I’m late 30s myself. Here is how I see the generational situations:
My parents’ generation: if you got any college degree or went into any skilled trade, you would have no problem purchasing a home.
My generation: if you picked certain well-paying majors or trades, you would be able to own a home.
The generation currently coming out of school: you will not afford a home without inherited wealth/family assistance.
It went from nearly anyone could get a home, to those who made just the optimal choices could get a home, to basically no one can get a home. I work with people who graduated with the same degree I have, yet because they happened to be born a 10-15 year later, they’re locked out of home ownership. I look at the cost of housing and compare it to their salary, and there’s just no way to make it work. To buy a home around here as a young person, you either need family money or you need to be a married couple, both working full time in high-paying STEM fields.
This is a super accurate general breakdown, maybe the clearest I’ve seen honestly. Completely matches what I’ve witnessed through life (with all the acknowledgements that it doesn’t portray everyone’s experience of course, and lots of the rest of my words here suffer from the same).
What I’m realizing more and more, and want to expand on your points with - is how badly we all misunderstand the “family money” thing. I was slow to grasp it, because when/where/how I grew up, that sounded like opulence.
These days it’s table stakes. A lot of us have it, built-in, a lot of us don’t. I never had that help, scraped and scrapped to take my family to stability. Now that I’m here, I can see - no one here is like me. Roughly everyone I meet, in the world I fought to enter, is somewhat at ease. They don’t have especially high income jobs. They didn’t fight and struggle and strategize to own a home here. They typically can’t even be convinced it’s not roughly this easy for most. And they didn’t inherit huge wealth, either - they have no idea they’re “special”.
The degree to which one’s parents had stability themselves is becoming a stark dividing line in the US. I expect that line grows sharper and wider in the near term.
Edit - the troubling thing I’m trying to point out, is the vast communities of families all across the US who had just enough of a boost to make their lives feel, in every (shallow) way, like the stable affluent days of decades prior - the thoroughly taught “American Dream”. The people with money to spend live in a cloistered fiction, accidentally (from their perspective), and this seems super bad news for the current state of affairs.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again.
Millennials and zoomers are essentially the “hard times make good men” crowd like the greatest generation.
Unfortunately, I’m not too confident on “good men make good times” this time around.
I’m late 30s myself. Here is how I see the generational situations:
My parents’ generation: if you got any college degree or went into any skilled trade, you would have no problem purchasing a home.
My generation: if you picked certain well-paying majors or trades, you would be able to own a home.
The generation currently coming out of school: you will not afford a home without inherited wealth/family assistance.
It went from nearly anyone could get a home, to those who made just the optimal choices could get a home, to basically no one can get a home. I work with people who graduated with the same degree I have, yet because they happened to be born a 10-15 year later, they’re locked out of home ownership. I look at the cost of housing and compare it to their salary, and there’s just no way to make it work. To buy a home around here as a young person, you either need family money or you need to be a married couple, both working full time in high-paying STEM fields.
This is a super accurate general breakdown, maybe the clearest I’ve seen honestly. Completely matches what I’ve witnessed through life (with all the acknowledgements that it doesn’t portray everyone’s experience of course, and lots of the rest of my words here suffer from the same).
What I’m realizing more and more, and want to expand on your points with - is how badly we all misunderstand the “family money” thing. I was slow to grasp it, because when/where/how I grew up, that sounded like opulence.
These days it’s table stakes. A lot of us have it, built-in, a lot of us don’t. I never had that help, scraped and scrapped to take my family to stability. Now that I’m here, I can see - no one here is like me. Roughly everyone I meet, in the world I fought to enter, is somewhat at ease. They don’t have especially high income jobs. They didn’t fight and struggle and strategize to own a home here. They typically can’t even be convinced it’s not roughly this easy for most. And they didn’t inherit huge wealth, either - they have no idea they’re “special”.
The degree to which one’s parents had stability themselves is becoming a stark dividing line in the US. I expect that line grows sharper and wider in the near term.
Edit - the troubling thing I’m trying to point out, is the vast communities of families all across the US who had just enough of a boost to make their lives feel, in every (shallow) way, like the stable affluent days of decades prior - the thoroughly taught “American Dream”. The people with money to spend live in a cloistered fiction, accidentally (from their perspective), and this seems super bad news for the current state of affairs.