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’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.
Yeah the press’ve been claiming it’s dying for 40+ years. y’all… It’s dead
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.
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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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.
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.
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.
That probably says more about your bubble than anything else
It’s affecting the working poor worse. the middle class can still afford rent far easier.
Middle class isn’t real. Everybody (perhaps over a certain age) thinks they are the middle class. There are those who own the factories, farms, offices, etc. And there are those who go in and sell their labour to make a living. “Middle class” is a term invented to sow division in the second group.
What a dishonest argument.
There’s a world of difference from someone barely getting by, living paycheck to paycheck, versus a middle class worker well into their career, able to afford minor luxuries and still squirrel away money for savings and retirement.
I am middle class. I am 20 years into my career. I make comparatively good money.
But due to not prioritizing buying property, I’ve pretty much missed my window. I can qualify for a mortgage, have the 20% down-payment, but the monthly payment would pretty much wipe me out, costing around $3k more per month than renting.
If I were at this point in my career 20 years ago, I could have easily afforded a house comfortably.
That is what we’re talking about when we talk about the housing crisis for specifically the middle class.
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.
There is no middle class - there is the working class and the exploiter class. People have misidentified a chunk of the relatively better off working class as somehow not part of the working class. Over time the systems of capitalism and the power imbalances at the heart of the non-unionized workplace will eventually reduce better off workers to the lowest common denominator as the exploiter class demands perpetually growing profit that must come at the cost of the working class.
If you’re making 50k it’s hard to be convinced someone making 300k…like your boss…or their boss is “part of your struggle”.
Your comment is extremely naive.
If you work for your money, you’re part of the struggle. If you own for your money, you’re part of the problem.
The problem is capital and it always has been. Sure, there’s a concerted effort by capital to deflect the anger due to them onto CEOs and the like but we have to be smart enough and worldly wise enough not to fall for it.
If you work for your money, you’re part of the struggle. If you own for your money, you’re part of the problem.
But the middle class is those who are able to leverage working for their money to accumulate capital to where they can live off of the proceeds of that owned capital. If you’re able to retire, you eventually become part of the ownership class.
There is a shrinking middle class but the actual people in it are those who split their adult lives into eventually retiring on their wealth, accumulated through working.
Thats not not what middle class means.
Middle class generally means people whose incomes are in the middle half (ranging from 40th to 60th percentile to the 20th to 80th).
If you want to pull out your own new definition based on whether their income comes from work or from return on investments, then I’d still point out there’s a large number of people who do both, especially when compared across the entire life cycle including retirement. So if you insist on this alternative definition, you still have to account for the big chunk of the population who do both.
I have to admire the brazenness with which you made up your own utterly unfounded definition of the term “middle class” then, immediately after being called out for it, accuse the person who hadn’t provided any definition of the term of doing exactly what you had just done.
Thats some advanced level bad faith engagement right there.
Its not my definition. Its a different school of thought that has stood up to scrutiny. It is different to what a lot of people would refer to as middle class and, of course, different again from what you, personally describe middle class to be.
I don’t really recognise a middle class but, if one is to exist, it is simply the middle earners of people who work for their money and they’re predominantly white collar workers. That’s all there is to it. What you described is petite bougouise and may well be middle class but not all middle class people are petite bougouise.
Its not my definition. Its a different school of thought that has stood up to scrutiny. It is different to what a lot of people would refer to as middle class and, of course, different again from what you, personally describe middle class to be.
I’m specifically pointing out the problem with the “how they earn income” definition, that it seemingly assumes that the two categories are mutually exclusive, to try to argue that there’s no such thing as a middle class They’re not. Most people who are in what most would recognize as “middle class” under the traditional definition get income through both methods, especially over the course of their lifetimes.
So even under that definition, which attempts to pretend there isn’t a middle class, there is still a middle class: those who have income through both methods, or even hybrid methods (ownership of an actively managed business that allows them to earn money while working but wouldn’t earn money without their own labor).
Using your logic… if you’re making 50k, it’s hard to convince someone making $20k is part of the struggle.
You really think people who make $300k are out there buying lambos and eating fine dining every night?
No shit, that’s the whole point of what he’s saying. It’s hard to be convinced becuse that’s part of the strategy.
There’s really only two classes: People with “fuck you” money and people without “fuck you” money.
Middle class is, mostly, simply the newfangled term for that portion of the proletariat which isn’t lumpen which is now called the precariat. Low-rank petite bourgeois also counts as the same class as it’s actually an economical one (petit bourgeois get shafted amply by capital), not political (what with their penchant for temporarily embarrassed millionaire narratives and support of “business-friendly” policies). That worker / petit bourgeois distinction has always been fuzzy and awkward I mean it’s not like there’s not workers who think like that.
This is posted in lemmy.world so while I appreciate the information I don’t think I’m alone in saying that 90% of the terms you wrote might as well be another language entirely (I get that they literally are from another language lol)
Yep. I’ve never been middle class though I’ve done better than some. I am not really successful in the traditional sense.
