10 ms·

Coastal Cities Priced Out Low-Wage Workers. Now College Graduates Are Leaving

82 points by tysone 3y ago

rektide 3y ago
The new labor crisis is fairly wild. All the really nice places to live are becoming so expensive that there is no local labor pool. Many of the wonderful mountain towns of Colorado for example are also suffering this fate.
- mistrial9 3y ago
  this is after abusing illegal immigrant labor relentlessly for 25 years, kicking the can down the road; truly reprobate
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    I've noticed the fast food places around me are back to hiring teenagers. It has been mostly people from South America in the past decade or so.
    - whitemary 3y ago
      because less immigrants are coming to the US now, because our labor situation is worse than many 3rd world countries for low wage workers
- prpl 3y ago
  Recently visited friends near Park City, UT - whose house has seen a double of real estate value and it looks to be headed towards a Jackson Hole situation where people live in trailers or down in Provo, which has had many avalanches this year on the highway. I’ve also seen the same in towns like you’ve mentioned in Colorado - one example I know being Silverton, which I think has doubled or more than doubled since 2019 (also famously the site of the mining tailings pond release) Lots of people are quick to blame Californians but it actually seems a small percentage overall, but it’s a convenient bogeyman.
- j_heffe 3y ago
  It's insane that our mountain towns are essentially playgrounds for the rich while European mountain towns still have a fair amount of housing supply.
  - rjsw 3y ago
    How many European mountain towns have you visited? All the ones that I know have a shortage of housing for service workers.
- jimbob45 3y ago
  All the really nice places to live are becoming so expensive Doesn't need to be this way either. We've come up with a number of ways to lower real estate prices on this very board that simply aren't being implemented by local communities. I have to believe that 2024 is going to be a massive turning point for a lot of US cities.
  - nikanj 3y ago
    The people who already own in the community vote against lowering real estate prices. The prospective future residents don't get a vote, so they lose every time.
    - jimbob45 3y ago
      We've had countless discussions about this on HN. There are solutions that don't require outright lowering real estate prices. There's simply no motivation from local governments to acquire any momentum toward changing things. The "luxury high class" renters are seen as more desirable than anything else to boost local economies and everyone else is seen as disposable.
      - chimeracoder 3y ago
        > There are solutions that don't require outright lowering real estate prices. There really aren't. The upward pressure caused by the need to keep property values increasing will always, in the long run, outweigh any other policy that you can use to attempt to reign in cost-of-living. You can play tricks to delay the effects or slow them down, but adding drag resistance doesn't stop a falling leaf from trending downwards. Mathematically, you cannot lower cost-of-living while also insisting that the price of the single largest living cost (housing) keep increasing. The only alternative is to lower the price of housing, but you can't do that without lowering real estate values for existing landed property owners, so they fight that tooth and nail, in nearly every locality across the board.
      - nikanj 3y ago
        You can't eat your cake and have it too. You can't have cheaper homes and simultaneously not lower real estate prices.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I believe the idea is to automate all that labor away so that rich people won't even have to think about breathing the same air as regulars, let alone ever see them.
cs702 3y ago
The "obvious" solution, raising wages, would add fuel to the engines of inflation. No one who understands what out-of-control inflation is like wants that. Central banks, in particular, don't want that.
- CogitoCogito 3y ago
  I'd personally consider overriding local single family zoning and allowing denser building the "obvious" solution. Seems like California is slowly moving in that direction.
  - cs702 3y ago
    Good point. You're right. NIMBYism stands in the way, but I agree it's the more "obvious" solution.
  - vorpalhex 3y ago
    This gets repeated often but it's not as if housing is the only expensive part of living in a big city, and increasing density will only make those other factors MORE expensive, not less, even though it reduces (slightly, temporarily) the price of housing. California with 10% more houses is not 10% cheaper. It is slightly more expensive.
    - slt2021 3y ago
      10% more people in bay area will create 10% more demand for services sector (many of which employ low wage workers) and will drive wage growth for services sector
    - BorgHunter 3y ago
      What gets more expensive with increasing density? Seems like most things are cheaper with more density, because (compared to less density but equal population) there's less area that needs to be covered by roads, water mains, fire stations, transit service, etc.
      - 3y ago
mrangle 3y ago
[flagged]
- sempergooglefi 3y ago
  [dead]
- vkou 3y ago
