Report: Young adults more likely to live with parents than spouses
apartmentlist.com
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The cost of housing and rent outpace inflation by a wide margin and cost considerably more than they did in the past. The age of the typical home buyer has increased 10-20 years in the last 40 years. Living costs more now than it did 40 years ago. It's not such a surprise then that fewer are able to achieve, or are achieving later in life, what used to be very common life milestones.
Well, historically speaking, societies always tend to collapse when they can't figure out how to sustain themselves. So I think it's a safe assumption that our society will also collapse eventually.
Spoilers: it's going to be extremely ugly
It was interesting to observe the Conservative party in the UK revisit this issue (again) at their party conference, it's amazing how much it riles large sections of the UK electorate when only less than 5 percent of families in the UK ever actually meet the threshold where it has to be paid...
Also your growth contrast is so lacking in details I can't find a counterpoint as you didn't really make a point. Especially when what you are replying to is about inequality and you are talking about economic growth.
I take this to mean where person living in year X was not better off than person living in year (X - 150). In that case, literally any time in human history before the industrial revolution. 150 years is an insignificant blip on the timeline of history.
As to your other comment, inequality and economic growth are intrinsically linked. The inequality people are complaining about is an unequal share in the economic growth of the society.
Well, it's the internet, and I don't really have a horse in this race, so we can just agree to disagree.
AD 1200 - AD 1350
I think the average person was significantly better off in 1200 than in 1350
Some guy living in 1000BC China is probably going to be as well off as someone in 1000AD China, which is to say they both aren't well off at all. I'm not sure what you're trying to get at here.
If you want to know if people are better off, look at real income. It's very clearly increasing over the last few decades.
It works since these egotistical morons are democratically in a majority.
Gonna be interesting to see how this shit develops when it hits the fan.
If a democratic minority is demanding power based on land, how are we not gonna be in a feudal society?
At its core, America has not changed one bit since.
Given the massive inequality in the population density and cost of living, looking into remote work or starting your own business in a lower CoL area could be a much better alternative to demanding someone else to drastically lower their living standard.
The US builds more 3 car garages than 1 bedroom apartments: https://www.curbed.com/2016/10/26/13423358/three-car-garages...
There's not even a shadow of Constitutional argument that that's a federal power.
A strict constructionist reading of the constitution would suggest that Gonzales v. Raich is judicial activism, and indeed, all the judges signatory to the majority opinion tend to be the "big government" types. Note that O'Connor and Rehnquist, two famous justices who often sided with strict constructionism, dissented. O'Connor wrote that though she did not support California's actions, she respected its right to do so:
"Relying on Congress’ abstract assertions, the Court has endorsed making it a federal crime to grow small amounts of marijuana in one’s own home for one’s own medicinal use. This overreaching stifles an express choice by some States, concerned for the lives and liberties of their people, to regulate medical marijuana differently. If I were a California citizen, I would not have voted for the medical marijuana ballot initiative; if I were a California legislator I would not have supported the Compassionate Use Act. But whatever the wisdom of California’s experiment with medical marijuana, the federalism principles that have driven our Commerce Clause cases require that room for experiment be protected in this case. "
Thomas also dissented, for somewhat similar principles though with different wording. Source for this is your link.
We don't implement things like this federally because needs differ. Bozeman, Montana can probably zone and sprawl as needed; it's small and there's lots of land. San Francisco can't. Why would any one feel the need to apply the same rules to both, unless it was an attempt to force a particular ideology on another? If there is sufficient support for something, it ought to pass just as well at the state or local level.
[0]: https://www.history.com/news/franklin-roosevelt-tried-packin...
If Bozeman, Montana can sprawl without worry, why does it even need restrictive zoning laws mandating SFH’s? That’s what doesn’t make sense. People who move to Bozeman clearly want to live in SFH’s. Outlawing restrictive zoning laws doesn’t affect them in the least.
In practice, considering home construction and home buying are often transacted in interstate commerce (e.g. a company buying parts or supplies from out of state to build), it’s likely a Supreme Court case against a law relating to zoning could be upheld. The federal government already claims the ability to regulate other things such as guns constructed within the borders of a state and never moved outside them, all based on the arguments upheld in cases like Wickard that they possibly could affect interstate commerce.
