That’s what’s gonna happen here in America. IF and I mean IF your family was lucky enough to have a single home in the family everyone’s going to be living at it. Many aren’t even close to lucky though…I wonder how many more will die on the streets in the coming years.
Man I’m glad I was born and raised in a working class town now. Prospects looked pretty dire here when I was a kid. Local industry fell flat in the 1990s and into the 2000s so tonnes of my fellow millennials left to go to uni and get jobs in cities. That kept the cost of living here low and I was able to buy my first house at 22.
Now those deserters are saddled with student debt and unaffordable rents with no prospect of ever buying their own home. Recently the local industry started taking off again in a big way. I’m already making a pretty good wage but I’m also in track to have a Masters Degree and a high paid job after 3 years with a house that should have its value skyrocket over the next decade.
I’m glad my partner and I bought our house when we did. Got it for fairly cheap about 5 years ago and have had a lot of work done to it. Mortgage is affordable and I reckon we’ve easily put 200k+ on to the value of it. Issue is no fucker will be able to afford to buy it.
We have the ability to feed everyone in the world, but we don’t. We could house everyone, but we don’t. We could heal everyone, and we don’t.
Capitalism was great for raising a huge portion of humanity out of poverty. It has its limits however, and we are reaching them. It’s time to find a new way of doing things, not for profit, but because those things need to be done.
I really enjoy that West is crumbling. You guys did dun dirty to us Iranians in the past 10 years, pressuring our economy and crippling it. Now you are experiencing a literal ‘Karma, Bitch!’.
It’s not far-fetched that, once Iran manages to have America fuck off the middle east, it will become the next superpower (for the 5th time over the past 2 millennia I believe and don’t say ‘Persia is not Iran’, you will show how uneducated you are, because Persia is a province in Southern Iran, it’s a Netherlands/Holland situation) and I hope I am alive to see the fall of West. Because you Westerners have been nasty to me, insulted me, been racist against me, etc. You deserve nothing but a nice fall from grace.
Let’s raise our cups to the fall of ‘jorsumeh’ that is the West.
I’m disabled and can’t work in my early 30s now. The numbers for disability benefits haven’t been adjusted for inflation since world war 2. Obviously I can’t afford to live anywhere else.
We’re a crumbling empire, we have an exploding homeless population and the billionaires like it that way. There’s laws in many places here in the US where you can’t use any kind of force to remove homeless people from your private property, if you call the cops in those places, they don’t do anything about it.
Part of the problem is that the billionaires want us all to be terrified of each other and to hate our neighbors so that we beg for authoritarianism…even worse than the authoritarianism we have now.
You can’t remove squatters or trespassers, but god forbid if you light up a joint, they’ll throw you in prison for that.
I’m doing some research into how this is connected to the fiat economy and finance capital. If anyone has suggestions of what to look at or search for, I’d appreciate it.
Second-order dynamics in financialised capital, or the fact financialisation of capital is essentially mimicking the infinite paperclip problem. Runaway infinities are a predictable output of the system.
Agree. I am that 30 y o still living at home. Work full time, 2 jobs and STILL cannot afford a rent without it decimating me to the ground. Its nothing to do with my budget: i get close to 3k/mo yet if i try to rent some place, i will pretty much have only about 400/500 left a month…. In a european capital. What is the point of renting in these conditions? And yes i know rationally its possible with my salary but i choose its more fruitful to help parent and be able to save rather than live ln the verge every month without being able to do much.
I am in my late 30s and was only just able to buy this month. It’s the cheapest place I could find in my city, and the mortgage repayment will clean me and my SO out to the point where we can’t afford to run a car. We’re both in full time employment with an MSc.
Yeah, Norway. House prices are not exclusively an American problem. Also the price of everything is going up especially food. If all goes according to plan I should be able to pay off the apartment shortly before I die.
Why not just find a nice apartment? I’m not trying to be a jerk here or anything, but if owning a home puts you out that much, why not just keep renting?