  Oh yes, it's totally the protests and a few broken store windows that ruined this town. Not the fact that 5 people are moving in for every 3 people-units of living space that get built. /S obviously.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  Considering, as per the article, that these trends have been going on for a while and include places like New York, which didn't see the upheaval that appears to be your particular bugbear, I'd say your argument is a non-sequitur.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  "Nurses, policemen and shopping clerks cannot afford living in the capital anymore" is a problem that transcends the US. Prague is pretty tranquil and does not have any rioting. It also has a major housing affordability problem. I believe the common denominator are the NIMBYs, who can very efficiently mobilize all sorts of environmental and other regulations to achieve their goal of ossifying everything.
0x445442 3y ago
This is fantastic. Young folks get to take advantage of wage arbitrage. Midwestern towns gutted by 40 years of foreign slave wages get an influx of new blood and a revitalized service sector. Two, seemingly warring, demographics get to cross pollinate and empathize with each other while collectively giving the middle finger to an unholy Government/Big Corp alliance trying to corral everyone in a few big geographical regions. Plea to young knowledge workers... Don't give in on remote work, take advantage of it.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  > Midwestern towns gutted by 40 years of foreign slave wages get an influx of new blood and a revitalized service sector. I think that is what is most galling about the fight against remote work. It is the way for knowledge workers to have quality of life (versus heading to a coast to save up before you have to leave because the COL is unsustainable into parenthood or retirement) while also providing a sustainable economic base for smaller towns that would otherwise be hallowed out. You don't want to cater to companies (who can play jurisdictions against each other for tax breaks and if they leave, can cause outsized impact to the tax base and local economy), you want to cater to remote workers [1] [2] (who will settle down and anchor themselves to your community, hopefully). [1] https://www.bobvila.com/slideshow/13-u-s-cities-incentivizing-remote-workers-to-relocate-578931 https://www.bobvila.com/slideshow/13-u-s-cities-incentivizin... [2] https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#relocation-incentives https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#relocatio...
  - thatfrenchguy 3y ago
    > It is the way for knowledge workers to have quality of life (versus heading to a coast to save up before you have to leave because the COL is unsustainable into parenthood or retirement) Meh, what you gain in square footage of your house moving in the Midwest, which is what I think you meant by "quality of life", you loose in career opportunities , weather / outdoor activities, quality of food, and cultural enrichment for your children. > (who will settle down and anchor themselves to your community, hopefully). Folks with 4-5x the median income coming into a county is more likely to create resentment than anything too, if they end up staying.
lapcat 3y ago
Buried the lede: > The overall migration rate in America today is historically low, and mobility has fallen since the 1980s for all kinds of demographic groups.
- j_heffe 3y ago
  It makes sense. Low-wage workers simply can't afford to move to a lower cost of living city, even if there were better job opportunities and cost of living.
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    How does this work? When I was a student and later when I got a job afterwards, moving was way easier. And I had hardly any money. Or am I thinking wrong here. The hurdle is not the physical move, but like losing close access to friends and family?
    - standardUser 3y ago
      It'll cost $5-$10k to move a modest household to a different state. That alone is an massive barrier for a lot of working class people/families. But you're also right that they may lose access to friends and family, which might include free childcare, rides to school, etc.
    - lapcat 3y ago
      Several factors: * I'm assuming that when you were a student, you didn't have a lot of possessions to move, didn't have a family and kids to move too, didn't have a house to sell. * You generally need to acquire a place to live before you can move, otherwise you'll be homeless when you get there. This will probably involve putting down a significant deposit on a new apartment, before you get the deposit back on your current apartment, if you live in an apartment. And many apartments require income verification to apply, which makes it difficult to move to find a new job; you have to already acquire a new job in the new place before you move. And of course travel is expensive to find/acquire a new job/home in a new place. * Moving can be very time consuming, especially if it's long distance. Which means time off from work, which may lower your income even more. * Of course losing access to friends and family, as you said.
monero-xmr 3y ago
