Comment by Apreche
2 days ago
This article isn’t wrong, but it neglects to mention real estate, transportation, and lodging. A party needs a venue, and it needs guests. And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue. If they stay a long time, they need a place to sleep.
People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
Likewise, the larger someone’s home is, the more likely it is to be location in an area with low population density and little to no public transportation. Congrats, you can throw a party, but who are you inviting? All your friends are far away. How can they get there? How long can they stay? Can you accommodate them sleeping there? You aren’t friends with your neighbors who can party easily. You are friends with people on the Internet who are strewn about the world.
And of course, if you live in a major city with lots of friends, small apartment strikes again.
This is part of the reason we have seen the rise of more public events like conventions. There’s a hotel involved. It’s a multi-day event worth traveling to. A lot of people you know will be there. It costs everyone some money, but it’s not out of the realm to go a few times a year. Best part, nobody’s home gets trashed!
> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party without a big home, a yard, a big kitchen, etc. Small apartments are for small get-togethers that probably don’t register as parties.
This is baffling to me. Most of the parties I went to in high school, college, and my 20s were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards.
Maybe expectations changed? Now it seems more like people feel the need to get ready before going out, to bring something, to pre-coordinate to arrive with a group of friends, to have a lot of space, to have everything pre-cleaned and ready to be the background in photos, and maybe even to have a meat and cheese platter that gets posted to social media. It seems there's much less willingness to just go places, be cramped, and just hang out.
Gen Z in particular is deathly afraid of having an earnest but unflattering moment captured in someone else's TikTok and distributed to the entire planet.
Whenever I watch movies/TV shows set in the future but released before the invention of the camera phone, I just insert some headcanon that future society realised the evils of uploading a recording of someone to social media without permission, and decided to ban the cursed devices.
What are you basing that off of?
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The stakes are naturally higher and harsher than at any point in history. The government, all kinds, are reinforcing it, and governments are entirely reflective of society, there is no washing your hands of this responsibility.
Gen-Z is not only completely in the right in being sheepish, their predecessors are entirely to blame, and every attempt to claim they were not a part of the increasing surveillance state is a lie.
Even the older members of Gen-Z can be blamed to a small degree.
There is no cure
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> were in people's tiny apartments, small rented houses, and small yards
Anymore this feels impossible due to neighbors, landlords, and police. I have so many anecdotes... I don't think it's "getting ready" as much as it's an intolerant society of chronically entitled people. Also, it's increasingly expensive to go out + I truly believe we're experiencing the destruction of "3rd places"
My 20's had a good amount of that too... but it was increasingly at odds with real consequence and risk. I'm just safer at home with my SO, in my space. It's getting much worse for younger generations :(
I agree that owning real estate doesn't seem a big issue to me, but urban design does: I lived on both sides of the pond and in the USA getting to a party usually involved driving somewhere. That means organizing to go there with a group and a designated driver to stay sober, or getting a taxi (too expensive, when I was young). In Europe, I could just get on my bike and show up by myself. That lowers the barrier to entry considerably. As far as I can tell, urban sprawl in the US has made it even more car dependent today than when I was growing up.
>> That means organizing to go there with a group and a designated driver to stay sober
That's not what it meant in the 1980's though. That's one of the things that changed. The US in the 1970's and 1980's was much freer in that regard.
Good insights -- people now have to have their party look good for their social feeds: insta, tiktok, whatever. I'm forever thankful that I never had to even think about that, and even if people were taking pictures, nobody gave a damn about the background.
I go through this with my wife for every party we throw. She wants the house cleaned, table set, food spread ready, seasonal cocktails mixed, furniture moved around, decorations just so, etc.
I’m like here’s a giant thing of ice cold booze have fun.
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People deep cleaned their houses for parties long before social media and smartphones came along.
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People are tired
And partying is expensive
always so much
In my younger days I threw 100 person parties in a San Francisco apartment - it's standing room only for sure, but so is going to a crowded bar. And I've cooked for 15 without a dining table - you eat on the floor wherever you can find space.
Now I don't disagree with your point; I'm not 22 anymore and live in the burbs and have a less full social calendar, largely due to the logistical overhead of finding my way into the city or getting friends from the city out here. But I do want to say you can have a lot of fun with a lot of friends in a small space with the right attitude :)
That's the spirit!
