Housing affordability is a tremendous crisis for young men
Zoomers and young Millennial men deserve a future
Friends - Thank you for the positive response to my last article, “The remarkably talented and alienated young Millennial male.” It seems to have touched a nerve on Substack. As a late-Gen Xer, I am trying to write both empathetically and unflinchingly. My objective is to “help the younger bros” and actually see them. (Basically, a parasocial gay big brother to Millennials and cringe but helpful uncle to Zoomers.) Here’s another piece in that vein. Let me know your thoughts. - Jeff
What are the causes of alienation among Remarkably Talented Men in their 20s and 30s? Are they material, cultural, or spiritual in nature? In this essay I discuss a material issue that jumps out: housing affordability.
When I first read my headline for this article, I was like: Duh! It seems obvious that housing affordability is a tremendous crisis for men in their 20s and 30s, not just in America but across the West. Canadians, Australians, and Brits will identify with this issue perhaps even more so.
It is obvious, and yet there’s such a gaping vacuum around issues facing young men that I have not seen this connection made elsewhere. To be sure, housing affordability affects women and other age groups too, and that matters. But right now I am focusing on issues facing 20- and 30-something men. Millennial and Zoomer men seem to exist in the cultural and political equivalent of a food desert. But I digress…
There is something unique in the male psychology around being a provider. It is difficult to think of anything more psychologically manly than creating the material conditions for family formation: a house, a car, groceries, etc. In today’s power law-driven economy and sexual marketplace, where the winner takes all, the guys in the top quintile are doing fine. I’m not worried about them. But what about the 80% of other guys?
According to an analysis of U.S. housing data by NBC News released earlier this week, the affordability gap in housing is near a 10-year high in the U.S.1 That’s the gap between an area’s median household income and how much income is necessary to afford payments on a median-priced home in that area. Five years ago, a household earning the local median income would’ve been able to afford a home in more than 90% of the counties in America. Today it is 60%! In other words, the housing market has become inaccessible to a large percentage of Americans. Culturally, no group is more affected than young men.
Elsewhere, the affordability crisis is even worse. In Canada, housing affordability has reached a four-decade low.2 In Australia, it’s at the worst levels on record. It’s a crisis in the developing world, too.3 According to the UN, 1.6 billion people around the world lack adequate housing, with projections that this could rise to 3 billion by 2030. Pretty much everywhere you look, it’s harder than ever for young men to buy homes.
Across the West, housing affordability feels like a form of intergenerational wealth transfer harvested by boomers. The memes about boomers selling their homes for millions after buying them for nothing crack me up every time. Hell, even I feel resentful toward them! They’ve had 40 years of declining interests rates and appreciating asset values. How could we not?!
It’s also frustrating to watch our countries open the immigration floodgates, refuse to enforce borders, and accommodate illegal migrants with free housing. I am not in the business of scapegoating marginalized groups, but there’s an undeniable collision of issues between housing and migration that is exacerbating the affordability crisis. New York City, which is legally required to provide shelter to anyone who requests it (how dumb is that?), was caring for nearly 60,000 migrants and asylum seekers as of last September.4 To the Remarkably Talented and Alienated Young Men discussed in my previous post, it sometimes feels like our countries care more about migrants than its native son citizens. This is not a health dynamic for our democracies.
Other sources of frustration include NIMBYs, the people and regulatory regimes standing in the way of building new housing, and monetary policy-makers who injected cash into our economies at historic levels.
There’s a lot to be angry about! Personally, I would rather see anger directed at policy-makers who’ve created these circumstances than immigrants seeking better lives or boomers navigating their retirements. Anger doesn’t solve anything, anyways.
So what is a 20- or 30-something man to do in this environment? On a personal level, you could focus on making more money and play the winner-take-all economy in your favor. This is obviously easier said than done. A more realistic alternative may be to bide your time, save up, and keep an eye on the real estate market in your area.
Geographic arbitrage may be an option depending on your career situation. Let’s say you have a stable job, a coastal-level salary, and can work remotely. Moving to a lower-cost region of the country might be a great option for you.
Politically, young men could be much more loud and aggressive in demanding actions on housing affordability. It’s a winning bipartisan issue, and U.S. state governors are starting to get the memo.5 For the political right, addressing housing affordability could unlock economic growth, foster family formation, and improve social fabric. For the political left, it could improve the cost of living for working- and middle-class people, push back against NIMBYism, and cool the jets behind right-wing populism. What is more socially stabilizing for the Remarkably Talented and Alienated Young Millennial Man than becoming a homeowner, a husband, and father?
