Do you have any evidence that tech salaries were high in the 80s and 90s? I thought Apple, Sun et al conspired to keep salaries down. As the son of an electrical engineer with a 45 year career in software we never lived, and he doesn't have the pension, that a junior engineer at Meta or Google would be able to provide today.
There's plenty of evidence[1]; but more importantly, when putting stagnating salaries in the context of housing prices, CPI, and inflation, it becomes even more jarring. Today, as an engineer making 125-175k in LA, for example, you will literally never be able to purchase a home near to where you work.
I thought this might be the trick that would get pulled. House price inflation is a completely inappropriate measure. House prices are not kept stupidly high by the 1% or capital class but by the 50.1% that vote against allowing any kind of building anywhere near an existing house, not near an existing house or that, heav'n forfend, might endanger the habitat of the lesser spotted newt.
> House prices are not kept stupidly high by the 1% or capital class but by the 50.1% that vote against allowing any kind of building anywhere near an existing house,
The discussion is not about a specific area or your specific area. There are large parts of the US where there is no such NIMBY voting allowed, much less enacted to prohibit construction. Prices have more or less ballooned everywhere in the US.
There were 0 votes on housing in Fargo, ND over the last few years and new homes are consistently over 400k because the land is cheap. The issue is not some uniform voting block artificially inflating housing prices.
Random home in Jacksonville FL: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1414-N-Center-St-Orange-C...
I was referring more to the additional processes that have been weaponized like CEQA.
In most of the US, additional zoning is welcomed. Zoning for smaller locales is controlled by financial limitations, rather than entrenched interests. Who doesn't want utilities to be brought to their area? For example, Puyallup WA is ~40 mi away from Seattle and there are still residences in Industrial zoned areas waiting for residential zoning to bring them sewer access. It's about the cost, not grassroots opposition.
Most towns can grow in every direction as fast as they can build. The issue is cost of land development and regulation, moreso than NIMBY influence.
Zoning controls the type of housing that is developed, and thus far typically represents the interests of NIMBYs without explicitly saying as much.
Sure, changing zoning from "light industrial" or "commercial" to include some level of residential is often welcome, and is generally a good idea. But such changes are not the crux of the battle over housing. We don't actually want towns to grow in every direction without bounds, as a general rule: we want them to have sufficient housing that the people who need to live there can afford to do so. That typically requires dealing with the zoning laws that prevent increases in residential density ... i.e. NIMBY-ism.
As I understand it in most of the United States zoning is controlled by City governments which are under democratic control. If enough of the people didn't want the zoning, the zoning wouldn't be happening.
I don't think you can separate the behavior of the voting public from the conditions imposed on them by the capital class and the propaganda they feed us through their media properties.
There are plenty of nice cities in the developed world where people making a third of that have no trouble buying homes. California is expensive, because people oppose building new housing in sufficient quantities. They may support it in principle, but they oppose what it means in practice.
Los Angeles also has other issues due to the way it has developed. The city is too large for everyone to commute by car and too sparsely populated to support good public transport. Building new housing is difficult due to the traffic it generates.
At least in Finland, home ownership seems to be common among the people in their 30s and 40s I know, regardless of what they studied or didn't. The most common reasons for renting appear to be being single and relocating often for work. Typical mortgage duration is 20-25 years, which means that if you are in your 30s or 40s, you are probably about halfway through. At least if you didn't switch to a bigger home recently.
> At least in Finland, home ownership seems to be common among the people in their 30s and 40s I know, regardless of what they studied or didn't.
You cannot call it home ownership, when these people are in decades of debt for their houses. 20-25 years is what I'd consider lifelong debt, if you enter it in your 20s. And for many it makes financial sense to go into that lifelong debt. When the parents croak about when they're halfway through paying, they have the option to sell the inheritance and can get free from the debt. To finally take back control of their life - but in reality to refinance and get a car and continue to feed the banks.
I saw an interesting factoid some time ago. In the early 20th century, it was considered enough to have 7 m2 of living space for an adult and half of that for a child. If people still considered that enough, they could buy homes and be debt free before 30. But because people can reasonably expect to afford more, they take loans against future earnings to buy bigger and better homes. Meanwhile, students live alone in apartments that once housed families.