Once again the market sorts things out itself. And in the areas losing young talent, it will also sort itself out. Nothing needs to be done, just observe what is happening and wait.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  True. The question is what sort of disruptions will emerge when the political class resides far away from economic power. I am now in Italy. Rome is the capital, but the center of Italian economic activity is Milan. Northern Italian businesspeople and politicians hate or at least despise "thieving Rome" and there was/is a significant secessionist movement. As of now, within the structures of the EU, an actual split of Italy is logistically impossible, but the country seems to owe some part of its dysfunctionality to the physical distance between seats of power and wealth.
  - rcarr 3y ago
    This goes both ways though. In the UK, everyone outside of London and the Home Counties despises London because it gets far more spent on it than elsewhere in the country. Take transport for instance: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134495/transport-spending-per-head-in-the-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134495/transport-spendi...
    - evgen 3y ago
      Lol. More people live in London than any three of those other areas combined; depending on how large you draw the circle that is 'London' you are looking at around 25% of the population. Trust me, everyone in London has an equal amount of loathing for the parasitic gammons outside the London area who could not survive without the handouts we provide but still bitch and moan about every pound they get.
      - rcarr 3y ago
        If people weren’t convinced about the typical Londoner’s superiority complex I present the above comment as exhibit A. > Trust me, everyone in London has an equal amount of loathing for the parasitic gammons outside the London area who could not survive without the handouts we provide but still bitch and moan about every pound they get. Congrats on your life in the dirty money capital of the world. I would like to see how long you survive in London if the surrounding areas of the country decided not to provide you with food on your table and energy for your home.
woodruffw 3y ago
Perhaps not intentional on the NYT's part, but I found the phrasing of "college graduates" deeply misleading: to me it implies a departure of younger demographics from cities, when the article is actually about college educated white-collar workers in the 40-to-64 demographic. In other words, the established family households to "empty nester" demographic. In fact, the only mention of younger college graduates is in a wiggle phrase with no attached statistic: > Younger educated workers were at first a bulwark against that trend, but have increasingly migrated away from these regions, too. (The same can be said for the article's statistics -- it's misleading, at best, to limit the analysis to 2020 and 2021.)
- ghaff 3y ago
  Of course, young families with kids migrating out of cities (but often not the broader metro area) is a trend that's been happening pretty much forever. Of my cohort of grad school classmates who moved to NYC upon graduation, I'm guessing only a couple were still actually in the city a decade later. As you say, the increase in some urban populations relative to a couple decades ago was mostly driven by new college grads, many of whom previously did not live in the city after undergrad, in part, because many of the jobs that weren't in finance were out in the suburbs/exurbs.
  - woodruffw 3y ago
    > Of course, young families with kids migrating out of cities (but often not the broader metro area) is a trend that's been happening pretty much forever. Of my cohort of grad school classmates who moved to NYC upon graduation, I'm guessing only a couple were still actually in the city a decade later. Right -- I didn't highlight it specifically, but that's another part of the article I found misleading: NYC has historically had large outflows because, every summer, hundreds of thousands of undergraduates and graduates complete their studies and leave. And similarly with young families: those who stay for over a decade are likely to remain, but many come to the city while they're young, stay to date and work, and decamp for the suburbs once they've had their fill. Both of these demographics and their historical trends are conflated with the post-COVID numbers (again, ending at 2020/1) for unstated reasons.
angarg12 3y ago
https://archive.vn/1Dvk3 https://archive.vn/1Dvk3
davidw 3y ago
There are a lot of policy issues where it feels like it's difficult to get anything done. Housing is one where ordinary people can make a real difference - and are. So much of this is at a local or state level where a small, dedicated group can really change the conversation. It's also an issue where the "ideological sorting hat" hasn't lumped it into a partisan category, yet. Montana just passed a bipartisan housing deal that's really good: https://www.sightline.org/2023/05/09/montanas-big-bipartisan-housing-deal/ https://www.sightline.org/2023/05/09/montanas-big-bipartisan... Groups like https://yimbyaction.org/2021/ https://yimbyaction.org/2021/ and https://welcomingneighbors.us/ https://welcomingneighbors.us/ are a great way to get involved.
JustSomeNobody 3y ago
> The overall migration rate in America today is historically low, and mobility has fallen since the 1980s for all kinds of demographic groups. Nearly every single economic disadvantage the "not rich" endures always goes back to Reagan.

