Few milestones in life mean as much to the American Dream as owning a home. And millennials have encountered the kind of trouble totally befitting their generation, which largely graduated into the teeth of the disastrous post-2008 job market. Just as they entered peak homebuying and household formation age, housing affordability is at 40-year lows, and mortgage rates are near 40-year highs.
The anxiety this generation feels about the prospect of never owning their own home affects their entire perception of their finances and the economy, says Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi.
“If they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives,” Zandi says.
Millennials have long been dogged by a brutal housing market. They faced not one, but two, cataclysmic economic events—the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020. Both of which left them reeling financially and struggling to afford a home. The Great Recession decimated the real estate market as the economy nearly collapsed under the weight of tenuous mortgage backed securities. While the pandemic brought with it a remote work boom that caused millions of citydwellers to flee to the suburbs, sending housing prices soaring.
This is a deeply reductive way to interpret what I said, and explains why your response was the way it is.
This is why I assume people don’t understand what I write, because when people respond so intensely to what I consider lukewarm takes, and I ask them to try and re-iterate what they think I meant, it’s usually an extremely reductive off base strawman.
I don’t think it’s on purpose, I just think tone and context are very difficulty to convey over text, and people will assume and interpret what a person writes as the worst possible take when they already disagree with them on something.
Not anything new, that’s just how these chats tend to go, people fucking loathe anything that challenges their view and then interpret all follow up statements in the most reductive and off base way possible, to avoid confronting the possibility that the very first thing they got challenged by might possibly be right.
Blowback effect.
It’s why Trump supporters, even when faced with insurmountable evidence they’ve hitched their horse to an out if control train wreck, will dug their heels in even further and demonize “the other side” despite the person they are following behind us literally quoting Hitler.
Because confronting the fact they truly were wrong, and were indoctrinated into a cult and fell for a massive amount of propaganda, means admitting they were foolish even when objective evidence is in front of them.
It’s no different from people who truly believe the housing crisis is as bad as they think. It’s like 90% propaganda built on top of misinterpreting/misrepresenting data… or just outright lying. It’s got a foundation of using mathematical numbers explicitly to fool someone without a keen eye. Using stuff like the average price of housing as a baseline and etc.
People would rather keep staying hitched to an objectively false pile of lies and you can clearly see here how absolutely filled with vitriol the blowback kicks in when someone points out objective truths.
That’s how intensely people will fight tooth nail and claw to avoid the possibility they were wrong. The fact the people fighting against me are insulting me, meming, trolling, etc should instantly be a red flag for which side is experiencing the blowback effect.
Let me also be clear here, my antagonistic stance and harsh demeanor are not directed directly at the people in this thread.
It’s with respect towards the assholes that are perpetuating it to profit off people’s ease in bring fooled
I’m not mad at you or really anyone here. I’m mad at the propaganda engine churning out disinformation at a profit and this thread is a testament to how fucking well oiled that engine is.
People, in here, are literally rehashing the premise if “how do I afford a home when my areas average/median price is x”
At this point that premise has basically become the “humans only use 10% of our brains” of realty in my eyes. Its an easy to swallow lie, it’s built on bullshit, and everyone spreads it like wildfire because it makes them feel better about themselves.
Honey, baby, sweetie pie. You have been playing judge and jury to people’s individual circumstances in a very condescending way this entire time. Heaven forbid someone got a degree they can’t use. Not everyone wants to buy obscure property in the middle of the country. Fucking hell, personally I would wither and die in a suburb if the queerphobes didn’t try and drive me to suicide first.
Some people want or need to live in a city and some of us aren’t in the US. People know their own circumstances and values. There’s not a lot of room to recover from mistakes at present but telling people that they earned their trouble is at best antisocial. If there isn’t a raft of decent options outside a very narrow subset of okay - that’s a housing crisis. When the eock bottom rent in a suburb one hour and a half outside of city and beyond transit for a one bedroom basement suite is $1400 and your area’s minimum wage is $15 for jobs that 20 years ago were careers… That’s indicative that you have priced out a decent chunk of the population. There are many times the number of people living rough in tents by highways then I ever saw 5 years ago and quite frankly when you’re poor it’s way easier to be poor in a city.
The people you’ve talked to have researched inside their own means, values and life goals and you keep trying to tell them it’s fine using nothing but your own narrow anecdotal and judgemental rubric of "nope housing is great actually because you just didn’t MATH. "
Congratulations! You don’t have a problem which means you fit perfectly inside the narrow slot of comfortable circumstance that currently exists for owning a home! That absolutely doesn’t mean housing precarity isn’t a massive problem it’s just it isn’t YOUR problem.
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It is true… But sometimes it’s fun to take the village idiot out for a spin.