To quote Lifehacker:
The median house price in the US right now is $196,500. If avocado toast costs $22 a serving, and you currently eat it twice a week, skipping those meals will allow you to save enough for a 20% down payment in just 17 years! You’ll probably lose some weight in the process, too.
“The median house price” in my neighborhood is $1.5 million. (Ours is not worth that, and when we bought eleven years ago, it was for almost half its current value at what we thought was the top of the market.) The median home price in my town has gone up 20% year over year since last year and has gone up over 100% in the past five years. In other words: if you cut avocado toast out from the time you are born, then at age 64 you will have accumulated enough money for that 20% down payment, assuming the housing prices never go up after 2017. In other words, assuming current growth patterns, you can eschew avocado toast forever for your entire life from birth to death and no matter how long you live, you will die before that saves you enough for a down payment.
This is what I mean when I say “home ownership, children, financial stability: pick two.” And the way things are headed, pretty soon picking two might be a luxury if you live in Silly Con Valley or New York or Washington DC or anywhere else that geography and attractive zip codes combine to artificial choke how many people can be stuffed in a spot.
This makes me think about Pitbull.
When I saw Rent for the first time, it was the early 2000s. The mid-90s were a long time ago. The dot-com boom had made it rain on a lot of people who might never have gotten tech money otherwise, and I know this because I was one of them. Retroviral cocktails had made it possible to keep pushing out the HIV/AIDS deadline another year, and then another, to the point where by 2017 it became feasible to live your entire natural lifespan with HIV. So when Benny wanted to replace an artist squat with a cybercafe, my instinct was “am I not supposed to be rooting for this guy?” And when all these broke-ass Bohemians were down at the Life Cafe clamoring for “BEER AND WINE” my thought was “why the hell are you going out if you’re that broke?”
And then 15 years on, after surviving George W. Bush and the financial meltdown and two stagnant “recoveries” and the Bay Area real estate market, someone gave me a mix CD with Pitbull featuring Ne-Yo, singing “I knew my rent was gonna be late about a week ago/I worked my ass off but I can’t pay it though/But I got just enough to get off in this club/Gonna have me a good time before my time is up.”
And I thought to myself, yes.
The game is rigged. It has been, for years and years. If you have an average middle class upbringing and a four-year degree from a decent school, how long will it take before you can get married and have a couple of kids on one salary? How about never? Unless you stumble into something amazingly remunerative and live somewhere with cheap real estate, you and your spouse will both have to work to make ends meet, in which case having kids means the expense of child care on top of the expense of having kids in the first place. And you have to send those kids to college, because we’ve systematically destroyed all the jobs that gave you the prospect of a living wage with just a high school diploma. Neither of my grandmothers ever worked a day outside the home in their lives. One grandfather was a carpenter, the other was a subsistence farmer turned steelworker. I myself had a stay-at-home mom for about four years, my brother for two. By 1979, it was pretty apparent that one single middle-class income wasn’t gonna get it done anymore.
So now look at the prospects for a young person graduating high school this year. If you want a shot at a decent job, you now have to have some degree, any degree, which means you go four years to whatever is the best school you can afford – and still, in all likelihood, two-thirds chance you graduate owing around $30,000 before you even get a job. Now you have that nut to make, on top of rent and whatever else you have.
“This the last $20 I got/But I’m gonna have a good time ballin’ or not/Tell the bartender line up some shots/Cause we gonna get LOOOOOOSE tonight”
$20 a week, every week, is $1040 a year. In fact, let’s assume you’re gonna be sick one of those weekends and probably stuck visiting family another (or maybe it’s your birthday and your friends treat you, why not). That’s a thousand bucks a year. Look back up at that median home price in the US. 20% down payment divided by $20 a week means thirty-nine years and fifteen weeks to accumulate that down payment. If housing prices somehow freeze, if you graduated at age 22 from East Roast Beef State, that means you’re probably sixty-one years old.
Four decades of austerity. Four decades of paying the bills on time and servicing that student loan debt and having no mortgage interest deduction on your tax and no equity on whatever rental property you got. Never mind the question of whether you could even afford to have kids.
Frank Sinatra once famously said “I’m for whatever gets you through the night, be it prayer, tranquilizers or a bottle of Jack Daniel.” I’m with Frank on this. I’m done throwing shade at anyone who gets high, anyone who got that new smartphone on an AT&T $25/month payment plan, anyone who scrounged under the couch cushions and smashed the piggy bank and found a $20 in their winter coat pocket and heads for the bar.
If home ownership takes four decades to reach, if the Baby Boomers used their ladder and then pulled it up behind them and then throw the blame on you for not having access to their ladder, if the American Dream is a luxury good? Then fuck it and fuck them. Tomorrow isn’t promised to you, because that feeble-brained tomato they elected could nuke us all tomorrow. This is not the time in history to defer any joy you can get out of life. Drink something. Smoke something. Unbutton that extra button. Kiss that person who gives you the eye. If you can find a way to cope, if you can unearth happiness in front of you now and make your life worthwhile instead of saving for two thousand weeks for something you may never catch up to, then fuck the olds and fuck the haters. Live your life and don’t apologize for it.