> Then there are the free services. Ms. Palmer, who is 39 and lives near Washington, D.C., said that the free 20 to 25 hours of child care she receives every month from her parents contributed to her family’s decision to have a third child. If she were to pay a babysitter, Ms. Palmer estimates it would add up to around $6,000 a year.
This kinda bugs me, not only because inter-generational child rearing has been the norm for most of history rather than something unique that deadbeat millenials are relying on, but also because it propagates the belief that anything you don't pay for with money is considered "free" (the bad "free", as in "deadbeat" or "moocher").
There's the whole debate that GDP is the wrong measure precisely because it doesn't measure these kinds of "unpaid services", but I prefer to look at it another way: a "livable" city is more than what restaurants and bars are around, but also who your neighbors and social connections are (I've heard this described as alternative forms of capital beyond financial capital like social and cultural capital).
It's not that millenials are killing the babysitter industry, it's more millenials are reaching the age where they understand the whole "it takes a village" folk wisdom.
Globalisation doesn't help with that. It's now easier than ever to move to a "hot spot", most of the time for work. But no one knows each other, everyone come for "the game" and their career. Social networks and instant messaging gives you the illusion that you still have a community.
It's all good in your 20s, when you're in good health, and when it's easy and cheap to make friends.
Then you hit your 30s and find out that you don't have any community, everyone moved somewhere else, the city is too expensive for a 2-3 bedrooms flat, and even if you stayed you'd have to work full time (if not overtime), which means you'd need someone else to bring your kids to school and take care of him/her after work, which isn't free.
It's a lot like the "get a loan to buy a car, buy a car to go to work, work to pay the loan" analogy. It's not a life, you merely exists for work and pay other people to take care of what used to be the core experience. At the end of the day the only thing you're looking for is a meal and this new netflix show your heard about.
The worst part is, as you said, that it's now frown upon to rely on your community because it's "free", and surely you haven't made it if you rely on free things.
I think what's especially twisted about this situation is the two-sided nature of it.
If you come from wealth, it's easy to get into a good school, and your parents can subsidize you while you're launching your career (or outright create a career for you).
If you don't come from wealth, and you get to a city, and you start making over $200k, it's hard to even take advantage of it.
Instead of having parents to subsidize me, I have parents who are pretty broke and in bad health. How can I justify buying a modest house in my area (for $1M), when my parents are piling up debt, struggling to pay rent, and barely able to buy groceries?
Flip that even further to people who come from really poor countries like India. I can't imagine if my parents were working $1 an hour -- how could I pay $3k in rent? How can you invest thousands of dollars in yourself when your parents don't even make that much in a year?
But if you don't make those investments, you're never going to get ahead...
It's not just that wealthy millennials have a huge advantage, but coming from a poor family has a HUGE disadvantage in terms of social mobility as well.
Getting that job in that major metropolitan area and actually going to work every day in that job carries such incredible direct and indirect costs, by the end of the year it’s typical for most people to be worse off than when they started.
This is to say nothing of the opportunity cost of all that time.
Then finally, if you are willing to factor in the societal/cultural pressures that come with the job and the massive costs associated with fulfilling them, as supposed to just calling that weakness on the persons behalf for succumbing to those myriad pressures... well, as you alluded, the tail is most certainly wagging the dog.
"It takes a village" has really bitten for me, I've seen just how bad it is without. Moving to the Bay Area, far away from any parental help, seemed so great when I was 25. Now I have children that I am raising without family help, while trying to do well in my own career, can just be totally emotionally crushing sometimes.
I'm deep in that too, right now. My partner badly wanted one last kid, and knowing we were already resource-tight and having no family around, I was very hesitant. Logistically I knew it would be a disaster but I agreed to it. I love the hell out of this kid, but "totally emotionally crushing" is apt. I'm not new to this, but I can only do so much. Working my job, being a stay at home dad, and having to maintain our relationship (plus my relationship with my son and adopted son) is genuinely outside of my ability. But it's what we have to do here. Expensive city, no connections, 3 kids.
I know it's stupid to go into it knowing it'll be hard, and I can't complain. I'm not. This is just what it takes, and I went into it knowing it would be temporary. Kids get a lot easier as they get older.
A lot of things that are worth it in life take a lot of work. I'll feel better in a few years. At the moment I feel like I'm dying.
At any rate, here's to things getting easier. I'm sure our hard work will pay off soon enough.
On top of that, here you can feel like you are working hard day in and day out, and you meet someone just like you, working just as hard, but they have $5M in stock because they worked for the right company at the right time.
Has anyone worked on creating a 'village' in the bay? Is there any thing like a network where people can watch each other's kids, or take them to activities, to take any pressure off? Like to be a member, you would of course need to have a kid, but instead of payment it's basically a time bartering system. I imagine the kids would benefit from interacting with other kids. I'm sure liability would be a nightmare, but perhaps it could be informal. I myself suffer from this as I have 6 kids, and am thinking about a move to the bay area.
I'm not so keen on the description here, but at the same time it's impossible to deny that there are people who take advantage of the good of society while simultaneously decrying it.
If we want to talk about moochers and deadbeats we need to stop looking at people in poverty who behave in ways we don't like. It's easy to call them names, but they're doing the best they can with the very little they have.
Shift the perspective to huge corps like Walmart, who rake in billions and themselves depend on state welfare to do so.
In the UK we call these people 'benefit scroungers', yet their impact on the British way of life is practically zero compared to what those with money can do, to the point where it's a false problem.
Yeah, I was going to say, my grandmother took care of me & my sister while my parents, in their 30s, were at work, or if they needed a night out. This was in the 80s, so it's not anything "new" to 30-somethings.
One of the new things with grandparents today is divorces.
Because all of my child’s grandparents are divorced they are not able to retire / and have to work. This prevents them from being able to offer the same kind of child raising assistance as grandparents that stay together.
Same here, my grandmothers and great aunt raised me when my parents had to work. In the late 80s...it’s not uncommon, especially in immigrant families. It is seen as a good thing, not something to be ashamed about.
You can do it, but it will just be a lot harder to do.
Personally I decided to stay in the Midwest and make 170k instead of 300k, but I have my family, and family matters more to me than an extra 130k in salary.
It's a data point you should consider, particularly if baby sitting, nannies, etc. are very expensive in your area.
People underestimate how much help one needs in raising kids because a few decades ago the mom would either not work or work an easier/part time job. This still happens in rural or semi rural areas in the US.
Nowadays in the city both parents are in 8-9 hour day high intensity jobs. You may have time for your kid, but you have less energy.
Inter-generational child rearing is an old tradition, but in recent US history wasn't it the case that your parents help you less but also ask less of you (think retirement homes).
Maybe the trend of adults relying more on their parents is only a failure if adults aren't expected to take care of their parents later on.
> it's more millenials are reaching the age where they understand the whole "it takes a village" folk wisdom
Boy, if it takes until your 30s to understand that "wisdom", then I weep for my contemporaries. In strong nuclear families with inter-generational ties, it shouldn't take longer than your late teens to realize that parental support is normal at least until you have kids of your own.
Having strong ties to your grandparents and parents should be the norm, and I'm very sorry for the Americans that haven't had the peace of mind from having a safety net of their extended families throughout their whole lives. This isn't meant to sound patronizing. Child rearing is one of the most labor intensive activities we have as a species and I for one will be taking all the help I can get.
I was born in NYC to Haitian immigrants, if you didn't know Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. I grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of West Indian first generation children, a common theme for us was that we were "tougher" than the white kids who grew up in NYC because they lived easy lives. It was typical short sighted thinking that young kids do.
I wonder what that kid would say now after reading this article. A lot of the people I grew up with went to crappy colleges. I did too, and we were too broke to even think about tuition so PELL grants funded my education. College Textbooks? You mean PDFs from The Pirate Bay.
I made it out and got a nice job in tech, but like many of my peers it is I who support my parents. I pay their health insurance, I lend them money for groceries, and I'm financing my dad's chemotherapy. Do you know how hard it is to save up for a house (on the west coast !!) knowing you'll never get a windfall from Mom and Dad? When in fact they are a liability budget wise?
I wish more articles were written about this side of the coin, it is my experience that many young people, especially minorities, are shouldering the burden of "elder care" earlier than they ever thought they would.
