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42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

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Re: 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

#161

Post by TitaRusell »

Animats wrote: post #88
slibhb wrote: post #80

Downward mobility is almost entirely caused by housing costs, which are a self-inflicted problem. We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing. I live in an expensive area and I'm always shocked by how many of my friends who cannot afford to buy a home (or even a condo) are NIMBYs. These are people in their 20s through 40s who have been earning since college, can't afford to buy, yet get annoyed…

> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing. If actual number of houses was the problem, house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline. It's existing houses being repriced upward by speculation that makes them unaffordable.

If they were unaffordable they would not be selling. Don't underestimate just how much money people can conjure up. Most parents don't want to be buried with their money Egyptian pharaoh style.

Re: 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

#162

Post by mikestew »

piguin wrote: post #30
alistairSH wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Source: https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st... OK, now I'm questioning the whole thing... it also claims 17% of Boomers reliant on their parents. So, we have some substantial number of 62-80 years olds relying on their 90-100 year old parents? Seems unlikely.

Maybe you're not familiar with the entire economy? There are a lot of households that depend on retirement checks of the oldest members and households that don't have traditional work but may have family homes, businesses and farms still in the name of the oldest relatives. Different groups would have different results as far as whether they will inherit independence or become destitute if parents die.

I'm the last of the Boomers, and my parents are in their 80s and I was a prom baby (meaning "young parents"). There's no way 17% of Boomers are sponging off Mom and Dad, because the overwhelming odds are: Mom and Dad are dead, and have been for a while now.

OTOH, I guess that doesn't mean someone isn't still cashing that retirement check.

Re: 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

#163

Post by lostlogin »

thegrim33 wrote: post #114
Animats wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing. If actual number of houses was the problem, house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline. It's existing houses being repriced upward by speculation that makes them unaffordable.

Anyone with 60 seconds of free time can trivially see that your claims hold no water. Simply Google for cities/areas with declining population, choose one, look up average housing prices there over the last 10 years or so, see how they've changed, correct the figures for inflation, and you'll see that in almost all cases inflation-adjusted prices are lower today in those places than they were 10 years ago.

I searched, the first hit was New York (seems odd?). I looked up average price over time, inflation adjusted. They are increasing.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYSTHPI

Edit: DuckDuckGo seems to have served me a terrible example, further digging shows some examples which don't even need looking up, its clear that pricing has plummeted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_city

Re: 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

#164

Post by richwater »

antinomicus wrote: post #132
LastTrain wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate this “we don’t build enough housing” narrative these days, because it implies this is a simple supply and demand problem, which it is not. I see so many progressives repeating this line, apparently not understanding that they are suggesting unfettered capitalism (up zoning…) is the solution. The fundamental problem is we simultaneously want our housing to be affordable and good investment. It can’t be b…

Public housing is the answer to this.

The NYCHA is the largest slumlord in the city. The country has proven over decades that it cannot operate public housing with any measure of success.

Re: 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

#165

Post by anon7000 »

brailsafe wrote: post #141
vslira wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not number of houses, it's number of houses where people want to live. "house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline" -> the causation could be running backwards: a family of 2 (maybe 2 retired people with accumulated wealth) can outcompete with a young family of 4 for the same unit, that drives prices up and population down. I'm not saying this is the case, but decreasing population not b…

This seems to be, or have been, a very common scenario in Canada, which is why I completely discount when most politicians start going on about a "housing crisis" when in another breath they'll say they don't want houses to get cheaper. If it was a "crisis", one might think houses would be treated with special care instead of basically just another commodity. If a person with wealth can just buy up as many of a finit…

Why not both?

Re: 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

#166

Post by mothballed »

alphawhisky wrote: post #133
s1artibartfast wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you separate speculation from legitimate price increases? If the houses are overpriced due to speculation, why isn't someone building Alternatives and undercutting them? This implies that there is either a real increase in value, a manufactur bottleneck, or both

Civil Engineer/City Planner here. The bottleneck is legislative. NIMBY's are all over in US politics right now, local and larger. These folks put together legislation that makes it extremely hard to build without City/County/Township permission, unless the project benefits them in some way. So, most places will disincentivize new construction unless they get a grant for it, because they feel obligated to help their c…

This is exactly it. I built a house for 60k a few years ago in a HCOL area by finding a legal loophole to permitting/planning that bypassed civil engineers, code inspections, and almost all planning. The house next to me, quite similar and 50 years old, is selling for 5x that.