*Oh sick, down voted for adding discussion, awesome. This place really is better than reddit!!
A lot of people feel rent is throwing away money. However, interest on a loan will cost a lot too so it’s not super straight forward
It honestly is pretty straightforward, from my perspective. With a fixed-rate mortgage, yes, there’s front loading of interest but the down payment and the portion of payments that goes into the principal is yours. If the you sell, that portion never goes away, as long as the value at least maintains. And, the payments do not change. You can even take further loans out of it, once you pay in enough (ex - replace a garage door).
When renting, none of the payment is yours once it leaves your hands. You’re also at the mercy of the landlord’s rules and whims when it comes to rent increases. End up disabled or retired on a fixed income? You’re boned the moment that the landlord decides that they can make more than you can afford to pay. Basically means that you’ll never be able to enjoy your later years to their fullest.
And that’s purely financial. Not even getting into the messed up limitations on one’s agency. It’s really messed up that the ability to buy a home has been stolen from so many of us.
Nothing has given me more ire towards renting than the removal of agency and lack of options. I need permission to do my laundry? I have to request someone fill a card value and the minimum is $15!? Oh and a single load of laundry is $5??
Ooor I could drive 15 minutes away and sit in the closest laundromat for 2 hrs for $6 (plus gas, time, etc.)
This sounds highly specific and not indicative of most people’s renting experience lol I’ve never heard of anything like that in my life. Ive been renting since 08
It’s more expensive and less stable. So fuck that.
Edit: there are no nice rentals here. Tourism is booming, and anyone with half a brain puts their house on Airbnb. What’s left is small and barely habitable for the same price as a mortgage.
Because retiring when you don’t own a home is difficult. Not only is rent a lot more than property taxes, but it tends to go up unpredictably.
So for most people, buying a home of some kind is a given. Doing so sooner means saving more money, both because rent is generally more than property tax and because loan payments build equity, which is still fundamentally yours.
The issue is not if some people stay home with their parents. The issue is when it becomes wide spread over the population. What we’re seeing with the housing market and more people with the financial necessity to live with their parents is a form of generational control. Conservatives want younger generations more dependent on their parents for housing so their parents have a say over those younger generations longer.
If a person’s parents control whether or not that person has a roof over their head, then that person is less likely to engage in political behaviors, life style choices, or life saving medical treatments like HRT, that could upset their parents. This could depend on the politics of a person’s parents, but the the trend is for younger generations to be more progressive than older generations.
Sure but it is still a cultural think. OOP speak about the West having housing issue but the West is also the cultural space where being housed by your parent is a form of unhealthy dependence, while in many places in the world, staying home with your parent is wide spread over the population whether the housing market is safe or not.
the West is also the cultural space where being housed by your parent is a form of unhealthy dependence
I think it was common for previous generations to believe that, but I do not believe that is the case for millennials and gen z. The issue is that our society has systems of oppression that remove a person’s choice about where they get to live. It’s not an accident that the housing market is this way.
I am that educated couple. Wife has an associates and was just able to find a small job. I have associates, BS, and MA and can’t even get a fucking interview because I don’t have the absolutely insane list of qualifications on my resume that these companies are demanding for a half-decent paying job. I did everything I was supposed to and they still won’t fucking pay me.
Unfortunately, much of that wealth was stolen from the global south via colonization. Redistribution of ownership must be done at a global, international level.
Not just their land, but their ideas of “freedom”, “equality”, and “democracy”. Europeans didn’t even know those words until the French Missionaries in the late 1600’s were met with the Indigenous Critique, and how Indigenous Americans had equal rights for men and women, were free to disobey arbitrary authority, had a conglomerate of states that conveined in a “federal” central committee, and could impeach their rulers. Of course, so-called “Enlightenment” philosophers who were just rich trust-fund babies stole that idea to create America and call themselves “Enlightened Thinkers” as if they came up with it themselves, while simultaneously degrading the Indigenous Critique by calling them “savages” who were “less advanced” than Europeans based on evidence they dreamed up while staring at a fireplace (I’m look at you Rousseu and Hobbes), stealing Indigenous politics as their own, and thanking them with ethnic cleansing.
