They need stable, actionable futures. Homes they can afford to own, communities they can raise kids in, an environment that won't go up in flames; they need systems that have their back.
>Many of my staff and friends don't want to have kids, make no effort to find a partner and find all sorts of excuses
Is the lack of affordable housing and/or environmental disasters really responsible for people who lack the precondition (eg. having a partner) for buying a home?
When was having a partner a precondition for buying a home? Furthermore, what’s the point of finding a partner when the cost of a permanent place together might exceed both your incomes put together, much less a place big and safe enough to raise a family.
> When was having a partner a precondition for buying a home?
When you make an offer on a house you're bidding against two-earner households. For a lot of us in tech the salience of this fact is diminished by the industry's high salaries, but for most folks this is a really big deal.
This is only an issue because of constrained supply driving prices up.
If there was more supply, prices would stabilize somewhere lower. Given enough supply that point would be somewhere one income could support.
It's the constrained supply paired with high demand that drives prices up and requires multiple high incomes to compete (especially in places where this has been taken to the extremes because of NIMBYism and entrenched anti-build regulation/incentives).
Regardless of market conditions, DINK still offers a huge economic advantage because, well it's in the name: two incomes, ~half the living expenses compared to a single. It's popular because it's meta.
Yeah, but it'll only drive prices up if supply is constrained.
Land is scarce so there will always be some constraints in highly desirable areas, but today we're way way below what the land can support because of bad policy.
Sure, I'm all-in on YIMBYism, but some places will always be more desirable than others and those places will likely always cost more and all things being equal buyers with two incomes will be more likely to be able to afford those houses.
It might not be a strict precondition, but it's still a pretty strong precondition. Maybe "precondition" isn't the best word here, but I think my original point still stands. Suppose someone claims that people are deciding not to have kids for whatever reason (eg. global warming, unaffordable healthcare, expensive houses)[1], and I retort by saying that people aren't bothering finding a partner[2], so they're not meeting their "precondition". Sure, you can theoretically raise a kid without a partner, but if you're not even bothering to find a partner, then maybe it's fair to say that's the main reason, rather than blaming global warming or whatever?
When was the last time you asked for a mortgage? This is fairly standard nowadays, and has little to do with the size of your income. Banks prefer a mortgage in multiple names because it reduces their risk. If you're over 40, in my country it is all but impossible to get a mortgage on your own, regardless of income.
I'm making a far more banal claim: buyers with two incomes have more money than buyers with one income (all things being equal and across large numbers of people) and the latter will always be at a relative disadvantage.
Good point on agency. Throughout their lives GenZ has either had less agency or felt like we have less agency to do what we want. Certainly true for some financial goals like buying a house
The oldest gen z are just out of college though. I think it’s the younger millennials you might be describing (people a decade into their career with little prospect of home ownership).
Back in the 60s, people were buying homes in their early 20s or even late teens because it was that affordable. Obviously that is a bit of a historical anomaly, but it's almost a necessary complement to the idea you're supposed to become an adult and mature and grow up after age 18.
Perhaps we ran in different social classes but in the 60's most believed that you had to save a good portion of one's life to afford a home and worked towards that end. Home ownership was not a given - it was considered an enormous investment that took much of one's life to prepare for.
However, the affordable rental market greatly mitigated that and allowed "delayed" home ownership until a suitable nest egg was constructed.
They also had things a lot harder in many ways than we do. The 60’s is over 50 years ago now. The world changes a lot in that time. Basing your expectations on the 60’s is unrealistic.
Yes you're right. We do have many modern conveniences and information they didn't have. So why would we go backwards on this key metric of home prices and rent? Or housing as a percentage of household income? It is an economic, social, and moral failure (see the situation in Los Angeles)
> Basing your expectations on the 60’s is unrealistic.
We use historical standards to measure progress all the time. The thing we should be exploring is "why has home ownership become so expensive?" and "what can be done to alleviate that impact?" Anything else is a distraction.
As someone who graduated college into the Great Recession, I was told and shown no path to work for the better part of a decade after college-despite going back to college to become more marketable in that period. And seemingly nobody cares about people like me because we don’t get the ink that the people slightly older or younger than us get.