In the old days it was common to build your own house. And it usually allows a house for half or less the market price. But this is effectively illegal/impractical in most the US. Some simple changes to legislation would halve the average cost of a house overnight!

Re: 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

#167

Post by ironman1478 »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #155
Noumenon72 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After thirty years of house prices rising astronomically, you can't appeal to "speculation" any more. People are speculating because the underlying scarcity makes prices sure to rise. I think if you look closely at "population down, house prices up" you will find normal supply-and-demand stories like "population down, houses down even more" or "population down (downtown), prices up (suburbs)".

Agree. So often I see people complaining "people treat their home as an investment…". Because in fact it turns out it is? Are we supposed to pass laws that fix the price of a home based on the square footage? (I wonder if jewelers complain that the reason silver is so expensive is that people treat it as an investment .)

Nobody advocates for fixing the price. People want more supply which will bring the cost of housing as a whole down or at least provide more price diversity.

Is it even beneficial to have a house worth a lot of money? Think about places where property is expensive, it is also expensive to live there in general because housing costs so much. The cost of housing means employers have to pay their employees a lot to keep them there. This in turn means you are paying more for goods and services. If you're a homeowner, but NOT a high income person, this is very bad. It means you can't make payments towards maintenance of your house, going out becomes harder, etc. Your quality of life decreases.

People who inherit homes that are worth a lot, but aren't flush with cash end up having to sell frequently because there is no way for them to maintain it. It's also the plot of white lotus season 2 with the villas lol.

Re: 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

#168

Post by thisislife2 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #111
thisislife2 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure - in my experience, I've observed that the more money you have the less people care about relations (their social circle becomes smaller) and healthy co-dependency reduces. This is more true of the young. Human nature tends to be selfish, which is not conducive for a healthy society. Young people becoming financially-independent at an early age may negate opportunities for self-introspection on that - w…

I don't agree with your characterization of "human nature". I mostly disagree that there is any such thing, and to the extent that there is, it seems to me that it is more like: cooperative, altruistic, empathic within the in-group, aggressive, selfish and uncooperative with the out-group. The great work of human civilization is to expand the size of the in-group.

Look at any popular religion and you will find a heavy emphasis on sacrifice, selflessness and delayed gratifications (that helps strengthen our control over our base desires). This is because early civilisations (that used a religio-political construct to form societies and nations) recognised that a healthy society only flourishes when humans are taught to fight their innate desire to be selfish. You can observe this when kids demand attention as they become jealous of their siblings or play with toys with anyone - they have to be taught to share, and appreciate it as a value.

Your perspective on the in-group and out-group is relevant of course - it isn't healthy if one is self-sacrificing without addressing their own needs. (However the degree of that varies between eastern and western culture. Eastern cultures, which have more civilisational history, perhaps don't necessarily see as it in such rigid terms?). Moreover, my point was that having wealth tends to affects your perceptions to "expand the size of the in-group" - money does provide more avenues to be independent, and thus a financially independent youth can (ignorantly) miss opportunities to learn how to have healthy co-dependent relations as most erroneously assume that such relations are not important to them because they have achieved "independence". Learning to be independent is important. But then learning to understand the importance of co-dependency is another step to become a mature adult.

Re: 42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support

#169

Post by cliglot »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #155
Noumenon72 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After thirty years of house prices rising astronomically, you can't appeal to "speculation" any more. People are speculating because the underlying scarcity makes prices sure to rise. I think if you look closely at "population down, house prices up" you will find normal supply-and-demand stories like "population down, houses down even more" or "population down (downtown), prices up (suburbs)".

Agree. So often I see people complaining "people treat their home as an investment…". Because in fact it turns out it is? Are we supposed to pass laws that fix the price of a home based on the square footage? (I wonder if jewelers complain that the reason silver is so expensive is that people treat it as an investment .)

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