this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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I'm not pretending that shit isn't bad, but doomerism isn't going to help anything. I'm trying to inject some hope in because if you can't build a better future if you can't imagine a better future. At the individual scale there are always options other than renting forever, and some can be really brilliant options for the right people
There is doomerism, an there is economic reality.
I'm talking about the economic reality. Like the fact more than half of millennia home owners had financial assistance from their parents to purchase a home.
Most people under 50 cannot afford to purchase a home solely based on income alone. It's a hard, cold, fact. And it gets worse for those under 40, and worse still for those under 30.
You can whinge on about fantasizing, I am going to stick to hard cold facts.
Another fact, we have underbuilt housing for 35 years. and we are still underbuilding it, meaning this problem will only get worse and worse unless we start constructing 3x the housing units we currently do.
Again, shits bad, but you're conflating the experience in famously unaffordable cities to the entire country.
The median home sale price in the US for Q4 of 2025 is almost exactly 400k. A conventional 30 year mortgage with 20% down comes out to a monthly payment of $2200/mo, and for a healthy ~30% debt to income you'd need a household income of about $100k/yr. Yeah that's not great at all, but that's with everything 100% conventional and median. You can reach 100k household income with 2 incomes pretty easily since most professional careers will pay around 40-60k/yr
Shop for more of a starter home at 300k (again, the median is 400k which means depending on the market you can very easily spend more or less than that and there's plenty of large cities with home prices starting around the 200k range) and that comes down to about $1800/mo or a household income of 70k. That's feesible for a single working professional at mid/late career, but more importantly that's an easy household income to hit with 2 average working class incomes
Again, shits bad but it's not completely unattainable in most of the country. Saying that because no average person can realistically expect to be able to buy a home in LA or Seattle or New York therefore nobody can isn't spitting facts, it's being a doomer. Can an average person expect to buy a property in a city where the median home price is nearly 7 figures? Of course not! But that's not the reality for most of the country.
Most large cities follow the median home price of 400k, some happen to have lower and some happen to have higher medians. And even better, for a person who isn't too married to the idea of living in a major city, small town America has plenty of wonderful homes for under 200k or even under 100k and some of these small towns are actually quite lovely and haven't been completely destroyed by conservative politics. Again, I'm being real here, shits bad, but it ain't the shitshow youre describing for the entire county
The median income is 70K.