'Disenfranchised' millennials feel 'locked out' of the housing market and it taints every part of economic life, top economist Mark Zandi says

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'Disenfranchised' millennials feel 'locked out' of the housing market and it taints every part of economic life, top economist Mark Zandi says
fortune.com

Few milestones in life mean as much to the American Dream as owning a home. And millennials have encountered the kind of trouble totally befitting their generation, which largely graduated into the teeth of the disastrous post-2008 job market. Just as they entered peak homebuying and household formation age, housing affordability is at 40-year lows, and mortgage rates are near 40-year highs.

The anxiety this generation feels about the prospect of never owning their own home affects their entire perception of their finances and the economy, says Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi.

“If they feel like they’re locked out of owning a home it colors their perceptions about everything else going on in their financial lives,” Zandi says.

Millennials have long been dogged by a brutal housing market. They faced not one, but two, cataclysmic economic events—the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the pandemic in 2020. Both of which left them reeling financially and struggling to afford a home. The Great Recession decimated the real estate market as the economy nearly collapsed under the weight of tenuous mortgage backed securities. While the pandemic brought with it a remote work boom that caused millions of citydwellers to flee to the suburbs, sending housing prices soaring.

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me to care for my father

That's your choice to make then.

Moving is an option, you are prioritizing your father's comfort over your own life.

You can do that, but no one us forcing you to.

You can tell your dad "look I'm leaving, I can't afford it here. You can come with me or not, but I have my own life to live and this place is killing me"

If he doesn't come with you, then that's on him.

He is a grown ass man, you aren't his parent...

Often I see this case, if you purposefully choose to shackle yourself to a relative, that's no longer "the economy"s fault you can't afford life. You made a choice to live outside your means, and that choice has consequences.

You always have the option to leave and most if the time if push came to shove, your relative will cave and follow.

Of not, you aren't responsible for them, stop lighting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.

Man you just keep finding new and inventive ways to continuously prove how much of a dick you are in this thread.

It's a fundamental truth. Children feeling compelled to care for their parents is purely their choice.

I never said it was a bad choice, but it is a choice.

But if you do make that choice, it has consequences.

The concept of children "owing" their parents their lives is anachronistic and ignores the fact the parent chose to have them.

Any parent that feels their children owe taking care of the parent in their older age is an asshole, period. A parent that raised their child well should produce a child that wants to help their parent out of love, not a feeling of owed necessary.

The former is family and love, the latter is narcissistic parents that think they "own" their child.

BUT a child shouldn't be killing themselves to take care of their parent. Any parent that actually loves their child would never ask their child to give up their own life to suit the parents comfort.

A good parent will do whatever it takes to support their child, and if that means leaving their old life behind to move (with their child) somewhere more affordable so the child can actually afford to take care of them, that shouldn't even be a tough question for the parent to answer, it should be an instant "yes, if you are sure you want to do that I'll support your decision"

Parents that compel their children to live outside their means just because they won't move with them somewhere in their means because they dont want to leave their old home behind are shitty parents, period

Parents should never be prioritizing their own comfort at the cost of their children's success in life. If you do that, you were never fit to have a child.

The concept of children "owing" their parents their lives is anachronistic and ignores the fact the parent chose to have them.

We get it. Your parents were shit to you, so the concept of loving and being loved is foreign and unheard to you. People choose to care for their parents because they love them, ya dink.

I'll take "didn't read the post and responded asap" for 200.

Nah, I read through your garbage. My point still stands.

I don't think you did, based on how your response makes no sense contextually.

You sound like you are more focused on vaguely trying to insult me instead of actually parsing what I wrote.

Oh well.

He is a grown ass man, you aren't his parent...

Man, I sure hope your kids tell you this when you're unable to care for yourself. Or better yet I hope you don't have kids, no need to continue your parasitic family tree. Self righteous prick.

Dude you really need to get off the internet now and then. You are so entirely out of touch with normal humans..

That’s a lot of psychopathic assumptions I’m just going to pretend you didn’t say. The point is the reality for most is dire and your clearly more interested in winning the conversation than understanding those shitheads on social media are only getting views because they are validating real problems in the economy.

I’m just going to pretend you didn’t say

That's easier than confronting reality.

Confronting reality is when you realize you'll be old and alone, with no one around to give a shit about you. Don't worry, you'll see it someday, champ. I'm hoping for it.

Of not, you aren't responsible for them, stop lighting yourself on fire to keep someone else warm.

Imagine if all of society operated on this person’s principals of “fuck you, I got mine!”.

It’s basically the GOP playbook.

There's a huge difference between helping others within your means vs outside your means.

This is actually the first principle of the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take, if you've read it.

Prioritizing your own health comes first, because a dead doctor can't save anyone else anymore.

Sacrificing your own health to try and help others typically is net negative cause now someone else has to look after your sorry ass in the fallout.

Working yourself to the bone helps no one, it's just net negative and doesn't do any favors.

That's explicitly why I said "lighting yourself on fire", which is actively harmful and tends to be, you know, lethal.

But it's so much easier to strawman what I said into something else entirely and attack that instead yeah?

Holy shit dude. You are an actual psychopath aren't you? Fucking Ebenezer Scrooge pre ghostly trio levels of heartless.

Fucking hell...

Probably saw shows like House and Sherlock and thought "if I act like this it'll mean I'm special too!"

See my write up in detail here, hopefully it helps shed more light on my point:

https://lemmy.world/comment/7448016

Heeeeellllll no. Seen enough that I am not touching that with a ten foot pole. I value my mental health more than that.