Instead of "don't disagree" please say: "I agree" it is proper English and not some stylized, holier-than-thou sounding, completely logically twisted up act.
>People these days don’t own real estate.
The home ownership rate has been 64%, plus or minus about 1%, for the last 45 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
The number of first-time home owners has plummeted though
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/research-rep...
Perhaps, but what about the median age of buyers? That tells a more complete story here https://www.axios.com/2024/11/04/home-buyer-age-older
But presumably we are talking about the parents of teenagers who would own the homes for these parties, so people who are 40+
Also look at the median purchase - it's incredibly bigger than 1950s.
The simple fact is that people still buy and own real estate, at pretty much the same rate for decades (a century?), and now end up owning much bigger places.
The median age of buyers has increased from 31 in 2004 to 38 in 2024.
The median age of the population of the United States has increased from 35.3 in 2000 to 38.8 in 2020. (hmmmmm)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_Sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_Uni...
As the population pyramid of the US, which is already a "population Empire State Building", further morphs into a "Population Baseball Diamond", I expect the median age of all buyers to increase and the percentage of owners by age group in the younger cohorts to decrease.
Additionally, as the median age increases, because older people tend to have more money, I expect home prices to continue to increase.
Honestly, I expect home prices to spike by 2035-2040 as the current crop of 50–60-year-olds reach retirement realizing that their only real prospect of not starving to death in retirement is the main (and often only) asset: their home.
That will further stress younger folks, but people don't seem to care and anyone who expresses concern is denigrated as a communist so what is to be done?
Regardless, with the homeownership rate for "under 35" fluctuating between ~41% in 1982 and ~37% in 2024 "nobody owns shit no mo" is still false.
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/charts/fig07.pdf
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Phones are the reason.
Everyone gets quick and lazy dopamine from phones. Why bother with anything else?
Think about how much time goes into phones. Who has time to plan? Who has time to coordinate?
Phones are probably why the birth rate is declining too.
You don't even need a house to party. You can use a pavilion at a park, go out in the woods like the rednecks I grew up around did, party at the trailer park. Homes are by no means a limiting factor.
It's 100% our phones.
The Smartphone Theory of Everything probably doesn't explain all of the recent social changes, nothing is that simple, but it sure does correlate really well with all kind of trends since they became widespread. Casual socializing, partying, friendships, drinking, and sex all began to plummet around the same time, while loneliness and depression increased.
Anecdotally is makes a lot of sense as well. Most of the people I know, including myself, spend an awful lot of time on their phones and the internet in general. All of those hours have to come at the expense of other activities.
When I was in my 20s I spent an unusual amount of time (for the era) alone on my computer, but since most people were still quite social it was easy to hop into various activities. Now that nearly everyone is spending a bunch of time alone on their phone the real life social networks have begun to fray.
Some of the changes are for the better (ie. fewer teen pregnancies) but I think these trends are quite bad overall, without a clear solution. It's probably not a coincidence that political polarization and extremism has also increased during this time. Banning smart phones in schools seems like a step in the right direction, albeit a tiny one. Hopefully we can come up with more.
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> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership...), while the rates are somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point the difference is at worst 10 percentage points.
This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
That’s the absolute percentage difference. Look at the under 35 category, it’s literally down 25%. That means 1/4 people that would have owned a house in that age group don’t now. Under 45 is a relative drop of ~17%, so about 1/5. One in four to one in five people is more than enough to see an effect.
I doubt it’s the only cause at all, this anti-social (“Bowling Alone”) trend has been going on for generations, and probably has multiple causes. But the US housing crunch on young people is adding to it.
And this damn attitude of “the younger generations are just entitled weenies” about housing is about the most infuriating attitude in the world. My parents bought their first house on a single earners blue collar salary at the age of 27. That house, with almost no updates, now literally needs a top 1% salary and payments for 30 years to be able to afford. Don’t tell the kids to stop whining when they’re watching older generations gobble up their future in the name of preserving property values.
And for the under-35s, I wonder just what percentage got their homes from their parents, who invested in properties decades ago.
