which is why a single blue collar salary that used to be enough for a good house, a car and the expenses for a family of 5 in the 60s, now can barelly pay the rent of small appartment in a major city.
Except this isn’t remotely true. For American’s you had the 62% home ownership in 1960’s for much smaller homes (on average 700 sqft) vs 65% now for an average of 2000sqft. The average American family in 1960 owned 1 vehicle, they now own 2. They went on less vacations, moms typically had to work on top of taking care of the family (little to no daycare), oh and interest rates were much higher as well (on top of that pesky women couldn’t even own a home by themselves). Single person living was roughly 10% vs 30% now, oh and those hard working dads often didn’t live by a year past retirement. And if you were a minority? You absolutely were f’ed.
Yes, costs are higher now relative to income, but demands also are. Want cheap, you move out to rural areas, but risk you don’t have work. The same problem that has been endemic in the US since it’s inception.
Yes, costs are higher now relative to income, but demands also are.
There is a dangerous underlying logic to this line of reasoning. Treating all technological innovation as an added cost to be borne by the end consumer leads to one inescapable dead end. Yes, sometimes there are actual costs. If so, fine. However, this blanket notion of hedonic price adjustment increases wealth inequality with no end. It isn’t a sensible and we should be thankful our ancestors were not so foolish or we’d all be living in trees or caves right now.
62% home ownership in 1960’s for much smaller homes (on average 700 sqft) vs 65% now for an average of 2000sqft
62% -> 65% sounds reasonable.
700 sqft on average -> 2000 sqft on average is suspicious though. It’s possible stats got skewed by the top 1%, who are today richer than ever before, and own ridiculous amount of property. Median sqft perhaps would be more representative
The average is higher but so is the median. A lot of the densely packed slums in US cities were physically destroyed which got rid of a lot of the homes that had very very small space per person, and newly built homes in the ever expanding suburbs after the roads were built out take up much more land and space is at less of a premium than in the cities where the land was very expensive and required building up and new construction standards were significantly higher than they had been.
On the good side this meant that families with a home had more space to spread out in, on the downside the destruction of the slums made it much more expensive to live in the cities with everyone competing for the remaining bigger homes and brought down the urban core populations (Manhattan is still down ~700000 prople from the peak of its population in the early 1900s) and the physically spreading out into the suburbs requires much morr inefficient infrastructure, more environmental impact, etc. Urban people who may have in olden times still been housed in cheap tenement slums now go without and are homeless because there’s a cliff between the streets and the most affordable housing whereas the slums used to make it a more gradual slope.
In all fairness I only saw evidence of that for Great Britain because a journalist of The Guardian actually notice that his daughter’s salary and his father’s salary were the same when inflation adjusted yet bought way less now, so he wrote an article about it.
I’ve read things that led me to believe that there is a similar situation in the US but I don’t know specifically how far the difference is in the US.
Except this isn’t remotely true. For American’s you had the 62% home ownership in 1960’s for much smaller homes (on average 700 sqft) vs 65% now for an average of 2000sqft. The average American family in 1960 owned 1 vehicle, they now own 2. They went on less vacations, moms typically had to work on top of taking care of the family (little to no daycare), oh and interest rates were much higher as well (on top of that pesky women couldn’t even own a home by themselves). Single person living was roughly 10% vs 30% now, oh and those hard working dads often didn’t live by a year past retirement. And if you were a minority? You absolutely were f’ed.
Yes, costs are higher now relative to income, but demands also are. Want cheap, you move out to rural areas, but risk you don’t have work. The same problem that has been endemic in the US since it’s inception.
There is a dangerous underlying logic to this line of reasoning. Treating all technological innovation as an added cost to be borne by the end consumer leads to one inescapable dead end. Yes, sometimes there are actual costs. If so, fine. However, this blanket notion of hedonic price adjustment increases wealth inequality with no end. It isn’t a sensible and we should be thankful our ancestors were not so foolish or we’d all be living in trees or caves right now.
62% -> 65% sounds reasonable.
700 sqft on average -> 2000 sqft on average is suspicious though. It’s possible stats got skewed by the top 1%, who are today richer than ever before, and own ridiculous amount of property. Median sqft perhaps would be more representative
The average is higher but so is the median. A lot of the densely packed slums in US cities were physically destroyed which got rid of a lot of the homes that had very very small space per person, and newly built homes in the ever expanding suburbs after the roads were built out take up much more land and space is at less of a premium than in the cities where the land was very expensive and required building up and new construction standards were significantly higher than they had been.
On the good side this meant that families with a home had more space to spread out in, on the downside the destruction of the slums made it much more expensive to live in the cities with everyone competing for the remaining bigger homes and brought down the urban core populations (Manhattan is still down ~700000 prople from the peak of its population in the early 1900s) and the physically spreading out into the suburbs requires much morr inefficient infrastructure, more environmental impact, etc. Urban people who may have in olden times still been housed in cheap tenement slums now go without and are homeless because there’s a cliff between the streets and the most affordable housing whereas the slums used to make it a more gradual slope.
Thing is, giant mansions existed in the 19th century too. They would’ve already been affecting the average home size in the 20th century.
The growth AFAIK is largely driven by the suburban mcmansions, which aren’t necessarily a 1% thing.
In all fairness I only saw evidence of that for Great Britain because a journalist of The Guardian actually notice that his daughter’s salary and his father’s salary were the same when inflation adjusted yet bought way less now, so he wrote an article about it.
I’ve read things that led me to believe that there is a similar situation in the US but I don’t know specifically how far the difference is in the US.