Buying a family-sized home with three or more bedrooms used to be manageable for young people with children. But with home prices climbing faster than wages, mortgage rates still close to 23-year highs and a shortage of homes nationwide, many Millennials with kids can’t afford it. And Gen Z adults with kids? Even harder.
Meanwhile, Baby Boomers are staying in their larger homes for longer, preferring to age in place and stay active in a neighborhood that’s familiar to them. And even if they sold, where would they go? There is a shortage of smaller homes in those neighborhoods.
As a result, empty-nest Baby Boomers own 28% of large homes — and Milliennials with kids own just 14%, according to a Redfin analysis released Tuesday. Gen Z families own just 0.3% of homes with three bedrooms or more.
My parents live in Texas and I live in WA. They say they wish they could afford to live closer to me, but based on their actions it seems like they value having a big piece of real estate more than they value being close to me.
Did they move away from you or did you move away from them?
“Old people to blame for not selling their houses or dying sooner!"
Seriously, WTF? It’s my house. The entitlement of some people…
Media doing everything they can to keep people fighting each other rather than the owner class…
Damn, reading these comments it’s pretty much working.
“Shortage of homes” created by a parasitic class of people and corporations who gobble up all the available homes
Baby boomers aren’t some evil monolith hiding in the closet waiting to steal your bag of Oreos.
Where do you propose they move to? Even if we wanted them to vacate homes, there’s an assisted living shortage (heads up, article is kind ehhhhhhhh overall) so we can’t just shove them somewhere.
Baby boomers aren’t, but capitalists are.
They’re the ones who gobble up all available real estate to manipulate everyone else with for their own benefit.
I assume that was Karashta’s intent, not Baby boomers as you deflected to.
The plan was that they sell their home and downsize into an easier to maintain condo.
Sure, if this hyper-abundance of condos exists. Unfortunately it doesn’t.
It existed 15 years ago, when millennials were starting to move out of their parents’ home.
Sure, but that’s 15 years ago and homebuilders drastically slowed down since then. Now the Boomers can’t sell their house and move somewhere cheaper screwing up a source of money for their retirement.
We’re all fucked in this mess, it doesn’t matter which generation you’re in.
What everyone is saying is that boomers were greedy. They held on to everything. Jobs, homes, they voted away our social safety nets because they wanted to keep their tax money and voted for conservatives and neo liberals.
Now the younger generation had a late start in life because of this. They got an education but couldn’t find jobs. They wanted to get a house to raise a family but they had to forfeit that whole idea because of the little savings they could make. And because raising a child in a one bedroom 500sqft apartment, or condo unit at best, isn’t ideal.
You’re directing the blame at the working class when the political system created these problems.
Who did you vote for in 2008? The neoliberal or the neocon?
2012? Neoliberal or neocon?
2020? The neoliberal or the alt-right lunatic?
2024? The neoliberal or the alt-right lunatic?
As a millennial I have a pretty bad track record by voting for all these neolibs
They trying to distract us. I aint looking at the single home owning boomers, its landlords and corporate real estate companies hoarding homes.
Yeah this needs more of an upvote, take a THIS
Right? Modern medicine is keeping people alive longer, and I’m not going to judge someone for wanting to keep the home they’ve probably lived in for many years.
I don’t rent, but from what I read it’s out of control, and corporations buying up homes, putting in the bare minimum to fix up (read: lazy/cheap contractors) and asking way more than it’s worth. Now, of course you don’t have to pay it, but if everyone is asking overprice, what are people suppose to do?
Mostly, you’re right, IMO. But these same people will vote against affordable housing being built near them… “Not in my backyard!”
Absolutely, it isn’t those boomer parents living in a house for 40 years that are driving up the costs. It’s corporations and landlords buying houses as investments so that they can rent them out while the market skyrockets.
They can’t sell. Their adult children have to live with them since they can’t afford anything else.
I wrote out a very angry reply, but as often happens, as I cooled down and reflected, it was 100% the result of this enormously clickbait title, not the article itself.