I strongly agree with this and relate as someone who makes a very good living as a computer programmer but has received nearly no financial assistance from parents (a few thousands dollars for college tuition but not all of it covered) who do not have much in liquid assets.
The parent comment highlights is an important divide that's exacerbating the wealth gap in the USA: The difference between millennials whose Gen X parents are a financial liability versus a financial advantage.
The Gen X'ers are either passing onto their kids either hundreds of thousands in investment and savings income, or tens of thousands in medical and elderly care liabilities. Few in my "millennial" generation are talking about it, but as their parents get older, the contrast is getting more noticeable among friends who have to deal with very different parental situations. It's dangerously perpetuating "wealth gaps" across generations. I fear it will not end well for society when more debt-laden adults see others who are coasting off of what their parents' gave them.
Yes, this is income inequality, generational wealth, and the racial wealth gap all rolled into one.
The worst thing about it is that I've completely reoriented my free time to prepare for interviews so that I can double my salary -- that will hopefully give me enough breathing room to accelerate my savings to buy a home and pass on wealth to my children. The game is the game...
I personally think this reality will make social democrats mainstream in no time (speaking of US). Especially with people like AOC stating the position so eloquently.
>I made it out and got a nice job in tech, but like many of my peers it is I who support my parents. I pay their health insurance, I lend them money for groceries, and I'm financing my dad's chemotherapy. Do you know how hard it is to save up for a house (on the west coast !!) knowing you'll never get a windfall from Mom and Dad? When in fact they are a liability budget wise?
I can only imagine how difficult that is. This is an interesting distinction between western and eastern culture too. I wonder if the obligation to take care of your parents is less pronounced in eastern households that are wealthier.
It's the opposite. The obligation to take care of your parents is definitely more pronounced in eastern households. See filial piety [1]. I'm Chinese and grew up in both Asia and the US. First of all, wealthy Chinese is a pretty small minority, so most working 20-somethings and 30-somethings are paying a portion of their paychecks to parents to support them. For those lucky enough to come from wealthy families, most are still expected to care for them in other non-monetary ways. For example in America many Chinese immigrants of the older generation can't drive; taking time off your work and taking your parents to their doctor's appointments is often a responsibility you have. (which of course means you can't live far away from them; there's going to be more and more work caring for them as they grow older.)
Like GP, I also grew up in a lower income family and made it out well in tech. My only advantage is that I'm older and started working 15 years ago, which lead to being able to afford to buy a house during the lowest years of the housing market (2010-12) so I have a really low mortgage in crazy bay area. I don't know how anyone in the bay would be able to save up for a house if they have to support their parents in addition to paying their own rent.
> I wonder if the obligation to take care of your parents is less pronounced in eastern households that are wealthier.
For East Asian families, it's still there but it is non-existent from a financial perspective. It's no different from the article even though it describes the US. I've personally seen several scenarios of approx 30 individual families:
1. Kids were either extremely spoiled so they ended up with a poor work ethic, were incompetent, or both. They are not millennials. Parents ended up supporting them for the rest of their lives. Their wealth eventually consumed in one generation with their businesses either being sold or destroyed. In all these cases, the parents were content with grandchildren.
2. Kids were high achievers. Stereotypical scenario of getting into the Ivys or international equivalent, with the right finance, law, or engineering jobs right after with continued progression. Parents still gave a lot of financial gifts even though they weren't needed.
The only real expectation when the parents are financially well off is that their children still take care of them when old age becomes an issue i.e. no nursing home. parents will live with one of their children until they die
I don't believe so. There are 2 cultural differences I've noticed as a son to immigrant parents in the US.
1) My parents primary goal was to make life better for their kids. It was in a nutshell why they immigrated in the first place - not to improve their own lives.
2) It's the responsibility of the kids to care for their parents. The idea of nursing homes is so foreign and repulsive to my parents (and myself for that matter).
This is a generalization but, from my experience, that's baked into eastern culture across classes.
So I disagree about the distinction, I have many Indian and Chinese friends who have no obligation to take care of their parents (admittedly from middle class backgrounds). And then I have two good friends who are American of long ago European descent who definitely help their parents out with the bills extensively.
To answer your question though, I've seen it as common in both eastern and western families of means to not be expected to take care of your parents as much.
While the story doesn't mention an "obligation" of the elder generation's children, I think it brings out a very interesting point. Unlike the US/ Western Europe, in Russia, and likely other previously-Soviet countries, there isn't a noticeable divide between those with rich parents and those without. No one has rich parents.
Strongly agree with this. I live in Europe, my tuition was free, and the paradigms are hugely different to the US, with things like: free health care, and such.
And still, the article reads to me like "upper middle class kids have it so hard today because they can't get as rich as their parents too easily".
The economic shift is real, but the wealth of our MIDDLE CLASS parent generation was an oddity in itself, not comparable to the reality of most people now OR then.
In addition to your observation, the tone of this article suggests that young people have some right to live in Manhattan or to own a $400K condo by the beach in San Diego. I'm a millenial, and I'm not aware of such an attitude among my parent's generation. It seems perhaps my generation has greater expectations than our parents' while also having worse economic circumstances. Even still, $100K household income is an affordable middleclass lifestyle outside of the downtown area of major metros.
> Do you know how hard it is to save up for a house (on the west coast !!) knowing you'll never get a windfall from Mom and Dad?
Pardon the naive question, but what sort of windfall from Mom and Dad to people expect when saving up for a house? Is it common on the coasts for parents to help their children buy a house? I've never thought to plan for help from my parents for anything (I'll be happy if they can cover their own care).
I didn't have any expectations but from anecdotal sampling of homebuyers over the past 20 years in the Bay Area there are lots of parents helping with the down payment, maybe sampling bias but it seem like it's mentioned in most local news articles about the home buying market.
My parents gave each of us kids $10K to help us buy our first house. That’s not a ton, but it’s way better than nothing and that was after helping us graduate from respected colleges with manageable student loan debt and giving us (very) low five-figure gifts to help retire the student loans after graduation.
It is common for first time home buyers to get a significant portion(if not all) of their first deposit for their mortgage(often 20%) from either family assistance or inheritance. This is especially common in the more expensive housing markets in the US.
Agreed. I'm in a similar situation (working in tech in the bay area and supporting my mom by covering her financial needs). I have two colleagues also in similar situations. It makes me wonder how many others in my peer group are faced with these same challenges..
What the article doesnt mention is college debt. I know tons of people who have college debt for degrees that pay absolutely nothing. Its debt they will never escape, and im guessing mom and dad feel guilty about it to some extent.
I came from a poor family, so college wasnt much of an option. My mom and dad had lived their whole lives under check cashing shysters and credit card debt until dad hurt his back and went on disability/heroin. Mom did the best she could at the local truckstop diner where i spent most of my time after school. College was never an option and looking back im glad it wasnt.
I grew up to become a damn good diesel engine tech. not the best, but i walk out of the shop every day feeling like I actually did something meaningful. Some days im even making cut-rate lawyer money. but I see college kids at my local bar, partly because thats an aesthetic for college kids my age, but also because its a necessity. They buy a round of el-cheapo beers and sit in the corner on their phones for an hour. They rarely tip or if they do its some weird math that comes out to screw over the barman, but its hardly their fault.
I bought a Sam Adams for one of these guys who was fired from mcdonalds for showing up to work late just once. He had a masters degree in business management. He came home to see his prius getting repossessed, and decided to just decided to keep on walking past his apartment and down to the local watering hole. His plan was to ride out an eviction and move back in with his folks.
"Those who do not have parental assistance in their 30s, however, continue to be at a disadvantage. “They are grappling with paying off student-loan debt, their savings might not be as strong because of that, and many are taking care of other family members,” said Iimay Ho, 32, the executive director at Resource Generation, an organization that works with people ages 18 to 35 with wealth or class privilege to engage on issues of inequality."
...
"For those without parental cash at the ready, there’s often some kind of debt hangover that holds them back in significant ways. Roger Quesada, 34, calls his $65,000 of student-loan debt to Sallie Mae, which incurs $400 a month in interest payments alone, “a jail sentence.” A lapse in his payments ruined his credit, he said, and has hampered his financial and career aspirations."
