This will sound ridiculous to most people:

I didn’t go to school after the 8th grade. I dropped out for several reasons, but even without lying, I talked my way into a very good career in IT. There was no database of schooling and I was hired on my personal merits, then I built a user experience department before that was actually a thing.

Within a few years, I was responsible for hiring but couldn’t hire anyone like myself. I wasn’t allowed to even consider anyone without a college degree, so I would have had to reject myself.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. That was 2002, and now in 2024, we’re rejecting people who might be awesome at their job (not to toot my horn, but I was very good at what I did and won industry awards) because they can’t afford to get a degree, as I couldn’t.

Most industries are pay to play now, and you can’t even break in by being exceptional nowadays. We’re trapping people out of what they’re great at and would love to do just because they were born into poverty.

Imagine the gifts we’re suppressing and squandering.

Here’s what’s changed

• The market has collapsed into a few companies. That means that monopolistic forces are in nearly full force
• Labor unions have been severely weekend. In the 60s almost out of fear companies were practicing “corporate charity” to try and keep employees from unionizing. They’ve lost that fear.
• Regulations around corporate stock price manipulation have been all but eliminated. Buybacks use to be illegal because they allow a company to artificially inflate their stock completely unrelated to the actual performance of the company.
• Social safety nets have been gutted or underfunded.
• Public education has been destroyed. We used to have a fairly robust public university system that’s been uber privatized with funding reduced to almost nothing.
• Hospital systems have consolidated as has insurance agencies which not only drives up the price of medical care, it drives down the wages of doctors and nurses while keeping them as minimally staffed as possible. This translates into terrible care that fucks you over when you need any medical work done.

I suspect affordable housing is the main thing here that has been stolen.

The whole mess of the economy is hanging on that one thing. It gobbles up every spare penny. There isn’t enough of it, and the price is only being constrained by how much the highest bidder is prepared to pay. The highest bidders are professional couples, no kids. If that’s not you, you ain’t getting shit.

As a wise man once sang, “build fuckin’ houses everywhere, millions of the cunts”.

The message was lost with the example chosen.

TL;DR - the world sucks for most people nowadays who want to buy a house.

The idea was that at one point in America, a single earner could afford to buy a home and upgrade the quality of their life if they:

• work hard
• had a decent job
• saved money
• did not procreate themselves into poverty

Now, even with two-earner families, it is not enough to afford even a basic starter home without being house poor and in debt for the entirety of your life without ever really “owning” anything (other than the payments). The reason for this change in home ownership experience is what is always hotly debated.

Those with general wealth or an entrepreneurial spirit will argue that it is still possible. The working class who just wants to do a job, earn a paycheck and leave work behind at the end of the day will disagree. The poor worry more about how to pay their bills at the end of the month and still feed themselves to worry about a house.

There are a lot of factors in my opinion on what has changed to make it so hard today but no reason greater to me than when a house became an investment instrument instead of a place to raise a family. Something left to your heirs to give them a leg up in their future and that was how upward mobility worked. However, now that a house is not just a home but an investment tool, more and more people are finding the “American dream” is no longer achievable.

How the value of a house was derived hasn’t really changed all that much. What has changed is how much that value is. It used to be that a single earner making 100k a year in a big city could afford to buy a home and with more kids (aka tax breaks) could afford to upgrade homes from the starter home to one in the suburbs. Then came the two-earner households. People could afford more so the real estate industry started charging more for the same things and people paid it … because they could. The single earner was left behind because two incomes will always be more than one.

Then came the real estate get rich craze. Those modern families with two working adults and positive cash flow just waiting to be … (oh wait, that’s the infomercial sales pitch). There was money to be made for little to no effort. Just buy a property, charge someone rent and make sure that your income was greater than your expenses. Boom! That’s it. Sit at home watching TV while your bank account gets rich. The two-earner family was now getting squeezed out by competition from the small investor. This also drove up the price of homes because the investor was willing to spend more if they thought they could charge more for the rental. The two-earner families now had to shell out more to buy or stay a renter because they could no longer afford to buy. Pretty cool business model where you can create your own customer base.

As is typical, it wasn’t long before real estate corporations started to muscle in on the business as there was money to be made; especially with the deep pockets of bankruptcy protected corporate entities that could speculate on property values going up without worrying about losses. They also started exercising local political and financial influence over zoning and construction laws to ensure opportunity and property values would go their way. The small investors started to get pushed to the side and all the while, home prices kept going up (and inventory going down). Since profits must always go up, these so called developers started to decrease the actual size of the living space to squeeze more profits from the same properties. The original shrinkflation. That’s how you ended up with shoebox sized apartments in big cities.

Finally, we come to modern day times, where publicly traded companies like the Zillow and Redfins of the world buy up whole markets in an effort to control supply and pricing. Real estate is unaffordable to most and the rich buy properties with no intention of using it for living. Instead, they use them as tax shelters for their wealth (tax deductible real estate investment trusts (REITs), 1031 exchanges, depreciation, and mortgage interest payments). Corporate shareholder interests also demand that housing costs keep rising regardless of the impact. What impact is that you say?

