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this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2023
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I'm solid GenX.
My grandparents bought a house on a corner lot in the northwest suburbs of Chicago for $6000. Which was about a years salary for Grampa, who worked as a welder. This was in the late 60s.
ETA: Their mortgage was around $50.00 a month.
I'm GenX as well and I will straight up admit that my wife and I got lucky, purchased a house in a "distressed" neighborhood in Portland because it was all we could afford, and now, 20 years later, the neighborhood is fully gentrifying and our house and property is worth way more than what we owe on it.
I'm conflicted as to how to feel about it. While on the one hand we very innocently bought the place because it was in a shitty neighborhood and was all we could afford, on the other hand I now know that we were what the urban studies people refer to as "bohemian colonizers," meaning that without knowing it, we were, by moving into the neighborhood as poor artist types, part of a much longer process of gentrification.
Again, I am of several minds regarding how I feel about the whole thing.
I really don't think that you should feel bad about this personally :)
Meh, gentrification is the result of bad policy, not personal, individual choices (except maybe for people flipping houses and landlords). Neighborhoods, and the people in them, should not stay poor forever. Rent controls, grants for people to start businesses or coops or whatever, allowing mixed-use zoning, and stuff like that can reduce the harmful affects of gentrification.
Pay it forward by voting on low cost housing initiatives and not becoming a nimby.
Yeah, I don't think you should feel bad. You can't really individually control processes like this and well... you needed a place to live.
You shouldn't feel guilty for being lucky. Just pay it forward to your community if you can or care.
I feel bad because I think the house I sold went to a landlord. At the time it didn't really occur to me that a cash offer probably implied land lord. I put some blame on my real estate agent for pushing lower cash offers over higher loan offers but it still makes me upset. The HOA in that neighborhood only allower 10% of the homes to be rented out and when we moved in they had a ton of signs saying that. I assumed that would be the case when we were selling.
It was one of the nicest while still being affordable townhomes in the area.
It doesn't keep my up at night or anything but at the same time it's not like I'm going to be selling my current house soon. It's an opportunity you only get so often.
What were you supposed to do live in a tiny apartment to make housing more available for the poor fuckers nearby who just happened to have started slightly closer?
Which would be round about $55000 in today's money, for those interested.
It's disgusting. And even more disgusting at America and Canada's disregard for the unavailability of owned housing at an even remotely appropriate cost.
Today a the median yearly salary for a welder is a bit less than $40,000.
For this price you can maybe get a camper, not too big though.
So, welders today make about 30% less, while houses today cost about 5x as much.
Progress!!
This is actually worse than it sounds 1 year of salary can be paid off in 2.5 paying the same amount someone pays for rent on their apartment. In 2.5 years you wont pay much in the way of interest. Over a 30 year mortgage paying the median home price of 388k means paying almost 3x the face value or roughly 1.1M or roughly 17 years of median income.