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.
Missing the other big factor:
There’s a large quantity of influencers profiting off of doomsaying and convincing millennial they can’t afford homes with bad math and bogus statistics. They churn out clickbait content with unfounded claims, purposefully designed to rile up viewers and drive engagement.
This of course applies to many topics, housing affordability just being one, that turns out drive big engagement by spreading disinformation.
It’s actively profitable to lie on the internet nowadays, so lots of my fellow millennials have an extremely soured and warped perspective of reality, because if you keep getting told lies by enough different random strangers on the internet on a topic you aren’t familiar with, you’ll start to believe it.
Spreading disinformation, especially about serious topics like economics, medicine, politics, religion, etc, needs to be cracked down on more. Posing as a professional online and spreading damaging info on purpose should result in jail time imo.
I’m not seeing any lies there. I worked my ass off my entire career and still have to go back to school to get a little piece of paper that lets me do what I do in a clinical setting. I’ve got 2 degrees already, almost a decade of experience and I’m even decently-paid, but thanks to the cost of being alive I was forced into even more schooling to open up a few more doors in the long run. I’m feeling exactly like this article, I’ve given life everything I’ve got and the bar keeps getting higher and higher, its soul-crushing, I’m just so tired.
Something I’ve noticed about lemmy is that people here love their anecdotes. Something I miss about Reddit is that data seemed to be held in higher regard.
I don’t mean to single out your comment but this is also a reply to the one above yours.
https://www.investopedia.com/millennial-homeownership-still-lagging-behind-previous-generations-7510642
So maybe lots of articles get written about this because it’s a growing problem but also our personal experiences might not be indicative of a larger trend (although yours seems to be).
Huh? If you want to talk data, this is directly from your article:
Yes. I don’t disagree. The excerpt I quoted made that clear, I thought.
Oh, I read your comment as countering GingaNinga’s.
It would appear that you and a bunch of others didn’t really read it at all. That, or the reddit hate trumps the point I’m making.
The saying goes you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Seems, however, that both you and pixxelkick have oddly chosen vinegar.
I don’t think it’s their choice. I think they’re both idiots.
I didn’t even have that big of a problem with what pixxelkick said overall until they started in with the “maybe if you had better budgeting software, you’d have an extra $700 a month like we do” bullshit.
… but you catch the most (flies) with bullshit.
Other people’s reading comprehension issues aren’t my problem. They’re the ones who will find daily living difficult.
The funny thing is this thread started with a comment about how people can’t manage their money. Maybe reading problems are a part of the issue too.
People on the internet? Reading things before responding to them?
I dunno, seems tough lol
Do you understand what the implications of this figure mean for housing affordability though, cuz it’s not the indicator you may think it is.
Too many people think median/average/etc house price figure is meaningful for housing affordability, but it’s a mostly useless value for people buying their first home.
You’ll notice though most doomer “no one can afford houses” content build their entire info on average and median house prices.
The median or average house is a fucking mcmansion though, not your first home.
Once you realize that, the rest of the following info clicks into place as the entire premise is built on the assumption that you wanna buy a small mansion as your starter home, and suddenly its like “ya no shit that’s not affordable”
A median is a value at the midpoint of a frequency distribution, such that the probability of a value being above or below it is equal. A median value is going to be highly dependent on the area - cities with a boom in the building of luxury homes will have a higher median value that may not be indicative of the existence of more affordable housing but, in a larger market with an even vaguely normal distribution of home prices, it should be an indicator of a fairly average (in the non-statistical sense) home. But why take my word when we can test your hypothesis!
For example, the median home value in Portland, OR is $515K with a median household income of $78K, yielding a median home price to household income ratio of 6.60. So lets hop on realtor.com and look at the first three homes listed at that price, +/- 2%. Look at these McMansions!
$510K for 2500 square feet on 7000 sq.ft. lot built in 1910
$515K for 2,234 sqft on 6,098 sqft lot built in 1992
$525K for a 1542 sqft condo with admittedly nice views of the river
Such luxury! Oh wait, they’re just average homes. The largest home in that price range is 2,624 sqft. The smallest is this guy which, while nice, isn’t a McMansion. It’s a very nice but not luxurious 1200 sqft apartment.
