At Least You Had Something...

In the Gen-Z-has-it-hard argument I stepped back from the overall statistics and even the comparative prices and income to zoom in on what were their particular sticking points. Housing is nearly always mentioned, college is usually in there, affording an unspecified car and the difference in wages for an entry-level job get mentioned. I tried to look back on those both as one who was there and knows the story behind the story but also how it does look now.  

Let's start with the housing. There is a common complaint that there are no small homes on small lots being built these days, because contractors are leaving money on the table if they don't build big.  It's true, and because there are fewer small houses all the time, they are not the bargain they should be. But that's only the beginning. Pretty much any house and most apartments have a dishwasher, a dryer, a far better stove and refrigerator, decent windows, wiring, and plumbing (compared to my childhood).  Those add up. The small houses themselves have grown. This is the house I moved into when I was two, in 1955.

It didn't have the garage or breezeway then, nor that addition on the front, just that cape with slanted ceilings on the 2nd floor bedrooms. The first house my wife and I bought was even smaller and less impressive.  Originally a 1906 one-room summer home, every room was a separate addition, including the bathroom and kitchen. Knob and tube wiring.  Stone foundation and some crawl space. About 900sf, $29,500 in 1978. It's one thing to be a defensive Boomer about how hard we had it, dear child, but to them "At least you had a house." 

And they're right. That was how we looked at it then, too.  Lots of young couples would never touch such primitiveness today even if it were available. Yet some would, but they can't. 

If you want to buy property and gradually build over three years, as some friends who went the log cabin route did, the town won't let you. They expect completion within a certain time period. If you can't build it to code, you don't get occupancy. None of these improvements - and they are improvements - destroys the market in itself.  But it's like a game of Jenga, and the tower is falling in a lot of areas. 

I always drove beaters for cars and was fine with it. Obama pretty much killed that for the next generation. In the 60s people had one car per family or none. Some guys hitched to work, even when they had families when I was a boy, and being in a city, we knew plenty of families that had no car at all. I knew rural people with no car, too, mostly old people who had someone drive them into town to shop once a week. 

We can sneer at devices and laptops and tell young people they can live without those, but a lot of them need them just to do their jobs.  You have to make a conscious effort to step away from that and embrace an entirely different life. We took a half a stab at it when we were first married and didn't like it.  Not everyone wants to grind their own flour now, either. Mother Earth News had lots of ways to building with rammed earth or aluminum cans stacked in mud, but try getting permission for that. You usually have to go well into the wild to find a place where the county will say "Hey, do what you want," and if you are that far out you and your wife had both better have reliable vehicles with 4WD. 

Medical care and insurance was less of an issue because it wasn't much damn good anyway. Health insurance was nice if you could get it, but people paid out of pocket, hoping nothing major would hit. If you got cancer or had a heart attack you were probably going to die soon with even the best of care, so people just didn't bother.  My grandfather was prosperous in his last decades, but when he got prostate cancer in 1969 at 73 he just said there was no point in getting the surgery and died a few months later. You can say that sucks but notice: when you don't have good things you also don't have to pay for them. 

I originally told myself that this ratcheting up of what you had to pay for included college, but that's only half true.  Both Doglas2 and bsking have pointed out to me that you can pay a lot less by not going the American Dream route of 4-year residential with nice cafeterias, gyms, and student centers. When my oldest looked at Asbury on his own, he said "Tell Dad it looks like a real college." That was still important to me in 1996. Not now. You probably can't do lab sciences entirely online, but plenty of things work fine.  Son #3 started at a 4-year school, switched to local, and eventually finished in accounting online. From Nome. Credential ratcheting means lots more jobs need a graduate degree now, just to get your resume read. If you've got a lot of student loan debt, that's going to cut into affording a house.

And before we go all kids-these-days on them taking out those loans to begin with, even though they'd been warned, I worked with lots of people who were told to save for retirement too, but didn't.