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The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

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Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#441

Post by vertbhrtn »

PaulStatezny wrote: post #304
leetcrew wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

presumably GP and their wife did not go on to both earn minimum wage after getting their degree(s?). even today when a bachelor's degree is worth less than it once was, the median wage for college graduates at their first job is around $48k. only about 2% of people with any amount of college education actually make minimum wage. it's pretty rough living on minimum wage, but paying off student debt is very rarely a co…

You're right. It was about [REDACTED FOR PRIVACY - but much much less than parent's 48k medium income per person for college grads] before taxes, both with college degrees. I'm sorry lapcatsoftware if it sounded like I was making light of poverty. Poverty is terrible. But at least in the US, there is _so much_ opportunity to not be stuck on a minimum wage salary. Resigning to the idea that, "Well, I guess I just have…

What opportunities? Tell me how an average cashier can land an average 150k/year job in a metro area? Don't forget that the said cashier has mediocre intelligence, so-so appearance, zero charisma and little talking skills. He might swap grocery store for an oil change shop, but that's about it. Our society is mostly stratified now, with a little upward mobility left for high-tech workers.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#442

Post by treis »

jlokier wrote: post #141
iso1631 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started as a trainee broadcast engineer in London on £17,800 a year in 2003. This left me with £1,082 a month (back then student loan payments were far higher than now). Rent for a tiny bedsit with a shared bathroom was £520 a month, 2 mile walk from work. I could live further out, but commuting costs outweighed any savings. That's the equivalent of £828 a month now. Bills were included. You can actually pick up a…

Where I live, most property agents will do a credit and income check, and would turn you away for not meeting the "minimum income level" for renting those places. Even if you feel you can afford spending 50% of your income, it doesn't follow that you can easily find a landlord who allows it. If you have a bad credit rating, as many people do these days, it will be even more difficult as more landlords check that than…

> Where I live, most property agents will do a credit and income check, and would turn you away for not meeting the "minimum income level" for renting those places.

This is where room in a shared house comes into play. They're available for $4-500 a month in my city.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#443

Post by munificent »

dcolkitt wrote: post #246

> Housing is more expensive for them than prior generations I harp on this constantly. But housing is not more expensive in the majority of American metros. Adjusted for inflation the median cost per square foot of new housing is almost exactly the same as it was in 1990. (This doesn't even take into account that mortgage rates are drastically lower since then.) We get skewed on this for two reasons. One is because h…

> Two is that we're highly skewed to a handful of elite metros, whose housing markets are not representative of the country as a whole. Housing is expensive in San Francisco, New York, LA, and DC. But in places like Tampa, Omaha, Cincinnati, and Phoenix the cost of housing (per square foot) has barely gone up at all.

I think cities are fundamentally the wrong unit to look at when thinking about housing prices.

What we really want to know is "how much does it cost to live some place where I can get a job". Knowing that Tampa is just as cheap today as it was 40 years ago means little if Tampa today has, say, only 70% of the jobs that it did back then.

What we really need is some sort of normalized "job availability unit" like "per capita" but "per employment opportunity" and then try to calculate current and historical housing costs relative to that.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#444

Post by [deleted] »

jeffbee wrote: post #379
texuf wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the extremely low interest rates, I wonder if the monthly payments are about the same.

It doesn't help as much as you've implied since 1) you need 20% of the sticker price for the down payment, and 20% of $200k is more than 20% of $130k, and 2) in many jurisdictions you pay tax on the market value, so your taxes go up whenever mortgage rates fall and prices rise.

[deleted]

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#445

Post by wahern »

antisthenes wrote: post #121
risyachka wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand the argument of "time to grow up" if a person lived without parents fine for years. Obviously he/she had already grown up.

Living with parents and being "grown up" are almost entirely orthogonal in well-adjusted societies. The fact that it's somehow related in American culture is very unfortunate.