So yes, let’s build-build-build more housing. Let’s enforce borders, challenge NIMBY regulations in our communities, and perhaps even ban Airbnb (sorry not sorry!).
Let’s unite to address affordability in our countries and make homeownership easier to achieve. Our 20- and 30-something men deserve a future.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading this. I welcome your thoughts in the comments. Please, no epithets, offensive language, or trolling. Keep it civil, thanks!
Comment from a friend: "How about these RE/PE firms ringing the bell opening the markets like they're superheroes for buying 50,000 single family homes sight unseen. I'm all about free markets, but it's crazy how those guys are revered when they're doing serious damage to the next generation of men."
There is a lot here to consider, but I think it's helpful to consider how material circumstances and cultural/social incentives interact rather than consider them separately; to that end, here are a couple things to note:
1. Boomers (and to a lesser extent GenX), as the fathers of Millennials, seem to feel absolutely no obligation to help their children out in pretty foundational ways. This includes both economically and also in terms of family formation. Johann Kurtz has written an article about this a bit from the economic angle.
https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/an-attack-on-nihilist-die-with-zero
I personally find it disturbing the degree to which these 55+ year old men feel literally absolutely no obligation to invest into some type of family legacy. They would rather give all of their money to their alma mater, or some non-profit, or some stock portfolio, or three more investment properties – which they don't even allow their children to live in!
You would think that these guys would at least buy a house for Kid #1 (and maybe Kid #2, too, since they can clearly afford to) so that they aren't kicked into a retirement home at 80 because sonny boy has seething resentment at not ever getting any help, and also literally can't afford to take care of daddy-o.
Similarly, these fathers play zero role in actually helping their sons find a compatible girl (or in my case, a compatible guy) to hitch themselves to and start popping out grandkids. Where the fuck is all the nihilism toward their own future line coming from? Baffling.
2. Further extending this, the people who already have a ton of wealth and material security seem to have no impetus to use that to build some sort of patronage network that would allows guys to find some meaning and also start building their life.
Ancient Problemz wrote an article about this, essentially pointing out that the wealthy are hogging all the houses and stocks, but they're not even using their power law wealth to create jobs anymore that center male-proclivities. That is, being a Product Manager in Seattle responsible for deploying Amazon's latest audiobook doesn't count; and women are probably better at doing that anyway.
https://ancientproblemz.substack.com/p/you-barely-live-once
Some of this is the aforementioned nihilism and short-sightedness, but a lot of it is this cultural addiction to a sort of 'market egalitarianism' and and allergy to more aristocratic modes of being: the belief that these lost Millennials and Zoomers need to 'earn their way into market dominance' just like they did.
Even the GenX Facebook manager who has earned $700K for the past ten years and has another $1.2M in unvested stock could just completely quit, move to Wyoming, buy up a hundred acres, hire a bunch of RTLMM to develop it into a sprawling estate (I would sign up for this!) including his own sons; and give the more talented ones the opportunity to become property managers, set up their own research institutions, focus on studying and producing commissioned high art, etc.
3. The Millenials' forefathers – whether biological Boomers or cultural GenXers – have done basically nothing to inculcate any sense of what it means to belong to and contribute to a shared aAmerican project. GenX is not really to blame for this, because they also did not receive any cultural or patriotic continuity from Boomers, so they kind of don't know either what healthy American identity and cohesion looks like.
The military used to be a place that fostered some sort of male-centric camaraderies, and also allowed to you get a decent education and stipend that could eventually be used for a downpayment, if only on a 1200 square foot single family home 1 hours outside of a major metropolis.
However, after the lies of Iraq/Syria/Afghanistan we know better than to sell our souls to an organization that doesn't even fight just causes; and that also wants us to pay ovations to pink haired trannies.
https://marcellinodambrosio.substack.com/p/how-to-kill-a-brand-the-us-army
4. Lastly, even the most religiously-fervent, community-oriented, fertile conservative GenX/Millenial fathers who have 'made it' are still deeply lonely and lacking any sort of extended community that can help build a shared culture, which includes attracting guys to into living close by, and helping them get on their feet.
https://mperrone.substack.com/p/conservative-no-more
Someone like my friend Michael Perrone is deeply trying to be the type of far-thinking, legacy-building aristocrat that I emphasize above, and he is finding it to a be a slow, arduous process with very little external support or interest, no guidelines, and active pushback from both material and cultural forces.
I have a call to get to right now, so I'm going to leave it there for now. From a personal standpoint, even if found my Prince Charming tomorrow and liquidated my whole retirement account, it's not clear that we'd be in a position to buy or build a property in a good location and find opportunities to move forward with a family, good career, etc.