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I'm not sure what to say about this other than it doesn't bode well. I really wonder what American society will look like in 50 years at this rate. People liv

I'm not sure what to say about this other than it doesn't bode well. I really wonder what American society will look like in 50 years at this rate. People living with their parents until their 30s, a sky-high divorce rate, high rents, massive student loan debts, these are not signs of a healthy society, and as someone else pointed out, it isn't good for the birthrate either. We better get to work on extending lifespans to mitigate this I guess.

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
Well at this stage in the game, it seems like everyone right now who owns a house is someone who owned a house 30 years ago, i.e. the only way anyone from my generation gets a house is to inherit it from my parents when they pass on. Fortunately, my parents fully intend to do that. There's a rise, however, in the number of seniors who reverse-mortgage their house and sign away the title to it in exchange for a monthly income until they die. If that continues, I imagine the banks and private companies will own all houses in about 50 years, because the previous generation decided to further screw their offspring in the name of having a slightly cushier final days.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- dionidium 10y ago
  i.e. the only way anyone from my generation gets a house is to inherit it from my parents when they pass on This statement can only be made with a straight face by someone who has never been off the coasts. There are 65 million people in the midwest and another 119 million in the South. A majority of those are in areas where cheap housing is the norm.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    Yes, homes in the interior of the continent are more affordable. But in my experience, none of the inland cities have a tech-job market robust enough to warrant buying a house with a mortgage, except maybe Chicago. And I wouldn't want to live there again, because of the corruption. So you can easily afford to buy a house, but when you have to move for a new job 3 years later, your equity may just be eaten up by closing costs and market fluctuations, and you might as well have been renting the whole time. There's just nowhere in the US where I feel like I might still be in the same spot 10 years from now. And even if I did inherit a house from my parents, I'd just have to sell it, because their city--my hometown--is absolute crap for tech jobs.
    - lygaret 10y ago
      Totally disagree with this: the tech-job market is pretty damn robust in Denver/Boulder, Minneapolis, and St. Louis, to name three that I have some personal experience with. Not to mention Austin, Dallas, Kansas City, etc. SF, NYC, and Boston aren't the only places you can get a job.
      - jdhawk 10y ago
        And conversely, the price of housing has doubled in most of those markets over the last few years (at least Denver, Austin, and DFW - the ones I have direct knowledge of) It might be cheaper than NYC, SF, & Boston - but we're not pulling down 200k+ Salaries for Sr. Engineers here either, its all relative.
    - dionidium 10y ago
      I am a programmer in St. Louis. I won't pretend that it's anywhere near the market that larger cities on the coasts are, but there are plenty of jobs to go around. It used to be the case that all of those jobs were at MEGACORP, but that's no longer true. You can find just about whatever you're looking for.
      - logfromblammo 10y ago
        I'm not allowed to look for jobs in St. Louis, due to a non-negotiable spouse veto. It's something about dating someone from there once, and being a Cubs fan.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      >>There's just nowhere in the US where I feel like I might still be in the same spot 10 years from now. Yet, funnily enough, the justification one hears frequently for enduring the housing premium of the Bay Area is the number of nearby jobs that make it easy to switch employers every 18 months or so.
    - tropo 10y ago
      Hmmm, you need some how-to-manage-living-and-jobs instruction. Wow. Here you go: Step 1 is to get a job. There are jobs all over the country. The concentration may be highest in the tech hot spots, but most of the jobs are elsewhere. Pick some place like Melbourne, FL. Pick a job that has long-term potential. Step 2 is to fly out there and look at rentals. Pick one. Move. Step 3 is to start looking for a home, casually at first. You want to learn about neighborhoods and traffic jams. Meanwhile, see how you like your new job. If the job doesn't work out, go back to step 1. If you need more time to figure out the local housing situation, rent for another year. Also, if you own a house in a different part of the country, get it sold. Step 4 is you buy the house. Move. Hopefully you can work there for decades. I've done a decade already. When things start to go sour, go back to step 1. Sometimes you may lose on the "closing costs and market fluctuations", but remember that it's no big deal when the houses are cheap.
