Your parents almost certainly voted to restrict the supply of housing so they could artificially inflate their houses value and retire off of their house.
The causes of the housing shortage are known. We can change it.
Son, one of these days, this will all be yours!
< gestures at crumbling 1985 tract home in car-dependent community >
Luxury. Some day, you'll have 13 zoomers living in a shoebox in the middle of the road...
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
We were evicted from our paper bag in a septic tank. We had to go live in a lake!
1985
Check out the guy with the brand new house!
It a little hard to blame them since they were sold the end of pensions and rise of the 401k. Which the bottom 60% of the country has close to zero of and then they can't make a living wage because the shareholders demand a greater return every year.
This hurts almost as much as my teeth.
I had to get a root canal the other day. The dentist had to wait to see if my insurance would cover it because I had recently had a different root canal and "they sometimes don't pay for more than one."
They had to clamp down, since so many people were getting root canals for shits and giggles. /s
You ain't need but the one toof ya fancy sum bitch.
My grandparents ordered their house from Sears and grandpa and my great uncles built it over a summer weekend.
Damn thing still standing and is now I think on a historical register.
But today… we can do the same thing. You want a single or double wide?
Ooh until you check the prices of a manufactured home (trailer / caravan) and find out how unaffordable they are. Bonus you can't get a traditional mortgage for one.
Also only a few companies will insure them. I think Foremost and State Farm were my only two choices. It wasn't something I considered when I bought my run down double wide manufactured home.
I keep on having this debate with my dad. He's 73 and I'm 37. One night he was like "people from your generation want to buy a 'starter home' and a vacation home, and then a few years later buy a bigger home!" and I was like "no one in my generation is even thinking about buying a vacation home when they can barely make a livable wage in a lot of fields." Teachers make about $25/hour (about 35-40k/year) and they deal with tons of shit from the faculty, state, and students themselves. I was making $112k/year working in IT and could barely afford to live by myself in or close to Manhattan.
Edit: just for context, my rent was $2500/month for a 500 sq ft 1 bedroom apartment about 30-45 minutes from Manhattan. The sales tax rate in NYC is 10%. A burger and a beer can easily cost you $20.
The (boomer) generation holds bizarrely strong biases, it could be they subconsciously they do it to avoid admitting they’ve screwed their kids with their political votes, or more likely they simply only care about getting their own and aren’t thinking far enough ahead to realize their being snookered and driving the bus off a cliff.
$112k/yr is a crazy amount of money; I also work in IT in a pretty high up position, I wish I even made half that...
Solution: enlist in the military! /s
Then you can be poor with ✨HEALTHCARE✨
Don’t forget PTSD and other depressive disorders.
"Kids these days are all gum, no gumption"
Thank you for bringing humor to an otherwise bleak post!
"I laugh because I must not cry, that is all, that is all."
-Abraham Lincoln (for real)
Feels like we’re already nearing Mad Max with a dash of Blade Runner for an appetizer.
Luxury bones
That’s what they’ll be called in insurance plans.
Basically happens now.
Implants--which actually function exactly like real teeth--are considered optional, cosmetic luxuries. They're almost never covered by dental plans and cost thousands of dollars. Per tooth.
Dentures--which suck and are mainly cosmetic and don't allow you to eat the same foods you always had when you had real teeth--are considered necessary and practical. You can get free dentures from government/welfare insurance. But even out of pocket are are only a couple hundred.
So untrue, just put it downpayment on a 30 yr fixed loan for some dentures.
I know. I wish we lived in a communist dystopia.
Or just a classic socialist democracy would do fine. Doesn't even need to be dystopian just you know like what they have in Norway and shit.
So nice of insurance companies to decide that our teeth, eyes, and minds aren't part of our bodies.
Don’t forget trying to figure out how much you can eat daily! A second meal is a treat!
