Prices have risen by 54% in the United States, 32% in China and nearly 15% in the European Union between 2015 and 2024. Though policies have been implemented to increase supply and regulate rentals, their impact has been limited and the problem is getting worse
Housing access has become a critical issue worldwide, with cities that were once accessible reaching unsustainable price points. Solutions that have been proposed, like building more houses, capping rents, investing in subsidized housing and limiting the purchase of properties by foreigners have not stemmed the issue’s spread. Between 2015 and 2024, prices rose by 54% in the United States, 32% in China and by nearly 15% in the European Union (including by 26% in Spain), according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
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Salaries have not grown apace with real estate prices. In the EU, the median rent rose by 20% between 2010 and 2022, with rental and purchase prices growing by up to 48%, according to Eurostat. Underregulated markets are wreaking havoc, and in the United States and Spain, 20% of renters spend more than 40% of their income on housing, while in France, Italy, Portugal and Greece, that percentage varies between 10% and 15%, according to the OECD. Many countries have created programs aimed at increasing the future supply of public housing, but their effectiveness has yet to be determined and analysts say that results will be limited if smarter regional planning decisions are not made.
We need to stop using the term “middle class.”
Back in the day, middle class meant Archie Bunker/Al Bundy supporting a family of four with one job.
Today it’s two college graduates struggling to keep up with the bills.
We’re in Tsarist Russia; a huge mass of serfs, a small set of professionals, and an aristocracy that controls 90% of the wealth.
The middle class has always been a myth to get people to work harder and for a homogenized society where everyone’s got that “all-American” family with a white picket fence. We can once again blame fucking Henry Ford. See Ford’s sociological department for the literal enforcement of this ideal in exchange for his touted “$5 a day!” lure. Company people came around to your house to check what you were eating, how you were dressed, how your kids were doing in school, and if you were an immigrant, how assimilated you were becoming and if it was acceptably quick enough.
No. There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.
Look up “Hells Angel’s” by Hunter Thompson. There’s a chapter where he runs down the economics of dropping out circa 1970. A biker could work a Union stevedore job for six months and earn enough to live on the road for two years. A part time waitress could support herself and her musicain boyfriend.
That was before Nixon started printing paper dollars to pay for Vietnam and Ronald Reagan cut taxes for the rich.
I have read Hell’s Angels, and while Hunter S. is always interesting, I wouldn’t really trust him to get his facts straight on anything except Nixon or college football. Blue collar work and trades are not necessarily what you’d call “middle class” in terms of performativity. You can have money, but middle class is about that idyllic myth being pushed. You can always have people living outside of the myth, but the Hell’s Angels lifestyle on the road is not for the 99% of people who are cultured to need the suburban 9-5er. Adorno writes extensively about the Culture Industry and being endlessly cheated out of promises that the (entertainment) media sells us, like as previously mentioned, sitcoms showing what a family ought to look like and their means. Also, fuck Reagan.
. There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.
In 1960 minimum wage was $1.00/hour and the price of the average US home was $11,000.00.
So a 1960 minimum wage could buy an average home with 5 years of 40h/week and you don’t think that’s a “pretty good life” compared to the current situation?!
One of the biggest problems nowadays is exactly that the house-prices to incomes ratio is several times what it was back then.
lemme technical comment.
I’m Dagwood and I was arguing that we’d actually had a ‘middle class’ where the average wage earner could move ahead in the world by working 40 hours a week.
Sohoriots was arguing that the middle class was an illusion.
I think you were trying to commnet to Soho and not me.
Okay?
The existence and purchasing power of the minimum wage is applicable to the working class and the poor, not the middle class unless your theory is that there is no such thing as a working class or poor and “middle class” starts at the bottom of pay scale, which would be strange given that being “middle class” at least back in the 60s was about what kind of work people did and were did they sit in the income scale relative to other people (hence the word “middle”) - so office workers back then were typically middle class whilst blue collar workers were typically working class, both due to the latter doing “manual” work unlike the former and having a lower income relative to the former.
That explains why I misunderstood your point as meaning that the minimum could not buy all that much, which per your clarification in this post is not what you meant.
Granted, compared to today, the working class of the 60s had more purchasing power than much if not most of today’s so-called middle-class.
The previous poster’s point wasn’t that there wasn’t a middle class, it was that blue collar workers and traders aren’t middle class which would be correct per the definition of “middle class” I provided in the 1st paragraph of this post.