And I feel for it, too. Compounding debt instead of compounding interest. Reminds me of a very relevant Onion headline:
"Lazy Poor Person Has Never Earned Passive Income From Stock Dividends A Day In His Life"
I wish more conversations around student loan debt discussed the outcome difference by major. The income gulf between an engineer and a lit major is massive. The conversation focuses on how bad the economy was when we graduated, but I suspect outcomes would be wildly different if people majored in STEM or business and instead minored in feminist dance theory or French poetry or whatever their passion may have been.
This is pretty spot-on for me at the moment. Low-mid 30's and I sort of have a "choice" to borrow from my parents to get me by (which would actually be saddling them with more debt - however they are FAR better equipped to deal with it). I'm taking a good hard look at declaring bankruptcy this week as an attempt to break out. It would be less heartbreaking than continuing the feelings of fealty.
This lateness thing doesn't get enough play. At a salaried level, people are just late all the time, late to work, late to meetings, working from home, leaving early, whatever. If you try any of that on an hourly gig, you get fired immediately (or worse, you're in some byzantine PIP system). Being late doesn't mean you're lazy, it means you forgot your phone or forgot to water your plants. It matters in almost no jobs. We need to come off it a little.
Part of that is from an oversupply of no (or very low) skilled labor. When people are desperate for "jobs" you can afford to be extremely strict and remorseless as an employer. I think this why past generations promoted things like unions and various workers' rights so strongly.
If I am 15 mins "late"
to work nothing happens. I will not even get less work done that day. People might not even notice.
I worked at Target in the fast food restaurant some years ago. If I was late to that, there was simply no one to take orders. It directly impacts the income of the business.
Late once -> fired definitely needs to be fixed, though.
At salaried level people aren't doing things that have hard time constraints. when you are delivering pizzas or working as a cashier your punctuality matters a hell of a lot more, it doesn't take a genius to figure that out, which is why if you fuck up once you're fired, it was literally the one thing they told you not to fuck up.
Of course there are extenuating circumstances, and managers should be more relaxed with people who make an effort (e.g. texting ahead that they are running x minutes late). But the vast majority of cases are not like this. Its people making stupid choices and suffering the consequences, I don't have much sympathy for that.
> Mary Wallace, a real estate agent... said that in 20 years she has rarely seen anyone in their 30s who did not have family help or an inheritance for their down payment.
This is the unwritten law of California first-time home ownership: you are waiting for your parents to downsize and cash in, or just to straight up die and inherit their house. You do not just get a job in CA and buy a home. The article also talks about the US in general, throwing around "six figures" as some indication of being financially safe. In CA, that is just not true.
I would not have a home without significant assistance from my parents. I can't imagine how it would be if I was saddled with large student loans as well (came from the UK where college education was cheaper) or had a job where the health insurance could leave me one bad situation away from bankruptcy.
Even if wealth distribution is possible, it comes with its own hurdles: early wealth distribution leads to questions about how elder care is going to get paid for, late wealth distribution leads to questions about how stunted the career and life development of the child is.
I think this is the new normal, and will be for generations past us, but I wonder what it will mean for G8 countries. I think step one is abandoning the idea that if you try hard you're going to live better than your parents. You might, you might not. It's not a given anymore.
A few years ago I had a few steady clients in DC and so I kept an apartment there. The wife and kids would fly up for a few weeks at a time and enjoy the city. The wife fell in love with DC and wanted to move so we started looking at houses. We met many of the families renting or selling the houses (normally you don't meet the owners when buying but whatever). We could not figure out how the owners were able to buy these homes based upon our estimation of their combined household income based upon their descriptions of their jobs and where they worked. After some time grappling with why we couldn't afford the homes and they could, a real estate agent told us "everyone here has help from their parents, everyone".
To be honest it really pisses me off because I feel like I'm crushing it in my business (blood, sweat & tears) but I can't buy a house in DC because I don't have wealthy parents.
There must be advantages that you had that others did not. My advice is to be happy for the advantages that you did have, and work hard to make it so that your children "have wealthy parents".
The idea that hard work leads to riches is ridiculous bullshit propagated by the rich who do no work and get rich off the hard work of others. It's beyond stupid, yet ingrained in our culture from the puritan days. It serves to keep people down while making them work for others' enrichment. We need to get rid of diseased thinking like this from our culture. Most rich people are rich because they were born into the upper class and many have never worked a day in their lives. Plenty of poor people and middle class people work really hard at their jobs with zero chance of becoming rich. Zero. Slackers abound in all classes. There is no correlation between hard work and good outcomes. That's just ridiculous. If there was, someone putting in hard work at McDonald's should be rich when they retire. The only rich thing about this is the joke played on people that believe this stupid puritan bullshit.
Why is CA so expensive? Is it something intrinsic to the land (weather, natural features, etc.) or is it something more variable, like job & entertainment opportunity? If it's the latter (and I suspect it is), it is a solvable problem, at least for most G8 countries, since there is a lot of un(der)-developed areas out there.
I would not have a home without significant assistance from my parents.
I don't know your specific case, but on average, you could have bought a home without assistance if you wanted, just maybe not when & where you bought.
Because land isn't taxed based on it's current value landowners have little incentive to develop their land in order to get the most out of it. They simply bank land as much as possible as it's the most surefire way to turn a profit. It's why we have golf courses* in city centers and dilapidated shacks* next to Google's global HQ.
Additionally, prop 13 gives landowners every incentive to lobby for policies that restrict development in order to drive up prices instead of fighting for the right to build 4 story apartments on their property.
Slashing property taxes always floods the market with speculators and destroys housing affordability. Look at Vancouver, or Malta, their housing shortages rival SF despite low wages and comparatively small economies.
The nature of employment in the US has changed very rapidly in the past few decades. Agriculture and manufacturing jobs have evaporated, replaced by service jobs. Globalization means that any job that doesn't need to be performed inside the US will likely leave the US.
What this means is that in the past, there used to be forces that encouraged jobs to be somewhat evenly spread across the country. Most medium-sized cities had a number of factories, small towns were surrounded by farms, etc.
Now the only jobs are jobs that involve working with or for other people, so you see a rapid concentration in a smaller number of large metro areas.
Unfortunately, cities cannot physically adapt as quickly as the economy has changed. The rapid change in housing prices — upwards in metro areas and downwards elsewhere — is basically a measure of how much the physical infrastructure is out of sync with today's needs.
Personally, I hope we figure out a way reinvigorate and distribute jobs across medium-sized cities. It's very difficult for the poor any elderly to uproot, and the US has tons of space, so I think it's better for everyone if the jobs come to them instead of forcing them to come to the jobs.
It's the jobs. You want to work at Google, you work in CA. You want to work in movies, you work in CA. There are various environmental factors (like the weather) and economic factors (like locking in property taxes when you buy) that keep people in their homes, stunting inventory.
Yeah, I _could_ buy a house somewhere else, just like I _could_ give up on a fulfilling career. But I don't think people are willing to spend the majority of their waking hours in a job they don't like so they can have a house, given the alternative of having a job they do and renting. Everything is a life choice, and home ownership is not be all and end all, but I think it seems very wrong that the dichotomy of career vs home-ownership is as harsh as it is.
IANAL or a real estate person, but my understanding is that it's a combination of the following:
1) Laws passed in the 1970s that lock in a home's tax value unless/until it's sold, meaning anyone who owned a home in the 70s will never, ever want to sell because their taxes will skyrocket from their fixed 70's values;
2) NIMBYs forbidding the construction of new housing, especially any high-density housing, meaning an area that's massively grown in population has not significantly grown in housing availability;
3) Tech companies insisting on building huge campuses here, attracting more and more people, who use their tech salaries to snap up the extremely limited housing, leading to tech companies needing to pay higher salaries to attract new employees, leading to those higher salaries being used to outbid others on houses, leading to tech companies needing to pay higher salaries...
When we rented our last house, the real estate agent handling the rental asked why we, a Bay Area-salaried DINK couple, weren't buying. We laughed, because the down payment alone on the house we were renting - a dinky, dingy two-bedroom from the 60s which hadn't been significantly upgraded or maintained since - would have been close to our combined yearly income, never mind the taxes and mortgage payments. And that was for one of the crappiest houses in the neighborhood, not one we'd actually consider buying.
It's a combination of the major metro areas (SF, LA, and SD) being boxed in by mountains, and of these areas supporting major globalized industries (tech, entertainment, and biotech/military, respectively) where per-employee revenue is high, productivity is high, and wages are correspondingly high. Fixed & limited housing supply + high incomes = very high house prices. Prop 13, as mentioned by other commenters, doesn't help.
