Quote:
Originally Posted by JManc
Then they should go where the affordable homes are and not expect 70 year-old couples who've lived in the same house for 40+ years to have to uproot their lives so entitled millennials can have their home. At some point, Millenials and X'ers need to grow up and stop blaming Boomers for everything.
|
Easy to say if you're comfortably settled where you want to be. Not that I blame anyone for acting in their own self-interest and owning a home where they've lived for decades, but to say the options available today are the same as back then just isn't true. The fact is someone in the 70's and 80's had a multitude of affordable urban options available to them. Moving to LA, San Fran, Seattle, even New York was doable on an entry-level salary and those cities had diverse economies and the wide variety of jobs that come with them. You could say they were sketchier and rough around the edges, but I'd love to opportunity to live in grimier 90's Manhattan over unattainable 2020's Manhattan. Where do you seek price relief nowadays? Salt Lake City? Kansas City? Unless you're lucky enough that your field is prevalent in those cities you'd probably be doing significant harm to your future career prospects.
I bought my first condo a year ago. 1,000 SF and I paid over 3 times as much in nominal terms (probably just over twice as much in real terms) as my parents did for a 4,000 SF new detached home in 1994, with a salary that is not indexed anywhere close to that level of inflation. The reality is that the previous generation did not have to compete with a globalized real estate/job market anywhere close to what it is now. I'm not going to blame the boomers for taking advantage of beneficial times, I wish I could do the same, but the opportunity for the average person to live in a tier 1 city is something that seems to be fading. I'm not going to cry about it, if you really want to make it work you'll find a way and that's what I'm doing. To distill the discussion down to something as trivial as "Millennials are complainers, and should just move for affordability" is disingenuous though.
I commonly see this attitude among older users here of "well we figured it out, so I don't see what Millennials are complaining about" and it just reeks of an inability to objectively evaluate something outside of one's own experiences.