I remember fondly of the days when housing costs wasn’t that much of a stressor and blood boilers for a lot of my relatives and friends. It was the late 90s and 2000s when the mood of America just seemed to be a lot more optimistic and less cynical. That was my childhood and teenage years. Now, the average American family and individual just seems so angry, stressed, and lonely. From personal experience, I’ve noticed some cracks showing in the American psyche way back in 2013-2015-ish when the after effects of that 2008 Financial Crisis/Housing Crash really started to show up in the microeconomics of Main street.
The Financial Crisis had basically demolished a lot of the mom & pop real estate builders/developers along with their construction tradesmen, and in the years since, the larger ones started consolidated and monopolizing, in order to gain more control over their price fixing tactics. A combination of overpriced land via developer monopolies and stupid decisions by local and state NIMBY/Baby Boomer council boards have created a scenario in which not enough of the “missing middle housing” were allowed to be built. For all those years due to both bottom up and top down corruption and greed at all levels of gov’t, we now have an artificial drought of decent affordable housing.
Like, literally I got the feeling that the majority of average Americans were not as stressed out with life as they are now. Truly, the worlds before the mid 2010s and after are completely different.
I know I may be overstating the extent to which housing is playing a role in pretty much every problem in America, but there’s no doubt it plays a big role in American political disenfranchisement nowadays. I just watched a really insightful video about just how every political and social instability can be tied to this one very simple issue, actually. Of course, with any kind of online educator and influencer, things should be taken with a grain of salt. But, it was insightful enough for me to create a post about the trajectory of the Affordability Crisis that been going on not since the Grand Reopening of 2022, but actually has its roots just as the early 2010s closed. By the way, the link to the aforemention video is this, if youre curious enough to bear through it: https://youtu.be/4ZxzBcxB7Zc?feature=shared
I, myself, am doing okay for someone my age, but the cost of living in my coastal state is really wearing away at my sanity for the past few years. So, like many others, Im planning to move to a Sunbelt state in a few years via the years-long investments accrued via my hard earned money from my crummy IT job.
But at this point, I just pray that this problem will resolve itself through the efforts of many Millenials and Gen Zers throughout many locales to reform zoning, and PRAY that the next two generations, Alpha and Beta, will have better economic mobility, social stability, and mental sanity than we did. I hope this problems gets better not just in zoning lax states, but also in other states nationwide, as well. The 2020s and 2030s are really the pivotal decades that’m are pretty much a sink or swim ones for future generations, in terms of peace and prosperity.
by godlike_hikikomori