The article itself DOES mention the mortgage rates, and it DOES acknowledge that Boomers might be willing to move out (in direct contradiction to its own title) but cannot bc of a shortage of affordable smaller homes, the same as everyone else.
In short, Boomers are trapped too - again it’s not that they “won’t” so much as they “can’t” - even if sitting better in a home that they (hopefully) own rather than having to rent.
There is simply no excuse for such a race-baiting, purposefully combative title.:-( Maybe we need to start using AI to generate new titles to replace those profit-mongering ones? :-)
One of the rules of this community is you must use the same title for your post as the news article title.
So now we have quite a few clickbait & ragebait titles, because that’s what the corps are doing. Pretty dumb rule, IMO.
Rules can change, but mainly I mean that we need to be the change we want to see in the world. e.g. maybe not even allow articles labeled as “news” that are meant only to distract our attention away from corporations’ profit margins, being written by conservative right-wing propaganda arms of the media such as [checks notes] “CNN”. Well… shit.
Yes, some kind of minimum standard would be good.
On piefed.social there are over 3000 domains that cannot be linked to, including all the alt-right propaganda ones. Brietbart, Russia Today, etc. I wouldn’t go as far as including CNN in that list though.
To clarify: I was being mostly tongue-in-cheek on that part. Most of the time you do not associate “CNN” with “right-wing propaganda”, as while it may not be entirely unbiased it does not lie so far on the spectrum as to deserve that label of “propaganda”. Or at least it has not been that way in the past?
The cussing at the end though was to indicate my absolute surprise at finding that this article is now contributing towards its inching closer to earning that distinction though. Or at least the title of this article accomplishes that effect, even though the content itself does not. Also, I noticed that this is not an “opinion” piece, nor at the end do they have a disclaimer that the views of the author may not necessarily reflect that of the journal - so this seems fully supported by the editorial staff at CNN Business?
Fwiw, I wonder if they even care which political direction it pushes people towards - so long as it makes people angry, their profits increase by people clicking on it?
Ofc I agree that CNN Business is not as far advanced along the propaganda spectrum as those others you listed (in those, the content itself would be biased as well)… but neither is CNN Business unbiased either, apparently. Just look at how many incendiary words & phrases are used - they “won’t part” (like a toddler holding a toy?), the direct interpretation that “that’s a problem”, the “think of the children” tactic, not calling them “Generation Baby Boomer” or some such but the almost pejorative these days “Boomers”, and using right out of the gate as almost a verb like BOOM those old farts did another thing again, now click to find out why you should be angry!? (which itself, like propaganda tends to do, implies the never-ending NOW that is all that is assumed to ever matter to the reader, not “this is happening lately” or “there is a trend showing up recently”, but “[THEY] WON’T PART”, as if that stage will continue forever without some inertia-stopping force to stop this “problem for young families” - a force that will demand ACTION? which btw is what drives the urge to click the article, b/c otherwise mere information delivery could allow someone to read the title and move on with their lives, but no, this article must be CLICKED, IMMEDIATELY!) Later, the article itself softens this heavy pushing of phrases considerably - e.g. note the switch inside to now “Baby Boomers”, and putting transition words in front of it to shift the focus away from them and more on the nature of the underlying transitioning effect itself (e.g. “Meanwhile, Baby Boomers…”, as in a process that is currently underway, over the course of some period of time, rather than the “BOOMERS WON’T PART” in more active, and urgent, voice).
So… from the title alone, it sure looks an awful lot like propaganda to me? I hope to see less of this from CNN Business in the future, but if instead I see more then I will have to update my view on where they stand on that spectrum. Again, at least in reference to their titles as separate from the actual article content.
Thank you for this chance to vent btw, and your perspective does help clarify matters.:-)
Yes, great analysis.
Someone on fedi somewhere recently said “if the article makes you scared or angry, you’re probably being manipulated”.
It sounds like a fantastic rule of thumb. To be fair, it is REALLY hard to make use of language in a way that engenders zero emotional response on behalf of the recipient - and why would you want to even?