> This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age.
Home prices have doubled over the past 20 years, twice the rate of income increases
This isn't just "complaining"
There's been 65% inflation over the past 20 years, so to properly compare housing prices you need to multiply the 20 years ago price by 1.65. A house that doubled in price in twenty years only increased by 20% in terms of actual purchasing power (2.0 / 1.65).
[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
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I’ve seen homes double in price in some areas just during Covid
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That's for the whole country. This site is very heavily biased toward people who live in major cities, where real estate has in fact become the purview of only the rich.
Short version of the history:
Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you can't do anything."
These cities have always had an allure, especially creative centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.
This was followed by insane real estate hyperinflation in those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros, that happens.
The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated everywhere and not just in the US -- but it's far less insane than the top-tier cities.
I post this every chance I get:
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
> Starting in the late 1990s...
How old were you then?
People have a tendency to remember some time period when everything was carefree and you didn't have to worry about how much stuff cost and all this new, great stuff was happening. And then you find out they were 12 and the time where they think all that went downhill was when they were 20.
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It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.
I would hope so, otherwise that would mean the country/locale is so bad that older households are packing their bags and fleeing.
So the most desirable properties, such as large SFHs, townhouses, penthouses, etc… within a short driving distance of an attractive city will likely be owned by the latter, by definition.
It's not a matter of competition around current supply, it's a complaint about policy that has lead to a decline in what a 20-something can purchase over time.
> It is really strange to read complaints that the vast vast majority of 20 somethings have no chance of competing against older established households in the housing market.
Not to mention Private Equity and huge real estate investment firms that vacuum up a significant (if small) number of homes. Even if that 20 something could scrape together a 20% down payment and make an offer for asking price, they're going to get beaten by some corporation buying with cash.
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The same managers - that then require asses in seats, keeping downtown valuable as investment, also own the mansion within driving distance. Might there be the remote possibility, of a no-win-scenario for the young, which results in violence? No way.
I'm not convinced. I live in Berlin and everyone is living in a flat, yet I've had my fair share of home parties, even in small two room apartments where half the party spilled out to the stairwell.
I'm pretty sure Berlin has public transportation. I have it here in Trondheim, Norway - but only one town that I've lived in the states had busses. They didn't run all night, on Sunday, nor did they visit all areas of the somewhat small town. (I'm from the US, lived more places there than I have in Norway)
Other places had taxis (that you couldn't order ahead of time to get to work on time) and some had none until they uber/lyft. (Don't know the current situation).
I'm going to guess the other thing Berlin has is safe areas to walk. I can go to a party and walk home, safely on walking paths complete with shortcuts, without even being harassed by the police and risk getting arrested and in jail for the night (for public intoxication). None of these were luxuries I had in the states.
And I'll say that yes, I've been in some small apartments - but only some folks with small apartments can host. You probably have no clue how many would host if they only had enough space, but a small apartment with 2 adults that have hobbies limits things.
Trondheim also has a university (which increases the odds of a party happening), and one could also walk across the entire city in less than an hour :). Most cities in the US suffer from being designed around cars, but that has not changed in the last 50 years, so I don't think it explains the decline.
It's been years, but I hope Den Gode Nabo is still fun.
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I don't think Berlin life corresponds much to USA life in this regard. We mostly have suburban sprawl and many areas that would be similarly dense, are not very populated with children/teens (because parent's often move to the suburbs)
I don't think Berlin is a good example because partying is kind of part of the city subculture.
People travel there literally to party.
People travel to Berlin to go party in clubs, not for home parties.
Partying in someone's apartment is a thing in probably every reasonably sized city in Europe, not just Berlin. Although you should probably alert your neighbours.
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> Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes.
About 2/3 of households in the US own the home they live in. Renting is the minority, not the majority.
Thank you for mentioning this! There's this weird, persistent meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the data.
There are shifting trends in generational home ownership rates, but these are still just initial trends we're seeing. If you look at the data [0] owner occupied has gone down from the 2000s housing bubble, but in the grand scheme of things is not even particularly low.
People also have this mistaken belief that investors like Black Rock are buying up huge swaths of property, when in reality most "investment" properties are bought by families and individuals, consider anyone who know who owns an AirBNB rental or other rental property, they would be considered "investors".