  - jonlucc 10y ago
    I live in the Midwest, and I am likely to inherit my first home. Housing is cheap relative to the coasts, but pay is lower, and student loans aren't based on my wages.
    - c0nducktr 10y ago
      I'll second this. Homes might be cheaper, but the rest of our bills aren't, and salaries are much lower on average.
      - dionidium 10y ago
        Homes might be cheaper, but the rest of our bills aren't The difference in housing is so huge that it sometimes feels like it swallows everything else. But, make no mistake, everything is cheaper here. Use a tool like this for some comparisons: http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
        Grishnakh 10y ago
        No, it isn't. Walmart or any other nationwide retailer isn't going to give you lower prices on TVs or clothes or groceries because you're in a low cost-of-living area. It all costs the same, nationwide. Same goes for anything online. ISP/telecom costs are not any lower in the midwest. Gasoline is not significantly cheaper. Cars cost the same no matter where you buy them. What else is left? I suppose you can get away with paying someone less to mow your lawn there, but that's about it.
        flubert 10y ago
        I wonder who can find heat maps for the price of things like milk, bread, electricity, similar to this map for gasoline: http://www.gasbuddy.com/GasPriceMap?z=4 http://www.gasbuddy.com/GasPriceMap?z=4
        dionidium 10y ago
  - refurb 10y ago
    Thank you! There is a bit of coastal bubble going on in this conversation. I made $50K per year when I graduated and bought a house about a year later. $170K for a new house in a nice neighborhood. The total house payment was sub $1000. That's typical when you get out of the big cities on the coast.
    - overgryphon 10y ago
      It's not typical for people to make 50k after college these days.
      - antisthenes 10y ago
        Especially in an area where houses cost $170k The vast majority of my peers actually do NOT make $50k - and we are all on the East coast, where a house would cost you ~$300k minimum for something that wouldn't require extensive repairs. Sometimes people need a good kick up their arse to be able to see outside of their bubble.
- sbuttgereit 10y ago
  Screw their offspring? By what law of nature did the property and wealth of a person's parents become an entitlement to said person? How did it come to pass that parents are sacrificial lambs to their children? What, if any, responsibility does a child have to go and make their own lives and happiness in your view? If parents decided to reverse-mortgage, sell, or otherwise not bequeath their hard earned property to their children they are acting completely within their moral rights. It doesn't matter if the parents hold on so they can continue to buy food or so they can cruise the world: it's their stuff. The child is not "screwed" out of anything because their parent's property was never rightfully the child's in the first place. If the parents decide to be generous and give their kids the house, car, bank accounts, etc.... lucky kid. The only case when this above is not true is when the child is not yet an adult or was born with defects which impair proper functioning as an adult.
  - nugget 10y ago
    Property rights are laws of man not laws of nature. The law of nature is that the strong take from the weak. To the extent property rights and other enacted laws create a permanent underclass of people who feel they were born into a raw deal then mismatched generational expectations will be the least of our problems. Expect serious turbulence in the decades to come. As Milton Friedman wisely said "the Earth belongs to the living".
  - morgante 10y ago
    > Screw their offspring? I agree that inheritance shouldn't be a natural right. I don't really expect to receive anything from my parents. However, things like rampant anti-development attitudes are an untenable example of screwing their offspring. The older generation already owns houses, so they love opposing any new development without regard for the fact that it's making home ownership impossible for all but the wealthiest or luckiest of my generation.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > so they love opposing any new development without regard for the fact that it's making home ownership impossible for all but the wealthiest or luckiest of my generation. I doubt very much that the effect it has on price of existing real estate and how it limits the market is something that the decision to oppose growth is made "withour regard for".
- hugh4 10y ago
  > Well at this stage in the game, it seems like everyone right now who owns a house is someone who owned a house 30 years ago That sounds like a perspective limited to a handful of major coastal cities. Go buy a house in Des Moines for $150K or something.
