5 ms·

>An enormous number of people, especially young people, are looking to avoid spending their lives in cars. Young people never wanted to spend their lives in ca

by tsotha 11y ago

>An enormous number of people, especially young people, are looking to avoid spending their lives in cars. Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars. What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families, so they move to the trendier areas and spend all their money instead of living in a cheaper area, commuting, and saving for a situation that would be good for raising children. The other difference is big US cities are quite a bit cleaner and safer than they were a generation ago. In the last few years the federal government has been moving subsidized housing to he suburbs, and with it has gone a lot of the crime.

nilkn 11y ago
> What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families, so they move to the trendier areas and spend all their money instead of living in a cheaper area, commuting, and saving for a situation that would be good for raising children. I think it might be simpler than this. They just can't afford to raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents could, so many choose not to, not because they legitimately have no interest but because they don't see the numbers adding up. On top of that, it's often no more expensive to rent a small apartment in the city vs. a large house in a suburb. And that large house with its tiring commute is just a burden to someone without kids.
- mjevans 11y ago
  As someone a bit over 30; exactly this. The numbers do NOT add up and haven't at any point in my life. Then there's also the job stability issue as well; who wants to buy a house or start a family when you don't know you'll be somewhere for years? Also with many family units having two workers, what happens when one doesn't have a job? None of our social structures (including laws and tax incentives/disincentives) or market valuations reflect the necessary liquidity imposed by current job market. I happen to think that more nicely constructed MDUs are a good housing option (insulation could always be better).
  - ghaff 11y ago
    >Then there's also the job stability issue as well; who wants to buy a house or start a family when you don't know you'll be somewhere for years? I can't help but feel that you're describing some mythical ideal that never really existed for most people. Yes, for a long time, a lot of manufacturing jobs were pretty stable and people worked for IBM for a long time. But, even in that case, even if the jobs were stable, people tended to move around the company a lot. The military, which has always been a large employer, is an even more extreme example of jobs being relatively stable but mobile. By the way, according to this Economist article from a couple years back, US workforce mobility has actually gone down significantly to a degree not explained by demographics: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-mobility http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-m... >Also with many family units having two workers, what happens when one doesn't have a job? And what happened when there was more typically one worker and he (the common case) lost his job?
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      But that's the point - workers mostly didn't lose their jobs. Some computer companies - DEC especially - made it a point of honour not to lay off or fire employees unless the circumstances were exceptional. I don't think people "moved around the company a lot" either. Certainly not any more than they do today. Mobility has gone down because only exceptional jobs pay relocation expenses, and the areas that offer the highest income also have the least affordable housing. So there's less disposable income around than there was in the 50s-70s, and that makes people much warier of starting a family.
- tsotha 11y ago
  >They just can't afford to raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents could, so many choose not to, not because they legitimately have no interest but because they don't see the numbers adding up. That's the conventional wisdom, but I don't buy it. Raising a family was always tough - when I was young my parents scrimped and saved in a way that I've never seen among millennials. Everybody did, and it was considered just part of parenthood, especially in the beginning. It's not that younger people can't raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents, it's that either they don't realize how tough it was back then or they're just not interested in making the same sacrifices. >On top of that, it's often no more expensive to rent a small apartment in the city vs. a large house in a suburb. And that large house with its tiring commute is just a burden to someone without kids. Sure, but it's far cheaper to rent a small apartment