Everybody outside of one of these industry hubs always says "Well, why don't major companies just move to areas with lower cost of living, where they can pay their employees less for the same work and be more competitive?" It's never that simple. Flip that comment around and ask an employee in a low-paying industry in a low-paying hub "Well, why don't you just learn data science, get a job at Google or Facebook, and move to the Bay Area so you can partake in these $300-400K/year salaries too?" You'll probably get a response that mentions some combination of family & community roots; it being hard to develop tech skills without mentors and teachers; not fitting in with the political & cultural views of people in Silicon Valley; and difficulty convincing employers that you do in fact possess those skills in the face of stereotypes to the contrary. Now multiply those difficulties by 50,000 employees and you see why corporations don't do this. Companies in knowledge industries are webs of highly-specialized human capital, each of which often has their own family & community roots in the local area and is reluctant to uproot their life just because their employer wants to save a few bucks by moving their headquarters elsewhere.
Because the Boomers forbid housing construction and put in prop 13 to shelter themselves from any tax increase as housing cost skyrocketed. They created this mess.
I was told to assume $350/square foot for new construction here in the East Bay by a design/build firm I contacted recently. So a typical 2000 sq. ft. home is $700K just for design, construction, and permits, plus $300K for land if you can find it. So it seems more like localized inflation to me. Architects and tradespeople need to pay to live here too. Plus requirements due to seismic and fire hazards, insulation requirements, etc. add to costs. Now solar panels will be required as well.
IMO prop 13 worked out really badly but it isn't the main cause of the problem, just one more giant expense for the new homeowner on top of everything else.
CA has expensive areas because Prop 13 means young people pay much higher property taxes than people who have owned forever and corporations pay practically nothing as long as they never rennovate. And you can't fix it without convincing people to vote to raise their own taxes, so we're basically screwed forever. Plus local control means communities can create jobs without building housing to support them, increasing emissions, clogging roads and forcing out everyone who wasn't already rich in the 90s.
It has desireable weather, beaches, mountains, deserts, forests, national parks, fresh produce, industries, higher education system, decent laws for worker protection, so it’s a pretty good piece of land.
It's not too complicated - most big cities in CA have simply not built enough housing to keep up with population growth.
Mass transit in/out of urban centers like SF/LA are very underdeveloped, so it makes it really difficult to live in a cheaper area outside of the city and bear the commute everyday.
cash purchases/wealth management have rushed in from around the globe to secure homes as an investment, meanwhile few want to leave, and huge, huge industry as started bringing highly paid young people. Similar story in the Seattle area..
This is the unwritten law of California first-time home ownership
That's a cop out. I bought my first home (2 br 2 ba condo) in Mountain View at age 25 with no assistance whatsoever, and at that point was still making well under 100K. I just prioritized accordingly.
To say that's the practice now is one thing, but 20 years ago? Hogwash... especially given the 2001 and 2009 drops.
“I think millennials need to get past this narrative they’ve made it on their own and ‘I pulled myself up by my boot straps,’” Mr. Isaacs said. “It hides all the kinds of ways they have been privileged by their race or parental help.”
I started to fire a snarky comment about how nice it must be to fit into the category of millennial who have enjoyed the listed privileges, but instead I'll just adopt the position that I am not the "target demographic" here, and maybe that's why after reading that entire article, finding this remark as the closing statement caused me to involuntarily furrow a brow.
I've met a member of every class that's lied about "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" (by the way, isn't that meant to be an ironic paradox?).
From the rich white male Boomer to an immigrant Chinese business owner, everyone seems to feel the need to make more of their struggle than it was. Like, it was already a struggle, why lie and make it seem more so? You started your business by working 12 hour days funded by the pennies in your pocket... And the 300k business loan someone was willing to give you on the basis of your bachelor's in business, which meant a hell of a lot in 1957. Or the classic "came into America on a boat with seven dollars in my pocket," not mentioning the family safety net back home or the fact that the 7$ was more like 7,000 and this was 1965.
But it's obvious why people do that, because people have been doing it for ten thousand years and it's nothing new. We like to feel important, and if our truth doesn't make us feel important we'll lie a bit until we feel important again.
So I'm tired of old people making flippant statements like above about millennials that are either completely off base or simply applicable to every human on the planet, for as long as we've been able to talk. Allow me to engage in my own psychological fallacy - I feel like with enough years under your belt, you should just know that's how we work.
I concur. What irks me the most is when the backstory contains unmentioned unethical elements.
I come across several people in business who all gave the "oh it was so hard in the beginning" while not mentioning their dark pattern websites (people unwittingly buying subscription), wolf-of-wall-street v1 of their broking business, or outright money laundering.
There needs to be a catchy phrase for the "I had it so hard" story.
But it's the same thing in the other direction. Countless people claim that they've done their best and were just unlucky - or even that no one could have succeeded in their particular situation. Yet, I often encounter people not making efforts/decisions/sacrifices I consider basic. And they also discount all the help and good fortune they are getting.
Strictly speaking, both "I got no help" and "I've done my best" are hyperbole, delusion, or lies. Both are tiring and frustrating. They are also a fairly natural, though crude, way to direct a conversation: "I think you are making excuses" and "I think you are underestimating the challenges".
Could just be as simple as nobody wants to sound like their success was handed to them (evokes jealousy & bitterness) and so everyone is encouraged to embellish their struggles just a little, which in turn means everyone else has to embellish just a bit more so their actually-perfectly-ordinary experience doesn't sound too comparatively cushy.
There's no such thing as an adult emerging from the woods having learned everything themselves. Because of this, it's a major fallacy to expect it from people who have "pulled themselves up by their bootstraps" because you will find something about their background that refutes it.
Let's say, some people are more privileged than others.
I don't understand - you think it never happens? Or rarely does? I classify my family in that "rags to moderate riches" story, at least gradually over a couple generations. I'd say it's more common than not that people with money today did come from families without it a couple generations ago.
That, along with "my teachers always said i wouldn't amount to anything." Seriously, I've been in some -rough- public schools with literal criminals, and never once heard a teacher come close to saying something like that.
It's also a weirdly broad generalization that I think shows an overly-simplified, almost naive way of seeing the world. As with any "X group with tens of millions of people," there are going to be people who actually do fit those criteria. e.g. How many ethnic or black millennials without parental help started from nothing and are now successful? I personally know of a couple at least.
For some reason, so many people seem to see "Millennials" as one gigantic person. It's similar to the odd occurrence of someone accusing HN of having conflicting opinions, ignoring the fact that HN is full of different people.
It's tiring how much the media and casual discourse treats "millennials" as one gigantic person, but then again generational cohorts are a planning tool because large numbers of them engage in similar activities around the same time. This greatly impacts markets, culture, and circles back around to influence lots of other aspects of life. It also leads to more pressure and (generally) fewer opportunities on those who have fallen behind.
As much as we deride or wish to discourage people from comparing themselves to others, falling behind (in terms of timing or attainment) compared to the median member of a cohort confers a disadvantage towards further progress that would follow the same formula. This is particularly and literally applicable to millennials: after all, the entire generation was told to follow a formula, where getting to college was the first step, and any further clarification of one's ambitions would be expected to materialize once that baseline was cleared.
Now that they're all firmly of working age, it's clear that following that formula blindly -- as if it were just one of those "this is how the world works" societal norms that everyone does, like brushing teeth or obeying stoplights -- was a mistake. But the message was fed by their elders, the same people who are now helping them out if they're able.
And if one had poor parents or hardly a shot at getting to college, what were they supposed to do? They came of age at a time when blue-collar work was precipitously falling, all the well-paying high-demand careers demanded years of education, and years of coddling and lack of substantive discourse about the middle class's economic realities have resulted in a generic, aspirational message like "follow your dreams". Higher education was positioned by public policy and combined wisdom as a tool of opportunity, how was one to know that predatory-sounding trade schools may have been a better bet? And if public policy drove young people towards those schools instead, would we now have tens of thousands of HVAC technicians and automotive mechanics and cybersecurity professionals working in food and retail?
It's almost like declaring everyone born roughly at the same time to be identical, is a desperate attempt to impose conceptual order on an illegible and chaotic universe! Or sumt'n!