A similar clause could be attached to the mentioned zoning law. (E.g. a person from one state buys land in another state? No zoning allowed - and because buying land within a state affects the prices for interstate purchases, suddenly there’s a nexus for regulation of purely intrastate purchases too!)
Not saying it’s a great idea, but it’s hardly clearly unconstitutional under modern precedent and interpretation.
> Force cities to build duplexes/triplexes/four-plexes everywhere.
Declining tax bases in rural areas will be death by a thousand cuts. It takes serious cash for a municipality to "keep the lights on".
This may sound slightly contrary to my prior opinion, but there ought be a middle ground between the free choice of wanting a SFH, but also having some level of community planning that ensures the community remains viable.
You would have each unit certified as either A, B or C. C being nearly no noise insulation, A being very quiet.
Let the market decide what they want to pay for.
And for some people, it beats a 3 hour commute. People should be free to choose what they prefer as long as it's safe.
And since housing is a zero sum game the market is already rigged in favor of landlords. People generally don't have as much choice where to live when you start considering school access, public transit, commute and so forth. Relying on the market to solve housing will simply result in miniature SFs popping up over the US, just like what's happening to Austin.
As if construction costs were the primary factor in determining the cost of real estate in places with housing crisis problems (like the Bay Area).
Of course, then you’d ask, well why are construction costs so high in the Bay Area? And you might hear something about earthquakes, insulation, whatever. But the real reason is that contractors and construction workers need to live here too, and living here is damn expensive!
You're making an assumption that noise insulation is particularly subject to the market. Unfortunately noise 'insulation' like other insulation is extremely sensitive to competence in instiallation and maintenance.
Because it isn't particularly easy to gauge when shopping I don't believe that it is... and in markets where there are more prospective renters than units, it especially isn't.
There are also plenty of multiplex designs that have good noise insulation.
In reality people do want to live in them which is why zoning laws are used to prevent them from being built. If people refused to live there, there would be no need for zoning as developers wouldn’t build homes people don’t live in.
I distinctly recall it calling for a ban on single family housing. Considering that there are many replies calling it an overreaction and replying as thought it called for a ban on single family housing in general I would be willing to bet money it did not originally say what it says now.
> Force cities to build duplexes/triplexes/four-plexes everywhere.
which makes the intention ambiguous and slanted towards banning single family homes.
Banning single family zoning does not equate to banning single family homes!
It's more like: re-legalizing a lot of different housing options.
Where people want to build, the power-hungry folks in charge put restrictions in place and demand a troll toll to let a few projects through. And the folks in charge where nobody wants to build see the opportunity and seize it. It's just human nature, and it's the reason local government shouldn't be put in charge of density regulation.
If someone is happy in their SFH, why would it disappear?
If someone has the money, they'll be able to build new ones too.
Yeah, maybe central San Francisco won't have many, as people cash out, but that seems pretty reasonable. You can go live in Lakeview Oregon and have a huge house on a huge lot if that's what you want.
Besides - SFH's predate most restrictive zoning laws (which really caught on in the 70's). SFH's, at the edges of the city, aren't going anywhere.
[1] https://www.reporternewspapers.net/2018/12/15/brookhaven-pio...
Seriously though, no matter how efficient we get with our space, eventually we'll hit a wall and the solution is going to be exactly the same as it always was and is: reproduce less quickly.
The only difference is how much nature will be left when we get to that point.
I've started to look at houses with yards as miniature nature preserves.
To Downvoters: I feel I've done a decent job outlining the futility of more and more compact housing. I'd like to know what your logic if you disagree.
2. If the economy need's growth but is going to level out at 11 billion, we should think about that now.
3. Enforcement is heavy handed, but at least admitting it would be a step in the right direction.
You should get out of the city more often.
I think overpopulation isn't our most pressing issue right now, but generally there are a lot of advantages to having fewer people.
Okay, here's the thesis. Sounds like neo-Malthusianism.
