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I don't see millennials being complicit with greedily jacking up the prices like boomers and others have been when one of the core experiences of being a millen
by sam0x17 3y ago
I don't see millennials being complicit with greedily jacking up the prices like boomers and others have been when one of the core experiences of being a millennial has been that you have to be a multi-millionaire to afford a home because of the decisions of our parents and their parents. Everything our parents got essentially for free or minimal effort (house, college, pension) is now 10x harder to obtain. It's just a different vibe and you don't just forget that.
Sure, things will feel different when a lot of millennials suddenly own something for the first time in their lives in like 20 years, but I simply don't see them forgetting their roots when their legacy has been "we were fucked over by our parents".
By then many of those houses, built with cheap 1970s and 1980s construction practices, will need to be rebuilt from the ground up by then anyway, and millennials have already shown a strong preference for building from scratch when given the opportunity. I think a huge percent are going to immediately sell and then build their own, which means they will care about affordable building costs, etc. They aren't going to long hold these houses, which means there will be plenty of houses on the market as well as plenty of new construction, which equals lower housing costs.
Also, I think a surprisingly high number of these boomers are going to reverse mortgage everything (or similar situations like sell the house to pay for the luxury nursing home) as a final fuck you, meaning millennials won't be as flush with cash as one would hope. Such things are just in the DNA of that generation it seems.
By many metrics, boomers have been more conservative and more selfish than generations before and after them. They really are a special bunch.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 3y ago> I don't see millennials being complicit with greedily jacking up the prices like boomers and others have been when one of the core experiences of being a millennial has been that you have to be a multi-millionaire to afford a home because of the decisions of our parents and their parents. We would not be the first, nor will be the last, generation to mistakenly believe itself morally superior to the ones that came before.
- Nasrudith 3y agoI've seen millennials fall for the same bullshit moral panics they rolled their eyes at as obviously stupid and wrong in their tweens and teens. As one myself I expect complete hypocrisy along with 'but this time is different" and turning out just like their parents.
- sam0x17 3y agoWe're not comparing apples with apples though. Boomers were born into a fortunate timeline where they did everything they were supposed to do and were MASSIVELY rewarded by a factor of 10x. Millennials have experienced the opposite and have watched as Zoomers get it even worse than us in many cases. All things are not equal with this one. Yes we can assume millennials will drift right like every generation does, but boomers have never experienced what it's like to be told just do X, Y, and Z and you'll be all set only to come out 1/10th what their parents were able to accomplish, despite expending more effort. That is not something you just forget about because after waiting 40 years you finally get to flip a $2m property. Boomers never had to learn that lesson, millennials at least understand it presently.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> boomers have never experienced what it’s like to be told just do X, Y, and Z and you’ll be all set only to come out 1/10th what their parents were able to accomplish Neither have millennials. The class of millenials doing worse than similarly situated members of previous generations (and still by far less of a margin than your hyperbolic 1/10th as well) are largely men without a college degree – overall, millenials are only slightly below the performance of earlier generations at similar ages, but the education gap in economic performance has widened and the gender gap narrowed.
- sam0x17 3y ago"Performance" is relative to the times. Back in the 60s good performance meant a union job with a pension and building a house by 25. None of the things in that sentence even exist anymore for the vast majority of people. If I were to say "hey let's buy or build a house right now" you would rightly say "that's a bad idea at the moment", so the opportunity that boomers had simply does not exist present day. My uncle was a grocer back in the day at a local grocery store, and he is able to live completely off of his pension that is still paying him some 30 years later. Those kinds of opportunities simply do not exist anymore. Companies don't even exist that long anymore, and if they do, they probably spend all their money and effort lobbying against unions and limiting or ending any existing pension programs they may have once had. The only exception being federal jobs and workplaces that have managed to unionize despite historic anti-union sentiment thanks to Reagan et al.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> I don’t see millennials being complicit with greedily jacking up the prices like boomers and others have been when one of the core experiences of being a millennial has been that you have to be a multi-millionaire to afford a home because of the decisions of our parents and their parents. That’s not an actual thing. The majority of millennials are homeowners, but also very far from multimillionaires, so the millennial experience has definitively not been “you have to be a multi-millionaire to afford a home”, no matter what reason you try to attach to that. https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/heres-how-much-the-average-millennial-is-worth/ https://www.fool.com/the-ascent/personal-finance/articles/he...
- sam0x17 3y agoRight, now we're the "stuck in a 30 year mortgage we can't afford and If I lose my job I could lose my house" generation. Humbling, in a way boomers never experienced.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Right, now we're the "stuck in a 30 year mortgage we can't afford and If I lose my job I could lose my house" generation. > Humbling, in a way boomers never experienced. Boomers actually did experience that, and, in fact, lots of them lost their houses. Yeah. Housing asset prices were lower, but maybe you should look at the industrial disruptions, wage trends, inflation rates, and interest rates during the Boomers prime earning years. Union jobs were great — until the whole domestic industry your union and job were in collapsed in favor of overseas competition. Pensions were great, if you could work your whole career with the same one; if your firm didn’t collapse and take its underfunded pension fund with it, and if you didn’t want the choice of looking for a better current pay than your employer offered, because pensions weren't portable. And, if you had to job shift mid-career (or even, for late Boomers, fairly early career) you probably didn’t have any of those on the table at all, as the shifts which led to the terminal decline in private sector union jobs, the long decline from the 197ps to 1990s in real wages, and made private sector pensions rare for new hires happened fairly early in the overall timeline of Boomers in the workforce.