Today’s Boston Globe reports that young people are not buying homes, and that their failure to do so will have negative impacts on the economy. The article comes complete with the required profile of an atypical exemplar of the affected class of people, a young woman who, at least implicitly, actually has the ability to purchase a home if she wanted to, but is inexplicably put off by the fact that other people who can’t afford homes are being foreclosed. But the article eventually gets to the root causes.
High unemployment, crushing student debt, and tight credit conditions are keeping many young adults and families from becoming homeowners, analysts and real estate professionals said. At the same time, the turmoil that has followed since prices peaked in 2005 and the housing market collapsed is changing this younger generation’s view of housing, long thought of as a safe, sure investment and prerequisite to the American dream.
(via Boston Globe)
90% of the truth lies in the first sentence of the quoted paragraph. People got foreclosed during the Depression, but I’d bet quite a bit that people still wanted to own homes back then.
What is most interesting to me about this story is the underlying subtext that these developments are the result of some force of nature, rather than deliberate policy. Had we, in 1980, deliberately set out to screw succeeding generations, we need not have done anything differently than we have done. In fact, it was deliberate.
I grew up in what would have to be described as a low income household. I went to an inner city high school. I attended an elite college and a state law school. Total college costs, tuition plus room and board, were a bit over $4,000.00 per annum. UConn Law School, when I attended, cost, I believe, $300.00 a semester, though it may have been double that. I graduated from law school with a total of $2,000.00 in debt. Through scholarships and work study, college cost almost nothing. My story, once a commonplace, cannot happen today.
The college I attended now costs upwards of $50,000.00 a year. Inflation alone cannot explain that. State universities, which back then were far cheaper than the relatively high ticket price at my college, are no longer a cheaper option. Back in my day, California colleges cost, if memory serves, $0.00 per year for in-state students. It was the best deal in the nation, but most other state universities and colleges were cheap. Proposition 13 took care of California, but in every state the anti-tax ideology has led us to abandon the common sense principle that since an educated citizenry benefits us all, all of us should bear the cost. Recently we learned that UConn will hire more professors, and pay for them with yet another tuition increase. It no longer even occurs to us that perhaps we should all be sharing the cost.
It’s not just increased college costs, of course. Spending on education has taken a hit at all levels, and the folks responsible for those cuts then complain that our young people are not educated for the millions of mythical unfilled jobs for which they allegedly lack skills. Our tax policies have shoved money toward the .01%, our corporations have shipped jobs overseas, and our political parties have vied to see which can gut the power of organized labor the most. We have constructed a society in which suitable jobs for those indebted students do not exist. When not the result of direct government action, the private actions that work to destroy us have been aided and abetted by both parties. See, e.g., the repeal of Glass-Steagall. The surprises come when we actually do something to benefit the people, such as the recent legislation that ended the bank’s student loan racket. The middle class is disappearing, and with it the consumer spending on which the economy depends in order to grow.
None of this was inevitable. The present plight of the young is a result of deliberate policy choices on the state and local level. Young people these days are entering a world of uncertainty that is unprecedented. No job is safe, no future secure. Is it any surprise that they put off starting families and buying homes? Once again, I am reminded of one of the finest lines of dialogue I can recall from any movie I’ve seen, the otherwise fairly forgettable Superman III, in which Robert Vaughn’s capitalist villain sums up his motivation, and that at work behind the Koch Brothers, et. al., who are screwing all of us, but particularly the young: “It is not enough that [we] succeed, everyone else must fail”
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