In this article from the Huffington Post, Michael Hobbes captures a lot of what it feels like to be a young person today: the profound uncertainty, desperation, and anger.
He describes in minute detail the ways our systems of economic safety are failing us, and points to fundamental changes in attitude that have caused them:
Over the last four decades, there has been a profound shift in the relationship between the government and its citizens. In The Age of Responsibility, Yascha Mounk, a political theorist, writes that before the 1980s, the idea of “responsibility” was understood as something each American owed to the people around them, a national project to keep the most vulnerable from falling below basic subsistence. Even Richard Nixon, not exactly known for lifting up the downtrodden, proposed a national welfare benefit and a version of a guaranteed income. But under Ronald Reagan and then Bill Clinton, the meaning of “responsibility” changed. It became individualized, a duty to earn the benefits your country offered you.
This is something I’ve felt acutely during my time in America, where benefits that ought to be universal are tied to employment.
Hobbes goes on to examine the housing affordability crisis:
Falling homeownership rates, on their own, aren’t necessarily a catastrophe. But our country has contrived an entire “Game of Life” sequence that hinges on being able to buy a home. You rent for a while to save up for a down payment, then you buy a starter home with your partner, then you move into a larger place and raise a family. Once you pay off the mortgage, your house is either an asset to sell or a cheap place to live in retirement. Fin.
This worked well when rents were low enough to save and homes were cheap enough to buy. In one of the most infuriating conversations I had for this article, my father breezily informed me that he bought his first house at 29. It was 1973, he had just moved to Seattle and his job as a university professor paid him (adjusted for inflation) around $76,000 a year. The house cost $124,000 — again, in today’s dollars. I am six years older now than my dad was then. I earn less than he did and the median home price in Seattle is around $730,000. My father’s first house cost him 20 months of his salary. My first house will cost more than 10 years of mine.
This part in particular resonated with me. As prices rise faster than we can save, buying that first home is increasingly impossible. My wife & I have had immense privilege and good fortune our whole lives and yet without some miracle windfall we, too, will struggle to become home owners in our hometown of Auckland. And there seems to be little will to fix the system, especially in New Zealand where home ownership is so inextricably linked to a secure retirement:
All the urgency to build comes from people who need somewhere to live. But all the political power is held by people who already own homes.
There is a deep unfairness to it all. And not one perpetuated by any one actor. It would be easy to point to our parents generation and place blame, but I expect many of them are as worried as we are.