82 points by tysone 3y ago

The new labor crisis is fairly wild. All the really nice places to live are becoming so expensive that there is no local labor pool. Many of the wonderful mountain towns of Colorado for example are also suffering this fate.

mistrial9 3y ago
this is after abusing illegal immigrant labor relentlessly for 25 years, kicking the can down the road; truly reprobate
- willcipriano 3y ago
  I've noticed the fast food places around me are back to hiring teenagers. It has been mostly people from South America in the past decade or so.
  - whitemary 3y ago
    because less immigrants are coming to the US now, because our labor situation is worse than many 3rd world countries for low wage workers
prpl 3y ago
Recently visited friends near Park City, UT - whose house has seen a double of real estate value and it looks to be headed towards a Jackson Hole situation where people live in trailers or down in Provo, which has had many avalanches this year on the highway. I’ve also seen the same in towns like you’ve mentioned in Colorado - one example I know being Silverton, which I think has doubled or more than doubled since 2019 (also famously the site of the mining tailings pond release) Lots of people are quick to blame Californians but it actually seems a small percentage overall, but it’s a convenient bogeyman.
j_heffe 3y ago
It's insane that our mountain towns are essentially playgrounds for the rich while European mountain towns still have a fair amount of housing supply.
- rjsw 3y ago
  How many European mountain towns have you visited? All the ones that I know have a shortage of housing for service workers.
jimbob45 3y ago
All the really nice places to live are becoming so expensive Doesn't need to be this way either. We've come up with a number of ways to lower real estate prices on this very board that simply aren't being implemented by local communities. I have to believe that 2024 is going to be a massive turning point for a lot of US cities.
- nikanj 3y ago
  The people who already own in the community vote against lowering real estate prices. The prospective future residents don't get a vote, so they lose every time.
  - jimbob45 3y ago
    We've had countless discussions about this on HN. There are solutions that don't require outright lowering real estate prices. There's simply no motivation from local governments to acquire any momentum toward changing things. The "luxury high class" renters are seen as more desirable than anything else to boost local economies and everyone else is seen as disposable.
    - chimeracoder 3y ago
      > There are solutions that don't require outright lowering real estate prices. There really aren't. The upward pressure caused by the need to keep property values increasing will always, in the long run, outweigh any other policy that you can use to attempt to reign in cost-of-living. You can play tricks to delay the effects or slow them down, but adding drag resistance doesn't stop a falling leaf from trending downwards. Mathematically, you cannot lower cost-of-living while also insisting that the price of the single largest living cost (housing) keep increasing. The only alternative is to lower the price of housing, but you can't do that without lowering real estate values for existing landed property owners, so they fight that tooth and nail, in nearly every locality across the board.
    - nikanj 3y ago
      You can't eat your cake and have it too. You can't have cheaper homes and simultaneously not lower real estate prices.
hotpotamus 3y ago
I believe the idea is to automate all that labor away so that rich people won't even have to think about breathing the same air as regulars, let alone ever see them.

cs702 3y ago

The "obvious" solution, raising wages, would add fuel to the engines of inflation. No one who understands what out-of-control inflation is like wants that. Central banks, in particular, don't want that.

CogitoCogito 3y ago
I'd personally consider overriding local single family zoning and allowing denser building the "obvious" solution. Seems like California is slowly moving in that direction.
- cs702 3y ago
  Good point. You're right. NIMBYism stands in the way, but I agree it's the more "obvious" solution.
- vorpalhex 3y ago
  This gets repeated often but it's not as if housing is the only expensive part of living in a big city, and increasing density will only make those other factors MORE expensive, not less, even though it reduces (slightly, temporarily) the price of housing. California with 10% more houses is not 10% cheaper. It is slightly more expensive.
  - slt2021 3y ago
    10% more people in bay area will create 10% more demand for services sector (many of which employ low wage workers) and will drive wage growth for services sector
  - BorgHunter 3y ago
    What gets more expensive with increasing density? Seems like most things are cheaper with more density, because (compared to less density but equal population) there's less area that needs to be covered by roads, water mains, fire stations, transit service, etc.
    - 3y ago

mrangle 3y ago

[flagged]