Yeah I think you meant to hit my comment here. I didn’t say it wasn’t a “pretty good life.” We’re sort of making points past each other at this point, but the gist is that 1. Dagwood is correct, you could get a decent house on minimum wage etc., however 2. I believe the notion of the middle class is a myth pushed to keep us struggling to work harder and to flatten diversity for ideological reasons (see my first comment).
I suspect we’re running with different versions of “middle-class”.
In Europe middle-class used to be about the kind of work one did and roughly correlated with doing or not manual work - those doing manual work were considered working class and those doing office work were middle class.
This tended to also match incomes, so middle-class usually had a middle range income, higher than the working class but not as high as the rich.
This all sorta matched because non-manual work was generally either some kind of management position or some position requring higher education - such as, say Medical Doctor, Engineer or Architect - which very few people back then had.
It wasn’t about what an income could buy, it was about the kind of work people did, their level of formal education and the level of their income compared to others.
Things have however changed a lot - a much higher percentage of people have higher education, most of the income advantage of higher education is gone and in general all layers but the rich have fallen down in the income ladder - were there was a middle class there is now mostly a gap and essentially the working class and the middle class have been squeezed together.
IMHO, what we have nowadays is a two class system:
- The Owner Class are people whose income is mainly from the ownership of things, not work.
- The Working Class are people whose income is mainly from working.
However we were talking about the 60s and I do belive there was actually a “middle class” back then, at least per the definition we had in Europe.
I’d love to try an experiment to see what it would cost to build a simple home to 1950s median norms and 1950s building codes, with no modern appurtenances like internet service and smoke detectors. One electrical outlet per room, small windows, no irrigation in the yard, just a hose. Plain telephone service to one jack. Rabbit ears for TV only. No microwave or dishwasher and only clotheslines for drying laundry. Middle of nowhere town with one store and a highway going by. How much would that actually cost?
I’m sure it would still cost more now because of materials, and there really isn’t a way to get around building codes. But the living one could achieve with a simple job, back then, was definitely simpler than what people consider a typical life now. I don’t really have a point here - I’m just wondering how big the cost gap would really be at the exact same living standard as yesteryear.
Unless you’re trying to say that all the advances made since 1960 are a direct result of inflation, nothing you posit makes any sense.
I mainly asked questions, positing only that lifestyle was simpler then, building codes were different, and materials were cheaper. What part of this are you having trouble with?
When I make a random observation I like to put “[off topic]” at the start.
I make the $1.00 minimum wage/$11,000.00 house argument a lot because it so clearly shows how far down we’ve gone.
A lot of people try to refute it by pointing out how much “richer” people are today.
I was confused because I thought you were trying to address the main point, not adding an aside
See?
You said:
There actually was a time when you could have a pretty good life with a simple job.
And my comment followed directly from this, wondering how possible it might be to achieve a past, arguably lesser, standard of living today. Attempting that would bring any wage/price gap with the past into focus by eliminating the overhead costs of modern regulatory bars, and the lifestyle creep factor that people sometimes cite. This is decidedly on-topic.
with no modern appurtenances like internet service and smoke detectors. One electrical outlet per room, small windows, no irrigation in the yard, just a hose. Plain telephone service to one jack. Rabbit ears for TV only. No microwave or dishwasher and only clotheslines for drying laundry
Bruh. All that is like pennies, comparatively speaking.
Also, pretty sure you’ve described is like every other property on sale right now, so no need for calculations - just check the local zillow or something.
Yeah. Al sold shoes. Unreal.
It was also a work of fiction.
Or propaganda.
A lot of 80s/90s TV was selling a lie because it was primarily written by the upper middle classes portraying the lives of the working class.
They had little idea how things actually worked.
You do know that there are people walking around your town who were alive in 1970, right?
And had money to go to the nudie bar…
A bunch of people complaining about a show they clearly never watched.
He barely supported a family of 4 on that pay. Especially the early seasons make running gags that they’re all on the brink of starvation as in fighting over an m&m they found in the kitchen to a tiny scrap of food elsewhere in the house, and skipping out on checks if they are out. Marcy had often complained the Bundy household was an eyesore for the neighborhood and was dilapidated. Plus his Dodge which was in constant disrepair, and was so old the odometer had rolled over from 999,999. Even more running gags about how Al only owns 3 pairs of underwear, all his socks are falling apart and have holes in them, and his generap wardrobe is cheap and out of date even for the time period. Al and Bud are often looking for some kind of side hustle while Kelly likely gets a lot of stuff bought for her from all the guys she dates.