It's not peculiarly American, it's a Western European, especially Northwestern European, pattern. See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2917824/, particularly the multigenerational household columns in the various tables.[1] And I'd bet it's related to the phenomenon of late marriage that has historically distinguished Western Europe from most of the rest of the world for the past 500 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line

I'm tempted to admit that the expression of this otherwise shared culture might be intensified by some of the more distinctive aspects of American culture (e.g. pioneer spirit, as mentioned elsethread), but I hesitate because assuming America is exceptional is a bad habit I'm trying to kick =)

[1] That paper is something of a rebuttal to the argument that NW European culture (including North American culture) was always strongly nuclear. But the lack of multigenerational living seems pretty clear; what they seem to show instead is that the trend of the elderly living alone is relatively new. Which doesn't seem surprising. A culture that pressures children to move out of the home doesn't imply a culture that pressures the elderly to live alone.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#446

Post by munificent »

racl101 wrote: post #138
war1025 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "poor" people (less than $100,000/year) How anyone making $100k can be considered "poor" is beyond me. No wonder everyone on the West coast thinks being a Millennial sucks.

Just like how you can live in a castle in middle America that costs $250K. It's just part and parcel of living where everyone else wants to live.

> where everyone else wants to live.

Another way to say that is "where the jobs are".

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#447

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #94

I'm my early 20s and in the UK. I earn more than my Dad who is in his 50s. He managed to get a house, have money left over for an expensive hobby, decent car, the odd holiday etc. I'm a 90th percentile earner. Will 95+ percentile earner in a few years time. Yet it feels like I am not as well off as I should be. I don't live in an expensive area either. Yet I need to save so much money to even have the opportunity to…

The post-WWII generation were able to buy a house plus car/holidays/etc on one person's median working class salary.

It wasn't a particularly palatial house, but the mortgage would have been paid off before retirement.

But this is a direct consequence of a rent-seeking economy which uses property rights as a proxy for political influence. The British economy started being converted from an industrial economy to a patrician rent-seeking speculative economy in the 80s, and the result was massive asset price inflation in property and shares.

This wasn't an accident. It made a certain kind of person extremely rich, and most other people increasingly poor to varying degrees.

Unless there's a change in strategy - unlikely - you can expect the wealth concentration to continue in the UK, with increasing danger to the personal circumstances of any kids you have - if not to yourself if there's a serious downturn.

Even a 95%er is in danger of losing their property if they lose their job for an extended period if they don't live off speculative investments and rent.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#448

Post by [deleted] »

elektor wrote: post #253
dcolkitt wrote: post #246

> Housing is more expensive for them than prior generations I harp on this constantly. But housing is not more expensive in the majority of American metros. Adjusted for inflation the median cost per square foot of new housing is almost exactly the same as it was in 1990. (This doesn't even take into account that mortgage rates are drastically lower since then.) We get skewed on this for two reasons. One is because h…

That's a valid point but millions of people live and work in SF, NY, LA, and DC. Their needs for housing should be acknowledged as well.

[deleted]

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#449

Post by t-writescode »

bradlys wrote: post #231
youredoneson wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So here's the thing My parents suck and I want nothing to do with them really Everything in my life is better the less I deal with them Everything

I think we’re going to have to accept we’re the uncommon ones around here. I don’t know what the stats are but I’ve got a feeling that most people on HN (particularly those in expensive cities) get along with their parents quite well. I’ve noticed in my time in SV that I’ve never really heard anyone say their parents are/were abusive. Or that they even really hated their parents. On the contrary, I hear most people l…

On the contrary, my mom and I get along swimmingly. We also know that we don't want to be in each other's hair endlessly and our limit for each other's presence is around 2 weeks.

Re: The majority of 18- to 29-year-olds in the US are now living with their parents

#450

Post by treis »

hkmurakami wrote: post #378
mywittyname wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in places like Tampa, Omaha, Cincinnati, and Phoenix the cost of housing (per square foot) has barely gone up at all. Maybe if you stop looking at like 2018. But my on-the-ground analysis living on one of these cities is cost of housing has fucking exploooded. I built a house just two years ago, which I thought was incredibly expensive at 2 times the median home price in the area. I had it in the back of my hea…

YoY median home prices were up 13% nationally in August. That's largely driven by the diaspora we're seeing with WFH/COVID, with people pushing into more affordable communities and driving up prices. Until now we were all competing in major metros pushing up only the top end of the curve but now there's a push towards the median priced areas.

>YoY median home prices were up 13% nationally in August.

That's a misleading statistic. It simply means that the houses getting sold has shifted towards the higher end of the market. If you look at the price for the same house it's gone up somewhere around 3% YoY.

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