in the suburbs and commute than it is to rent in the city. Yes, commuting sucks. But it sucked in the 20th century as well. My dad spent more than an hour on the road each way. Every day. That't the kind of sacrifice I'm talking about. In addition to the commute my dad brown bagged his lunch every day, made his own coffee (Folgers), drank PBR non-ironically, did his own plumbing, painted what needed painting, mowed his own lawn, and fixed the family car himself when it broke down. If you live that kind of lifestyle today you can afford a family in the same way my parents did. I'm not making a moral judgement on the other peoples' procreation choices. All I'm saying is family was a priority for previous generations in a way that it isn't today. It was part of being an adult.
  - nmrm2 11y ago
    >...in a way that it isn't today. I submit that you're comparing unmarried and childless people of today with married and child-bearing people of yesteryear. Do the other comparisons and you'll find that you are off base -- people today do make enormous sacrifices to start families at a young age, and people in the 50s to 80s who were single with no children did live lavish lifestyles. To the extent that there are differences between the primary peer comparison -- married couples raising children -- it's mostly a byproduct of the fact that people wait longer and have smaller families. Waiting longer is some combination of less social pressure to pop out kids (a good thing! Having kids because of an obnoxious parent's pestering is how you end up with broken families, divorced or otherwise) and a better understanding of fertility/access to medical care (also a good thing). Smaller family sizes are, IMO and as someone who grew up in a large family, a good thing as well. Keeping the size of one's family manageable means having the time to both build up a career and also heavily invest in the upbringing of each child. I think that's far more commendable than the "pop 'em out, pay for shit, parent on the weekends and leave wifey in the kitchen the rest of the time" mentality of a huge portion of the baby boom generation. And also more commendable than leaving yourself penniless and jobless in old age for your children to take care of you. It's possible to raise one or two or maybe three kids well. Doing a good job at raising five or six means someone has to give up a career, and even then you're probably just barely keeping up (i.e., not doing the best possible job at fostering intellectual and emotional health.)
ghaff 11y ago
>The other difference is big US cities are quite a bit cleaner and safer than they were a generation ago. While it's not universal, there are large areas of major coastal cities (among others) that middle-class+ people would have hesitated or flat-out typically not have lived in 30 years ago that are now considered highly desirable. That said, it's easy to overstate the US Millennials want to all live in the city trend. FiveThirtyEight had a piece a while back that basically concluded the urbanization trend is largely exaggerated. The more accurate statement is that college-educated millennials are slightly more likely to live in a handful of particularly dense urban locations (think Brooklyn).[1] In fact, they say that, among all adults 25-34 the percentage in urban locations overall has actually declined a little. The data is complicated to interpret but their bottom line was that: "Millennials overall, therefore, are not increasingly living in urban neighborhoods. Rather, the most educated one-third of young adults are increasingly likely to live in the densest urban neighborhoods. That’s great news for cities trying to attract young graduates and a sign that urban neighborhoods have become more desirable for those who can afford them. But the presence of more smart young things in Brooklyn is not evidence that millennials are a more urban generation." There are a lot of trends going on in parallel that make it hard to draw clear non-anecdotal conclusions about where people prefer to live. I also think a lot of people on this board probably find it easier to work remotely or to cherry-pick a job in easy commuting distance (whatever their preferred mode of commuting) than is the norm. Furthermore, in many cases, preferences for dense cities, suburbs, and the country are sufficiently deep-rooted that a lot of folks have trouble understanding how anyone could see things differently. [1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less-urban-than-you-think/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...
pjlegato 11y ago
> Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars. Actually, many of them did. Talk to some old people in the US suburbs about what life was like when they were young in the '50s and '60s. Most grew up in a dense city and then voluntarily left it for the suburbs. Most of them thought spending their life in a car was great -- certainly way better than having to take the bus or the train. It was a sign of success. When cars went mass-market as America suburbanized, densely built urban areas and the use of public transport were increasingly associated with poverty and being trapped in the archaic past. If you lived in the suburbs and commuted by car, it was prestigious, it was modern; it meant you were doing well for yourself financially, and were forward-looking to a brighter future with new and better ways of doing things. It was the 1950s cultural equivalent of working at a startup and living in a gentrifying hipster neighborhood in San Francisco today. No doubt someone will reply that these perceptions was all manufactured merely due to General Motors malfeasance and marketing campaigns. That may be true, but that's entirely beside the point. Those campaigns worked because many young people then actually did agree with their content, and were very happy to drive everywhere.
- tsotha 11y ago
  >Most of them thought spending their life in a car was great -- certainly way better than having to take the bus or the train. It was a sign of success. You're overstating that quite a bit. Sure, driving for twenty minutes beats taking public transportation. But sitting in stop and go traffic for a couple hours every day is awful and people always realized it.
  - turar 11y ago
    How much stop and go traffic was there in the 50s?
    - tsotha 11y ago
      I don't know about the 50s, but by the sixties traffic was as bad in some places as it is today. Traffic in Southern California, where I grew up, is actually better today than it was in the 70s.
madengr 11y ago
>In the last few years the federal government has been moving subsidized housing to he suburbs, and with it has gone a lot of the crime. Thank you Obama and HUD. My nice, small city has had several gang-related murders in the last few years, all within subsidized housing.
Spooky23 11y ago
Yeah sure. The real story is that the younger kids have lousier paying jobs and items like cars are prohibitively expensive. My dad had a loaded up Mustang that cost like $2500 in the late 60s, at 19 or 20, paid for by bartending. The equivalent car today is probably 2x-2.5x more in real terms. The city is coming back because it's the undervalued and people are priced out of the newer suburbs. People end up reproducing, so the permanent underclass and garbage schools will probably send most of these folks to the older suburbs.
- tsotha 11y ago
  I remember paying over a dollar a minute in the '80s for a phone call to my sister in the same state. Air fare was crazy expensive compared to today, as was anything electronic. Some things have gotten more expensive, and other things have gotten cheaper. Overall it's a wash. If it seems like life is more expensive it's because people buy a lot of things today that we didn't have back then. Things you don't really need, like cable TV and $5 coffee.
  - chongli 11y ago
    It's not "a wash". Housing and education are dramatically more expensive than they were a few generations ago. Gone are the days of paying for your degree waiting tables with enough left over to put a down payment on a house. Now you can look forward to a mountain of debt for an education and mortgage that you might never pay off in your life time.
    - bmelton 11y ago
      It might be "a wash". Housing and education are more expensive, but food and entertainment costs are way lower. The cost of most things inside your home, like appliances and televisions is cheaper. Tools, hardware, and common home repairs are also cheaper. It's very hard to get an exact 1:1 ratio, as many of us spend hundreds of dollars on cell phones that didn't exist back then, or thousands on computers, but naming two economic things that have gotten more expensive doesn't invalidate the myriad of things that have gotten commensurately cheaper.
morgante 11y ago
> What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families Do you have any evidence to support that, or are you just engaged in standard Millennial-bashing? Most people in my peer group certainly plan to raise a family in the future, they're just being responsible and waiting to have kids until they are at a good place career-wise.
- tsotha 11y ago
  There are two factors that determine how much money you have. Being "at a good place career-wise" is only half the equation. Your career better be going to a really, really good place if it requires living in an area with $4500/month rent.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > Your career better be going to a really, really good place if it requires living in an area with $4500/month rent. There's no requirement that you stay in the same place which made your career. My personal plan is to work in NYC for the next ten years and then take the accumulated savings to buy a house outright in a nice town.