But let’s not forget an the important fact…it’s a fictitious TV show made for the purposes of entertainment about a lower class family and anyone who tries to use it as examples of affordability or someone living beyond their means should have lost all credibility to their argument.
Yeah the press’ve been claiming it’s dying for 40+ years. y’all… It’s dead
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Sounds like you’re saying that the actual middle class is a small set of professionals at the upper end of what we generally call the “middle class?” And that 90% of people are actually working class? That seems like a really sensible interpretation. I mean, if you don’t own your home and can’t build significant savings, you are living pretty close to hand-to-mouth. And that’s a lotttttt of people these days.
Yes.
That’s exactly what I was saying
I wanna see those college graduates struggling with the bills. I know artists, PhD students, unqualified workers and else who have this problem to some degree. I don’t know anyone with a college degree and 3+ years of private sector experience struggling. We can debate wth is with the stagnant real wages, but certainly nobody with a decent degree is struggling. Or only by choice.
What I know contrary is people with any IT related degree, or businessy degrees, or STEM grads going into consulting, etc. And all those people earning enough to support a family of 3 way before hitting their 30s, yet being single and enjoying that income all by themselves . They then pay insane rents in the cities, travel, go out for dinner every other night, maintain some random portfolio of ETFs, buy groceries at organic-only groceries, and so on.
So, yeah, wages been stuck for a looong while. But if you struggle to make the ends meet with a college degree it’s on you.
if you struggle to make the ends meet with a college degree it’s on you.
Counter example: teachers
Good point, but as pointed out, private schools pay very, very well.
USA is a bit of an outlier, in most others developed countries you’ll do absolutely fine even working in a public school. Not so much in the developing countries. But there private schools are even more widespread.
Not private sector.
Yes, private sector too.
- the vast majority of teachers are public sector
- some percentage of private sector are parochial, who get paid less
- most private schools are charter, where teachers are paid less
- the remaining private school teachers may get paid more but are a small percentage, not representative of the market, nor accessible to most teachers
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/pay-salary/private-teacher-salary
Private school teachers, generally, earn less than their public school counterparts
Pay for private sector teachers is affected by all the public sector teachers. It’s the same job market.
Not really, no. Experience in one won’t count the same as experience in the other. Public school pay more attention to credentials and continuing development, whereas private not. It’s not so easy to jump between the two
I worked as a teaching intern at a private school. I talked to lots of teachers there. I have friends who are public school teachers. They’ve all worked in both. What you say is simply not true.
Hello. I have 4 years of private sector experience. Living with someone else who also does. Both STEM and paid above average for the place we live in (Portugal). Rent is half our bills.
Living alone outside not in a cube and in any place that resembles a city is but impossible. 40 years ago we’d be higher middle class.
You live in a developing country that has “recently” ended a straight of dictatorship. Your previous government did everything possible to fk up your rental market to the point of it having one of the worst salary-to-housing ratio in the world.
40 years ago you would’ve been unemployed cuz there was no private sector.
At the same time, with your background you wouldn’t even need to move to Germany/France/Nordics to fix your situation. You could move to fuckin Poland and you’d get your housing needs sorted out.
When I say “by choice”, for Portuguese folks it means staying in their country. You have an EU passport. Use it.
“Just move dude, trust me, one more move and this time you’ll find affordable housing. Yeah, just uproot your entire life and move all your belongs and family and its so easy guys. Just load everything on the metro that heads straight to Poland and you’ll be fine, you dumb idiot I can’t believe you haven’t thought of this.”
Lol. Lmao even
Supply and demand. Stop letting people (or corporations) buy more than one house and watch prices fall. I own a home, and I’m perfectly willing to see it lose value in order to avoid seeing my country turn into some modern feudalistic hellhole.
My condo has gone up at least $100k in value since I bought it just before shit went crazy, but that value is meaningless if I can’t afford to capitalize on it and move anywhere. I feel like I’m basically trapped in this house, since everything else has gone up so much more than my place.
Same. If Zillow is correct my house is worth 90k more than we paid for it, but I can’t sell it because everything else went up with it, and I’m locked into a stupid low interest rate. It’s like someone gave me a beer that never gets empty, but I also have to hold it forever. If I want to switch to a different drink I’m shit outta luck, but I can’t really complain because I always have the beer 🤷♂️
If only other people saw it the same. Property/homes should’ve never been an investment asset.