Most Americans still live in a house, and own that house (or at least, some member of their household owns it).
0. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
One important data point is that houses have become much more expensive compared to income in the last decades. When I lived in CA, my plumber neighbor told me he bought his house in the 70s for 80000 on a salary of 40000. Today he would probably pay 800000 for the same house but make maybe 100000 or a little more.
It's definitely harder to buy a house these days.
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I don't know about the United States, but in (parts of) Europe it is the case. "Nobody owns homes any more" is an exaggeration of course, but things are not alright in the housing market, in part because private corporations are buying up quite a large percentage of the housing stock to rent. I think in Ireland it's about half.
Like I said, I don't know about the US. It's a big place and you're probably taking too much of a "grand scheme of things" view here. Aside from geographical diversity, total % of home ownership doesn't change that fast – lots of older people already own homes, their children often inherit those homes. Houses aren't like hotdog sales and numbers change slowly.
What matters more is how much does an average 25 or 30 year old pay in housing costs? What hope does someone with a decent (but not exceptionally well-paid) job have of purchasing a house? A single % of home ownership across the entire population doesn't really capture that. Doubly so for such a large country as the US. I'm sure there are affordable homes out in the sticks, but also ... no jobs. That might work for the remote software dev, but not everyone is a software dev.
In Ireland the total housing ownership has fallen, but not dramatically. However, the reality for people not already having a home is quite bleak. Buying a house now is significantly more expensive than it was a decade or two ago, as is renting. I could buy an apartment on my own ten years ago with a salary that really wasn't all that great. I'd have no hope today. My rent today is about three and a half times what it was 15 years ago. There is a generation of working 20 and 30-year old who are still living at home because they can't really afford to move out.
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Yes, it’s surprised me how this meme was everywhere in the comments while the data does not support it. I’d bet it’s splashy headlines in news outlets. Important to correct it so that policy is focused on what’s most effective.
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It's another example of mistaking the current trading trends for the overall asset reality. Like NFTs, TSLA, and house prices, a relatively small amount of daily trading money can move the "market cap" quite a lot.
And those old folks that took their home equity and used it to buy property for an AirBNB are in fact an example of the rich/old folks screwing the young generation hard. (Other examples: vote to reduce taxes, to increase tuition, stop the free market from building more housing, do nothing on global warming, let the economy be swallowed by health care and financialized scams). As are the people that own and rent 3 houses, while their grandkids have to move far away. (Disclaimer: I live in San Jose, and my adult kids will never be able to live near me).
> There's this weird, persistent meme that large corporations are buying up all the housing and nobody owns homes anymore, which is fundamentally not supported by the data.
They are and the trend is there. The housing market moves slowly and it takes time to chip away enough at the larger stat. Once the boomer's age out, even with wealth and asset transfer, let's revisit this and see how it looks. I'd bet 2/3 ownership looks more like 1/2 or less by then, which is a significant drop and it probably will only continue from there.
For adults under 35, less than 38% own their own home and the rate is falling.
Also, it varies quite a lot by state. Over 3/4 of adults own their own home in West Virginia, but in New York it's a bit over 1/2.
Population also varies wildly by state, and New York makes up a far larger percentage of the USA than does West Virginia.
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Owning an apartment isn’t materially different than renting an apartment here. It’s sometimes better as many apartments have free or rentable spaces available for parties as a selling point, but rarely can you use that space late in the evening.
Owning a home in an HOA area can drastically cut down on what kinds of parties you can host.
To some extent but there are differences. You have housing stability, a fixed price going forward, the ability to renovate most of the internals, and the ability to affix things to the walls without worrying about marks when you have to move out.
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But what's the demographic breakdown of this?
How many of that 2/3 is households that have owned the home for 20+ years—ie, since before the subprime crash?
How many of that 2/3 is households of people 65+? And how many is people under 30? Partying is still largely a young people's game, and even if your "household" owns the home you live in, if that's your parents or grandparents, you're much less likely to be hosting parties there.
That is severely overrepresented by old farts who don't party. Among people who party most probably rent.
yeah, as an East European, it's crazy that our real estate prices are basically the same as the non-super expensive US cities, and we make like one-fifth the salary.