As a European I agree. The amount of shit we, on our high white horses, caused across the globe is astonishing. It would be interesting to see what the world would have looked like today had there never been any colonization.
It’s the whole “they’re gonna hunt me for sport?!” Meme, I think. They imagine that if we share ownership equitably globally, they will suddenly have to go to eating rats and dying in the streets, when realistically it will just mean a heavier emphasis on industrialization and international public transit, with more equitable distribution of wealth.
For anyone confused: no, I’m not advocating for people taking your gaming PC.
This decline is a necessary aspect of Capitalism. Competition, for all it helps initially with forcing prices lower, ultimately comes at the cost of increased exploitation of the Working Class. As all value comes from labor, there is only so much you can immediately automate away to lower cost of production before you must further exploit your labor force to remain competitive.
Socialist markets, ie ones controlled by Worker Co-operatives, still face these issues, but delay them due to being of and for the workers themselves.
Only a non-market form of Socialism, such as Anarchism or Communism, can actually permanently solve these issues. Markets are a useful tool during Capitalism, but just as feudalism gave way to Capitalism, so too will Capitalism give way to a more equitable distribution of control.
I’m not positive that the world is going to be a comfortable place to live in at all in the next 40-80 years. I can’t be sure it’s morally acceptable to bring a new life into the world just to struggle until death. I know if I were given the choice I would have rather just not have been, it’s not worth struggling forever just to barely get by until the game changes yet again and you get knocked back down to the peg you started on.
I can’t be sure it’s morally acceptable to bring a new life into the world just to struggle until death.
That has been true for just about everyone throughout history.
the game changes yet again and you get knocked back down to the peg you started on.
People in the developed world not having kids is part of how they ‘win’ the game.
The reason boomers were able to demand so much is because, as the name implies, they’re a big fucking cohort. They were politically influential from the time they could vote. Keeping birthrates depressed and shipping in cheap foreign labour is how those with power keep everyone else powerless.
It’s a weird situation, but the way to improve living standards for future generations is to… have future generations. Even if you don’t feel like you can entirely support them now.
You’ll bring the “Population Bomb” doomers out, proving failed predictions never have consequences for the predictors since they can always say it will happen next year- since 1798
meanwhile 1000 and 1 Stinkpieces are being written about population decline, blaming young generations for not getting busy while job and housing prospects go down the shitter.
I don’t really agree, because I consider labor or opportunity based immigration a symptom of continued economic injustice in the global south. Modern societies, among many other things, need to acknowledge the reality that the planet has a material limit on the population it can support.
This is why it’s critically important for millenials who want a family to buy homes. Good ones. Big ones with land. It’s going to end up a generational home. You’re gonna need room for additions.
Are you aware of the general difficulties faced by the Millennial generation with buying housing? Because it sounds like you’re not. Millennials aren’t not buying homes because of a preference as much as a lack of option.
Whole thing reeks of setting us up for failure. Insecure housing means no/less kids, and that has huge rippling effects 30 m-50 years from now when millenials are too old and infirm to work and there’s not enough people to replace us in the workforce.
And then our boomer parents, who somehow despite all our best efforts are still alive, will be blaming us for it.
Shit man I ain’t got no money I was just lucky enough to buy a house before they got stupid expensive. My zillenial brethren have my sympathies, I get that it sucks. But what sucks more is that it’s going to suck more later. The longer you wait to suck it up, the more it’s gonna suck.
uh if you want to live remotely close to where the jobs are, its gonna be a tiny shitty appartement in exchange for life long debt. not a house, most definitely not a desireable one. thats with two median incomes lol.
those who can buy houses do so thanks to family or have exceptional income or both. mostly both
Many other countries have multi generational homes that aren’t huge or massive. This is a very American centric mindset of needing a giant home for more people.
Also, millennials definitely can not afford what you described
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