Sites that have voting, like HN and Reddit, will get judgement that because of what is up voted. There is of course lots of different people, but clear trends do start to appear and that is what people view and assign to be the overall opinion.
> For some reason, so many people seem to see "Millennials" as one gigantic person.
This happens everywhere, all the time. "Baby Boomers" are as often talked about as a group: "Muslims", "Hipsters", "Hacker News", "Liberals", "Conservatives".
I haven't received a dime from my parents since I was 16 (when I got my first job). Paid for college myself, paid off my debt myself, bought my first house myself, and have essentially done everything without their help since I was legally allowed to.
And the people that do need help (like my younger brother), what irks me is that he certainly does not think he pulled himself up from his bootstraps. He knows that he was dealt a bad hand and painfully acknowledges the help he's getting.
This comment from the article is incredibly myopic because either you did in fact bootstrap against harsh circumstances or you know you didn't because the recession has dealt you a tough hand. I think the outlier is the individual who think they did it themselves and really believes that (when they didn't).
The only people I know who own homes, in the markets mentioned, wouldn't consider themselves white so I can't figure out what they're trying to say here.
i've only heard millennials whine about how they're the victim of every injustice ever committed. I don't think i've ever heard one say the pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.
The achievers are likely the quiet ones, precisely because they're a bit tired of articles like these telling them that they can't be proud of their success.
I wanna know where this narrative that “[millenbnials] made it on their own and blah blah bootstraps.” The narrative I heard is “the boomers fcked the economy and left us with nothing but the remnants of their eventual estates.”
This all rings true, but it doesn't have to make you feel like America is broken. I'm of South Asian descent, where finances between generations are even more intertwined. In America we've created a narrative of one generation being completely free of the last, and when we don't fulfill it we feel shame. Like many destructive narratives our society has, it might be time to let this one go.
"let go" the notion of individual freedom, and replace it with your parents having control via financing over your life for most of it. Yeah I'll pass. Alternative proposal - vote for parties who will reverse intergenerational inequality: reform the housing market, dispose of the (corporate and literal property) rentiers, introduce a wealth tax, equalise pensions (it's insane that one generation is going to get pensions and the next basically isn't).
"Let go of the idea that you can live as an independent human" have a word with yourself.
>Let go of the idea that you can live as an independent human" have a word with yourself.
I assume your family has a couple generations of America under their belt? If so, I'm not surprised you find the statement your op to taste bad. It's fundamentally opposed to the American value system (though as this article indicates, at odds with the reality of America today).
Are they wrong? If you had time to apply for colleges because you had housing in high school and didn't have to work all day to pay for food and housing, are you truly independent? If you didn't have to fetch your own water every morning and hunt your food? Maybe you think I'm taking the argument too far, but I see where they are coming from. True "freedom" is a bit of a myth, and shouldn't it be? Do you want to be the sole party responsible for ensuring your medicine isn't laced with arsenic?
In any case, other cultures have taken on the idea of familial responsibility and wealth to great success by their own measures. Just because it is different, doesn't mean it's bad.
Right now one of the problems is that if the two parties, the Democrats are pro-pension and pro-equalization but anti-housing. Meanwhile the republicans are pro-housing and mostly anti wealth tax. I think that’s one of the fundamental reasons we’re in this mess.
Individual freedom has always been an illusion, but the interventions you are proposing would help us all take responsibility for the system rather than defaulting to one where the only system we can maybe rely on is our family.
I agree that our cultural shouldn't consider it a failure to have multiple generations of a family helping each other and working together. That's what family is all about!
At the same time, there is an underside to this. No one gets to choose their family, and a cultural that presumes familiar support is a cultural that makes life harder for those who happen to be born into dysfunctional or tragic families.
Maybe the way to thread the needle is to have a culture that says "we're in this together" and is based on more "family" as defined by the people you choose to make part of your life and less people you happen to share DNA with.
What is the way forward for those born in dysfunctional families and no safety net? I think the only answer is try to amass as much wealth as possible while I can in an area it's more possible (bay area, nyc etc) and bail out solo somewhere else later to try an afford a decent life.
At the same time, there is an underside to this. No one gets to choose their family, and a cultural that presumes familiar support is a cultural that makes life harder for those who happen to be born into dysfunctional or tragic families.
I'd say it's the exact opposite. A culture that does not presume family support is one that feels it unnecessary to lend a helping hand to those without strong family networks to draw upon.
Family support is, for most people, a given -- to pretend it doesn't exist is to deny reality. When someone faces life without it, he can't help but feel a bit cheated. When one considers family help to be unremarkable, then those who succeed without it look all the more exceptional.
I'm not Asian American so take this with a grain of salt, but from what I see in my friends it is NOT uncommon for Asian American parents to have a significant presence in their child's finances particularly when it comes to purchasing property, college, etc.
Parents and grandparents are also more than happy to take care of children.
Two of my Chinese American friends own property in a high COL area due to help from their family (none of them are rich) but they are far from "ashamed" of it nor do they think they did it all by themselves. The "flipside" is that the sons and daughters are expected to house and take care of the parents once they reach very old age and do the same thing their parents did to them with their own children.
My parents left south asia because of the corruption and theocracy, not so they could live an independent life and die alone. I'd hazard a guess, though, that the difference is more manufactured than real. My wife's family came over from Ireland in the 1600's, but the idea of tallying up the time grandparents spend taking care of kids and categorizing it as "unpaid labor" would seem odd to them too.
I suspect the real difference is between middle/upper-middle-class Americans and everyone else. There was a brief spell when a kid from a middle class household could go to college at 18 and afford to start a family, and not look back. The NYT finds it remarkable that its often no longer true. But it wasn't true for much of America even in the 20th century. Multi-generational entanglement was always common.
This strikes quite true to me. When we were between one apartment lease and buying a house, my wife, daughter, and I moved in with my parents. My mom stayed home with our daughter for almost a year, and my wife’s mom did the same for another year. We are also considering having a third child, in large part because my parents live 5 minutes away and provide a lot of free child care.
But I question whether this is “new.” None of this would be unusual in the least in Bangladesh, where my family is from. I strongly suspect that it’s not new in the US either, or at least was only unusual compared to a status quo that existed only for a blip of time during the 20th century.
>I strongly suspect that it’s not new in the US either, or at least was only unusual compared to a status quo that existed only for a blip of time during the 20th century.
You're entirely correct. I'll go a step further and say it never even went away--at least in my experience as a child of lower middle class White baby boomer parents in the South.
I have a great uncle on my mom's side who stayed at home while he finished college and then him and his wife lived with his parents for a while after he graduated.
My dad's oldest brother and his wife lived with their parents for a while.
My dad's youngest brother lived with his parents for years.
My grandparents eventually moved in with my dad and his wife--partially because they were getting too old to maintain a house, but also to help him afford a new house after he'd gone through a bankruptcy.
Both sets of grandparents also provided my parents with free childcare, and my parents and aunts and uncles all borrowed plenty of money from my grandparents over the years.
I have many friends who've had similar experiences.
I think the solid, seemingly disconnected "nuclear family" is an interesting mythic tale in the American Dream that is an accident of consumer marketing more than anything else. It sold more homes, it sold more goods, so it became a useful myth to marketers. In reality it never existed, not even in the mythic 50s where it got so ensconced in television sitcoms and advertising.
My parents are also Bengali. It's given me a different perspective about the topic. The nuclear family is kind of a unique thing on a world stage. At least in Bangladesh, it's hard for people to place trust in wealth they can't hold themselves (this includes pensions given by the government), so they'll spend their money on gold, property or land (assets in general). Having and raising children becomes a give and take, where you can only expect to be taken care of in old age if you take care of and invest in your children. This an incredibly old system, and it's because it's been proven to be effective regardless of location or time.
>On average, each millennial parent receives $11,011 per year in combined financial support and unpaid labor, the 2017 TD Ameritrade Millennial Parents Survey found, for an annual total of $253 billion in America.
I wish they had separated the unpaid labor from financial support. Grandparents helping raise the kids is a tradition as old as time; the labor portion is not the surprising part here.
That did seem like a really weird framing. It seems like the corollary article would be. "Family ties eroding, grandparents no longer spending time with grandkids"
Yes, this seems so strange to me as well. Like, true, this is quantifiable in terms of dollars, but there are worlds with out money. The 'family' has always been a world without money (define family as you will).