> Seriously though, no matter how efficient we get with our space, eventually we'll hit a wall and the solution is going to be exactly the same as it always was and is: reproduce less quickly.
Yep, that's the Malthusian endgame. Unpacking this claim, it seems to be claiming that the Earth is a closed-system that we can't escape. Now I'm looking for evidence or supporting arguments that prove that.
> The only difference is how much nature will be left when we get to that point.
What exactly does the phrase "how much nature will be left" mean to you? This is too hand-wavy, especially for such a heavy-handed conclusion.
> I've started to look at houses with yards as miniature nature preserves.
Is a golf course a nature preserve? No. Of course not. It's an extremely controlled environment. Any wildlife foolish enough to try to inhabit it that doesn't fit in a coffee cup will almost certainly be chased off, trapped or killed.
https://earther.gizmodo.com/lawns-are-an-ecological-disaster...
The constraint isn't necessarily that people have to leave the planet so much as we need to ensure access to minerals and high industrial capacity.
When we exhaust "nearby" minerals and space transit has advanced enough, colonization will look more attractive.
Will we hit a bottleneck along the way? I don't know. But it would be an awful shame if it were political.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINUSA
Japan's total fertility rate has been consistently below-replacement since 1975:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINJPN
Nonetheless, it took until 2010 for Japan's total population to peak and begin to decline. It's estimated to take until 2042 for Japan's population to fall lower than it was in 1975:
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/japan-population/
That's a 67 year lag between a country reducing birth rates below replacement and the country actually having more space available per capita.
So I downvoted you on two counts:
1) You seemed to be unaware that the US is already reproducing less, to the extent that its population will eventually decline without immigration.
2) "Reproduce less" takes a very long time to reduce total population. It takes many decades even if there is no immigration. Its influence is far too slow to help today's young adults afford their own living spaces.
> "Reproduce less" takes a very long time Pretty much every real solution to any problem I have ever seen takes generations. If the point of more housing is to mitigate suffering while these changes take root, that sounds realistic and responsible. As it is, it sounds like nobody has any thoughts at all about when we should realistically cap ourselves and I don't think that's responsible.
It appears your argument is that reproducing less is good, but we're already doing it (though not on purpose), so therefore me saying we should do it on purpose is wrong?
Most developed nations are below replacement rate, and you don't have to look far in places like the northeast or midwest of the US to see places that are going to seed and reverting back into wilderness.
I'm in between generations and watching the old vs young bickering / division is painful to see... but I've also got a low tolerance for a lot of the "OMG boomers" stuff out there from folks who as a whole have a really poor voting record. Get in the game people....
If you want to fix voting for the younger generation the barriers to actually vote need to be lessened if not removed.
Did I have "a lot going on"? Sure. Do I have utter faith in "The Government" and//or "The Voting Process"? Not really.
But I still vote. It's my right and also, as I've come to see it, my duty. Free speech or no, I believe that if I want to complain about an election and be taken seriously I should participate in it at at least the bare minimal active level.
I've always made time to vote, and at least read the voter's pamphlet if not also further sources to attempt to make that vote an informed one.
Asking for a thesaurus.
Since moving to California after that, I've voted by mail as much as possible, and I literally live right next door to my polling station; I see it and their parking spots right out my bedrooms' windows every day.
Seniors have time but have trouble getting to the pols.
Middle age - Are working/picking up kids but still find time.
I think younger people see through the effectiveness of voting. If I do vote my vote seems to really not matter. If all young people vote as a block maybe an issue will be mentioned or moved towards something I like. But the effort / reward doesn't add up when the election is decided in the mid-west and the election is called before my vote is even records as a California resident.
It seems crazy that you are given two choices that basically blame each for everything gone wrong or take credit for everything positive but do the same thing when given the chance.
Liking a photo is so much more rewarding and feels like more of a direct impact.
As long as young people keep thinking like that, and old people don't, old people will keep winning elections.
> If all young people vote as a block maybe an issue will be mentioned or moved towards something I like. But the effort / reward doesn't add up when the election is decided in the mid-west and the election is called before my vote is even records as a California resident.