Maybe Portland is a shitty example? How about Gillette, WY? Gillette has a median home value of $390K and a median household income of $72k, yielding a median home value to household income ratio of 5.42. Let’s see what’s in store!
$390K 2,880sqft 7,200sqft lot built in 2010
$410k 3,002sqft 6,199sqft lot built in 2011
$410k 3,944sqft 6,522sqft lot built in 1975.
The largest in that range is actually my third result, with the smallest coming in at 2706 square feet on 0.31 acres. Check that one out, it looks like they built two houses on top of each other. It’s weird looking!
Note: only the first house was close to the median. I had to bump the upper price limit to 5% above median to get more than two results.
You’ll get a lot more space for your dollar in Gillette, but a McMansion? They’re still lacking the ostentatiousness and cut rate luxury characteristic of the McMansion, so not really. Certainly not the best a man can get.
I love how they’ve done nothing but bitch about “no one showing facts” but they avoid the posts with citations like the plague because they already got theirs and want the poors to shut up.
Oh yeah, I suspect they just want their biases confirmed. Anyone who shows evidence that the premises upon which their biases are based are flawed gets ignored. It seems those that scream “it’s just facts and math, you can’t argue with math” the loudest tend to have arguments largely based in neither.
I’m not shaving just because your wordplay was ingenious. Thanks for the housing info though.
Comparing median house price to median income is an instant “doesn’t know how housing economy works” flag.
Those properties are all a fair bit on the large side as well, and are in extremely good quality.
The first link is a smaller home but on a large property and literally dead center of Portland on highly valuable land, so that’s an instant cherry pick.
The second is absolutely a mcmansion at 3000sqft, well over double the size of a starter home which usually ranges in the ~1500 range. Substantially more than anyone needs as a starter. It’s in the suburbs but a quick glance shows you basically everyone has RVs and boats parked on their properties. The house is incredibly good condition and looks newly fully renovated. Several tiers above a starter home by a large margin, it’s bizarre you thought thus house supported your argument. This is literally a textbook mcmansion.
The third is insane that you thought to even link it. Clocking in at nearly 3x the size of a starter home, double car garage, also newly renovated, and fairly close to the center of Gillette as well. This is less a mcmansion and just a huge bilevel. At what point did you seriously think that this house did anything other than support my statement, clocking in at that kind of Sq ft and with that location?
This is exactly as I wrote and you’ve done nothing but confirm, that the “median” house prices are many tiers above a starter home and only a fool thinks these are the houses first time home buyers will be saving up for.
Next time when you wanna try and find houses that aren’t affluent, maybe take the five seconds to notice the literal sailboats parked in people’s driveways? It’s a pretty big tell lol
I included median income because it’s interesting and at no point make or even vaguely suggested it has any significance. It’s funny how you just make shit up to counter points that aren’t being made.
I made this post to definitively test a theory: that you’re shockingly, blatantly intellectually dishonest, someone who doesn’t care about an honest conversation but who simply wants to be right at all costs, up to and including just lying. Like you did here, repeatedly.
My point was median valued homes aren’t McMansions, homes that are defined by their size, ostentation, and luxury, which are none of these homes. But you don’t care, you just want to be right, so you lie and use your own personal definition of a McMansion, which is apparently “big and/or nice house maybe with boat”, like watercraft ownership has any bearing on the type of home. I live in a 1300 square foot home and own a $95k 5th wheel. I guess I live in a McMansion too! You even move my goalposts for me by pretending my comment was about something it was not, that I was somehow claiming a median valued home was a “starter home”. It’s easy to refute evidence when you pretend the thesis is something that it’s not, but it makes you a liar.
So now we have, for all to see, clear evidence that talking with you is an absolute waste of time. Thank you for that. Easiest block I’ve made all year. Feel free to have the last word.