People are forced to rent, delay starting a family and find other ways to make money besides working for a living. Some try to do it through investments in the stock market where there are always more individual investor losers than there are winners. The same place the Zillows and Redfins of the world go to get their money so they can afford to try and manipulate said markets you can no longer afford to buy in. If you ask me, this is capitalism at its finest so long as you are on the right side of the financial wall. If your main focus in life is not to make money, then you will be supporting someone who does make it their focus. Welcome to modern serfdom.

“Serfdom, condition in medieval Europe in which a tenant farmer was bound to a hereditary plot of land and to the will of his landlord.” - Encyclopedia Brittanica

I’ve pointed this out before-

On TV in the 1980s, Tom and Roseanne were out of work constantly, but they owned a house and they never lost it.

On TV in the 1980s, Al Bundy supported his housewife and two kids on a shoe salesman’s salary.

You know what the criticism was? It wasn’t that they owned a house. It was “their house is too big for what they make.”

I don’t remember anyone thinking it was ridiculous that Al Bundy was a homeowner. Because of course he would own a home.

Even renting and even in the 90s… no one said that it would be impossible to live in Manhattan and work in a cafe like on Friends. The criticism was that the apartment was too big. The idea that it was something you could do was not in question.

Yes, it’s all TV and it’s all fantasy, but the public reaction to it should show you something.

I would be content with not having the housing market cannibalized by AirBnB and real estate companies, a paycheck that isn’t eaten up by greedflation and a passable healthcare (I live in Europe, so we have public healthcare, at least nominally).

Back when this was a real thing, billionaires didn’t exist. I say we try very hard to go back to this economic era.

This was never the norm it’s a myth that never actually existed even when it was supposedly the norm most people struggled

When it really hit me was when I found out how much my girlfriend’s parents paid for their house a few miles from the beach in San Diego on blue collar salaries. It was 1/5th the cost adjusted for inflation that it is now. If houses were still that price I could easily afford 2 on my salary, but instead I can’t afford 1

sacrifice the quality of everything for maximum corporate profit

I’m not from the US. And I’m amazed how my dad put 4 of his kids through college during the late 80s and early 90s and here I am struggling with just 1 kid.

I worked the factories in the late eighties, most had spouses that worked, most rented or bought a single wide, we all barely scraped by and were just a disaster away from being broke broke.

Sure you had a few, and I emphasize a few, guys who made decent bank, but they were specialists and most people were clamoring to be their right hand person to take over when they retired or quit.

That wasn’t the bulk of us.

We didn’t own that comparable sized house.

We didn’t take vacations, we visited family in another state.

We didn’t drive a nice or a lot of times even decent cars.

We on the line didn’t support a family of five comfortably, we all fucking struggled to make ends meet but we could keep modest for on the table and a roof over our heads.

That family of five on a high schoolers education was always a bit of a myth but I will say it was certainly better back then than today, at least there was abundant factory work that paid better than the minimum.

One major factor: women entered the workforce. Labor supply doubled, and two incomes per household became normalized. Our current economic system fails to account for the work of raising children which was implicitely built into the “traditional family” model.

That’s a double whammy for workers. The value of labor is halved. Both partners are expected to work to achieve a similar standard of living. And, without one partner doing household and child-rearing labor, those costs are borne by the workers.

Poverty in first world countries is a new phenomenon that has only emerged in the past 10 to 20 years.

Sarcasm aside… yes, the working class is still being exploited. It didn’t take Twitter tier propaganda to say it.

It was never going to be possible for the US to maintain that kind of standard of living forever. It worked out in the 1950s through to the 1970s because WWII left huge swaths of industry and agriculture in Europe and Asia devastated — it took decades^0 for affected countries to rebuild. Meanwhile, North American based manufacturing soared and became the envy of the world — everyone bought form North America, and anyone with no particular skill set who was looking for a job could get a good Union job in any number of factories.

But that couldn’t last forever. There was no policy the US Government could have taken (other than perpetual war against everyone else?) that would have kept the rest of the world from re-industrializing. Japan, China, Germany, Italy, France, and the UK (amongst others^1) were able to re-industrialize to a point where the US suddenly had competition again — and while the US could have some competitive advantage against some of its more Western allies due to size, they weren’t going to be able to keep that kind of lead forever against China, Taiwan, and Japan. The world wound up with more capacity than there was a market for, and so the winners were the ones that could do the job the cheapest (as is the way in a competitive marketplace).

It was an anomaly that brought the kind of prosperity the US experienced in the post-WWII years; you can’t recreate that today (as it’s only due to the limitations of the technologies at the time that North America was broadly spared any destruction during the war years — in the post WWII nuclear/ballistic missile era that wouldn’t be the case anymore).

^0 — there are still areas in Europe that are uninhabitable (and unfarmable) today due to WWI and WWII.
^1 — it did somewhat help that the Soviet Union re-industrialized under Communism; the generally closed nature of their economy, combined with the huge inefficiencies of most of its industries under centralized control didn’t really challenge or threaten the US’s economic might.