State and local elections matter too.
Voting is not economically rational if it takes more than zero time, given those odds.
When so many people beat the drum of economic rationality, is it a surprise people don't vote? At most one of "economic rationality is valid" or "you should vote" is a true statement. When we're told that the former is true, we're being told not to vote.
There are modifications of "rationality" that actually provide a justification for voting. But you'll never see an economist acknowledge that superrationality is a thing, for instance.
So if you aren't the one, single deciding vote it's not worthwhile? That's an immature approach. All the more immature because you go on to couch it in rhetoric about economics and "rationality" that amounts to nothing more than third rate sophistry.
You're not a taxi cab that has to be in service 24 hours a day to maximize utilization. You're a person with responsibilities. Your "economic rationality" is just a lazy justification for only doing what you feel like doing ("provides marginal value!") and never doing anything you don't.
If you're going to be a bum, be honest with yourself and those around you.
Is a thing only worth doing if you can cast yourself as the lone hero who turned the tide?
This seems like the Tragedy of the Commons. You fish in a stream, because why not? One person can never eat enough fish to make a dent in the population. Then a thousand of your neighbors fish the same stream. Soon it's completely depopulated, and there are no more fish for anyone, and everyone involved can still say "it wasn't my fault, my impact was barely noticeable."
Either it's nobody's fault, just a totally unavoidable act of God, or it's everybody's fault, and you all should have worked together to address it. Only one of those ways of thinking will get anything done.
In one of those elections, my preferred candidate won by a mere 129 votes out of 2.8 million votes cast:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Washington_gubernatorial_...
If you don't vote, you won't be able to tell if your vote "really mattered" in an election until it's too late to do anything.
Traditionally older people tend to have (or have had) more set schedules/defined work hours, more benefits (paid time off), and better job security in general. I'm not saying it's impossible for kids today to vote, but there are some disturbing trends in employment and the way workers are treated that I can see making it harder than it's been for previous generations.
Previous generations were able to support themselves at least enough to move out of their parent's homes. Young adults today are clearly struggling in ways that past generations haven't had to and that's going to strain how much time and effort they can spend on local and state politics.
Of course none of that addresses the larger issues like voter disenfranchisement and gerrymandering which limit the impact of voters making the effort seem less worthwhile.
I still think young people should do everything the can to get involved and vote, but I'm not going to pretend that any mention of their struggles can be dismissed by calling them "whiny entitled people"
Every year more than 1M people default on their student loans, ruining their credit and essentially their lives.
Currently this is a voting block of 8M people and it will continue to grow by 1M every year. There is one candidate who has promised to forgive all student loans, and yet the person won't garner anywhere close to 8M votes.
There is a coordinated effort to indebt young people with loans they will spend the next 40-50 years of their life paying. Their degrees won't even pay for themselves as evidence by the fact these young people who historically could at least move out and begin their lives are no longer able to afford to do so...and when these issues are mentioned people are silenced (or downvoted into the grey so their comments can't be read).
There is more to this than young people don't vote, especially where they have every reason.
However, 8 Million is the potential voting block of people who have already defaulted on their student loans...there are a total of 44.7 Million people with student loans who all would be interested and benefit from loan forgiveness/abatement. To put those numbers in perspective it it just exceeds the number of elderly voters on Medicare (44 Million).
Also, if you live on a red state vote for a moderate. Try to influence the primaries.
I find this a very questionable statement. Most middle age people are working 40+ hours, on top of devoting hours to kids, maintenance etc. They are every bit as busy as young people, if not more so.
Politicians respond to only 2 things, votes and lobbyist dollars. If people want to make a change and have politicians stop ignoring them then they need to establish themselves as a reliable voting block. Until they do this they are just shouting into the wind / twitter / reddit / facebook.
Voting by absentee ballot takes minutes, everyone who want to has time for that.
That's the bug right there. Rental housing is a popular investment vehicle, at a ROI of 9.5 % it slightly outperforms the stock market. Any regulation and anything that would decrease profit will be stridently opposed by the wealthy classes. They go and vote and sit on the city council.