If anything, having other family members in the child-rearing process is something of a luxury. If you have 'good-enough' parents and siblings, I'd imagine that you'd want the whole family involved.
I can't imagine how toxic a relationship you'd have to have with your family to see child-rearing in terms of dollars and cents.
Readit News
This kinda bugs me, not only because inter-generational child rearing has been the norm for most of history rather than something unique that deadbeat millenials are relying on, but also because it propagates the belief that anything you don't pay for with money is considered "free" (the bad "free", as in "deadbeat" or "moocher").
There's the whole debate that GDP is the wrong measure precisely because it doesn't measure these kinds of "unpaid services", but I prefer to look at it another way: a "livable" city is more than what restaurants and bars are around, but also who your neighbors and social connections are (I've heard this described as alternative forms of capital beyond financial capital like social and cultural capital).
It's not that millenials are killing the babysitter industry, it's more millenials are reaching the age where they understand the whole "it takes a village" folk wisdom.
It's all good in your 20s, when you're in good health, and when it's easy and cheap to make friends. Then you hit your 30s and find out that you don't have any community, everyone moved somewhere else, the city is too expensive for a 2-3 bedrooms flat, and even if you stayed you'd have to work full time (if not overtime), which means you'd need someone else to bring your kids to school and take care of him/her after work, which isn't free.
It's a lot like the "get a loan to buy a car, buy a car to go to work, work to pay the loan" analogy. It's not a life, you merely exists for work and pay other people to take care of what used to be the core experience. At the end of the day the only thing you're looking for is a meal and this new netflix show your heard about.
The worst part is, as you said, that it's now frown upon to rely on your community because it's "free", and surely you haven't made it if you rely on free things.
If you come from wealth, it's easy to get into a good school, and your parents can subsidize you while you're launching your career (or outright create a career for you).
If you don't come from wealth, and you get to a city, and you start making over $200k, it's hard to even take advantage of it.
Instead of having parents to subsidize me, I have parents who are pretty broke and in bad health. How can I justify buying a modest house in my area (for $1M), when my parents are piling up debt, struggling to pay rent, and barely able to buy groceries?
Flip that even further to people who come from really poor countries like India. I can't imagine if my parents were working $1 an hour -- how could I pay $3k in rent? How can you invest thousands of dollars in yourself when your parents don't even make that much in a year?
But if you don't make those investments, you're never going to get ahead...
It's not just that wealthy millennials have a huge advantage, but coming from a poor family has a HUGE disadvantage in terms of social mobility as well.
Getting that job in that major metropolitan area and actually going to work every day in that job carries such incredible direct and indirect costs, by the end of the year it’s typical for most people to be worse off than when they started.
This is to say nothing of the opportunity cost of all that time.
Then finally, if you are willing to factor in the societal/cultural pressures that come with the job and the massive costs associated with fulfilling them, as supposed to just calling that weakness on the persons behalf for succumbing to those myriad pressures... well, as you alluded, the tail is most certainly wagging the dog.
I know it's stupid to go into it knowing it'll be hard, and I can't complain. I'm not. This is just what it takes, and I went into it knowing it would be temporary. Kids get a lot easier as they get older.
A lot of things that are worth it in life take a lot of work. I'll feel better in a few years. At the moment I feel like I'm dying.
At any rate, here's to things getting easier. I'm sure our hard work will pay off soon enough.
If we want to talk about moochers and deadbeats we need to stop looking at people in poverty who behave in ways we don't like. It's easy to call them names, but they're doing the best they can with the very little they have.
Shift the perspective to huge corps like Walmart, who rake in billions and themselves depend on state welfare to do so.
In the UK we call these people 'benefit scroungers', yet their impact on the British way of life is practically zero compared to what those with money can do, to the point where it's a false problem.
Because all of my child’s grandparents are divorced they are not able to retire / and have to work. This prevents them from being able to offer the same kind of child raising assistance as grandparents that stay together.
https://www.amazon.ca/Sacred-Economics-Money-Society-Transit...
https://www.amazon.ca/Wealth-Nature-Economics-Survival-Matte...
The first one is (fittingly) available for free online, though my local library also had a copy: http://sacred-economics.com/read-online/
That's great. Awesome society.
Personally I decided to stay in the Midwest and make 170k instead of 300k, but I have my family, and family matters more to me than an extra 130k in salary.
People underestimate how much help one needs in raising kids because a few decades ago the mom would either not work or work an easier/part time job. This still happens in rural or semi rural areas in the US.
Nowadays in the city both parents are in 8-9 hour day high intensity jobs. You may have time for your kid, but you have less energy.
Maybe the trend of adults relying more on their parents is only a failure if adults aren't expected to take care of their parents later on.
Boy, if it takes until your 30s to understand that "wisdom", then I weep for my contemporaries. In strong nuclear families with inter-generational ties, it shouldn't take longer than your late teens to realize that parental support is normal at least until you have kids of your own.
Having strong ties to your grandparents and parents should be the norm, and I'm very sorry for the Americans that haven't had the peace of mind from having a safety net of their extended families throughout their whole lives. This isn't meant to sound patronizing. Child rearing is one of the most labor intensive activities we have as a species and I for one will be taking all the help I can get.
How is it meant to sound? Talking about weeping for your contemporaries.
I wonder what that kid would say now after reading this article. A lot of the people I grew up with went to crappy colleges. I did too, and we were too broke to even think about tuition so PELL grants funded my education. College Textbooks? You mean PDFs from The Pirate Bay.
I made it out and got a nice job in tech, but like many of my peers it is I who support my parents. I pay their health insurance, I lend them money for groceries, and I'm financing my dad's chemotherapy. Do you know how hard it is to save up for a house (on the west coast !!) knowing you'll never get a windfall from Mom and Dad? When in fact they are a liability budget wise?
I wish more articles were written about this side of the coin, it is my experience that many young people, especially minorities, are shouldering the burden of "elder care" earlier than they ever thought they would.
The parent comment highlights is an important divide that's exacerbating the wealth gap in the USA: The difference between millennials whose Gen X parents are a financial liability versus a financial advantage.
The Gen X'ers are either passing onto their kids either hundreds of thousands in investment and savings income, or tens of thousands in medical and elderly care liabilities. Few in my "millennial" generation are talking about it, but as their parents get older, the contrast is getting more noticeable among friends who have to deal with very different parental situations. It's dangerously perpetuating "wealth gaps" across generations. I fear it will not end well for society when more debt-laden adults see others who are coasting off of what their parents' gave them.
The worst thing about it is that I've completely reoriented my free time to prepare for interviews so that I can double my salary -- that will hopefully give me enough breathing room to accelerate my savings to buy a home and pass on wealth to my children. The game is the game...
I can only imagine how difficult that is. This is an interesting distinction between western and eastern culture too. I wonder if the obligation to take care of your parents is less pronounced in eastern households that are wealthier.
Like GP, I also grew up in a lower income family and made it out well in tech. My only advantage is that I'm older and started working 15 years ago, which lead to being able to afford to buy a house during the lowest years of the housing market (2010-12) so I have a really low mortgage in crazy bay area. I don't know how anyone in the bay would be able to save up for a house if they have to support their parents in addition to paying their own rent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_piety
For East Asian families, it's still there but it is non-existent from a financial perspective. It's no different from the article even though it describes the US. I've personally seen several scenarios of approx 30 individual families:
1. Kids were either extremely spoiled so they ended up with a poor work ethic, were incompetent, or both. They are not millennials. Parents ended up supporting them for the rest of their lives. Their wealth eventually consumed in one generation with their businesses either being sold or destroyed. In all these cases, the parents were content with grandchildren.
2. Kids were high achievers. Stereotypical scenario of getting into the Ivys or international equivalent, with the right finance, law, or engineering jobs right after with continued progression. Parents still gave a lot of financial gifts even though they weren't needed.
The only real expectation when the parents are financially well off is that their children still take care of them when old age becomes an issue i.e. no nursing home. parents will live with one of their children until they die
1) My parents primary goal was to make life better for their kids. It was in a nutshell why they immigrated in the first place - not to improve their own lives. 2) It's the responsibility of the kids to care for their parents. The idea of nursing homes is so foreign and repulsive to my parents (and myself for that matter).
This is a generalization but, from my experience, that's baked into eastern culture across classes.