In fact I just checked and the ratio of avg salary to real estate prices is about the same as in New York.
This is misleading. The trend is going in the opposite direction and the figure is closer to 53% https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1ew7tp6/no_67_o...
Yeah, but the 2/3 of people are old boomers that don’t party.
My sister and her husband throw a pretty great annual Halloween party at the house they rent which is 1-2 hours from the nearest city and a good 15-20 minutes from the nearest town.
I don't think the real estate situation helps but I think there's a deeper social problem driving both of those effects.
I'm not saying this isn't part of the problem, but my experience has been different. When I was in my 20s, my friends and I all lived in apartments and had parties fairly often. I recall that when I was a kid in the 90s my parents often went to small house parties as well. Now, in my 40s, neither I nor anyone I know ever goes to parties despite us all owning houses and cars and living fairly close to one another.
My theory is that people have fewer parties because people have gotten flakier about attending larger social events. It is much easier to cancel plans at the last minute with a text or a social media DM, and people always seem to want to keep their options open. We've moved to getting together only with one other couple/family at a time b/c any time we try to have larger group events half of the invite list will cancel the day of.
"People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. "
This is only true in some HCOL places ands big cities. Plenty of people own homes.
Not in high-density areas like cities. People own homes in low density areas (middle of nowhere), which makes them isolated, hence no communal activities like partying.
In Philadelphia everyone I knew owned a home (condo, townhouse, rowhome or stand alone) by 30 basically.
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> Wealthy people own it all.
Most homes in the US are mortgaged. More likely the banks, which ultimately means the depositors, who are just as likely to be everyday average people (the wealthy normally keep their wealth in things like businesses), own most of it.
Homeownership rates in the US fluctuate, but are basically flat over the past ~45 years.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S
>People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all.
The article says a similar decline is seen among the wealthy.
> And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue.
Add in the odd issue of younger people not getting their drivers licenses or owning/having access to a car.
It could be anecdotal but I've seen this in a number of locales across the country. Curious if there's hard numbers on it.
No, owning a house does not give you more license to throw a party. Not owning a car never stopped anyone determined to go to a party. A place to sleep? What kind of party are you imagining in your head? One where people travel hundreds of miles and need a hotel? Your take is ridiculous. People party in small apartments all the time, I've been to hundreds. I took the bus there many times, or got rides from other friends going to the party, and now ride-sharing is a thing. Sleep?? That was never, ever part of the equation. I know it's a tired cliche, and usually used as a troll, but I can confidently say that you obviously don't get invited to many parties.
US suburbs have not changed. I grew up in US suburbs (in the 70's and early 80's) and there was partying.
My own personal theory? Music sucks now, ha ha.
US suburbs have very much changed!
The median new home size skyrocketed in the '80s.[1]
Many of the post-war suburbs were planned communities built with schools, churches, grocery stores, and other necessities within walking distance.[2] Compare that to developments today (and since the '90s), that are all housing, lack sidewalks, and require a car to get to necessities.
Serendipity doesn't happen when everyone's in cars. You don't pull over to invite an acquaintance over for a beer or offer to watch their kids.
1: https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/average-home-size/#smal...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitt_%26_Sons#Construction_o...
Good point. Car culture was nonetheless a thing even in the 70's though where I grew up up. And those 70's suburbs are still there. So I am not sure why they are still not partying in Overland Park and Prairie Village, Kansas.
People rarely like music made decades after they were young; tastes settle.
I like plenty of current music. Not pop music though. (My kids don't seem to either.)
The consumption of music has changed.
I almost never meet people who like the same bands as I do. I can listen to new music that I love at home. If I go to a bar or a party I'm going to mostly hear music I don't like, and if I do like it, I could have already heard it at home.
Maybe that is part of it
This is such weird reasoning. When you're young and throwing parties where you're implicitly inviting a whole lot of people who you don't know, they will be bringing random chaos and you want to appear judgement proof and have it be someone else's property getting accelerated wear and tear. By the time you own a house with a yard, you're only inviting people you already know, with maybe one layer of transitive trust. Perhaps this focus on owning a house as the first step to doing anything points to the real problem though?