Even if you do move back into the same neighborhood after construction is complete and your rent isn't impacted too much (which is not a super common outcome), it's likely the community around you has changed. Gentrification increases the costs of basic food, clothing, and other resources in your area. You're local diner might be replaced with a wagyu beef slinging $15 hamburger joint. It's doing brisk business, but you can't afford to eat there. Your old dinged and dented grocery store or market stall is now a fancy Whole Foods.
That's not to say it's impossible to build or improve neighborhoods, but it's also not so easy as 'just build more on top of existing units.' The disruption and displacement of hundreds or thousands of lives for years is significant.
There's a healthy debate around how best to deal with this -- do we just bite the bullet and build a TON of housing all at once? Do we try to preserve the residency of the people currently living there and build up opportunistically? Do we try to decommodify housing altogether to remove the incentives that lead to this situation? (If we priced housing based on how well it provided housing, rather than based on what the market would bear, we'd see a different sort of situation, I'd imagine.) I dunno, maybe the combination is all three.
I highly, highly recommend this youtube playlist which works through these sorts of things using Cities Skylines (which is a great city sim game): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvUByM-fZk&list=PLwkSQD3vqK...
I think it needs to be solved at a macro level, in a way that is nuanced and delicate. Because on one hand, assuming the rest of the world doesn’t change, making an area nicer to live is objectively good. And upper middle class people deserve housing too, and landowners perhaps should have at least some level of control over what they do with their property (you can argue that landlording in general could be abolished, but that’s a separate discussion).
Of course on the other hand, it is a shame that poor people have to fight to keep their neighborhoods shitty so that they don’t get displaced to somewhere far away from their jobs and community.
I’m not sure if there’s a great economic solution that still involves a market housing economy. The least worst solution I can think of is to basically carve out special units for the exact people displaced. IE if I want to built a 300 unit condo tower in West Oakland taking up a whole block, I have to provide current-market-rate rents for all the people currently living in that block.
Yes, we absolutely should. I live in a tract house/neighborhood from the 40s in the East Bay, which is a cookie cutter house that was constructed en mass, and was cheap (For the time) and high quality. I believe the house was initially purchased for something like ~8k (~140k in 2019 money), but it is worth many more times than that solely because no more housing has been built en mass since the war.
We should of course move onto building multifamily homes, and away from the mess SFH suburbia created, but the principle remains the same: More housing availability pushes down prices for everyone.
Look at Palo Alto and East Palo Alto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palo_Alto,_California
So... yeah, build a ton of housing, but start doing it a lot more in the rich areas that have been exempt from it for far too long.
It sure worked for Harlem.
Also, nobody is entitled to live anywhere they want at whatever price they want. It's this attitude that drives so many "affordable" housing programs that are complete failures (and a tax on the middle class).
In my area, new construction has raised the rent of “nice” apartments and shifted aging properties to Section 8, which is a defacto price floor.
So it's generally hard - for good reason - to persuade young people that any of the political candidates on the slate care about them. This has only barely begun to change recently.
North American cities are sparse and are nowhere near our tech limits. Housing shortages in North America are due to nothing more than bad regulation.
They also use shitty materials. Compare a modern house with century-or-more home which are often timeless art pieces.
Harold can fuck right off then because that's not his business. The other two, could potentially be an issue, however, but in my experience, most apartments like that are not filled with retirees, but working class individuals and to an extent working class families.
The real problem with gentrification is the unearned increase in property values that accrue to owners and not renters. This could be solved with Georgist land value taxes [1].
>>Harold can fuck right off then because that's not his business.
Don't come to Japan then. [1][2] Like it or not, some cultures (including the older generation of Americans) hold certain social mores that include expectations of public appearance and decorum.
[1]https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/12/19/national/stigma...
[2]https://observers.france24.com/en/20170504-japanese-authorit...
So I would guess most 3 car garages are built in the countryside, where there is lots of space for building.
The two numbers point to completely separate issues.
If singles would be willing to move to the countryside, perhaps they wouldn't have a problem to find accommodation. (A job could be a different matter).
