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I suspect affordable housing is the main thing here that has been stolen.
The whole mess of the economy is hanging on that one thing. It gobbles up every spare penny. There isn't enough of it, and the price is only being constrained by how much the highest bidder is prepared to pay. The highest bidders are professional couples, no kids. If that's not you, you ain't getting shit.
As a wise man once sang, "build fuckin' houses everywhere, millions of the cunts".
This was never the norm it's a myth that never actually existed even when it was supposedly the norm most people struggled
It was in NZ when I was a kid and I know the US had always had a higher standard of living than us
This will sound ridiculous to most people:
I didn’t go to school after the 8th grade. I dropped out for several reasons, but even without lying, I talked my way into a very good career in IT. There was no database of schooling and I was hired on my personal merits, then I built a user experience department before that was actually a thing.
Within a few years, I was responsible for hiring but couldn’t hire anyone like myself. I wasn’t allowed to even consider anyone without a college degree, so I would have had to reject myself.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this. That was 2002, and now in 2024, we’re rejecting people who might be awesome at their job (not to toot my horn, but I was very good at what I did and won industry awards) because they can’t afford to get a degree, as I couldn’t.
Most industries are pay to play now, and you can’t even break in by being exceptional nowadays. We’re trapping people out of what they’re great at and would love to do just because they were born into poverty.
Imagine the gifts we’re suppressing and squandering.
Yeah, I’ve noticed a shift. Even 5 years ago I hardly ever saw the college degree requirement for software development, and if it ever came up my yea experience nipped the question in the bud. These days, with over a decade of experience, I am getting automated rejections because I don’t have a diploma. I have been contacted and actively turned down over the phone after clarifying that I do not have a degree (many AI systems read my resume as having a degree in “degree” for some reason.)
I’ve put out hundreds of applications, and have had a handful of interviews.
The degree means nothing. Someone going to school for development doesn’t make them a good developer, it means they test well. My decade+ in the industry with multiple completed projects however…
It's more than "you need a degree" now. Some jobs require a undergraduate "business" degree, as if that means anything. This by definition excludes people who get harder degrees.
So you will see entry level financial roles going to people who have taken a few "leadership" (handshaking) courses and basic accounting. While someone with an English or Sociology degree (who might actually know how to write an email) is rejected.
Don't get me started on internships. Getting coffee every day, handing out mail, and doing a 2 week office furniture inventory are not indicators of a promising future.
The main problem is, businesses literally don't know how to hire. If you know what skills you need, you can find someone in a day. You can literally set up a folding table at the metro entrance and find 5 good interview candidates.
Thank you for sharing :)
I think many will agree the bureaucracy and corporate life is killing a lot of things, because of absolute assholes in management positions. But without written out experiences like yours, it is just unsubstantiated ideological hate.
The message was lost with the example chosen.
TL;DR - the world sucks for most people nowadays who want to buy a house.
The idea was that at one point in America, a single earner could afford to buy a home and upgrade the quality of their life if they:
Now, even with two-earner families, it is not enough to afford even a basic starter home without being house poor and in debt for the entirety of your life without ever really "owning" anything (other than the payments). The reason for this change in home ownership experience is what is always hotly debated.
Those with general wealth or an entrepreneurial spirit will argue that it is still possible. The working class who just wants to do a job, earn a paycheck and leave work behind at the end of the day will disagree. The poor worry more about how to pay their bills at the end of the month and still feed themselves to worry about a house.
There are a lot of factors in my opinion on what has changed to make it so hard today but no reason greater to me than when a house became an investment instrument instead of a place to raise a family. Something left to your heirs to give them a leg up in their future and that was how upward mobility worked. However, now that a house is not just a home but an investment tool, more and more people are finding the "American dream" is no longer achievable.
How the value of a house was derived hasn't really changed all that much. What has changed is how much that value is. It used to be that a single earner making 100k a year in a big city could afford to buy a home and with more kids (aka tax breaks) could afford to upgrade homes from the starter home to one in the suburbs. Then came the two-earner households. People could afford more so the real estate industry started charging more for the same things and people paid it ... because they could. The single earner was left behind because two incomes will always be more than one.
Then came the real estate get rich craze. Those modern families with two working adults and positive cash flow just waiting to be ... (oh wait, that's the infomercial sales pitch). There was money to be made for little to no effort. Just buy a property, charge someone rent and make sure that your income was greater than your expenses. Boom! That's it. Sit at home watching TV while your bank account gets rich. The two-earner family was now getting squeezed out by competition from the small investor. This also drove up the price of homes because the investor was willing to spend more if they thought they could charge more for the rental. The two-earner families now had to shell out more to buy or stay a renter because they could no longer afford to buy. Pretty cool business model where you can create your own customer base.
As is typical, it wasn't long before real estate corporations started to muscle in on the business as there was money to be made; especially with the deep pockets of bankruptcy protected corporate entities that could speculate on property values going up without worrying about losses. They also started exercising local political and financial influence over zoning and construction laws to ensure opportunity and property values would go their way. The small investors started to get pushed to the side and all the while, home prices kept going up (and inventory going down). Since profits must always go up, these so called developers started to decrease the actual size of the living space to squeeze more profits from the same properties. The original shrinkflation. That's how you ended up with shoebox sized apartments in big cities.
Finally, we come to modern day times, where publicly traded companies like the Zillow and Redfins of the world buy up whole markets in an effort to control supply and pricing. Real estate is unaffordable to most and the rich buy properties with no intention of using it for living. Instead, they use them as tax shelters for their wealth (tax deductible real estate investment trusts (REITs), 1031 exchanges, depreciation, and mortgage interest payments). Corporate shareholder interests also demand that housing costs keep rising regardless of the impact. What impact is that you say?
People are forced to rent, delay starting a family and find other ways to make money besides working for a living. Some try to do it through investments in the stock market where there are always more individual investor losers than there are winners. The same place the Zillows and Redfins of the world go to get their money so they can afford to try and manipulate said markets you can no longer afford to buy in. If you ask me, this is capitalism at its finest so long as you are on the right side of the financial wall. If your main focus in life is not to make money, then you will be supporting someone who does make it their focus. Welcome to modern serfdom.
"Serfdom, condition in medieval Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord." - Encyclopedia Brittanica