>>2211555Being alone can be cheap. Average US home price has surged to $383,000, but in Wyoming, which is super open, half of all homes are less than $279,000.
It's more that /out/ areas that are near towns for shopping without driving super far, near airports so you can see your family easily, and with good schools where your kid won't sit on a bus for 3 hours a day aren't cheap.
Housing overall is fucked and it's not hard to see why. The GI generation had the best economy in US history in terms of % growth, although they got started with the Depression and WWII. Boomers got the second best, without the bad stuff. Arguably US Boomers had the greatest place/time to live in all of human history. Very high economic mobility, very low inequality, rapidly raising wages. You could drop out of high school, buy a house and car, and raise a family with a stay at home mom. New Deal and Great Society programs also paid out more as a safety net, and have been paired back since, particularly the value of Social Security. Also, you used to get pensions. Plenty of retirees still make more than their 30 year old children every year on a pension salary they've pulled every year for a decade. My in laws got to retire at 55 pulling in $100,000 a year until death.
And then the Boomers also wracked up $30 trillion in debt, largely on a series of massive tax cuts during their peak earning years (essentially buying stuff they wanted and passing the bill down 30 years on notes). Then they get UBI, up to $3,500 a month, and universal healthcare despite having the highest health costs. Both expenses dwarf defense.
But... they still saved almost nothing for retirement. Boomers consoomed hard. So most of their wealth is in the three bedroom they bought for $85,000 in 1990 they now might sell for $700,000. The market is set so that housing always has to go up, if it doesn't go up Boomers don't get gains and politically this isn't ok.