I think we all know this already. We’re poking the bear because it’s fun to watch him dive past points being made and scramble to fabricate data so he can ‘win’ every argument.
That’s a long response that somehow still manages to miss nearly every point previously made, plus has a hefty dallop of bullshit.
I’m forwarding your comment history to Drs. Dunning and Kruger in case they want to do a case study.
So… you paid for two degrees already and are going for a third, and you are having financial issues?
Do you have all three of your degrees fully paid for (all debt on the first two gone, and enough money for the third without having to take out a loan)?
Otherwise it sounds like you are bad with money. Taking out huge loans you can’t afford isn’t the path to affordability. It’s pretty rare that degrees are a good financial investment.
Degrees are mostly a passion investment. You need to already be well off enough to afford all the extra costs to get the degree, abd you are paying money to do a job you like after.
There’s tonnes of jobs that pay incredibly well that don’t require a degree at all.
Taking out a large loan to get a degree is a terrible financial choice.
If you just care about finances, go work a job that pays well and has a low barrier of entry that anyone with a pulse can get into.
If you want to do something you are really passionate about and it’s financial investment sucks, that’s the tax you simply pay to have a job you prefer.
The intersection of:
Is extremely rare. There’s a couple trades that aren’t too bad, but they usually pay well due to a low demand low supply situation.
Thanks for the judgment and assumptions, that really helped me out! I worked throughout my BSC, so yes that was paid for and a must-have starting point for my field, so no way around that. Then i did my Msc which comes with a stipend so I was able to come out of that with a debt that I paid off in 3 months. Right out the gate I was incredibly lucky and was hired at a top research institute and paid well since I was proficient in a relatively niche field. Things were ok then the pandemic blew everything up, my landlord sold my place from under me, rent is crazy high with few alternatives available, buying is out of the question, groceries and bills are insane… I get your point, I’m not exactly out to collect degrees like pokemon, I’m definitely done schooling after this and never again.
Ah, that changes things a lot, upgrading a degree is a bit different than getting another one, that makes more sense.
What’s stopping you from just moving somewhere better and applying your degree in a better market? Chances are there’s a big corporation somewhere that will hire you with your experience and masters degree, with an office in a better location that actually has an affordable cost of living.
Honestly thats not completely off the table, the upgrade will give me some freedom and a lot of options so I’ve been considering a move. Due to the nature of my program I have to be near a hospital, university or major research institute and the best opportunities are unfortunately in major cities, where things are expensive.
What field? There can be surprisingly financial options that are outside these scopes for industries that you typically associate with those.
Many private industries need to contract in specialists in fields for on site work. You end up away from home a month at a time often, but the pay can be very compelling.
Lol warped perspective? Millennials are the poorest working generation since the great depression. Millennials, the largest working generation ever in America only hold ~3% of the wealth. Our parents at the same age owned ~30%. So Ya shut up
Case in point, lol
What point exactly?
Don’t need a professional expert to acertain whether the market is sour. Where I am the cost of renting a one bedroom apartment is around $1800 a month plus utilities on the low end. Mind you I am in a city but is you drive an hour and a half away to the farthest “commutable” burbs you are still looking at rents that are $1400 for essentially a one bedroom basement suite.
There are a lot of people my age I know who are working proper professional jobs double income no kids situations who are never able to save up enough for the initial down payment for a house. Why would they when they face so much precarity? Whatever money they are able to sock aside for a rainy day might only cover a car repair or some time off work if they have a life altering event like a parent dying and paying down chunks of student loan.
They wouldn’t be able to handle paying for repairs and maintenance for an actual property while still paying high mortgage. Practically every early millenial I know who didn’t start making their nest egg through a job in trades right out of high school and instead spent time in the post secondary system getting a degree got bit.
So a suite halfway between the two for ~1100 probably exists 45 minutes away, which sounds completely workable and average.
That only sounds marginally worse than pre2020 when it was closer to ~1000.
That sounds pretty normal mate and not that unaffordable.