On the other hand, I do wonder how the economic outlook for work in the US looks once the deeper portions of the boomers retire and open up work. Not a lot of optimism though.
I’m the same age (although skipped college). Lots of friends in the same situation needing to get multiple degrees before finally finding their way into unrelated careers.
I think a lot of this lack of agency is what's driving the current interest in things like van life and digital nomadism. Whichever way you sell it, the idea that people ought to live every year until their 40s spending a huge chunk of their wages paying off some random Baby Boomer's mortgage through extortionate rents rather than their own is a bleak thing to face, especially when you can't even hang up a picture or adopt a pet in a lot of cases.
I for one am planning on moving onto a sailing yacht next year, while it's not exactly much cheaper that money is better spent on the inevitable maintainance than keeping the landlord's wine cooler full!
I'm sympathetic to the later part, but first part not what they want.
They want the dynamism of being able to change jobs and careers, they all want the opportunity for career progression which for the most part isn't there (it's always been competitive).
That means more risk and all the things that come along with it.
I think even 'remote work' will have a serious of consequences we're not ready to accept, which is that it will make workers even more fungible.
If someone literally can't show up for work ... then they're generally going to be seen as more easily replaced or changed around.
This talk really changed my thought process on careers. Basically every corporation in America is fundamentally unstable to work for, where you COULD be laid off for essentially arbitrary fiscal goals. That instability makes it impossible to trust your leaders (i.e. the company) to actually support you. As long as the people who pay your salary don't think long term about organizational health, people will be forced to play games and constantly job hop.
This coupled with the fact in tech at least that the easiest way to get a raise -- and usually a substantial one -- is to switch to a new company. If a person can either: spend a year genuflecting and begging their manager for a single-digit raise*, or spend three weeks interviewing and get 15%-plus more to do substantially the same work...all else being equal, which should we pick?
*Not to complain about 5%. For the vast majority of workers that's an unattainable dream -- but that just furthers the point that the worker is not treated as an asset.
> They want the dynamism of being able to change jobs and careers, they all want the opportunity for career progression which for the most part isn't there (it's always been competitive).
Why do people want this though? 50 years ago, you could be a mechanic, work 50 hours a week and own a house. The wife could be at home to take care of the kids. These days, both have to work 60 hours a week to afford a rental apartment.
in the 70's, a home cost about 4.5 times the median yearly household income. Right now it's about 7 times the yearly income. That doesn't seem like a massive increase (even though it's more than a 50% increase), but employment of married women also increased from 40% to 60%. So while we have, on average, more earners in a household, we pay more of our income on housing. It's a double whammy.
So people want careers in order to start earning a living wage in order to be able to actually raise kids and live a meaningful life in a nice home. People don't just want a career because they want a career, they want that because they don't want to be wage slaves who don't get to live a life. Also, they don't get to raise their kids, because they don't have time for that.
Absolutely. Another HN commenter put it very nicely in a recent similar thread: people are working so they can make enough money to afford to be able to work.
If two adults have to work full time to have a house with kids, then they also have to be making enough for child care and various other things that they might be able to do more cheaply if only one of them was working.
In Germany where I live home owners are in the minority (40%). In Europe on average homeownership is about 70%. Yet, we are one of the richest countries in Europe.
Furthermore, buying a house on credit does not mean you own it — since as long as you pay your debt it’s the bank that owns it really.
Finding a partner and maintaining a relationship got nothing to do with owning a home. I am saying that as a dad without owning a house.
Being a tenant in Germany cannot be compared to being a tenant in the US.
Being a tenant in Germany is essentially as stable (if not more stable) as taking a mortgage on a home in the US. This is still the type of stability the state provides, which is quickly disappearing worldwide as all funds go into real estate due to a decade of zero (or negative) interest rates.
> Yet, we are one of the richest countries in Europe.
We have strong social security, but Germans have few assets and those aren't really equally distributed. I don't think financial problems are standing in the way of kids though.
>Many of my staff and friends don't want to have kids, make no effort to find a partner and find all sorts of excuses
Is the lack of affordable housing and/or environmental disasters really responsible for people who lack the precondition (eg. having a partner) for buying a home?