To answer your question though, I've seen it as common in both eastern and western families of means to not be expected to take care of your parents as much.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ANormalDayInRussia/comments/9sbeqy/...
While the story doesn't mention an "obligation" of the elder generation's children, I think it brings out a very interesting point. Unlike the US/ Western Europe, in Russia, and likely other previously-Soviet countries, there isn't a noticeable divide between those with rich parents and those without. No one has rich parents.
And still, the article reads to me like "upper middle class kids have it so hard today because they can't get as rich as their parents too easily".
The economic shift is real, but the wealth of our MIDDLE CLASS parent generation was an oddity in itself, not comparable to the reality of most people now OR then.
Pardon the naive question, but what sort of windfall from Mom and Dad to people expect when saving up for a house? Is it common on the coasts for parents to help their children buy a house? I've never thought to plan for help from my parents for anything (I'll be happy if they can cover their own care).
I came from a poor family, so college wasnt much of an option. My mom and dad had lived their whole lives under check cashing shysters and credit card debt until dad hurt his back and went on disability/heroin. Mom did the best she could at the local truckstop diner where i spent most of my time after school. College was never an option and looking back im glad it wasnt.
I grew up to become a damn good diesel engine tech. not the best, but i walk out of the shop every day feeling like I actually did something meaningful. Some days im even making cut-rate lawyer money. but I see college kids at my local bar, partly because thats an aesthetic for college kids my age, but also because its a necessity. They buy a round of el-cheapo beers and sit in the corner on their phones for an hour. They rarely tip or if they do its some weird math that comes out to screw over the barman, but its hardly their fault.
I bought a Sam Adams for one of these guys who was fired from mcdonalds for showing up to work late just once. He had a masters degree in business management. He came home to see his prius getting repossessed, and decided to just decided to keep on walking past his apartment and down to the local watering hole. His plan was to ride out an eviction and move back in with his folks.
"Those who do not have parental assistance in their 30s, however, continue to be at a disadvantage. “They are grappling with paying off student-loan debt, their savings might not be as strong because of that, and many are taking care of other family members,” said Iimay Ho, 32, the executive director at Resource Generation, an organization that works with people ages 18 to 35 with wealth or class privilege to engage on issues of inequality."
...
"For those without parental cash at the ready, there’s often some kind of debt hangover that holds them back in significant ways. Roger Quesada, 34, calls his $65,000 of student-loan debt to Sallie Mae, which incurs $400 a month in interest payments alone, “a jail sentence.” A lapse in his payments ruined his credit, he said, and has hampered his financial and career aspirations."
And I feel for it, too. Compounding debt instead of compounding interest. Reminds me of a very relevant Onion headline:
"Lazy Poor Person Has Never Earned Passive Income From Stock Dividends A Day In His Life"
https://local.theonion.com/lazy-poor-person-has-never-earned...
I’ve not seen this distinction made before. Can you elaborate?
Is incredibly tone deaf way to describe people living paycheck to paycheck.
I worked at Target in the fast food restaurant some years ago. If I was late to that, there was simply no one to take orders. It directly impacts the income of the business.
Late once -> fired definitely needs to be fixed, though.
Of course there are extenuating circumstances, and managers should be more relaxed with people who make an effort (e.g. texting ahead that they are running x minutes late). But the vast majority of cases are not like this. Its people making stupid choices and suffering the consequences, I don't have much sympathy for that.
As a high level guess it sounds like you probably didn't grow up in or too near a major city (if truck stops are in play).
Are you still working where you're from? How did you come to find HN?
I know there's a large number of mechanics on here, and it makes complete sense. But I'm curious how all these roads meet, sometimes.
This is the unwritten law of California first-time home ownership: you are waiting for your parents to downsize and cash in, or just to straight up die and inherit their house. You do not just get a job in CA and buy a home. The article also talks about the US in general, throwing around "six figures" as some indication of being financially safe. In CA, that is just not true.
I would not have a home without significant assistance from my parents. I can't imagine how it would be if I was saddled with large student loans as well (came from the UK where college education was cheaper) or had a job where the health insurance could leave me one bad situation away from bankruptcy.
Even if wealth distribution is possible, it comes with its own hurdles: early wealth distribution leads to questions about how elder care is going to get paid for, late wealth distribution leads to questions about how stunted the career and life development of the child is.
I think this is the new normal, and will be for generations past us, but I wonder what it will mean for G8 countries. I think step one is abandoning the idea that if you try hard you're going to live better than your parents. You might, you might not. It's not a given anymore.
To be honest it really pisses me off because I feel like I'm crushing it in my business (blood, sweat & tears) but I can't buy a house in DC because I don't have wealthy parents.
I don't think you can generalize San Francisco to the entirety of the G8. Even in the US, it's not like that in many places.
I would not have a home without significant assistance from my parents.
I don't know your specific case, but on average, you could have bought a home without assistance if you wanted, just maybe not when & where you bought.
Because land isn't taxed based on it's current value landowners have little incentive to develop their land in order to get the most out of it. They simply bank land as much as possible as it's the most surefire way to turn a profit. It's why we have golf courses* in city centers and dilapidated shacks* next to Google's global HQ.
Additionally, prop 13 gives landowners every incentive to lobby for policies that restrict development in order to drive up prices instead of fighting for the right to build 4 story apartments on their property.
Slashing property taxes always floods the market with speculators and destroys housing affordability. Look at Vancouver, or Malta, their housing shortages rival SF despite low wages and comparatively small economies.
* https://www.planetizen.com/node/93284/la-country-clubs-takin...
* https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/15/google-ca...
What this means is that in the past, there used to be forces that encouraged jobs to be somewhat evenly spread across the country. Most medium-sized cities had a number of factories, small towns were surrounded by farms, etc.
Now the only jobs are jobs that involve working with or for other people, so you see a rapid concentration in a smaller number of large metro areas.
Unfortunately, cities cannot physically adapt as quickly as the economy has changed. The rapid change in housing prices — upwards in metro areas and downwards elsewhere — is basically a measure of how much the physical infrastructure is out of sync with today's needs.
Personally, I hope we figure out a way reinvigorate and distribute jobs across medium-sized cities. It's very difficult for the poor any elderly to uproot, and the US has tons of space, so I think it's better for everyone if the jobs come to them instead of forcing them to come to the jobs.
Yeah, I _could_ buy a house somewhere else, just like I _could_ give up on a fulfilling career. But I don't think people are willing to spend the majority of their waking hours in a job they don't like so they can have a house, given the alternative of having a job they do and renting. Everything is a life choice, and home ownership is not be all and end all, but I think it seems very wrong that the dichotomy of career vs home-ownership is as harsh as it is.
1) Laws passed in the 1970s that lock in a home's tax value unless/until it's sold, meaning anyone who owned a home in the 70s will never, ever want to sell because their taxes will skyrocket from their fixed 70's values;
2) NIMBYs forbidding the construction of new housing, especially any high-density housing, meaning an area that's massively grown in population has not significantly grown in housing availability;
3) Tech companies insisting on building huge campuses here, attracting more and more people, who use their tech salaries to snap up the extremely limited housing, leading to tech companies needing to pay higher salaries to attract new employees, leading to those higher salaries being used to outbid others on houses, leading to tech companies needing to pay higher salaries...
When we rented our last house, the real estate agent handling the rental asked why we, a Bay Area-salaried DINK couple, weren't buying. We laughed, because the down payment alone on the house we were renting - a dinky, dingy two-bedroom from the 60s which hadn't been significantly upgraded or maintained since - would have been close to our combined yearly income, never mind the taxes and mortgage payments. And that was for one of the crappiest houses in the neighborhood, not one we'd actually consider buying.
Everybody outside of one of these industry hubs always says "Well, why don't major companies just move to areas with lower cost of living, where they can pay their employees less for the same work and be more competitive?" It's never that simple. Flip that comment around and ask an employee in a low-paying industry in a low-paying hub "Well, why don't you just learn data science, get a job at Google or Facebook, and move to the Bay Area so you can partake in these $300-400K/year salaries too?" You'll probably get a response that mentions some combination of family & community roots; it being hard to develop tech skills without mentors and teachers; not fitting in with the political & cultural views of people in Silicon Valley; and difficulty convincing employers that you do in fact possess those skills in the face of stereotypes to the contrary. Now multiply those difficulties by 50,000 employees and you see why corporations don't do this. Companies in knowledge industries are webs of highly-specialized human capital, each of which often has their own family & community roots in the local area and is reluctant to uproot their life just because their employer wants to save a few bucks by moving their headquarters elsewhere.
