, and safely away from, the unwashed and unimportant minions below them. But, it has allowed the apple to rot out inside from the bottom up, like the distribution of wealth here in this meat grinder capitalist deal. Soon the shiny apple skin that hides the rot below collapses down, at which time we eat them, like the song says. Out of the palace, and into the ditch!
Yes it’s all unsustainable and so inhumane. Private equity buying up homes has made it astronomically worse. There is no decency. I’m Gen X and as much as I worry about my own situation as I age I am most concerned about what is happening to Millennials and Gen Z
I only wish I'd had the foresight to buy in the 90s when it would have been doable! It wasn't a priority then, and by the time I wanted to, it was way too late. This Gen Xer will be paying rent until I die. 😥
Homelessness in the 30's. Riding the rails and "The Grapes of Wrath"?
But you're right. Our generation is blessed where steady work, marriage/kids, and homeownership were standard
I'm in my mid-fifties and sadly, I own nothing. back 2010, my wife and I were buying a house, when I lost my job and had to move in order to find another. Since then, we haven't been able to get the financing to buy another. You have to take out loans for houses, for cars, and for education. Kids today will never stand a chance. I was lucky enough to have a grandmother that believed in me and helped me pay my student loans, and I paid her back and on time.
If I could just ahead of things, I'd be okay, but every time I get a nest egg started, a car breaks, the water heater breaks, or the A/C.
Between all the crap, kids today will be broke and dependent on government for shit.
Thank you for seeing how lucky you were rather than assuming you somehow worked harder than folks younger than you! I'm on the border of Gen X and millennials and I had sisters to each side. My 1971 model sister just doesn't get it, but she doesn't want to. My younger sister totally gets it. As the family black sheep I actually didn't "settle down" until after my younger sister. (As the family black sheep I also didn't get any of the useful parental co-signing or loans) I feel incredibly fortunate and extremely lucky to have married someone who DID have access to these things, because it means we have a reasonable mortgage. We still almost lost our house during the pandemic, and again my in-laws saved us. It shouldn't be this way, I don't understand why more people regardless of how lucky they were to be born in a time where they earned pensions, or be born into a family with more wealth (because more privilege allowed them to do so) can't take a quick look at the housing prices versus wages and the costs of living and not see how profoundly broken this system has become. Yet it's relatively rare, so I salute you. ❤️
Oh, it's EASY for me to see because that's pretty much the only financially lucky thing I have going on. I've never made anything like the median income, and that's with a college degree. We eat beans and rice, hang up all our laundry and do absolutely everything possible for ourselves rather than hire anything done. Our cars are ancient. You get the idea. But I'll have housing, and I'm very grateful for that.
Yes, my parents both worked in local television news and neither had degrees but they have pensions. They switched to 401Ks about the time I was 17-18 and most of the jobs require degrees now. But the salaries are probably pretty close to the same. My husband got a degree in journalism and ended up at a newspaper. He never made as much as either of my parents and obviously that job is gone. I've always got a room in the house half deconstructed and I'm trying my hardest to DIY a fence, lol because we're never going to be able to afford one. And I'm fine with it but I'd like to be able to leave the state I'm in and I know it's just not going to be possible. His job has free tuition for our 13 year old and we can't walk away from that even if we could afford (which we can't) to move by selling the house. We'd never be able to get another one.
I agree very strongly with 2/3d or more of this article (most importantly - cause of homelessness) but quibble with the ease of the proposed solution. I’m in California and believe ardently that housing scarcity is the No. 1 issue in the state - if we could only fix it we’d be practically perfect (in my view.) But I don’t believe that “we simply don’t want to.” It’s genuinely difficult to steer that large ship - zoning is a huge contributor, and is being fixed slowly and painfully, but also building anything here is absurdly expensive and it’s genuinely difficult to figure out why. My area has been dumping millions and billions into affordable housing and it doesn’t make a dent - it’s just not enough. I don’t particularly object to banning investors from collecting housing but the evidence this does much to the price was weak last time I saw it. And I’ve seen some arguments that tax breaks to encourage homeownership actually contributes to high prices.
