
Downward Mobility (1982) - aniham
http://nymag.com/news/features/48652/
======
_bxg1
"The baby boom generation may never achieve the relative economic success of
the generations immediately preceding it or following it."

"Members of the baby-boom generation were taught to appreciate the good
life—the arts, books, good clothing, travel—and grew accustomed to it during a
mass prolonged adolescence in which marriage and childbirth were delayed until
after the magic age of 30."

Wow. This is startlingly familiar.

~~~
ericd
I wonder how much of what this article describes (housing crisis, lack of
spending power, inability to buy a home, etc) is due to demographic booms
straining housing supply that doesn't react very quickly. The Millenials are
another relatively large generation, and we have another housing crisis in
almost every major city at around the time they're reaching 25-35.

~~~
wil421
Could your provide a source for your housing crisis in most major cities? If a
look at the top 10 largest metro areas[1] only one is in the news often, Los
Angeles. NYC and DC do not have the same issues as the west cost. Boston,
Atlanta, Dallas, Houston are not even close to having the same issues as SF or
Seattle.

[1][https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
releases/2018/popest-m...](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-
releases/2018/popest-metro-county.html)

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
As usual when looking at metro stats, a lot of it has to do with how you slice
"city" and "metro". If you look at the top combined statistical areas,
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area),
I would argue that the top 6 all have serious housing affordability issues
that I've heard about quite frequently, and the reason they're not as bad as
SF/Seattle is that (a) they're not as geographically constrained and (b) most
of these are older cities (e.g. NY, Chicago, DC) which were already bug on an
absolute basis and thus could better absorb growth.

------
PebblesHD
Every time this topic comes up I come back to some basic maths. My parents
were, in the late 70s and early 80s, able to buy a detached house in a suburb
reasonably near public transport to the CBD on their combined teachers
salaries with a mortgage repayment at around 35% of their wages. My partner
and I are, on paper at least, earning multiples of that even accounting for
official inflation figures and we’re left renting around twice as far away
from the city for around the same portion of income.

At some point the realisation has to occur that a house 50 miles from anything
is not worth $1m and the only reason they can currently sell for that is
existing home owners can leverage that asset to buy them. There will
eventually be no more existing home owners to sell to and the market should
logically come back to sanity, or at least I very much hope it will. That or
I’ll be moving my family to a more affordable location overseas creating the
same effect for their own first home buyers as I take up a property that would
have been used by a local. What happens after a few cycles of that I wonder...

~~~
lukevp
Where do you live that a house is $1m 50 miles from everything? The valley?
You don't have to go overseas for affordable housing. Most of the Midwest is
extremely cheap. Heck, I live about 20 miles from downtown Austin and 30 miles
from the main tech area and my house is under $250k, and Austin has a booming
tech sector. Houston and Dallas are some of the largest cities in the US, have
a lot of tech, and are similarly affordable.

~~~
hestipod
Having to live somewhere where you hate the culture, politics, climate,
geography is soul killing. The Midwest is cheap because it doesn't offer the
benefits the expensive places do. Most people are here because they were born
here. I never met anyone who chose to move here for any reason other than
economic or family obligation. They convince themselves its great for a time
because their dollar goes a lot farther, but the reality sets in soon enough.
People from amazing places don't dream of a grey/beige house in a suburb in
Kansas, or having to drive hours into some Iowan "town" to get to even
something terrible like strip malls and big box stores, they don't have post
cards of these places on their walls and don't visit them on holiday. You can
usually find a place that's cheaper than where you are, but it's cheaper for a
reason.

~~~
squish78
It might be inconceivable to the HN demographic but some people truly enjoy
the small town/ rural lifestyle

~~~
hestipod
There is small town rural life within an hour of any big coastal city. You
don't have to move to the homogeneous middle of the country for that.
Suggesting people move from a popular place to middle America for a good
quality of life is disingenuous in my view because its predicated entirely on
the fact that it's "cheaper". Their lives aren't going to be "richer"...only
their bank account for a time, but even that will fade as salary and
opportunity are less as well. Yes some people enjoy being surrounded only by
their race, religion, and politics so that outweighs the losses of
accessibility, culture, and experience...and frankly most of the ones who have
never experienced anything else don't even know what they are
missing...getting away from that gave me the only good parts of my life
personally. Once again...people don't put photos or postcards of Topeka or
Little Rock or some town nobody knows of in the vast sameness of the Midwest
on their dream walls. There is a reason for that.

~~~
mjparrott
There are nice places to live that aren't on a postcard

------
DoreenMichele
After a lifetime of homes filled with endless physical books, I got rid of all
my books to accommodate my health issues. I currently live in a small space
that would likely constitute serious deprivation if it weren't for the
internet.

My cheap smartphone gives me endless reading material and games and
conversation and banking in the palm of my hand.

My sons and I have more than a hundred free or cheap games stored _in the
cloud_ instead of in endless shelving units intruding into our limited space.
It's a very large part of why our lives work at all in such a cramped space.

I wonder how much this feeling of deprivation talked about in the article is
due to people generally making that swap -- of physical goods for virtual ones
-- and failing to consciously recognize it. If you feel _a proper home_ has a
big living room where every wall is covered in tall storage units to hold your
books, games and software, it's easy to not recognize that you actually have
more games to play and more stuff to read with the incredible bonus that none
of it needs to be dusted. It's easy to feel like you simply have _less_ and
infer that you must be deprived.

I'm not saying there aren't real problems. I have real problems with not
making enough money and not having certain important elements of a middle
class life.

I'm just saying that virtual goods make it difficult to compare our current
lives to lives before the internet.

How much does your Kindle library weigh? Practically _nothing_ in some sense.

Yet you may still have reading material equivalent to many bookshelves worth
of physical books. You may even be holding more books in the palm of your hand
than you ever physically owned back when owning dead tree books meant buying
bookshelves and dedicating valuable living space to it.

------
pbourke
Was it really true that middle class families could afford 2 houses, private
schools, etc in the 50’s and 60’s? Or is this just another case of all
socioeconomic classes in America calling themselves “middle class,” and some
of the profiled individuals came from upper middle class families in the top
20% of wealth/income.

I’d also find it interesting to see how some of the profiled individuals made
out over the ensuing 30 years. My guess: pretty damned well.

~~~
codingslave
I know that at least in the midwest, areas like Detroit and Ohio had factory
jobs that supported that kind of income level. This was without a college
degree. I know this because I have family members from the midwest. They also
retired quite early, with a very good pension, low stress, etc. But that was a
blip in time, not something could have lasted forever. But then again, could
certain economic policies have extended that economic period? Its a
contentious question