sempergooglefi 3y ago
[dead]
vkou 3y ago
Oh yes, it's totally the protests and a few broken store windows that ruined this town. Not the fact that 5 people are moving in for every 3 people-units of living space that get built. /S obviously.
SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
Considering, as per the article, that these trends have been going on for a while and include places like New York, which didn't see the upheaval that appears to be your particular bugbear, I'd say your argument is a non-sequitur.
inglor_cz 3y ago
"Nurses, policemen and shopping clerks cannot afford living in the capital anymore" is a problem that transcends the US. Prague is pretty tranquil and does not have any rioting. It also has a major housing affordability problem. I believe the common denominator are the NIMBYs, who can very efficiently mobilize all sorts of environmental and other regulations to achieve their goal of ossifying everything.

0x445442 3y ago

This is fantastic. Young folks get to take advantage of wage arbitrage. Midwestern towns gutted by 40 years of foreign slave wages get an influx of new blood and a revitalized service sector. Two, seemingly warring, demographics get to cross pollinate and empathize with each other while collectively giving the middle finger to an unholy Government/Big Corp alliance trying to corral everyone in a few big geographical regions. Plea to young knowledge workers... Don't give in on remote work, take advantage of it.

toomuchtodo 3y ago
> Midwestern towns gutted by 40 years of foreign slave wages get an influx of new blood and a revitalized service sector. I think that is what is most galling about the fight against remote work. It is the way for knowledge workers to have quality of life (versus heading to a coast to save up before you have to leave because the COL is unsustainable into parenthood or retirement) while also providing a sustainable economic base for smaller towns that would otherwise be hallowed out. You don't want to cater to companies (who can play jurisdictions against each other for tax breaks and if they leave, can cause outsized impact to the tax base and local economy), you want to cater to remote workers [1] [2] (who will settle down and anchor themselves to your community, hopefully). [1] https://www.bobvila.com/slideshow/13-u-s-cities-incentivizing-remote-workers-to-relocate-578931 https://www.bobvila.com/slideshow/13-u-s-cities-incentivizin... [2] https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#relocation-incentives https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job#relocatio...
- thatfrenchguy 3y ago
  > It is the way for knowledge workers to have quality of life (versus heading to a coast to save up before you have to leave because the COL is unsustainable into parenthood or retirement) Meh, what you gain in square footage of your house moving in the Midwest, which is what I think you meant by "quality of life", you loose in career opportunities , weather / outdoor activities, quality of food, and cultural enrichment for your children. > (who will settle down and anchor themselves to your community, hopefully). Folks with 4-5x the median income coming into a county is more likely to create resentment than anything too, if they end up staying.

lapcat 3y ago

Buried the lede: > The overall migration rate in America today is historically low, and mobility has fallen since the 1980s for all kinds of demographic groups.

j_heffe 3y ago
It makes sense. Low-wage workers simply can't afford to move to a lower cost of living city, even if there were better job opportunities and cost of living.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  How does this work? When I was a student and later when I got a job afterwards, moving was way easier. And I had hardly any money. Or am I thinking wrong here. The hurdle is not the physical move, but like losing close access to friends and family?
  - standardUser 3y ago
    It'll cost $5-$10k to move a modest household to a different state. That alone is an massive barrier for a lot of working class people/families. But you're also right that they may lose access to friends and family, which might include free childcare, rides to school, etc.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    Several factors: * I'm assuming that when you were a student, you didn't have a lot of possessions to move, didn't have a family and kids to move too, didn't have a house to sell. * You generally need to acquire a place to live before you can move, otherwise you'll be homeless when you get there. This will probably involve putting down a significant deposit on a new apartment, before you get the deposit back on your current apartment, if you live in an apartment. And many apartments require income verification to apply, which makes it difficult to move to find a new job; you have to already acquire a new job in the new place before you move. And of course travel is expensive to find/acquire a new job/home in a new place. * Moving can be very time consuming, especially if it's long distance. Which means time off from work, which may lower your income even more. * Of course losing access to friends and family, as you said.

monero-xmr 3y ago

Once again the market sorts things out itself. And in the areas losing young talent, it will also sort itself out. Nothing needs to be done, just observe what is happening and wait.