In California, there are only developers who bribe the local governments (City Councils) with their "affordable" housing scams. Tiny percentage goes to a slightly lower than astronomical rent. Affordable housing is very easy to build. The United States just doesn't want to do it. Also, equity groups snap up the middle class houses and rent them out, but no maintenance. I lived in one during COVID in Orlando. Beautiful home in a lovely neighborhood where everyone owned except us. American Homes for Rent out of Nevada. What scam artists. It’s the American way. I am grateful for my dual citizenship with Canada.
We essentially agree -- but my point is that we COULD change zoning and the other things you mention. I do not live in California but apparently there are extra hoops to jump through that do not exist everywhere. Some hoops need to be there but others could likely be eliminated -- if political will exists. However, if you already own a lot of property there, it's probably not in your best interests to lower barriers. You would know better than me about specifics in California. I live in Cheaphousinglandia. :)
We could be using 3D printing for really good quality homes right this minute but we don't want to. The NIMBY effect is really powerful. The people who own homes in nice places absolutely do not want affordable housing near them. They don't!
I am always reading about various deregulation that will "free up the market, and make blah blah blah easier and then the regulation is gone permanently and whatever problem they were supposed to solve is not solved but made more complicated. Someone makes money but nothing else changes. I'm not talking about housing specifically they've tried this type of argument on so many things. California does have more barriers than needed. The problem is that I don't trust the people who will benefit from deregulation regardless of whether they help the unhoused to be honest about what regulations need to be changed.
All so true. I read a couple of weeks ago that the numbers of accounted for homeless people is now over 650,000 now and growing larger every month. And all the government wants to do is keep them off the streets and out of sight. That amount is about 25% larger than our current military strength now. What happens when they become over a million strong? A march on Washington? I can just see the D.C. cops and local national guard try to control a crown that large. They couldn't control the few hundreds that raided the capital building on January 6th.
They didn't want to control the crowd on January 6 (I'm saying there should have been more security in place, not that the officers didn't try to prevent it because some did). I'm pretty sure if a mass of the unhoused attempted to organize a peaceful march but was that size they'd be met with the brutality we see every time people speak out against actual injustice. It boggles my mind they let those people break into the Capitol and then walk back to their hotels, sleep it off and go back to their home states.
It was all about who was in charge and your right, the recent college campus brutality against students peacefully exercising their first amendment rights is an example of what would happen on a huge scale if such a protest were to be organized. The land of the free is a fallacy and now, just media propaganda for enticing rich foreigners to immigrate or invest in the U.S. Which is also failing on a massive scale. Corporations are leaving, people are leaving and investors are taking their money elsewhere. The United States is fading away into a second tier country and the rich, elitist politicians are fighting this tooth and nail. I am afraid for our future right now.
It's really hard not to be, that's for sure.
There is a superb documentary titled, “Park Avenue Money, Power and the American Dream by Alex Gibney.
👏👏👏 thank you!
Those early home prices you're listing blow me away. As a young Gen Xer I guess... I'm new to my 50s. My first house in 2001 was 'cheap' for the area, but still $120k in Colorado. My second house, a decade later, was $100k more, and somehow it's worth more than 3x that purchase price 14 years after we bought it.
This does all hit very hard, though. I have a 17 and 19-year-old and I have no idea how they will ever be able to retire or buy a house. I am somehow a millionaire on paper (because of ridiculous housing markets) but can't do anything to really ease their burden.
I don't really like to imagine the future for my children, it scares me and makes me sad.
We are eating our young in this country. I don't think you're alone in worrying about your kids -- my daughter has what you might call a starter house and it cost more than my fourth house! She and her partner want to purchase a house and the amount they plan to spend is enough to give me heart palpitations. They aren't wealthy, but will have to pay rich-person prices anyway because that's just what houses cost now. How can everything necessary to life now cost more than ordinary people can afford?
