Posted on 12/11/2023 8:53:44 AM PST by Red Badger
I live in Florida panhandle in a 1960’s era neighborhood. Houses are slowly being torn down and new ones built.
We get offers about once a month in the mail from real estate investors to buy our house. It is paid for. My lot is a big corner lot and they could divide it and build two houses on it. But the prices they offer would in no way buy a comparable home.
I paid $69k for the house in 2002, but these new homes are $300k or more...............
I doubt Tik Tok has many people in the 88+ age range.
Anyone claiming economic hardship while paying for Door Dash to deliver their meals is a retarded lard butt.
“the average salary was $1,300”
Salaries are typically paid to college graduates. They were rare in 1930, and highly valued back then. College graduates are now a ‘dime a dozen’ (and sometimes overpaid even on that scale).
Production of college graduates up nearly 20-fold since 1929:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/238164/bachelors-degree-recipients-in-the-us/
Most prices are up around 100-fold, and pretty much so are wages. Tip O’Neill got paid 17 cents an hour for mowing grass in Cambridge, MA in 1927 as I remember reading. His replacement might be working for $17/hour.
See post 23—I crunched some real numbers.
Wages are not close to keeping up with rents in the last sixty years.
This article has lots of interesting charts of different age groups:
What is happening is that a large number of folks are living lifestyles they cannot afford—and that is because their wages are not covering their expenses.
I would recommend the Dave Ramsey approach—live below your means—but most folks are not choosing to go there.
BTTT
Tik-Tokkers?
Aren’t those mostly people with blue, pink or purple hair with lots of face piercings and tats putting out videos of themselves expounding on various topics, usually from inside a vehicle?
They mention student loan debt and sky high rent but they neglect to take into account the cost of drugs and alcohol and subscriptions to dating and gaming apps. Young people today have expenses that never could have been imagined 100 years ago.
Rents are up for a number of reasons:
1. good tenants pay for what bad tenants refuse to
2. insurance is now expensive
3. units built in the 1960s and 1970s need expensive work
4. tradesmen are in strong demand and price themselves accordingly
5. most new apartments are “luxury” units, driving up the rent average
6. units are increasingly held by large organizations needing to hike rents to satisfy Wall Street
7. land values have soared as US population has doubled in my lifetime
So to that I say screw them.
It uses CPI which doesn’t include such discretionary and trivial items as food and energy. (/S)
$1,300 was PER YEAR.
There is no such thing as a labor shortage, there are only wage shortages.
“Wages are not close to keeping up with rents”
The average wage is nowadays is mainly for service jobs, rather than for industrial jobs as in the past.
Machinists tend to make more than waitresses.
Pre-FDR shop clerks might have worked nearly sixty hours a week.
After the PPACA was passed, many work weeks were reduced below 30 hours.
Those are all good explanations for high rents.
The problem is that average young people can’t afford them!
Your explanations are solid—but at the end of the day it does not matter why—average young people are in trouble.
In the 1960s, superhighways were built that opened up cheap suburban land.
That cheap suburban land has been built upon and the resulting real estate is no longer cheap because the US population has doubled.
Also building codes have gotten tough - and houses more expensive as a result.
Compare the complexity of a 1968 car to a 2024 model.
Our town has a few powerful weapons to stay rural:
(1) Minimum acreage for lots
(2) Nasty environmental restrictions on septic systems—requires not just large lots but specific types of land characteristics
(3) Endangered species fun and games—the brown speckled beetle or something—amusing unless you are trying to build here
(4) No town water or sewage—so no way out for developers.
The entire spectrum of new development regulatory requirements is amazing these days—archaeological, Native American, historical, hazardous waste, waste disposal, aquifer etc etc etc....
There is plenty of land—but good luck building on it!
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