> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...), while the rates are somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point the difference is at worst 10 percentage points.
This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
> This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
Home prices have doubled over the past 20 years, twice the rate of income increases
There's been 65% inflation over the past 20 years, so to properly compare housing prices you need to multiply the 20 years ago price by 1.65. A house that doubled in price in twenty years only increased by 20% in terms of actual purchasing power (2.0 / 1.65).
That’s the absolute percentage difference. Look at the under 35 category, it’s literally down 25%. That means 1/4 people that would have owned a house in that age group don’t now. Under 45 is a relative drop of ~17%, so about 1/5. One in four to one in five people is more than enough to see an effect.
I doubt it’s the only cause at all, this anti-social (“Bowling Alone”) trend has been going on for generations, and probably has multiple causes. But the US housing crunch on young people is adding to it.
And this damn attitude of “the younger generations are just entitled weenies” about housing is about the most infuriating attitude in the world. My parents bought their first house on a single earners blue collar salary at the age of 27. That house, with almost no updates, now literally needs a top 1% salary and payments for 30 years to be able to afford. Don’t tell the kids to stop whining when they’re watching older generations gobble up their future in the name of preserving property values.
That's for the whole country. This site is very heavily biased toward people who live in major cities, where real estate has in fact become the purview of only the rich.
Short version of the history:
Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you can't do anything."
These cities have always had an allure, especially creative centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.
This was followed by insane real estate hyperinflation in those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros, that happens.
The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated everywhere and not just in the US -- but it's far less insane than the top-tier cities.
People have a tendency to remember some time period when everything was carefree and you didn't have to worry about how much stuff cost and all this new, great stuff was happening. And then you find out they were 12 and the time where they think all that went downhill was when they were 20.
I've asked older people about this for this very reason, and they've generally agreed with me. There's always been an allure to big cities but it went into overdrive starting in the late 90s - early 2000s.
As for real estate prices, that's objective. You can easily look that up. RE prices went insane starting in the 2000s with the 2008 crash only being a brief pull-back in a long bull run. You can also clearly see the divergence with big top-tier cities appreciating at a much faster rate than smaller cities. You can see it in the numbers.
Look into the origin of early personal computers. They're from all over: Albuquerque (MITS), Dallas (TI, Tandy), Boston (DEC), Miami (IBM PC), Philadelphia (Commodore), Seattle (several), etc. In the early 2000s if we re-did the PC revolution it would all be from the SF Bay, because by then if you were doing anything cutting edge in computing it had to be in the Bay Area.
The general feeling of "things were better and looking more upward in the 90s" is pretty common across generations. 9/11 was kind of the 21st century's market crash of '29
> "We, alongside the mujahedeen, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden said.
> He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
> "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.
> As part of the "bleed-until-bankruptcy plan," bin Laden cited a British estimate that it cost al Qaeda about $500,000 to carry out the attacks of September 11, 2001, an amount that he said paled in comparison with the costs incurred by the United States.
> "Every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs," he said. "As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
> "It is true that this shows that al Qaeda has gained, but on the other hand it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something that anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced.
> "And it all shows that the real loser is you," he said. "It is the American people and their economy."
> As for President Bush's Iraq policy, Bin Laden said, "the darkness of black gold blurred his vision and insight, and he gave priority to private interests over the public interests of America.
> "So the war went ahead, the death toll rose, the American economy bled, and Bush became embroiled in the swamps of Iraq that threaten his future," bin Laden said.
It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.
I would hope so, otherwise that would mean the country/locale is so bad that older households are packing their bags and fleeing.
So the most desirable properties, such as large SFHs, townhouses, penthouses, etc… within a short driving distance of an attractive city will likely be owned by the latter, by definition.
It's not a matter of competition around current supply, it's a complaint about policy that has lead to a decline in what a 20-something can purchase over time.
The same managers - that then require asses in seats, keeping downtown valuable as investment, also own the mansion within driving distance. Might there be the remote possibility, of a no-win-scenario for the young, which results in violence? No way.
> It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.
Not to mention Private Equity and huge real estate investment firms that vacuum up a significant (if small) number of homes. Even if that 20 something could scrape together a 20% down payment and make an offer for asking price, they're going to get beaten by some corporation buying with cash.
If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...), while the rates are somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point the difference is at worst 10 percentage points.
This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.