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.
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.