  - mac01021 10y ago
    > Go buy a house in Des Moines for $150K or something. You can get a house for that same price almost everywhere on the east coast. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_everywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_everywhere
- shostack 10y ago
  Do you have a source on the rise in reverse-mortgages by seniors? Would love to research that more.

AdmiralAsshat 10y ago

Well at this stage in the game, it seems like everyone right now who owns a house is someone who owned a house 30 years ago, i.e. the only way anyone from my generation gets a house is to inherit it from my parents when they pass on. Fortunately, my parents fully intend to do that. There's a rise, however, in the number of seniors who reverse-mortgage their house and sign away the title to it in exchange for a monthly income until they die. If that continues, I imagine the banks and private companies will own all houses in about 50 years, because the previous generation decided to further screw their offspring in the name of having a slightly cushier final days.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
dionidium 10y ago
i.e. the only way anyone from my generation gets a house is to inherit it from my parents when they pass on This statement can only be made with a straight face by someone who has never been off the coasts. There are 65 million people in the midwest and another 119 million in the South. A majority of those are in areas where cheap housing is the norm.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  Yes, homes in the interior of the continent are more affordable. But in my experience, none of the inland cities have a tech-job market robust enough to warrant buying a house with a mortgage, except maybe Chicago. And I wouldn't want to live there again, because of the corruption. So you can easily afford to buy a house, but when you have to move for a new job 3 years later, your equity may just be eaten up by closing costs and market fluctuations, and you might as well have been renting the whole time. There's just nowhere in the US where I feel like I might still be in the same spot 10 years from now. And even if I did inherit a house from my parents, I'd just have to sell it, because their city--my hometown--is absolute crap for tech jobs.
  - lygaret 10y ago
    Totally disagree with this: the tech-job market is pretty damn robust in Denver/Boulder, Minneapolis, and St. Louis, to name three that I have some personal experience with. Not to mention Austin, Dallas, Kansas City, etc. SF, NYC, and Boston aren't the only places you can get a job.
    - jdhawk 10y ago
      And conversely, the price of housing has doubled in most of those markets over the last few years (at least Denver, Austin, and DFW - the ones I have direct knowledge of) It might be cheaper than NYC, SF, & Boston - but we're not pulling down 200k+ Salaries for Sr. Engineers here either, its all relative.
  - dionidium 10y ago
    I am a programmer in St. Louis. I won't pretend that it's anywhere near the market that larger cities on the coasts are, but there are plenty of jobs to go around. It used to be the case that all of those jobs were at MEGACORP, but that's no longer true. You can find just about whatever you're looking for.
    - logfromblammo 10y ago
      I'm not allowed to look for jobs in St. Louis, due to a non-negotiable spouse veto. It's something about dating someone from there once, and being a Cubs fan.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    >>There's just nowhere in the US where I feel like I might still be in the same spot 10 years from now. Yet, funnily enough, the justification one hears frequently for enduring the housing premium of the Bay Area is the number of nearby jobs that make it easy to switch employers every 18 months or so.
  - tropo 10y ago
    Hmmm, you need some how-to-manage-living-and-jobs instruction. Wow. Here you go: Step 1 is to get a job. There are jobs all over the country. The concentration may be highest in the tech hot spots, but most of the jobs are elsewhere. Pick some place like Melbourne, FL. Pick a job that has long-term potential. Step 2 is to fly out there and look at rentals. Pick one. Move. Step 3 is to start looking for a home, casually at first. You want to learn about neighborhoods and traffic jams. Meanwhile, see how you like your new job. If the job doesn't work out, go back to step 1. If you need more time to figure out the local housing situation, rent for another year. Also, if you own a house in a different part of the country, get it sold. Step 4 is you buy the house. Move. Hopefully you can work there for decades. I've done a decade already. When things start to go sour, go back to step 1. Sometimes you may lose on the "closing costs and market fluctuations", but remember that it's no big deal when the houses are cheap.
- jonlucc 10y ago
  I live in the Midwest, and I am likely to inherit my first home. Housing is cheap relative to the coasts, but pay is lower, and student loans aren't based on my wages.