Also, one option would be to sell your appreciated house and move to someplace like central Illinois and buy a house for like $1K or so. Your kids could do the same. Not a perfect plan, but a possibility.
Or move to west Texas and buy an acreage where you can build whatever suits you - literally. Zoning shmoning. County building permit is a single page - one sided. We pay $137 a month for 20 acres an hour east of El Paso. Property taxes are $300 a year.
We could fit 1264 tiny houses on 20 acres (I did the math.) The soil composition is correct for on-site adobe.
Bonus combo: it would only take a couple hundred people doing this in the right locations to flip rural and remote Texas gerrymandering districts blue.
Yes! The home ownership is so dear to me. Every king needs a castle and every queen a moat, to keep zealous company to a finite level.
Love what you wrote and your smart and lucky trajectory. Your thinking and points are all valid, but respectfully a bit too narrow or only exposing some parts of the puzzle.
So all is not as bleak as you are projecting IF people —young, middle age, and older— think not only “outside of the box”, but also look to the past, combine the two, and then “go beyond”.
Young, middle-aged and older will be fine and “homeowners “ if they are not wedded to only the idea of “starting small and moving up to “large single family homes or condos to own” AND most crucially, if governments and people and developers cooperate and think beyond racist exclusionary housing as they have been doing formally since 1925.
(I won’t bore right now, but that’s the year a racist a US Supreme Court got involved in racist exclusionary zoning— and including the racist “redlining” period sponsored by the US Government and banks.)
I know about this all as a lawyer and author of a chapter about “Cluster Housing and “Planned Unit Developments” in 1978 as
part of a law school class project and as one one that came from —among other things, a “very wealthy developer and commercial land investment family”— and as one that whether with my family or on my own has been “up and down over and over, has been through the gamut of “middle-class /genteelly poor to very wealthy.”
In short, the affordable and acceptable housing problem not just an economic problem but also a sociological “Us vs. them” /NIMBY problem.
I’ll not only explain a bit here, but these subjects /concepts will be some I’ve been exploring conceptually* for 70+ years and will be further writing about in my Substack I’ve been preparing behind the scenes.
* As a child that was moved VERY often by parents, as a teenager that lived in France for 3 months while going to school /touring, as a college student, as a renter, and now homeowner from 1978-present of a variety of homes, I have lived in, rented and owned, and been exposed to “the gamut” of housing. I can personally compare the pro’s and con’s among all.
I have had the luck to be able to experience and compare also a variety of lifestyles in all of that time through all of those different types of housing so my thinking has been shaped by direct exposure.
I have also personally lived in or exposed to —whether as part of a family or on my own—everything from small rental apartments, to boarding houses in 2 countries, to town houses, to basements, to “retirement housing” to “starter homes”, to luxury small villas, to giant (5,600 square feet 1969-1997 where my neighbors were “Ray and Joan Kroc of McDonald’s fame whom I had known since 1959**) to my current 2,700+ square foot home.
**I was exposed to and lived like the 1% “through Mr. Kroc and my parents, including a step-father, who had been realtors for McDonalds and ultimately early franchisees in 3 states and my Dad and his family that had been “retailers and clothing factory owners and developers in 3 states owning department stores and as many as 90 womens’ clothing franchises to my in-laws that were small very successful retailers in 2 states, to my own 13 years as an Assistant County Attorney for Miami-Dade County and other commercial and residential real estate developer experience and before that as a law clerk to two law firms representing developers, bank, governments for bond counseling, zoning, high-end divorces, I learned and further learned about planning, zoning, politics, economics, profit, and lobbying.
[And since 2010 I have been intensively studying the “tiny house” —and every now and then—the “co-housing” movements.]