Rent for a similar apartment is around $1200-$1500 month. If you start at zero, and have a regular paying professional job, you'll spend around 3-5 years saving up for the down payment - depending on how frugal you live.
But if you have resourceful parents, it's no problem to get your own place. Banks will gladly re-mortgage their (paid down) house, or use it as collateral.
In fact, there's quite a divide here, first-time house owners are getting younger, because their parents will bankroll the mortgage / down payment, just to get their kids in on the housing market. They know that if they have to wait 5-10 years, the market will be much more expensive.
The big problem (IMO) with our housing market is that it takes too much time to get projects started, especially big affordable apartment complexes, because the established owners will engage in full-force NIMBY-ism warfare on any developers that dare to steal their precious sunlight or "visual pollution".
I don't live in the US, but I feel we share a lot of the similar problems when it comes to the housing market.
The "fear of missing out" seems reminiscent of a market nearing its peak, or minimally, plateauing. Home prices have more or less always gone up long-term, though it's been very gradual over long periods. 10% year-over-year gains don't continue unabated forever.
Generally, the situation isn't like that. For example, in my location the median house prices are less than 3x the median household income.
I finally gave up and concluded that I had already missed out, and accepted not being able to afford housing. Not long after, prices plataeued, and have even cooled off somewhat over the past year, despite tight inventory and falling interest rates. I'm guessing there was a mini bubble due to a FOMO frenzy and now that the frenzy is over, prices are taking a respite from ballooning.
For the sake of the region, I hope prices have hit an equilibrium point and will stop outpacing inflation, although I'm going to hedge by buying in now.
Young people in general tend to be more mobile even if it's often within a general metro area. Buying a house (or even a condo) really limits your ability to easily move and, depending upon the type of housing, often is a significant time commitment as well.
People are very much entrenched in the "Renting is money out the window" ideology, which gets repeated ad nauseam from you're old enough to move out.
Home ownership is also one of the big adulthood milestones here, because there's so much responsibility involved.
But I think the main (current) driver is ever growing cities, along with the ever growing housing prices. We've experienced a ton of centralization for the past decades, but it is especially now that people are starting to feel the heat of exploding rents and housing prices. FOMO is very real.
We also don't move that much around. Most people move away for college / university, then to a city or two for work - usually settling down fairly quick.
To be clear, home ownership is often an adult milestone in the US as well. But, anecdotally, it's not something a lot of people really pursue for the first decade or so out of school--especially if they haven't gotten married.
It doubles the probability of one person losing his job, but it halves the consequences of it.
It makes the probability of losing all income a lot lower.
Going away to college is a halfway point. There is a whole infrastructure to help you with the transition.
Moving out entirely on your own is a big step. You learn to take care of yourself and at least for me, there was a lot of pride in being able to say “This is my own life and I can take care of myself”.
Multi-generation housing has been the default throughout most of history, and is still common in many parts of the world. Being an adult and taking on extra responsibilities is orthogonal to whether or not you live in a multi-generational household.
And yes, multi-generational living was very common in the past, but so was having 5+ children. That doesn’t necessarily make it a better choice.
>that doesn’t mean there isn’t a big difference between living on your own or living in your mom’s basement.
Where you live really says nothing about your level of responsibility or self-reliance. I know people who moved out when they were 18, but still depend on their parents for financial support, and I know people living at home who's parents depend on them for financial support.
I know people who live with their families who can grow a significant portion of their own food, and people who live alone who would starve if DoorDash shut down.
And I know people who live with their parents who have children of their own to care for, and people who live alone who have carefully orchestrated their lives to avoid any kind of responsibility to other people.
>And yes, multi-generational living was very common in the past, but so was having 5+ children. That doesn’t necessarily make it a better choice.
Not necessarily, but the converse is also true.
You move out because you desire freedom. You wanted something, so you bought it. Don't frame it as something noble, or inherently superior.
I live away from my parents, but that was a choice of practicality - the amount of money I make by doing so vastly outstrips the amount I would save by living at home.
But I also know a few folks who live at home because it’s just easier. No pesky mortgage to deal with, clothes always get washed, meals cooked, etc.
