[diydsp]

At a fancy breakfast restaurant this morning, HGTV was on the TV (as opposed to say sports). I watched for a while as family after family looked forward to their remodeling and buying their homes, in the range of $579k - $989k. I thought about how I was almost able to afford a house until the great interest rate hikes of 2023. Now I'm on the sidelines for a long time to save up... and I'm a middle-aged person. Think about this from a young adult's perspective:

Not only are they so much less likely to remodel and buy at a home under these circumstances, but their own plight, which is other lucky peoples' success, is a form of entertainment. Meanwhile they have been informed that short of great technical mistakes or a miracle, they and any offspring they might create will be subject to environmental collapse.

But of the three: social media, economic inequality, and environmental collapse, which are we going to focus on? Would it be the ones that the Boomer generation created? or the scapegoat that we don't even have a good theory to explain.

Articles like thisare a good example of "Manufacturing Consent." Chomsky states that consent is obtained by narrowing the scope of the discussion. In this, we will constrain the discussion to social values and social media without venturing into areas such as environment and economics.

[yucky]

I can find you thousands of homes under $200k in almost every major metropolitan area in the country, and first time homebuyers are FHA eligible which means 3% down gets them their first home. I think most people even thinking about home ownership can scrape together $6k.

The problem is now people expect their first home to be their dream home, not a starter home. And they want it in the same handful of high cost of living cities.