I doubt future generations will have “basement dwellers” because none of us can afford to own basements.

moistclump@lemmy.world to Showerthoughts@lemmy.world – 271 points –

“Basement dwellers” implies parents with multi level houses. I feel like the kid living with their parents for a long time will become more of a thing but they’ll be lucky to have the privacy and space of a whole basement.

And so I say, basement dwellers? In this economy?

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that and no one can afford kids

No one has ever been able to afford kids. Kids are fucking expensive!!!

That’s not true. Kids used to pay for themselves. My grandmother had 14 siblings. Many of them started working right after grade 8 and handed over their pay to their parents to help support the family!

Ok....sure...my grandpas siblings quit school at that age - their mom sent them to work instead because they could earn a quarter a day. I'm not sure that was really paying for themselves.

They also worked on the farm and helped in but kitchen. Life was very different back then. Medical care wasn’t nearly as advanced, accessible, and expensive as it is today. School was brief and free, not an enormous expense like it is today. Food was cheap, just labour-intensive because you had to grow it yourself. Housing was cheap too: you largely built it yourself and you didn’t need 15 bedrooms for 15 kids: 3-4 would suffice.

IIRC one kid totals an average of 250k in expenses over 18 years, for simplicity we'll say 240k and 20 years,

One kid costs about $1k a month right now.

What adds insult to injury is how those costs can be subsidized, free school meals alone would SIGNIFICANTLY lighten the load on lower class families, improve educational outcomes, improve child nutritional outcomes through regulation of what's on the menu, and even improve sociability since kids now have additional settings to encounter their friends in where their parents and teachers are supervising to correct bad behavior.

Plus it adds an incentive for rich kids to mingle too since being the one person who's not at school dinner because their parents can practically hire a private wait staff and meal planner is immediately going to single you out and there is NOTHING that hurts a kid more socially than sticking out for something like being a rich kid.

A generation without chicken tendies, the horror

I have to imagine our relationship with trendies will only evolve, not end.

You can make your own, with far less fat and sodium

In the future, the basement won't be known as the basement. It will be known as home because we won't be able to survive long on the main floor due to the radiation exposure and roaming raiding gangs.

where i live (texas), most houses I know don't have basements, so at least a part of texas is basement dweller free

I wonder why not. Most places I've lived that didn't couldn't due to the water table or ground stability. I wonder if it's just cheaper with how shitty houses are being built now.

In the DFW area, the ground is largely unstable. Foundation issues are very common here because of how much shifting goes on. Much of the soil around where I live is a red clay that just disappears the moment it gets too wet.

Digging out a basement is expensive

Yes, and you have to dig deep in some places to get below the frost with your foundation. In those places a basement makes sense because you're digging that far either way. Texas frosts don't get very deep, so you're able to have a shallower foundation making a basement just an extra cost.

The uh, people owning the places with basements will die and someone will be able to buy that property

Nonono, you do it wrong. You pool together to rent a small part of a basement for a short time. During that time you build a hidden entrance to your own basement under the other basement and in 200-300 years you have your own basement. And evolution will make the job easier as it will make you smaller to fit better into the basement.

Duh! Do we have to explain everything to you people?

My poor kids. They’re welcome back anytime they need to but my basement is not really finishable. Their room is tiny, with bunk beds and no door.

The door part is complicated. I would have fixed that from the beginning if I could have.

I grew up in a ranch house with a full unfinished basement.