Of course you can reject the idea, but you'll find that you'll also be rejected more often by potential romantic partners.
I just don't see this changing. I'm 30 and over half of my friends spent at least 2 years at home in their 20s. Every single time the issue was finances, they needed cheap digs as their debt and low income disallowed renting.
In the meantime we switched the URL above to a news article about the report.
Edit: site seems back up now, so switched back to the original from https://www.10news.com/news/local-news/report-young-adults-m....
This would also relieve housing pressure in the Bay Area, and let native kids not in the tech industry maybe one day move into their own places without waiting for their parents to die.
>Employees could take home more of their salaries.
That's not how it works. These companies would pay much lower salaries, with the justification that "the cost of living is much lower". We already see this whenever companies have multiple locations, with any of those locations in low-CoL areas. They'll push employees to relocate to the cheap place, but the employees don't get to keep those high salaries.
For businesses in general, I agree. But there’s a reason I listed these particular ones
Yes, but if some software corp builds a campus in the middle of nowhere, there won't be robust competition, obviously. So the salaries are going to be terrible. The only reason the corporation would do this is to save money, so they're not going to offer salaries similar to the high-CoL location; doing so would cost them more money (paying for building the new campus, the huge administrative cost of opening and staffing this location and getting it productive, plus the lack of savings in salaries). The whole idea doesn't make any sense at all. If you look at the way companies operate, they never do this, except for manufacturing (where they're looking for low-skilled workers they can train). For high-skilled knowledge workers, they always go where the workers are.
Which means that while they would not be living with parents, they would not be living with spouses either.
why? Because it feels like your always working to pay off the landlord or the bank just so you can have somewhere to sleep. Even if you own it outright, property and taxes are 10k/y, now your paying $1k/m just to have a place to sleep before you can even spend money and work for the things that you want. The worst of it, is as prices go up there should be a huge push to build more to balance the market, but than you have all these huge artificial barriers to entry to build preventing that from happening.
So it makes sense to try to live with parents, make enough money to buy your house outright so at least than you have a chance to get out from indentured servitude.
To be honest most of us are just hoping the real estate market collapses, or these barriers to entry are overcome so that prices can drop because we are not willing to pay these prices which amount to servitude. Our refusal for this type of "life" is what causes a decreased in birth rates and growth in general in the economy.
Post college I lived in a small town in Michigan and saved up a down payment for a house in 2 years making less than $50k.
You can still do it, but not in the most desirable US cities.
I think it's a matter of who is the head of the household (i.e. the person who is pulling the most weight regarding the financial stability of the household). So "young adults living with their parents" is interpreted as "young adults not becoming functioning members of society"
That said, I agree pretty much entirely with your comment.
I do think it's sad that modern society has kind of dismantled the extended family. That it's become such a faux pas to have multiple generations living under the same roof. Instead it somehow makes sense to leave our small children with complete strangers for most of the day and have our young adults living alone in apartments scarcely bigger than a box a continent away in the name of starting careers. I honestly think we are overdue for a reversal in some of these trends.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_...
Here's the author's source data:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/dchx6y/in_...
This doesn't seem so surprising. The chart shows in 1968, about 80% of 26 year olds lived with a spouse. Today, even if every married 26 year old lived with their spouse, we'd only hit about 32% of 26 year olds.
They don't group people living with their unmarried partner with people living with a spouse.
Based on their chart, 23 is the age at which most people no longer live with their parents.
Isn't this number pretty insignificantly small? Also, not being married severely complicates things like joint ownership and sharing an income, precisely the sorts of things that make buying a house easier.
That said, see my above comments about why you cannot treat married people amd those people the same.
Where I'm from it's both common and normal for people to never marry their lifelong partner and even raise a family together.
There's no real discernible difference here between an unmarried couple and a married one. They act the same. You wouldn't be able to tell which they were unless they told you.
Quebec used to be religiously catholic. However, the church kept the people down and kept them poor and in the early 60s, the people rebelled against the church and secularized. Quebec today isn't perfect (no place is), but things are much better now than they were under the catholic church.