Are you familiar with the term “sold out”? Supply is not unlimited, and you shouldn’t spread a hypothetical like it’s a fact. That’s exactly the thing you complained about in your original post.
I’ve yet to see an example city I couldn’t find plenty of options, even Toronto of all places.
When push comes to shove this convo always boils down to this:
Me: okay fine what city?
Them : (city)
Me: (proceeds to link 4-5 solid options I found in a couple minutes)
Them: noon those don’t count because (arbitrary reasons)
Me: ah so it’s not a housing problem… you are just picky and don’t want a solution, you just wanna be mad
Every. Single. Time.
Yeah bruh a 1500 sf house in my hood sold for $1.3 million.
Oh shut up and enjoy retiring in your home that you worked half as hard for as the rest of us you privileged turd.
You sound salty. What budgeting software do you use, out of curiosity? I find without auto import support for my transactions and debt tracking, it felt way more challenging to get my finances in lime to save up.
I swapped to Mint at the time (though it’s shutting down now RIP) and having that ability to see every penny we were spending lined up really helped a lot in terms of tightening the budget up to improve our ability to save.
We squeezed another $300/month out of our budget, pushing us up from $400/month to $700/month and that effectively halved our time to hit out goal.
There’s just so much random shit people seriously don’t think about as expenses adding up. My quick energy drink I’d often grab with a snack in the morning otw to work barely registered on my radar, but it was $5 or whatever a day, 3-4 days a week, which adds up to nearly 90 bucks monthly.
Just ordering a bulk box of energy drinks instead and remembering to grab it otw out the door was saving me like $50 a month.
If you don’t have specific budgeting tools installed and actively used, you don’t really have a leg to stand on (yet) when complaining about cost of living.
Go start there, run the numbers and import your last couple months transactions, and if you truly can’t see a few hundred bucks a month you can squeeze than I can sympathize with ya.
No.
Cool. Once in a while we can afford to go out to a restaurant if we can put enough towards healthcare bills, credit card bills and student loans that month.
During the year abd a half we saved, we only ate out a couple times total? Our anniversary and Christmas. Maybe on my birthday too IIRC.
So yes indeed, while saving money you diont waste it on frivolous stuff like eating out, that is 100% correct and very normal.
Cool. We don’t have anything left to save. If you can save $700 a month by only going out to eat twice in a year, you must be going to extremely expensive restaurants.
But hey, maybe you’re not thousands of dollars in medical debt. We are. I’m looking forward to you telling me that that’s my fault for getting sick.
That sucks mate, the US Healthcare system is fucked.
$700/month in savings is very solid though, and that’s after paying off existing loans as part of our budget.
Great, but your claim was better budgeting software was the problem. It’s not the problem for many, many people. Debt is the problem. So is the fact that over 60% of Americans can’t afford to save anything because all of their money is gone to pay bills, rent and debts once they get paid. And better budgeting software won’t pay off debt if you aren’t paid enough to do it. Nor will it pay inflated rent. And it certainly won’t get you a house.
We’re lucky enough to already have a house and we still had to take out a HELOC on our mortgage just so we could cover other costs.
We don’t buy endless luxuries. We don’t buy the latest goods. My computer is from 2015 and was a gift. My phone is from 2018. My car is from 2016 and I only bought it (used) because my 2002 car’s engine block cracked. Our kitchen is not filled with high-end brand name foods. Yes, we very occasionally do something fun as a family. Should my child never get to have fun just so we can somehow magically save $700 a month through budgeting software?
If you use budgeting software and truly can’t find any highlighted costs you can actually cut, and despite that can’t afford to save money, then you have my sympathy, that sounds shitty and challenging.
My point is and continues to be if you complain about cost of living but you don’t use freely available budgeting tools, I won’t sympathize with you (yet), because every grown adult should just be doing that. It’s a basic part of life and being an adult that people just don’t bother doing.
Itd be the equivalent of someone complaining their car doesn’t work but then admitting they’ve never checked their oil.