You need a home to party? News to my younger self. Parties in crowded shitty apartments, outdoors, or even in cars were the norm when we were young.
This complaint - we don’t have nice houses so we can’t party - is unintentionally emblematic of the root issue in misaligned expectations and excuses for realigned priorities. Nobody Inknew when young had houses either.
Look, it’s not obviously bad to me that young people party less. Blame gaming, blame some resurgent conservative cultural values, blame the internet or even laziness. Maybe the youth today just have better things to do, and that okay. Binge drinking, drugs, and stupid decisions aren’t necessary good investments in time, and many, many, friends from back in the day didn’t survive it. Like less kids smoking cigarettes, maybe this is a good thing (for them and all of us).
But it’s ridiculous to try and turn this behavioral trend into some manifesto on housing inequality. Give me a break.
And even if every person did live in a detached home where they could hypothetically throw a party, there are smartphone connected Ring cameras everywhere. Parents always know what's going on now.
Eh, I feel like my (and most peoples) main exposure to house parties was in HS and college when basically no one owns their own home. Rented apartments, houses and family homes seemed to work fine then, I can't really think why that wouldn't be the case now.
Note the age-group with the biggest drop is 15-24, its not like the average 18 year old owned their own home circa 1995.
Jeez, youngish people feeling left out on investing into real estate see it as root of most of problems this world is facing now.
Sorry but can't agree, as do most folks here backing up with some hard data. That 'glass is half-empty' approach to daily life ain't healthy long term, ever thought about that?
This is just absolute total nonsense. Normal people do own real estate. Lots of people rented back then and do now. Friends were “far away” back then too, they took their cars, bummed rides, took buses, whatever. Where do they sleep? Where do you think they slept back then? The floor, the couch, the lawn, or they didn’t sleep at all and just went home in the morning.
That reminds me of an article I can't find anymore on the plight of the American poor couple trying to raise a child in a gasp 900sqft. Uh, check real estate sqft averages around the world?
I never was much of a partier as a teen but I've been to a few, and they were all in flats ranging from much smaller than an American house to literally one room sometimes with 15 people in it. Had no problem falling asleep drunk on somebody's kitchen floor or on a couch in a room with a bunch of other people.
Even in the US a dorm room (a tiny, rented place) is a stereotyped party location.
Oh and ofc numbers are wrong. The houses in the US are bigger than ever and homeownership rate is smth like 60%.
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You correctly blame corporate buy up of real estate as a problem but nobody ever cites upper income new immigrants as a problem. Where I live the only people purchasing $600k - $1 million residential properties are newly arrived Chinese, Eastern European, South Asian and Arab immigrants.
Makes for a very angry native population who are being pushed out of the places they were born for new arrivals. We'll never be able to build enough housing to account for the continual flow of well to do immigrants and native population.
In a twist that has multiple levels of irony, I've heard that there's protests going on in Mexico right now about this, with the wealthy immigrants/tourists being from the US.
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Are you claiming that they’re already well to do (by American standards) when they arrive?
I can’t count a single immigrant in my network that was rich by American standards (which makes them filthy rich by most other nations standards) and then chose to move here.
Sure my sample size is probably 30 families (across a dozen countries) but that’s not nothing.
Every single one built their net worth here. Meaning that opportunity is also available to natives.
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Most of these immigrants are not rich before they get here with maybe the exception of the Chinese who explicitly buy real estate as investments outside of China.
Yeah, that's a good one too. I remember reading that China was allegedly trying to curtail this by limiting money movement out of the country for large transactions, but we all know that the people with that kind of money will find a way (if those "efforts" were even really being made).
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The biggest bias to watch out for is to assume what has happened in the past on the same trajectory.
It wasn’t long ago when the experts were warning about over population.
I dare say that the housing crisis is driven by people needing housing, and the number of people alive being problematically high seems like it might be related to the problem of overpopulation. Food supply has kept up, but if housing has not, isn't that still a problem driven by overpopulation?
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more importantly imo: maids and housewives.
good riddance btw. but we need to adjust because partying is nice. we are still working ad if we have a free employee taking care of half our lives.
welp, it's always a class issue.