Personally, I think the government ought not to enforce religion or morality. However, it can be very important for society to do so.
Hard to live with your spouse if you’re not even married.
What’s actually surprising to me is that 80% of 26 years olds were married 50 years ago!
If rents and mortgages are a certain price, people keep taking out mortgages for that price with the assumption that prices won’t go down. So there is a huge portion of people and loans whose economic situation is dependent on rents and housing prices not going down. If enough people buy into a delusion with high risk to ruin, it’s not longer a delusion
Let’s say over the course of 5 years rents decreased by half in the Bay Area. The real estate market would also probably decrease by about half. Suddenly tons of people are underwater on their loans, both regular homeowners and many investors who are no longer able to cover their loans with the market rent. That’s bad for banks and a huge portion of the populace, and could cause a huge economic meltdown. So it’s politically untenable.
The only actual solutions I can think of are to never let housing supply become an issue, let inflation take care of it (if people’s income increases due to inflation, and housing prices stay the same, it prevents homeowner/investor insolvency while effectively reducing rent), or just wait for some big natural disaster. So hopefully the big one comes soon and gives us a chance to rethink how we build
If that square footage was simply placed somewhere with reasonable local access to services it would be less concerning how disastrous the housing and property markets are, but the McMansions are going to enter total obsolescence and abandonment when their current residents want to downsize and nobody can afford to live there.
I don't have kids and likely never will but I won't be surprised if my mates' children will have to live with them until they turn 30 at least. And those are all reasonably steady families with good incomes.
But without fail almost everywhere in the Americas and Europe is structurally against density in any form and systemically fights it.
All those other places never could afford suburbs.
This means: no big ugly blocks, skyscrapers, etc. People want to have spacious homes and living areas, and beautiful neighborhoods.
They basically want to be suburbs, but 5 min walk from everything important, and max 30 min drive from work.
I also live in a one that's quite wealthy and constantly expanding by engulfing nearby suburbs and you're right that people there want everything from suburban lifestyle with city perks but the huge downside is the commute times since the city got so wide and there's no underground, if you want to get from on side to another you're in for some hour+ commutes which in a big city would take 20 min by underground. Basically if you don't live close to your job, you're kinda screwed.
Students love it since if you live in the city center you can commute by bike or foot anywhere important within minutes, but as a working adult, the work commutes are killer since most tech companies can't afford inner city rents which are mostly taken by cafes, fashion shops, architects, doctors, lawyers, banks and real estate agencies.
"The United States’ birthrate fell for a fourth consecutive year in 2018, bringing the number of people born in the country to its lowest level in 32 years"
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/us-birthrate-decrease....
I don't think I need a citation to support the claim that the US is also currently trying to stymie immigration.
The money is still there and will likely not go anywhere except into fewer hands and pockets. Its up to societies to actually adjust their tax model to curtail it.
There's a nice US graph here: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/productivity#hist...
An OECD study that goes up to 2005: http://www.oecd.org/employment/labour-stats/41354425.pdf
I moved to western Europe and realized why. Millennials there don't want to take part in the competitive rat race to be productive as their boomer parents have bought plenty of properties when real estate was cheap and salaries were high enough that even a factory worker in the 70's could afford a large apartment. They will later inherit said properties so they feel no pressure to get into high stress jobs since they are basically taken care of for life. So why bother?
The only people I know who are constantly grinding and hustling here are immigrants who don't own any real estate so they're constantly working to afford to get on the property ladder.
It's interesting to see different trends between young adults in different decades.
New generations tend to living with parents more often, they are more educated, but earn less in average.
At their age, I just didn't have the stuff they have. I couldn't afford things like furniture, a TV, crates of dishes, or boxes of clothing. I had student debt to pay off, enough clothes to last between laundries without going too rank, and a set of pots and pans that were good enough to eat out of. When I moved, I'd share a borrowed station wagon with a friend to move all out stuff in one trip.
I only just earned my empty nest. If one of my kids comes back for a "long term visit", they'll get tired of being questioned on when they're moving back to their own place.
Totally understandable.