My wife and I paid 2,200 dollars per month in rent for the top floor of a small split level house in El Segundo, CA. It was perhaps 900 square feet of living space, with half a garage for storage, and was a pretty good deal in 2013. That house is worth around 1.4 million dollars now. Our friends from the area bought a condo for just shy of $800,000 in 2013 and thought it was a steal. Condos in the same complex are well north of a million dollars now. Back then I also helped a friend move into a new apartment in the San Fernando Valley, where she paid a similar amount per month and lived on the third floor.
There something hidden in these anecdotes that most people when discussing the housing crisis will avoid talking about and instead focus on other obvious contributors to today’s sky-high housing prices. I shall talk about the real deal, which are the things you buy through housing which are not the houses themselves.
We left the LA area in 2014 because we took stock of the housing prices and realized that certain things would be forever out of our reach if we stayed there, namely owning a home. We probably could have had children and stuck it out there, but it would be an economic stall-out for an extended period of time as neither of us made enough money to afford a house payment, at least in the places where we would actually want to live.
The shit boomer take would be to point out that you don’t have to live in upscale El Segundo; you could live in Norwalk or Compton.
And that, as they say, is the rub. It’s not difficult to buy a house in the bad part of Fresno, California, or buy a condemned shack by an air force base in North Dakota, but these are not places where most people desiring a middle-class life would want to live.
Supply and demand in general is only part of the equation as to why anyone born after 1980 is in despair over housing. The real supply and demand problem comes not in the form of buying a house per se, or in maintaining a “middle class lifestyle” economically, but in acquiring the social conditions that those of us born after 1980 remember. And because of the decline of our society and its social bonds, purchasing those social conditions is a matter of buying an expensive house. You pay the piper to get through the filter.
But what are those social conditions that were common to most Americans up through the early 2000s? High trust, low crime, material security, clean streets, safe schools and a good college-prep education, etc. are what we remember, and precisely what we have to now pay extra for.
Want you kids to go to a good school? You have to live in the “nice” part of town, which means buying an expensive house. Sure, you can live in a track home from 1970 for a lot less, but you’ll be sending your kids to school with sociopaths and gangbangers whose parents get a section 8 allowance to live in a neighborhood that had a nice school fifty years ago. Time to pay up.
Don’t want your car or house to get broken into? Don’t want to start up your car only to see you are on empty because somebody siphoned your tank? Don’t want to put burglar bars on your windows to keep a meth head from stealing your PS4? Pay up.
Comedian Cedric the Entertainer pointed this out years ago. Paraphrasing – Why do we (African Americans) move out as soon as we get successful? Because you steal our stuff!
Whites aren’t the only people fleeing the inner city and its “diversity”; they are just the ones that had the means to do it for the longest.
My friend in LA had to get an apartment in a nice part of town on the third floor so that she wouldn’t get all her stuff stolen or get raped by someone jumping in through the slider or the window. That’s real. She could get ahead by living in a cheap studio in a shit part of town, but as a single female she would be risking her safety (and probably have economic losses due to theft, etc. keeping her from getting ahead). She had to pay up.
Yeah, you don’t have to live in El Segundo, but it has good schools, it has good neighborhoods with good cops, it has clean streets with no homeless people stealing your gas. Pay up.
Oakland used to be a beautiful city some 30 years ago and more. It had wide streets, decent-sized houses, and lots of good neighborhoods. Those same suburbs that were the height of middle-class pride in the 1950s are now slums. The wide medians that once held tall trees are full of tents pitched on dead grass where addicts trade for their chosen medicines. Yes, Mountain View and Concord are expensive, but you won’t have a homeless person pitching a tent in your front yard and shitting in your garden. Pay up.
Want to live in a place where you speak the same language as your neighbors? Want to live close to your parents? Don’t want to commute an hour and a half to work? Want to live near a hospital? Pay up.
A house is not just a house anymore; it’s a buy-in for a set of standards. Unfortunately, the most efficient filter for finding people of similar values and basic moral fiber is a financial one, and it is accomplished through the housing market, since that puts those who pass the filter in physical proximity with one another. You aren’t just buying a roof and four walls, countertops and floors, ceiling fans and fences. You are buying safety, cohesion, education, cleanliness… In effect, you are paying a premium for what used to be standard in the United States of America.
This is what is so devastating to younger people trying to make enough economic gains to buy a home. “The American Dream” isn’t a house so much as all the other stuff that goes with it. A house is where your family lives, among friendly neighbors who care about you, near a school where your children are given knowledge and are reasonably safe, etc. The house is the critical cornerstone of that dream. Are you going to raise a family in a cramped apartment, listening through the walls to your neighbors screaming at each other in a language you don’t understand? You can do it, certainly, but most people Gen Z and older remember better conditions as children. No wonder they are so pathologically nostalgic and anxious. No wonder they choose to be “child free,” when the buy-in for the cornerstone of family life is so expensive. Of course, ad to the expense of the house the debt gained to get a degree to get the white collar job to pay for the house, increased rent while saving for a down payment, high cost of commuting because cars are more expensive, paying out the nose for health insurance you don’t even use, etc. Not only will your mortgage be astronomical, you’re already carrying one in the form of you and your spouse’s student debt and you still have to pay the piper in high rent right now if you want to avoid modern social decay.
Something rather odd arises from these conditions as well. Besides homes being more expensive on their own due to immigration, welfare programs, and general urban decay, homes of the same size and quality Millennials grew up in don’t fit their needs, even at a premium. They have to buy newer, larger homes to get the social conditions nobody will discuss. The filter has to be even stricter, which means even more money. If they could buy a three bedroom cottage in the nice neighborhood they would, but they can’t.