If you talk to any financial advisor, having a budget system is always step 1, so if a person hasnt dine that yet, their complaints just sound like whining to me as the person hasn’t even done the absolute bare minimum step 1 yet to try and address or even understand the problem.
I assume such a person doesn’t want to put any work in to get out of the hole they dug themselves into.
IF they do have a budget and their costs simply are just that bad, and they’ve already cut every single cost they can, then they have my sympathy as that means they actually are trying.
But unfortunately, after working with a LOT of people in various industries who complain about these issues, it has become abundantly clear that most people just want to complain and not actually do anything about it, and just keep wasting money.
I don’t know your situation, but I’ve worked with so many people and so so so few of them even could hold a convo about budgeting, let alone talk about what tool(s) they use and tracking solutions they leverage.
So I now, after many many years of seeing how awful everyone seems to be at budgeting, just assume the average person is completely incompetent when it comes to managing money as the default.
For every 1 person I meet who has preferred budgeting tools, I have met dozens and dozens that couldn’t even explain what a tax bracket actually means or is.
So I just assume the average person is at that level for finances. No hate, it’s just facts that most people just… don’t know or care to know how money works, they have other priorities in life, like family and their jobs and hobbies, /shrug
https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/148198/1/paper_2019012.pdf
I mean, I’ll side with the academic research conducted by experts.
Wait a moment… This says home ownership is related in a statistically significant way to parental status, even among skilled graduates…
Hrm…
After four years of having Trump as president, how is it possible that you cannot see how dangerous ideas like this are?
You mean the president that largely became elected due to massive waves of disinformation smear campaigns and fear mongering?
Did you forget the DNC worked with media outlets to install him as the “easy” opponent for Hilary to beat?
It’s so much more than that though, imho.
For one thing, it’s not merely people “posing” as professionals - i.e. those who have no credentials to show - but the actual professionals themselves who are often the source of misinformation. Remember when Trump told people to drink bleach (and then two guys in Kansas literally did precisely that)? He also told people that sunlight can destroy the virus - I know people irl who when they got sick, they went outside to sunbathe… in the dead of winter, in sub-freezing temperatures.
For another, there are charts & graphs of news media outlets from before being bought out by billionaires vs. after that, which conclusively prove that the name of the buyer is mentioned drastically less often (and most especially in a negative context) after that purchase compared to before it. If “reporters” - the literal card-carrying members of this establishment - cannot be trusted to tell the news, then who can?
To become TRULY informed about something… takes many, MANY years. When I was a kid, I believed in trickle-down economics, because that’s what I was told. I even voted based on that. Many people still do believe it, but not in spite of listening to their news organization of choice, and rather b/c of it.
I upvoted your comment bc I think it adds value to the conversation, but ultimately I disagree with your ending sentence: it seems far more likely that those who speak out against “the establishment” will end up in jail, thus turning that into one more tool for those who speak “untruths” to remain in political power, than for the reverse to happen.
My latter statement needs to legally be specifically limited to disinformation on specific topics. Posing as a doctor and giving faje health advice, posing as an investor, etc.
Will it cover all disinformation sources? God no, you are 100% right that major news outlets are a captured market now.
But cracking down on some disinformation is better than nothing.
During Covid 2020, there was a study that found the vast majority of disinformation could be sourced back to like, I want to say it was like a total of only a couple dozen specific people? Like a small handful of trolls basically could be blamed for a huge amount of disinformation. Some of them profited off it.
I think cracking down on the “source” points of bullshit could be a good starting point to at least taking a very large chunk out of the problem.
(100 bucks says many times it will be found to be Russian or Chinese actors at play in one way or another)
Aren’t the things that you describe "already* illegal? Not that rich white people ever face any consequences for things these days, but… even so, aren’t there technically laws in place for that already? “Fraud” for one.
Which illustrates that regardless of Right or Wrong, a thing that is not enforced is basically not a thing at all - a mere suggestion that people can feel free to ignore, especially if their finances depend on them doing so.