That does sound a lot easier, making assumptions about people and not bothering to read what they wrote sounds like it makes it easier to sleep at night, knowing there's zero possibility you maybe were just mistaken about something.

Perhaps, but as far as assumptions go I have not neglected to notice you have not bothered to correct me either.

I have also experienced that some people refuse to give up and feel like they must deliver some nebulous and ultimately wanting ad hominem "parting shot" not persuant to the original arguement so they can self-rationalize their own position and feel like they came away saving face. You wanted to find a rationale to dismiss me and there you have it : I am not worth engaging with because I don't "understand you". Now back to your comfortable life you go.

I have no idea what you are talking about at this point. You literally admitted to not being able to mentally handle my points and that they were bad for your mental health.

I'm curious what you think my point is, that's it's so eldritch and terrible its causing you 8d6 psychological damage.

Cuz I seriously don't think my take is even a hot take, it's wild how I'll write what I perceive to be pretty basic "don't be a dick" logic and people will be like "whooaaa hey now we got a psycho over here, hey this dude thinks parents shouldn't treat their kids like objects, what the fuck right?"

W i l d

Dude. You have shown regular disregard for the humanity of the people you were discussing stuff with in this thread. Essentially you told someone who is trying to help an ailing loved one that essentially they could always just force an elder to move or abandon them and that the hardship is essentially their fault. Tearing an elder from their eatablished support system is a massive blow to them particularly when they are reaching end of life.

I have also read enough in your surrounding comments to see you routinely try and force your very narrow vision of success and correct choices on others.

At a certain point don't care what the hell what specific context you think absolves you of that notion. It's toxic as fuck and I will personally have none of it.

Essentially you told someone who is trying to help an ailing loved one that essentially they could always just force an elder to move or abandon them and that the hardship is essentially their fault

This is a deeply reductive way to interpret what I said, and explains why your response was the way it is.

This is why I assume people don't understand what I write, because when people respond so intensely to what I consider lukewarm takes, and I ask them to try and re-iterate what they think I meant, it's usually an extremely reductive off base strawman.

I don't think it's on purpose, I just think tone and context are very difficulty to convey over text, and people will assume and interpret what a person writes as the worst possible take when they already disagree with them on something.

Not anything new, that's just how these chats tend to go, people fucking loathe anything that challenges their view and then interpret all follow up statements in the most reductive and off base way possible, to avoid confronting the possibility that the very first thing they got challenged by might possibly be right.

Blowback effect.

It's why Trump supporters, even when faced with insurmountable evidence they've hitched their horse to an out if control train wreck, will dug their heels in even further and demonize "the other side" despite the person they are following behind us literally quoting Hitler.

Because confronting the fact they truly were wrong, and were indoctrinated into a cult and fell for a massive amount of propaganda, means admitting they were foolish even when objective evidence is in front of them.

It's no different from people who truly believe the housing crisis is as bad as they think. It's like 90% propaganda built on top of misinterpreting/misrepresenting data... or just outright lying. It's got a foundation of using mathematical numbers explicitly to fool someone without a keen eye. Using stuff like the average price of housing as a baseline and etc.

People would rather keep staying hitched to an objectively false pile of lies and you can clearly see here how absolutely filled with vitriol the blowback kicks in when someone points out objective truths.

That's how intensely people will fight tooth nail and claw to avoid the possibility they were wrong. The fact the people fighting against me are insulting me, meming, trolling, etc should instantly be a red flag for which side is experiencing the blowback effect.

Let me also be clear here, my antagonistic stance and harsh demeanor are not directed directly at the people in this thread.

It's with respect towards the assholes that are perpetuating it to profit off people's ease in bring fooled

I'm not mad at you or really anyone here. I'm mad at the propaganda engine churning out disinformation at a profit and this thread is a testament to how fucking well oiled that engine is.

People, in here, are literally rehashing the premise if "how do I afford a home when my areas average/median price is x"

At this point that premise has basically become the "humans only use 10% of our brains" of realty in my eyes. Its an easy to swallow lie, it's built on bullshit, and everyone spreads it like wildfire because it makes them feel better about themselves.

Honey, baby, sweetie pie. You have been playing judge and jury to people's individual circumstances in a very condescending way this entire time. Heaven forbid someone got a degree they can't use. Not everyone wants to buy obscure property in the middle of the country. Fucking hell, personally I would wither and die in a suburb if the queerphobes didn't try and drive me to suicide first.

Some people want or need to live in a city and some of us aren't in the US. People know their own circumstances and values. There's not a lot of room to recover from mistakes at present but telling people that they earned their trouble is at best antisocial. If there isn't a raft of decent options outside a very narrow subset of okay - that's a housing crisis. When the eock bottom rent in a suburb one hour and a half outside of city and beyond transit for a one bedroom basement suite is $1400 and your area's minimum wage is $15 for jobs that 20 years ago were careers... That's indicative that you have priced out a decent chunk of the population. There are many times the number of people living rough in tents by highways then I ever saw 5 years ago and quite frankly when you're poor it's way easier to be poor in a city.

The people you've talked to have researched inside their own means, values and life goals and you keep trying to tell them it's fine using nothing but your own narrow anecdotal and judgemental rubric of "nope housing is great actually because you just didn't MATH. "

Congratulations! You don't have a problem which means you fit perfectly inside the narrow slot of comfortable circumstance that currently exists for owning a home! That absolutely doesn't mean housing precarity isn't a massive problem it's just it isn't YOUR problem.

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