Homeowners who want to move in the future, or have roommates they want to move out in the future (children), should be okay with homes losing value or at least not increasing. My house has increased in value by 50% in five years with no improvements. That’s great, right? No, it just means I can’t move or downsize without increasing my mortgage.
Stop letting corporations gobble up single family homes.
Stop letting multi-home owners buy and buy and buy.
Tax vacant homes.
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I subscribe to the newsletter for BIG by Matt Stoller and he’s been writing about corporate slumlords and housing cartels lately. Shit’s fucked.
Tax vacant homes.
I know this is a popular idea on Lemmy, but intentionally vacant homes are a very small minority next to homes that are not livable or not sellable. It’s mostly going to hurt people who can least afford it
Source?
Driving through rural areas and seeing all the unlivable homes. Seeing home listings in the rural area I grew up how long they can be on the market even when houses sell here their first day
I don’t see actual stats, but the internet has l plenty of anecdotes like
Edit: data is mostly by state, but does show rural states have th highest percentage of vacant homes. Looks like about 7.5 million “permanently vacant” homes in the US, or 5% of the market, and some percentage of those just won’t sell
However,Alasaka is a great example, listed as one of the highest percentage of vacant homes - but not one of the highest rates of homelessness
Thats why we don’t make decisions on these sorts of things or wild declarations about them based on anecdotes.
Your reply may have come between my original wording and an edit that I thought was “quick enough”
The edit doesn’t really show why it would effect poor people disproportionately. Also, no one should be surprised that vacant homes in the ass end of alaska have very little effect on rates of homelessness.
Homes where noone wants to live don’t count towards relief for a shortage unless you can figure out how to make those places at least baseline attractive to people. Jobs, schools, parks, a sportsball team, all that stuff.
Exactly. Passing a tax on empty homes will disproportionately hurt people who can’t sell for homes that can’t solve the problem
Still makes sense in places with tight housing markets, though. Triply and quadruply so if it’s infested by speculative investment. Then make sure that short-term rentals require a hotel license if it even smells of being a commercial short-term rental (couch surfing is completely fine, doesn’t take up a housing unit) and last, but not least: Public housing. Look at Vienna as to how to do it but that can literally take the better part of a century to do because land. Specifically in the US, you also need to build tons of public transit don’t worry even if you make your metro free at the point of use it’s cheaper than road/sewer upkeep in suburbia. Suburbia is a financial graveyard for municipalities, they just don’t generate enough tax revenue for the infrastructure they demand.
Seems like a solvable problem. If the home isn’t livable, have it condemned. Now it’s a tax write off.
Only put a tax on vacant homes where there is an active housing crisis, rural areas should be excluded
I don’t see anything here that supports the idea that a vacancy tax would “hurt people who can least afford it”. Even if we go the anecdotal route, the location of vacant homes says very little about their owners.
lol you’re worried about the landlords
At some point we need to have a grown up conversation about the finite nature of land, specifically land that people can live on and find work from.
This “the rich make up the rules and lets pretend land will never run out” nonsense clearly isn’t working for anyone but the rich.
A lot of this was already talked about by the traditional Left, way back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The discussion back then was all about Power, and by that I mean the capacity of forcing or blocking others from doing what they want, not just the version of “Power” talked about the useful idiots nowadays which only sees the Power of the State, never the Power that comes from Money and Ownership.
This is why some of the suggested solutions they came up with back then explicitly involved things like Confiscating the Means Of Production and Land Reform, which, whether one agrees or not with it, at least recognized and tried to address the Power inherent in the Ownership of that which is needed to produce things for the rest.
The problem is that the supposedly Leftwing (but really mostly Liberal and not even honestly so) thinking since at least the 80s pointedly avoids talking about the Power Of Money as if people’s life’s aren’t shaped by access to a place to live, access to food, access to healthcare and the time they have to spend working being defined by how little of the product of their work ends up in their hands, none of which is trully their choice nowadays.
Maybe we should start again looking back at some of the best things from back then, such as Social Democracy.
I’m on my thirties, I don’t know a single person that can afford to live alone, they are either sharing with a stranger/spouse or still with their parents.
I know three people who can live alone. My friend the computer scientist, my friend who lives on a property her engineer dad bought, and my friend who live in a three room apartment. Bathroom, bedroom, kitchen, top floor of an older Colonial house. Looks like a converted attic.
That probably says more about your bubble than anything else
The prices are set by banks. The only limit on what somebody can sell you a house for is what the bank is prepared to lend you.
If the interest rates go down, the price goes up. If the term lengths go up, the price goes up. Prevent lending, and the landlords will buy it up because normal people can no longer afford them.