Whereas conversely, that same issue in reverse, let’s call it Wrong or Right, if it receives oh let’s say Congressional backing, receives legal protections. At worst, imagine someone doing a crime, then immediately receiving a Presidential pardon, was it really a “crime” then? (Yes, obviously, but… is it though? Not by all definitions of that word.)
So you are right, but naive: “misinformation” is not something that you or I get to define, but rather those in power do, hence they will twist and pervert it to suit their own ends.
I see that you are trying to avoid the “politics” surrounding the topic and trying to discuss it in isolation or that, but that is simply not how the world of humans has ever worked, at any point in our existence. Like, at best that only works when all sides are participating in a “good faith” effort to arrive at The Truth - and yes, under those conditions what you said is an effective means, e.g. a doctor who gives bad advice regardless of the criminal court system can lose their medical license that is governed independently - but the problem is that wherever politics gets involved, we can no longer depend on people acting in good faith anymore.:-(
Fraud doesn’t necessarily cover socialed7a as you aren’t selling a product or directly profiting off a service you are selling, so it’s a gray area.
You can have multiple layers of abstraction between the disinformation and actual income stream with social media influencers, which heavily muddies the water.
But at this time, AFAIK no… it’s not illegal in the US to cosplay in medical outfit and say random shit on Instagram.
They are defined, and we are talking about disinformation, not misinformation.
Disinformation is the purposeful spreading of factually incorrect info willfully and knowing it’s wrong.
Misinformation is the same but not knowing it’s wrong, basically “on accident” or because you genuinely think it’s the truth.
For disinformation to be legally acted on it would be up to the prosecutor to prove without a shadow of doubt that the defendant knew the info was wrong and benefited from still spreading it.
Which you can guess is very difficult to price, you’d need effectively to convince a jury that the person didn’t truly think they were right.
There are already precedents for this, as there is a type of disinformation that is illegal right now, and that is Libel.
The Depp v. Heard case was a well published example of this. The prosecters had to effectively prove that Heard truly knew she was lying and benefited from that lie, and acted to deceive. An extremely high bar to prove.
But they had evidence photos of her clearly doctoring photos, testimony of witnesses that went against her accounts, text messages, etc.
So it’s a high bar but not an impossible bar.
The same would be the bar for making “professional disinformation” illegal. You’d need to prove the person knew they were lying, which is very tough but not impossible (you’d be surprised how often these idiots just admit to it outright)
Who will enact this grand plan though? Lawyers? Politicians? Scientists? Congressional funding controls all of those, and already-known facts are choosing to be ignored right this very second. So yeah, very few here will disagree with you that disinformation should not be prosecuted - what people are saying is that there is a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path. How to get it DONE?
But far, Far, FAR worse than that even, asking Congress to do this for us would be… significantly worse than not doing that. Congress will use this tool as a weapon to enact the precise and exact opposite of what you say: instead of shutting down the dis-information sources, they will shut down the pro-information ones. Remember all the rhetoric against Fauci? Politicians care about facts, if and only when they can use them to further their own agendas.
Congress is the very source of much of the disinformation going around right now. They aren’t going to stop simply b/c we ask nicely. Nor are they likely to cooperate. Instead, if what you are saying were proposed as a law, they are likely to simply gladly accept the gift that we offered them, then proceed to bash our heads in with it.
That is my own two cents anyway. And as you can see, I am not terribly trusting:-). For example, China is doing exactly what you are proposing - though young people there do not seem terribly happy with the results:-(.
For those downvoting, the most effective lies always have some truth to them.
Honestly the biggest reason they can’t afford housing is because the majority don’t know how to budget and/or stick to it. This goes for a large amount of the poor as well. They’re constantly spending their money on consumables and other non-wealth building things. In the US, as a society, we’ve done a shit job of teaching our kids this valuable lesson, pun intended.
Doesn’t mean the value of the dollar isn’t lower than it has been in a while and that mortgage rates aren’t high (they aren’t the highest, by the way; it was at ~12% in the 90s). That food prices aren’t insane and that corporations aren’t taking advantage and jacking up their margins, they are.
Boomer take.
That’s cool. I’m not a boomer.