inglor_cz 3y ago
True. The question is what sort of disruptions will emerge when the political class resides far away from economic power. I am now in Italy. Rome is the capital, but the center of Italian economic activity is Milan. Northern Italian businesspeople and politicians hate or at least despise "thieving Rome" and there was/is a significant secessionist movement. As of now, within the structures of the EU, an actual split of Italy is logistically impossible, but the country seems to owe some part of its dysfunctionality to the physical distance between seats of power and wealth.
- rcarr 3y ago
  This goes both ways though. In the UK, everyone outside of London and the Home Counties despises London because it gets far more spent on it than elsewhere in the country. Take transport for instance: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134495/transport-spending-per-head-in-the-uk/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134495/transport-spendi...
  - evgen 3y ago
    Lol. More people live in London than any three of those other areas combined; depending on how large you draw the circle that is 'London' you are looking at around 25% of the population. Trust me, everyone in London has an equal amount of loathing for the parasitic gammons outside the London area who could not survive without the handouts we provide but still bitch and moan about every pound they get.
    - rcarr 3y ago
      If people weren’t convinced about the typical Londoner’s superiority complex I present the above comment as exhibit A. > Trust me, everyone in London has an equal amount of loathing for the parasitic gammons outside the London area who could not survive without the handouts we provide but still bitch and moan about every pound they get. Congrats on your life in the dirty money capital of the world. I would like to see how long you survive in London if the surrounding areas of the country decided not to provide you with food on your table and energy for your home.

woodruffw 3y ago

Perhaps not intentional on the NYT's part, but I found the phrasing of "college graduates" deeply misleading: to me it implies a departure of younger demographics from cities, when the article is actually about college educated white-collar workers in the 40-to-64 demographic. In other words, the established family households to "empty nester" demographic. In fact, the only mention of younger college graduates is in a wiggle phrase with no attached statistic: > Younger educated workers were at first a bulwark against that trend, but have increasingly migrated away from these regions, too. (The same can be said for the article's statistics -- it's misleading, at best, to limit the analysis to 2020 and 2021.)

ghaff 3y ago
Of course, young families with kids migrating out of cities (but often not the broader metro area) is a trend that's been happening pretty much forever. Of my cohort of grad school classmates who moved to NYC upon graduation, I'm guessing only a couple were still actually in the city a decade later. As you say, the increase in some urban populations relative to a couple decades ago was mostly driven by new college grads, many of whom previously did not live in the city after undergrad, in part, because many of the jobs that weren't in finance were out in the suburbs/exurbs.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  > Of course, young families with kids migrating out of cities (but often not the broader metro area) is a trend that's been happening pretty much forever. Of my cohort of grad school classmates who moved to NYC upon graduation, I'm guessing only a couple were still actually in the city a decade later. Right -- I didn't highlight it specifically, but that's another part of the article I found misleading: NYC has historically had large outflows because, every summer, hundreds of thousands of undergraduates and graduates complete their studies and leave. And similarly with young families: those who stay for over a decade are likely to remain, but many come to the city while they're young, stay to date and work, and decamp for the suburbs once they've had their fill. Both of these demographics and their historical trends are conflated with the post-COVID numbers (again, ending at 2020/1) for unstated reasons.

angarg12 3y ago

https://archive.vn/1Dvk3 https://archive.vn/1Dvk3

davidw 3y ago

There are a lot of policy issues where it feels like it's difficult to get anything done. Housing is one where ordinary people can make a real difference - and are. So much of this is at a local or state level where a small, dedicated group can really change the conversation. It's also an issue where the "ideological sorting hat" hasn't lumped it into a partisan category, yet. Montana just passed a bipartisan housing deal that's really good: https://www.sightline.org/2023/05/09/montanas-big-bipartisan-housing-deal/ https://www.sightline.org/2023/05/09/montanas-big-bipartisan... Groups like https://yimbyaction.org/2021/ https://yimbyaction.org/2021/ and https://welcomingneighbors.us/ https://welcomingneighbors.us/ are a great way to get involved.

JustSomeNobody 3y ago

> The overall migration rate in America today is historically low, and mobility has fallen since the 1980s for all kinds of demographic groups. Nearly every single economic disadvantage the "not rich" endures always goes back to Reagan.