Unfortunately, when that emotional response later turns into disappointment after learning that it was fake, you develop a pattern of distrusting whomever it was that made you feel that way. Which at this point is almost EVERY major corporation, especially the formerly “news” ones?!
e.g., I recall feeling sick upon learning that Donald Trump had sex with a 14-year-old (at the time) girl. Even though I was being, um… “encouraged” to feel that way… I do not regret that emotion, nor distrust who sold me that story, to the extent that those facts are accurate? (based on her own testimony, which she said she was willing to swear to in a court of law, and she provided details that supposedly were corroborated, at least enough to place her at one of those parties, yes run by Epstein, where that occurred - e.g. there was an actual photo of her + DT standing together iirc; which I note that even if she faked a portion of the story, the news media source itself seems like they had done their due diligence at that point)
Whereas for the OP article I feel far more “betrayed”, by its title, seeking to place blame solely onto baby boomers who are stuck in their giant empty homes due to the mortgage rates & housing availability situation - which they themselves may not feel is optimal (higher costs of heating / cooling for one) - rather than on the real sources that are causing the actual “problems” that the title alluded to. But live & learn - and from now on I will know to heavily distrust any article coming forth from CNN, which I find so incredibly sad, but like the housing crisis itself, is simply the unfortunate truth nowadays:-(.
Fortunately it’s not quite as bad as Brietbart, at least not yet…:-(
Yeah, it’s tricky. There is a point where a headline becomes deceiving and it’s very hard to pinpoint where that is. I like your AI idea and will do some experiments along those lines.
I’m here to say thank you for keeping your cool on the internet despite the clickbait and somewhat ragebait headline.
This definitely helps make the Fediverse a nicer place.
Gee, boomers are being selfish! Who would have guessed?
Truts me a single individual owning a home is not a problem and it isn’t what is causing housing insecurity.
It’s corporations that own thousands even millions of homes
I bought my first house in 2010, during the last dip in the housing market. Sold every asset I could for the down payment and end up with a mortgage payment I could afford. The value of the home has since increased 3x from when I bought it; I couldn’t afford to buy the place today, let alone move someplace else. My major source of frustration has been property taxes, which now cost 1.5x more than my mortgage payment. I’m not entirely certain I’ll be able to STAY in this place if they keep going up 20%/year like they have been.
Somewhat similar here. Bought in 2011, with housing prices still depressed by the 2008 crash. Since then, we’ve put a good bit of money into the place (it needed work, still does). We also have kids now, so the space is really nice to have. The house now appraises for 2.5-3x what we spent for it, which is not justified by the money we’ve spent on it and is mostly driven by the market going nuts. While we might be able to swing the mortgage, were we to be buying the place now, it’d be very tight. Also, there’s just no incentive to move. The local schools are good. The neighborhood is nice, I work from home (wife doesn’t work), so there is no commute. We know and like our neighbors and regularly have neighborhood BBQs in the cul-de-sac… Sure, when the kids are gone, we might consider a smaller home further out, with more land and less neighbors. But more likely, we’re just going to keep putting money and effort into this house and let the kids drag our desiccated corpses out of the place.
They trying to distract us. I aint looking at the single home owning boomers, its landlords and corporate real estate companies hoarding homes.
Really tired of big news companies blaming individuals for industries ruined by the greedy elite, if I can’t afford to buy a house l,they can’t afford to move houses. My parents would have a shot in the dark affording a new house.
Boomers shouldn’t have to part with their homes. They, too, need a place to live.
The issue is not Boomers owning the house they live in and refusing to leave it (even if it might be larger than they require) The issue is in particularly large corporations owning thousands of properties and taking them away from the housing market.
Corporate propaganda.
Obviously fuck boomers.
But we can’t afford housing because of corporations. Not other people.
Hmm. In my opinion it’s preferable if the boomers keep their houses so their children can inherit the value.
Where I live, it’s a bigger issue that boomers sell their houses too cheap to companies that demolish the house to build apartments. The boomers then waste the money on renting overpriced apartments for the rest of their life.
I get that it’s difficult to maintain a house as you grow older and these houses are usually not well maintained, but they’re really just pissing their value away.