The system has been fucked for way too long, and in order to fix it, you’re going to have to upset a lot of people who have put their money into their home.
The governments solution will be to start offering 40 year mortgages. Do nothing to make housing affordable, just extend the time to pay it off like they’ve done with auto loans going from 60 months to 72 months terms.
This is part of the plan to keep crushing the middle class. The powers that be would be able to change this situation within weeks if they really wanted to.
It’s been the plan for a while now. The wealthy look back at the Gilded Age as the Golden Age. That’s what they’re trying to return to very clearly. They want an age in which you and your children go to work in the dark and come home in the dark and that home is owned by the company. They want an age in which none of us have any chance at all of breaking loose of the cycle.
How? There is just too many people, too few houses here in Australia. Not enough materials to build them or tradespeople.
Just want to point out, EU inflation rate from 2015 - 2024 is a 12% change, so out of the 3 examples listed only the EU has had stable prices. Technically housing prices went down in some EU countries based on this information, like Portugal. And EU inflation has gone down since the 2022 spike, which means there was a tiny housing bubble in 2022.
This only applies to housing prices of course - rent is a different story so being addressed in different ways across different EU members.
Yeah, I was curious so I was looking the other day, median household income I believe came out to 14% of the median house cost in the U.S. (in 2022) in 1975 it was around 28%.
Well, in the Post 2008 Crash World with the most favorable policies for the Asset Owner class since the time of the Monarchy, after the rich finished draining the Poor and Traditional Working class using rent-seeking anchored on their control of assets connected to life essentials (most obviously, Housing) and, especially in the West, their leverage of the Demand Side for Work thanks to having sent most jobs abroad with Globalization (something which was itself pushed by the rich in the 70s and is core in Neoliberalism), they would obviously go after the Middle-Class next.
I mean, did anybody really expect that the Greed of the Owner Class would somehow magically stop when the only large pool of wealth left out of their hands was the one held by the Middle-Class?
What I find funny in all this is the “Modern” “Left” parties were the scions of the Middle-Class obsess over Supposedly-Left-but-really-Liberal ideas (mainly Identity Politics) having forgotten the core concern of the old-fashioned Traditional Left (such as Communism, Socialism, Social-Democracy and independently of one agreeing with their actual solutions of not) which is about Power (in the sense of who, if any, can impose their will on others directly or indirectly) hence totally ignoring the detail that 4 decades of Neoliberalism have de facto turned Money into a Power far above the State, and which most definitelly forces on others choices such as were to live, how to live, and what to do.
The “Modern” “Left” thinking, birthed in the 80s from some ideas from American think tanks and without Equality explicitly as an Ideology (instead they had some pre-made policies for “Equalities” - i.e. Equality on a group by group basis, with how much each person’s deserving of fair and equal treatment and access to things in life depending on their “group” membership defined by their genetics, religion, gender, sexual orientation or place of birth - that avoided like the plague even mentioning Equality For All, the only real Equality) were useful idiots for the Neoliberals and now here were are, when even those priviledged scions of the Middle and Upper Middle-Class are starting to be squeezed by the wealthy, whose power they so pointedly avoided talking about and criticizing, must less trying to control and reduce.
Con-fucking-gratulations!
Basic, modern human needs such as housing, healthcare, education, nutrition, utilities (electricity, internet, water & sewage), and transportation should never be a means of profit. As with everything, there is a cost to maintaining these systems and to profit off of them inherently means diverting resources away from these systems that serve our society into the pocket of an individual.
You guys have a middle class?
The middle class is a myth so newspapers can pander to you by letting you pretend you’re better than the working poor. Half of food stamps are in the “middle” class these days.
It’s affecting the working poor worse. the middle class can still afford rent far easier.
I’m in the middle of relocating to Ohio. I sold my house in GA and despite getting mildly fucked by the “they’re first time homeowners” BS I still have about $130,000 profit from the sale. 100k of that has to go into the down payment just so I can afford anything over 200k.
My initial budget was about 310,000 but I had to bump it up to 350 just to find something that isn’t a poorly maintained shit hole that would require 50k just to make it decent again, and to have more than 1.5 bathrooms.
And this is on top of all the houses bought by people who watched a a season of Flippers, and thought it they put shittier grey vinyl on the floor they could net 100k.
Hey, here’s a thought: outside of banks holding the deed in the context of mortgages, corporations aren’t allowed to own residential properties for perma-renting purposes.