by tsotha 11y ago

nilkn 11y ago

> What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families, so they move to the trendier areas and spend all their money instead of living in a cheaper area, commuting, and saving for a situation that would be good for raising children. I think it might be simpler than this. They just can't afford to raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents could, so many choose not to, not because they legitimately have no interest but because they don't see the numbers adding up. On top of that, it's often no more expensive to rent a small apartment in the city vs. a large house in a suburb. And that large house with its tiring commute is just a burden to someone without kids.

mjevans 11y ago
As someone a bit over 30; exactly this. The numbers do NOT add up and haven't at any point in my life. Then there's also the job stability issue as well; who wants to buy a house or start a family when you don't know you'll be somewhere for years? Also with many family units having two workers, what happens when one doesn't have a job? None of our social structures (including laws and tax incentives/disincentives) or market valuations reflect the necessary liquidity imposed by current job market. I happen to think that more nicely constructed MDUs are a good housing option (insulation could always be better).
- ghaff 11y ago
  >Then there's also the job stability issue as well; who wants to buy a house or start a family when you don't know you'll be somewhere for years? I can't help but feel that you're describing some mythical ideal that never really existed for most people. Yes, for a long time, a lot of manufacturing jobs were pretty stable and people worked for IBM for a long time. But, even in that case, even if the jobs were stable, people tended to move around the company a lot. The military, which has always been a large employer, is an even more extreme example of jobs being relatively stable but mobile. By the way, according to this Economist article from a couple years back, US workforce mobility has actually gone down significantly to a degree not explained by demographics: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-mobility http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2012/07/labour-m... >Also with many family units having two workers, what happens when one doesn't have a job? And what happened when there was more typically one worker and he (the common case) lost his job?
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    But that's the point - workers mostly didn't lose their jobs. Some computer companies - DEC especially - made it a point of honour not to lay off or fire employees unless the circumstances were exceptional. I don't think people "moved around the company a lot" either. Certainly not any more than they do today. Mobility has gone down because only exceptional jobs pay relocation expenses, and the areas that offer the highest income also have the least affordable housing. So there's less disposable income around than there was in the 50s-70s, and that makes people much warier of starting a family.
tsotha 11y ago
>They just can't afford to raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents could, so many choose not to, not because they legitimately have no interest but because they don't see the numbers adding up. That's the conventional wisdom, but I don't buy it. Raising a family was always tough - when I was young my parents scrimped and saved in a way that I've never seen among millennials. Everybody did, and it was considered just part of parenthood, especially in the beginning. It's not that younger people can't raise a family as easily as their parents and grandparents, it's that either they don't realize how tough it was back then or they're just not interested in making the same sacrifices. >On top of that, it's often no more expensive to rent a small apartment in the city vs. a large house in a suburb. And that large house with its tiring commute is just a burden to someone without kids. Sure, but it's far cheaper to rent a small apartment in the suburbs and commute than it is to rent in the city. Yes, commuting sucks. But it sucked in the 20th century as well. My dad spent more than an hour on the road each way. Every day. That't the kind of sacrifice I'm talking about. In addition to the commute my dad brown bagged his lunch every day, made his own coffee (Folgers), drank PBR non-ironically, did his own plumbing, painted what needed painting, mowed his own lawn, and fixed the family car himself when it broke down. If you live that kind of lifestyle today you can afford a family in the same way my parents did. I'm not making a moral judgement on the other peoples' procreation choices. All I'm saying is family was a priority for previous generations in a way that it isn't today. It was part of being an adult.
- nmrm2 11y ago
  >...in a way that it isn't today. I submit that you're comparing unmarried and childless people of today with married and child-bearing people of yesteryear. Do the other comparisons and you'll find that you are off base -- people today do make enormous sacrifices to start families at a young age, and people in the 50s to 80s who were single with no children did live lavish lifestyles. To the extent that there are differences between the primary peer comparison -- married couples raising children -- it's mostly a byproduct of the fact that people wait longer and have smaller families. Waiting longer is some combination of less social pressure to pop out kids (a good thing! Having kids because of an obnoxious parent's pestering is how you end up with broken families, divorced or otherwise) and a better understanding of fertility/access to medical care (also a good thing). Smaller family sizes are, IMO and as someone who grew up in a large family, a good thing as well. Keeping the size of one's family manageable means having the time to both build up a career and also heavily invest in the upbringing of each child. I think that's far more commendable than the "pop 'em out, pay for shit, parent on the weekends and leave wifey in the kitchen the rest of the time" mentality of a huge portion of the baby boom generation. And also more commendable than leaving yourself penniless and jobless in old age for your children to take care of you. It's possible to raise one or two or maybe three kids well. Doing a good job at raising five or six means someone has to give up a career, and even then you're probably just barely keeping up (i.e., not doing the best possible job at fostering intellectual and emotional health.)

ghaff 11y ago

>The other difference is big US cities are quite a bit cleaner and safer than they were a generation ago. While it's not universal, there are large areas of major coastal cities (among others) that middle-class+ people would have hesitated or flat-out typically not have lived in 30 years ago that are now considered highly desirable. That said, it's easy to overstate the US Millennials want to all live in the city trend. FiveThirtyEight had a piece a while back that basically concluded the urbanization trend is largely exaggerated. The more accurate statement is that college-educated millennials are slightly more likely to live in a handful of particularly dense urban locations (think Brooklyn).[1] In fact, they say that, among all adults 25-34 the percentage in urban locations overall has actually declined a little. The data is complicated to interpret but their bottom line was that: "Millennials overall, therefore, are not increasingly living in urban neighborhoods. Rather, the most educated one-third of young adults are increasingly likely to live in the densest urban neighborhoods. That’s great news for cities trying to attract young graduates and a sign that urban neighborhoods have become more desirable for those who can afford them. But the presence of more smart young things in Brooklyn is not evidence that millennials are a more urban generation." There are a lot of trends going on in parallel that make it hard to draw clear non-anecdotal conclusions about where people prefer to live. I also think a lot of people on this board probably find it easier to work remotely or to cherry-pick a job in easy commuting distance (whatever their preferred mode of commuting) than is the norm. Furthermore, in many cases, preferences for dense cities, suburbs, and the country are sufficiently deep-rooted that a lot of folks have trouble understanding how anyone could see things differently. [1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less-urban-than-you-think/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...

