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by _bxg1 2512 days ago
"The baby boom generation may never achieve the relative economic success of the generations immediately preceding it or following it."

"Members of the baby-boom generation were taught to appreciate the good life—the arts, books, good clothing, travel—and grew accustomed to it during a mass prolonged adolescence in which marriage and childbirth were delayed until after the magic age of 30."

Wow. This is startlingly familiar.

2 comments

I wonder how much of what this article describes (housing crisis, lack of spending power, inability to buy a home, etc) is due to demographic booms straining housing supply that doesn't react very quickly. The Millenials are another relatively large generation, and we have another housing crisis in almost every major city at around the time they're reaching 25-35.
Could your provide a source for your housing crisis in most major cities? If a look at the top 10 largest metro areas[1] only one is in the news often, Los Angeles. NYC and DC do not have the same issues as the west cost. Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston are not even close to having the same issues as SF or Seattle.

[1]https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2018/popest-m...

As usual when looking at metro stats, a lot of it has to do with how you slice "city" and "metro". If you look at the top combined statistical areas, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_statistical_area, I would argue that the top 6 all have serious housing affordability issues that I've heard about quite frequently, and the reason they're not as bad as SF/Seattle is that (a) they're not as geographically constrained and (b) most of these are older cities (e.g. NY, Chicago, DC) which were already bug on an absolute basis and thus could better absorb growth.
What once was an issue in Manhattan has spread out in the following generations across the country. Their contemporaries in, well, Westchester County, were doing just fine. Ask anyone who was working at IBM in the 80s.