This is what Baby Boomers are missing about this discussion when they mention that the home the millennials were raised in was 1500 square feet, not 3500. In 1985 you could live in a 1500 square foot home and have neighbors who weren’t drug dealers and reasonably expect that the kids in the neighborhood wouldn’t be stealing parts off your car at night. It’s not the same now.
Homer Simpson didn’t just pay for a modest house with his salary, he had Ned Flanders as a neighbor. Buy that house today and you’ll get an immigrant from Honduras running an illegal daycare or a couple without teeth cooking up meth in the shed.
Well, at least you’ll inherit your boomer parents’ dream home when they die, right?
Think again.
The biggest expense is still in front of the Boomers, and that is the long-term end-of-life care they will require. They need their house to continue going up in value, because they need to sell it to pay for the nursing home once they break hips or start to go senile. As life expectancy increases and there are ever more expensive medical procedures to squeeze a little more life out of the tube, the idea of generational wealth will pass away for the lower classes.
So, what is the solution for young people going forward?
This is a tough nut to crack because lots of Gen Y and younger people have already made mistakes that they cannot unmake due to following the good-intentioned but misguided advice of their elders. Gen Z has a reasonable chance of turning things around in their own lives, though they will undoubtedly continue to inherit increasing social decay due to the political decisions of the Baby Boomer generation. Until the boomers die off, they will want ever more immigration and social programs, since they are now the primary consumers of things like Medicaid.
The best advice I can give is to look outside of cities and hot real estate markets since housing is the biggest single cost a person has now. This is at best a prudent trade-off, because areas with high rent also have high employment opportunities and access to other amenities (hence why people want to live there). Being able to work remote and choosing a job/career that allows that may be a huge boon to younger workers, since you will be able to work for an urban salary but live more rurally.
Rural areas also have other benefits, namely distance from urban decay and crime. However, you might have fewer neighbors and they might be further away. It is harder to form a social network. You have to drive more to get things. Small towns often have their own problems including poverty and crime, so while it might be cheaper at first glance, you’ll still have to pay up for the social atmosphere you want. All this is assuming that you can get decent internet, which is not always possible with rural living.
It’s difficult to predict what the future will be. The 40-year career is dead, so you probably need to be switching jobs every few years to have your salary keep up with inflation. There is no telling what job skills will be needed in ten or even five years in the white-collar sector, but you can guess that there will still be demand for technical trades like plumbers, etc. It’s even hard to say government jobs will be secure, but my guess is we’ll still have toilets breaking down in the future (maybe even more).
Beyond that, look at education as an investment, not a four-year party-time-find-your-spouse rite of adult initiation, which was how my generation viewed it. You should buy the education and certifications you really need, not more. Go to a community college, then transfer to a state university if you need a 4-year degree. You have a chance of paying tuition out of pocket that way. Not having a 500-1000 dollar per month payment leaving your bank account when you are fresh out of school allows you much more latitude for risk and savings when you are young.
In fact, it’s advice that never goes out of style: avoid usury. It’s easy to live lean when you aren’t having to pay a piece to a loan shark. One of the best things I did as a young person was avoid debt, and while I certainly could have saved more, not losing all the money in interest was its own kind of gain.
The internet can provide some other benefits, too, namely virtual communities. These don’t provide physical security the way neighbors do, but they do provide opportunities to know and gain from people with similar values to your own. You can cooperate on art, education, and politics remotely now, which is essential when those in close proximity to you are figuratively from a hostile tribe.
It’s rough out there. I will remind you that Christ’s tells us not to worry. This doesn’t mean do not plan or care nothing for the future, but don’t let it drive you to anxiety or despair. There are many cycles we must endure, from the seasons to the rise and fall of kings.
For a more artistic exploration of these topics, check out my anthology Afterglow: Generation Y.
Also, check out this book, edited by Alexander Helene, which is the result of a virtual collaboration in a virtual community!
Thanks for the wise words. Being a 24 year old guy from the rural south, I'm not in the thick of things. However, social decay and the results of problems elsewhere in the country effect my community heavily. Drugs and crime mainly, though law and order remains intact. Even still, homes in my area have tripled in price in the last couple years, which leaves me in an undesirable position.
Luckily, I found your YouTube videos in time (the one saying college is mostly a scam) to keep me from diving into student loan debt without a solid grasp of my aspirations. I'm doing farm work/landscaping, and giving music lessons at night to pay cash for a cyber security degree. I am in a good spot relative to many of my peers and will soon be in a much better position, but I remain uneasy.
Anyway, thanks for affirming my sanity amongst all the insanity, and excellent article. Sorry for the long reply, but you struck a chord with me.
I loved this essay, and have come to the conclusion I'll never be able to buy a house, or hold down a proper job in Canada, I'm a historian, trained editor, trained janitor and sailor but would have to live in a slime-infested city. I hate cities, and could not imagine living in a western one for very long due to my love for nature and complete aversion to modern politics.
That said, I am heading out east to Asia, in the hopes to use my skills to teach English while there is a demand, and to make good money so that I could hopefully by year's end buy a house in the country out there, and also pay for a new degree in French grammar as they will pay through the nose for French teachers out there. And once I've that, I can name my price in places like Japan.
I would be willing to go back to train to be a plumber but feel too old and weary to go back in to become one, but I encourage most I come across to take up that path.
It's not much better up here in the north it might actually be worse, as Canada is on the verge of collapse and nobody has any interest in fixing it. And the cities are becoming ever more important in people's lives and ever more powerful, so that if you want out you must leave the country.