pjlegato 11y ago

> Young people never wanted to spend their lives in cars. Actually, many of them did. Talk to some old people in the US suburbs about what life was like when they were young in the '50s and '60s. Most grew up in a dense city and then voluntarily left it for the suburbs. Most of them thought spending their life in a car was great -- certainly way better than having to take the bus or the train. It was a sign of success. When cars went mass-market as America suburbanized, densely built urban areas and the use of public transport were increasingly associated with poverty and being trapped in the archaic past. If you lived in the suburbs and commuted by car, it was prestigious, it was modern; it meant you were doing well for yourself financially, and were forward-looking to a brighter future with new and better ways of doing things. It was the 1950s cultural equivalent of working at a startup and living in a gentrifying hipster neighborhood in San Francisco today. No doubt someone will reply that these perceptions was all manufactured merely due to General Motors malfeasance and marketing campaigns. That may be true, but that's entirely beside the point. Those campaigns worked because many young people then actually did agree with their content, and were very happy to drive everywhere.

tsotha 11y ago
>Most of them thought spending their life in a car was great -- certainly way better than having to take the bus or the train. It was a sign of success. You're overstating that quite a bit. Sure, driving for twenty minutes beats taking public transportation. But sitting in stop and go traffic for a couple hours every day is awful and people always realized it.
- turar 11y ago
  How much stop and go traffic was there in the 50s?
  - tsotha 11y ago
    I don't know about the 50s, but by the sixties traffic was as bad in some places as it is today. Traffic in Southern California, where I grew up, is actually better today than it was in the 70s.

madengr 11y ago

>In the last few years the federal government has been moving subsidized housing to he suburbs, and with it has gone a lot of the crime. Thank you Obama and HUD. My nice, small city has had several gang-related murders in the last few years, all within subsidized housing.

Spooky23 11y ago

Yeah sure. The real story is that the younger kids have lousier paying jobs and items like cars are prohibitively expensive. My dad had a loaded up Mustang that cost like $2500 in the late 60s, at 19 or 20, paid for by bartending. The equivalent car today is probably 2x-2.5x more in real terms. The city is coming back because it's the undervalued and people are priced out of the newer suburbs. People end up reproducing, so the permanent underclass and garbage schools will probably send most of these folks to the older suburbs.

tsotha 11y ago
I remember paying over a dollar a minute in the '80s for a phone call to my sister in the same state. Air fare was crazy expensive compared to today, as was anything electronic. Some things have gotten more expensive, and other things have gotten cheaper. Overall it's a wash. If it seems like life is more expensive it's because people buy a lot of things today that we didn't have back then. Things you don't really need, like cable TV and $5 coffee.
- chongli 11y ago
  It's not "a wash". Housing and education are dramatically more expensive than they were a few generations ago. Gone are the days of paying for your degree waiting tables with enough left over to put a down payment on a house. Now you can look forward to a mountain of debt for an education and mortgage that you might never pay off in your life time.
  - bmelton 11y ago
    It might be "a wash". Housing and education are more expensive, but food and entertainment costs are way lower. The cost of most things inside your home, like appliances and televisions is cheaper. Tools, hardware, and common home repairs are also cheaper. It's very hard to get an exact 1:1 ratio, as many of us spend hundreds of dollars on cell phones that didn't exist back then, or thousands on computers, but naming two economic things that have gotten more expensive doesn't invalidate the myriad of things that have gotten commensurately cheaper.

morgante 11y ago

> What's different with this generation is they don't seem to have much interest in forming families Do you have any evidence to support that, or are you just engaged in standard Millennial-bashing? Most people in my peer group certainly plan to raise a family in the future, they're just being responsible and waiting to have kids until they are at a good place career-wise.

tsotha 11y ago
There are two factors that determine how much money you have. Being "at a good place career-wise" is only half the equation. Your career better be going to a really, really good place if it requires living in an area with $4500/month rent.
- morgante 11y ago
  > Your career better be going to a really, really good place if it requires living in an area with $4500/month rent. There's no requirement that you stay in the same place which made your career. My personal plan is to work in NYC for the next ten years and then take the accumulated savings to buy a house outright in a nice town.