Also, the US is extremely not in a recession and currently has the strongest economic performance in decades or ever. (Yes, for young people. And for poorer people most of all.) It was of course in a recession in 2008 and in 2020.
But, /other English speaking countries are in recessions/, and their housing crises are worse than ours. Part of what's happening is that you're picking those posts up because they're in English and not realizing they're in London.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/05/millenn...
> I couldn't afford it if I wanted, now.
Sounds like you own it though. So you could afford an equally priced piece of land if you sell that one. Most people's houses are the largest component of their net worth, so it of course looks bad if you leave it out of the calculation.
(This is why blocking housing construction is bad for the elderly though - it makes it hard to downsize so you can't use your housing net worth towards retirement as easily.)
Other approaches which many people do include having your parents help with the down payment or inheriting.
And of course land value tax would solve this. So would upzoning, which would allow 10x more productive use of the land.
The perfect weather kind of makes up for it, I say as going outside for an hour today gave me a sunburn.
California notably.
Also see discussion at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40490610
Of course it's not just housing that has become more expensive – health care and higher education costs have also outpaced inflation for decades.
This one's partly natural for Baumol reasons - basically, having any highly paid industry near you raises the price for any service. But it's also partly the US has many bad ideas intended to create explicit limits on supply in healthcare, like limited residency seats and certificates of need for hospitals.
Maybe only in the major rich developed western countries whose economies peaked in the post-WW2 boom, and then switched to profiting by fleecing their young in order to enrich the existing wealth holders (usually through horrible housing policies), but in most of the former undeveloped and underdeveloped parts of the world, average young people are now richer than their parents or grandparents ever could have dreamed of.
Back in my home country a few decades ago, you would have to wait 10 years to be eligible to buy a commie crapbox car and vacationing would mean 1-2 times/year in some local village a few km away from home, and that's if you were lucky. Now some any young people can buy a car after saving a few months of wages and can afford to go on city breaks abroad in Lisbon, Barcelona or even Asia, something unthinkable to their parents.
I think a lot of westerner from rich countries have forgotten what true depression inducing poverty and suffering actually feels like since 2-3 generations ago, hence why they can afford this luxury of being depressed over petty things and forget how good they actually have it: that happiness comes from having friends, family unit, health, safety, life experiences, and not from having bigger McMansions than your predecessors.