  - c0nducktr 10y ago
    I'll second this. Homes might be cheaper, but the rest of our bills aren't, and salaries are much lower on average.
    - dionidium 10y ago
      Homes might be cheaper, but the rest of our bills aren't The difference in housing is so huge that it sometimes feels like it swallows everything else. But, make no mistake, everything is cheaper here. Use a tool like this for some comparisons: http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-living-calculator.aspx http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
      - Grishnakh 10y ago
        No, it isn't. Walmart or any other nationwide retailer isn't going to give you lower prices on TVs or clothes or groceries because you're in a low cost-of-living area. It all costs the same, nationwide. Same goes for anything online. ISP/telecom costs are not any lower in the midwest. Gasoline is not significantly cheaper. Cars cost the same no matter where you buy them. What else is left? I suppose you can get away with paying someone less to mow your lawn there, but that's about it.
        flubert 10y ago
        I wonder who can find heat maps for the price of things like milk, bread, electricity, similar to this map for gasoline: http://www.gasbuddy.com/GasPriceMap?z=4 http://www.gasbuddy.com/GasPriceMap?z=4
        dionidium 10y ago
- refurb 10y ago
  Thank you! There is a bit of coastal bubble going on in this conversation. I made $50K per year when I graduated and bought a house about a year later. $170K for a new house in a nice neighborhood. The total house payment was sub $1000. That's typical when you get out of the big cities on the coast.
  - overgryphon 10y ago
    It's not typical for people to make 50k after college these days.
    - antisthenes 10y ago
      Especially in an area where houses cost $170k The vast majority of my peers actually do NOT make $50k - and we are all on the East coast, where a house would cost you ~$300k minimum for something that wouldn't require extensive repairs. Sometimes people need a good kick up their arse to be able to see outside of their bubble.
sbuttgereit 10y ago
Screw their offspring? By what law of nature did the property and wealth of a person's parents become an entitlement to said person? How did it come to pass that parents are sacrificial lambs to their children? What, if any, responsibility does a child have to go and make their own lives and happiness in your view? If parents decided to reverse-mortgage, sell, or otherwise not bequeath their hard earned property to their children they are acting completely within their moral rights. It doesn't matter if the parents hold on so they can continue to buy food or so they can cruise the world: it's their stuff. The child is not "screwed" out of anything because their parent's property was never rightfully the child's in the first place. If the parents decide to be generous and give their kids the house, car, bank accounts, etc.... lucky kid. The only case when this above is not true is when the child is not yet an adult or was born with defects which impair proper functioning as an adult.
- nugget 10y ago
  Property rights are laws of man not laws of nature. The law of nature is that the strong take from the weak. To the extent property rights and other enacted laws create a permanent underclass of people who feel they were born into a raw deal then mismatched generational expectations will be the least of our problems. Expect serious turbulence in the decades to come. As Milton Friedman wisely said "the Earth belongs to the living".
- morgante 10y ago
  > Screw their offspring? I agree that inheritance shouldn't be a natural right. I don't really expect to receive anything from my parents. However, things like rampant anti-development attitudes are an untenable example of screwing their offspring. The older generation already owns houses, so they love opposing any new development without regard for the fact that it's making home ownership impossible for all but the wealthiest or luckiest of my generation.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > so they love opposing any new development without regard for the fact that it's making home ownership impossible for all but the wealthiest or luckiest of my generation. I doubt very much that the effect it has on price of existing real estate and how it limits the market is something that the decision to oppose growth is made "withour regard for".
hugh4 10y ago
> Well at this stage in the game, it seems like everyone right now who owns a house is someone who owned a house 30 years ago That sounds like a perspective limited to a handful of major coastal cities. Go buy a house in Des Moines for $150K or something.
- mac01021 10y ago
  > Go buy a house in Des Moines for $150K or something. You can get a house for that same price almost everywhere on the east coast. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_everywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_everywhere
shostack 10y ago
Do you have a source on the rise in reverse-mortgages by seniors? Would love to research that more.