In short and again, the problems you raised are not just economic, but sociological and even involve, of course, personal “snobbism, classicism, keeping up with the Jones, of course, personal self-images and “striving”, and even if not overtly racist or racist*** at all, “I want to live with my own kind for comfort and acceptance”.
*** “Classism” and even “religious racism, including in and out of the same religions, such as “orthodox v. reform” Jews are also issues as have been the “urban v. rural v. suburban” involved, as are such issues as “traffic”, commuting, mass transportation, child care and consumer and retail shopping and services, religious institutions and medical care, schooling from home to public to private to “distance learning”, to politics to “lifestyle”.
And I further saw the economic residential ups and downs of the uber-wealthy, including of local and international celebrities you’ve heard about or haven’t by way of the private but international religious and political boarding school I went to for 1 year, and the local private day school and international boarding school my kids went to. (And I learned about yet other residential life styles from my Dad, a “boat kid” from Pennsylvania to Miami Beach during the Depression.)
So I will close here for now, but if the issues you raise are coupled with the issues other commenters and I raise are explored comprehensively, politically (through activism, lobbying, legislation, “thinking ahead and outside the box”, proper zoning and planning involving ALL “stakeholders”, etc.), the problems you raise CAN be solved, but there is no one easy solution.
And because human beings and thus “life and
“s…t”, Acts of God”, greed & capitalism, and local, national and global politics happen”, above all, “patience” **** is needed at the same time as “deliberate urgency”, and “all deliberate speed” [from ‘Brown v. Bd. of Education’] as well as people skills, legal and even “warfare strategies & tactics” are also needed.
(****For example, it took my family and I twenty years and an “FBI /Mafia-like chart exploring relationships among people, including ‘Wayne Huizenga’ of Blockbuster, Waste Management, Dolphins fame, to sell 1 piece of commercial land between 1985 and 2005. The land could have been commercial or residential or both.)
And between my now deceased husband and his first wife in 1969 and I jn 2024 it’s been all of that time watching cows and tumbleweeds on our New Mexico land zoned for both commercial and affordable multi-family in a situation that famously started out as the bait in a land fraud scheme written about in the NYT in the ‘70’s.
[Look up “Horizon Corporation”. There’s still no municipal services, “Tiny Houses” may be an answer. Also look up “Rio Communities”. My kids will likely get the land and maybe can live “off grid” and VERY cheaply.]
Signing off for now: let’s all “talk” again and try to be part of the solution. At 72, I think /hope I have a few more years to study and work at it. I also need to anyway: Miami and a large home are way too expensive!
Interesting. Mi esposo and I are already doing this. We have a total of 40 acres less than an hour from a major city. I'd rather not deep dive it in the comments but the short and skinny is - if you know what to look for, it's not nearly as hard as you'd expect.
To purchase 40 acres is something few people can do while they’re still young enough to develop the land themselves. I always dreamed that but it was unrealistic. I could do it now, possibly, if I sold everything I own, but I don’t see myself planting orchards and building a straw bale house now.
Incidentally, my point here is two-fold: that yes, it *is* possible, still, to obtain land - even vast acreages - for almost comically small amounts of money, but in order to do so and also to execute on owning that land (just getting out to your property may require hiring a guide - it did for us) you need to be both physically capable of and mentally prepared to become a fucking pioneer. Literally.
If there is any other actually viable path forward, in twenty years of searching, I haven't found it.
My first 20 acres costs me $137 a month and $300 a year in property taxes. My second 20 acres costs $280 a month and I don't yet know what the property taxes will be. Probably around the same as the first. Two different companies, in-house financing, $200 down on the first piece. $1500 down on the second.
And mi esposo and I are young enough to develop the land ourselves. (The soil composition is well suited to on-site adobe.)
It's hardly unrealistic. Where there's a will, there's a way. What is actually necessary is a willingness to go somewhere unpopular - because all the places that are any kind of popular are either teeming with people already, or priced like a timeshare on the moon. Most people aren't prepared to consider these kinds of places, is what eliminates it as a solution for most people.