IMO prop 13 worked out really badly but it isn't the main cause of the problem, just one more giant expense for the new homeowner on top of everything else.
Move literally anywhere else if you can.
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Mass transit in/out of urban centers like SF/LA are very underdeveloped, so it makes it really difficult to live in a cheaper area outside of the city and bear the commute everyday.
Not re-evaluating property values until sale.
NIMBY zoning laws everywhere.
To say that's the practice now is one thing, but 20 years ago? Hogwash... especially given the 2001 and 2009 drops.
I started to fire a snarky comment about how nice it must be to fit into the category of millennial who have enjoyed the listed privileges, but instead I'll just adopt the position that I am not the "target demographic" here, and maybe that's why after reading that entire article, finding this remark as the closing statement caused me to involuntarily furrow a brow.
From the rich white male Boomer to an immigrant Chinese business owner, everyone seems to feel the need to make more of their struggle than it was. Like, it was already a struggle, why lie and make it seem more so? You started your business by working 12 hour days funded by the pennies in your pocket... And the 300k business loan someone was willing to give you on the basis of your bachelor's in business, which meant a hell of a lot in 1957. Or the classic "came into America on a boat with seven dollars in my pocket," not mentioning the family safety net back home or the fact that the 7$ was more like 7,000 and this was 1965.
But it's obvious why people do that, because people have been doing it for ten thousand years and it's nothing new. We like to feel important, and if our truth doesn't make us feel important we'll lie a bit until we feel important again.
So I'm tired of old people making flippant statements like above about millennials that are either completely off base or simply applicable to every human on the planet, for as long as we've been able to talk. Allow me to engage in my own psychological fallacy - I feel like with enough years under your belt, you should just know that's how we work.
I come across several people in business who all gave the "oh it was so hard in the beginning" while not mentioning their dark pattern websites (people unwittingly buying subscription), wolf-of-wall-street v1 of their broking business, or outright money laundering.
There needs to be a catchy phrase for the "I had it so hard" story.
Strictly speaking, both "I got no help" and "I've done my best" are hyperbole, delusion, or lies. Both are tiring and frustrating. They are also a fairly natural, though crude, way to direct a conversation: "I think you are making excuses" and "I think you are underestimating the challenges".
https://planetsave.com/2013/12/23/a-rigged-game-of-monopoly-...
Let's say, some people are more privileged than others.
Cracks me up every time. It most certainly is.
The few people who I know have "pulled themselves up by the bootstraps" in the proverbial sense, almost never use such dismissive terminology.
For some reason, so many people seem to see "Millennials" as one gigantic person. It's similar to the odd occurrence of someone accusing HN of having conflicting opinions, ignoring the fact that HN is full of different people.
As much as we deride or wish to discourage people from comparing themselves to others, falling behind (in terms of timing or attainment) compared to the median member of a cohort confers a disadvantage towards further progress that would follow the same formula. This is particularly and literally applicable to millennials: after all, the entire generation was told to follow a formula, where getting to college was the first step, and any further clarification of one's ambitions would be expected to materialize once that baseline was cleared.
Now that they're all firmly of working age, it's clear that following that formula blindly -- as if it were just one of those "this is how the world works" societal norms that everyone does, like brushing teeth or obeying stoplights -- was a mistake. But the message was fed by their elders, the same people who are now helping them out if they're able.
And if one had poor parents or hardly a shot at getting to college, what were they supposed to do? They came of age at a time when blue-collar work was precipitously falling, all the well-paying high-demand careers demanded years of education, and years of coddling and lack of substantive discourse about the middle class's economic realities have resulted in a generic, aspirational message like "follow your dreams". Higher education was positioned by public policy and combined wisdom as a tool of opportunity, how was one to know that predatory-sounding trade schools may have been a better bet? And if public policy drove young people towards those schools instead, would we now have tens of thousands of HVAC technicians and automotive mechanics and cybersecurity professionals working in food and retail?
This happens everywhere, all the time. "Baby Boomers" are as often talked about as a group: "Muslims", "Hipsters", "Hacker News", "Liberals", "Conservatives".
And the people that do need help (like my younger brother), what irks me is that he certainly does not think he pulled himself up from his bootstraps. He knows that he was dealt a bad hand and painfully acknowledges the help he's getting.
This comment from the article is incredibly myopic because either you did in fact bootstrap against harsh circumstances or you know you didn't because the recession has dealt you a tough hand. I think the outlier is the individual who think they did it themselves and really believes that (when they didn't).
The only people I know who own homes, in the markets mentioned, wouldn't consider themselves white so I can't figure out what they're trying to say here.
- Read in the voice of Lt. Commander Data
"Let go of the idea that you can live as an independent human" have a word with yourself.
I assume your family has a couple generations of America under their belt? If so, I'm not surprised you find the statement your op to taste bad. It's fundamentally opposed to the American value system (though as this article indicates, at odds with the reality of America today).
Are they wrong? If you had time to apply for colleges because you had housing in high school and didn't have to work all day to pay for food and housing, are you truly independent? If you didn't have to fetch your own water every morning and hunt your food? Maybe you think I'm taking the argument too far, but I see where they are coming from. True "freedom" is a bit of a myth, and shouldn't it be? Do you want to be the sole party responsible for ensuring your medicine isn't laced with arsenic?
In any case, other cultures have taken on the idea of familial responsibility and wealth to great success by their own measures. Just because it is different, doesn't mean it's bad.
At the same time, there is an underside to this. No one gets to choose their family, and a cultural that presumes familiar support is a cultural that makes life harder for those who happen to be born into dysfunctional or tragic families.
Maybe the way to thread the needle is to have a culture that says "we're in this together" and is based on more "family" as defined by the people you choose to make part of your life and less people you happen to share DNA with.
I'd say it's the exact opposite. A culture that does not presume family support is one that feels it unnecessary to lend a helping hand to those without strong family networks to draw upon.
Family support is, for most people, a given -- to pretend it doesn't exist is to deny reality. When someone faces life without it, he can't help but feel a bit cheated. When one considers family help to be unremarkable, then those who succeed without it look all the more exceptional.
Two of my Chinese American friends own property in a high COL area due to help from their family (none of them are rich) but they are far from "ashamed" of it nor do they think they did it all by themselves. The "flipside" is that the sons and daughters are expected to house and take care of the parents once they reach very old age and do the same thing their parents did to them with their own children.
I suspect the real difference is between middle/upper-middle-class Americans and everyone else. There was a brief spell when a kid from a middle class household could go to college at 18 and afford to start a family, and not look back. The NYT finds it remarkable that its often no longer true. But it wasn't true for much of America even in the 20th century. Multi-generational entanglement was always common.
But I question whether this is “new.” None of this would be unusual in the least in Bangladesh, where my family is from. I strongly suspect that it’s not new in the US either, or at least was only unusual compared to a status quo that existed only for a blip of time during the 20th century.
You're entirely correct. I'll go a step further and say it never even went away--at least in my experience as a child of lower middle class White baby boomer parents in the South.
I have a great uncle on my mom's side who stayed at home while he finished college and then him and his wife lived with his parents for a while after he graduated.
My dad's oldest brother and his wife lived with their parents for a while.
My dad's youngest brother lived with his parents for years.
My grandparents eventually moved in with my dad and his wife--partially because they were getting too old to maintain a house, but also to help him afford a new house after he'd gone through a bankruptcy.
Both sets of grandparents also provided my parents with free childcare, and my parents and aunts and uncles all borrowed plenty of money from my grandparents over the years.
I have many friends who've had similar experiences.
It's not very effective if kids move away to find work. Then it fails both the grandparents & the parents. That might be its greatest shortcoming.
I wish they had separated the unpaid labor from financial support. Grandparents helping raise the kids is a tradition as old as time; the labor portion is not the surprising part here.
It can be the difference between someone being a stay at home mom/dad vs providing a second income stream for their family.
The financial impact is that big.
If anything, having other family members in the child-rearing process is something of a luxury. If you have 'good-enough' parents and siblings, I'd imagine that you'd want the whole family involved.
I can't imagine how toxic a relationship you'd have to have with your family to see child-rearing in terms of dollars and cents.