But I also think that attitude is a load of shit.

Early on in the 1980's I went to a community college to get the first couple of years of college out of the way. I sublet a room from a single woman (probably her landlord had no idea) and I rode a 10-speed bike between a pizza restaurant I worked at and the community college (yeah, sucked in the Kansas winter-time).

Later, at a university, I was able to work as a dishwasher at a dorm and pay my way through college.

But there's probably no way my kids can do the same 40 years later.

It would be, to me, a tragedy if our kids only finally "make it" when their parents die and all our assets are cashed in and divided among them. For myself, this would have come at a time when I didn't need the windfall.

I'd rather help them out now as they are trying to climb the ladder to homeowner, etc.

(It sure would have been nice if one of my parents could have forked over the cash to buy me that Macintosh Plus back in 1986. Alas, a student loan I was nervous to apply for did the trick.)

Totally not on his radar: changes in tuition over time, portion of budgets of public colleges that were coming from state funds (his tuition wasn't free but was close), vs changes in median hourly wages over the same period.

Very clearly on his radar: those students were not gonna donate to anyone's campaign regardless of what he said.

I don't want to get too specific here for privacy reasons, but I believe the main difference between myself and my peers is that I chose to live with my parents and save for a house instead of moving out and getting an apartment right away during/after college. With almost zero real expenses outside my student loans, and the median software engineer salary for the region, I was able to save enough for a down payment after just a couple years. I did this because I disliked the idea of having no equity and paying rent to offset someone else's mortgage instead of saving for my own. My parents really liked that reasoning.

In many respects I'm fundamentally an outlier, yet once I bought mine, my peers with much lower incomes started doing the same after I explained the financials. When they actually sat down and calculated the mortgage payments, they realized it wasn't that bad, as long as they got something on the smaller side, which is still bigger than an apartment anyway.

To be clear, housing costs were crazy and still are. But I sense "crazy" is pretty relative when talking to people online from other countries. Housing in the US is expensive, especially compared to various convenient periods within the last 100 years. But even now, it's not the unrealistic back-breaking dream it seems to be when I talk to Europeans about it, and I suspect that's why so many Americans on social media overestimate the costs.

It was very clever of you to choose to be born to tolerable parents with enough spare cash to let you live with them and save up, rather than jerks or even just poor parents that needed your help as soon as you got a job.

That is 'small' cheat code if parents tolerable. I have multiple peers which got much better life and places to live because lived with parents in their 20s.

It just doing napkin math and even if you live 5 years with parents and doing minimal savings (saving rent and part of food) you already poses good chunk of deposit when comes to buying property.

I think some people in the comments are thinking you are saying they could outright buy a house straight out of school! (Which in a way might be a symptom explained in the article!

(Interestingly the cost of housing in the Bay Area back then - late 1980s - was the same as that Rust Belt city; we almost ended up there.)

You realize that your comment reads like "well, actually things shouldn't be getting better over time"

I, for one, completely disagree.

We now have renewable energy sources for both of these things spinning up faster than ever. It won't be all that long before we can generate a majority of our energy with clean power that doesn't require consuming any non-renewable resources.

No; much more important differences between then and now are the top marginal tax rates and the labor power.

Less than half a million Americans died in WW2. For American demographics, the war was a footnote, unlike the utter devastation it inflicted on Germany, Poland, Yugoslavia, the USSR.

This entire problem more or less resolves to the cost of land. It became effectively super-cheap post-WW2 for the aforementioned reasons. Now we've run out that runway and will face rolling bankruptcies across all sorts of municipalities due to infra maintenance costs.

So it can be done. Even today.

The German equivalent is that everybody is complaining about rising rents in city centers because everybody wants to live in city centers. Home ownership in Germany basically means that you'll have to pay it off for the rest of your life anyway (and that's not a new phenomenon) so in the end there isn't all that much difference to renting finance-wise, except that renting is usually much less hassle.

What the calculation looks like is extremely dependent on local constants, of course. I'm some countries, housing depreciates.

That’s an incredibly new, and probably temporary, phenomenon.

Across the vast majority of space-time the non-working elderly are poorer than their still working children and rely on them.

As late as the Greatest Generation senior discounts weren’t a sick joke.

Currently, the barrier to entry has never been lower, and the access to information has never been better. I don't see either of those things changing any time soon.

Of course, even with that, basic financial literacy with younger generations seems to be at an all time low. The finger pointing on that could go in many directions.

Strongly doubt the xennials will be as rich in twenty five years as 70 year olds are now.

Xennials have benefitted from the same forces that made the boomers rich. They're not young adults.

Xennials were at prime house buying age when houses were really cheap after the 2008 housing crash.

If you bought at exactly the right second of the crash, houses were where they were at the peak of the late 80s bubble.

It's young adults that are getting screwed. Xennials are no longer young adults.

P.S. I bought my first house in 2001 at the age of 28. In hindsight I got super lucky and timed it perfectly. I bought it the month I paid off my student loans, which took me ~4 years of accelerated payments.

1) Not enough young people can contribute to make social security payments to the elderly, across most of the developed world. A typical pension in Belgium is almost comparable to a typical young person’s salary.

2) At a young age, the previous 2–3 generations could afford social mobility levers, i.e. a house and car.

Note that I’m not commenting on the management, investment strategy, returns, or sustainability of social security (point 1).

“Across the vast majority of space-time”, the elderly also somewhat contributed to the tribal/community needs, trained their replacements, cared for grandchildren, and so on. Oh, and everyone was poor, so the range in standard of living was reasonably tight.

Isn't this exactly "spend the youthful years struggling and get to enjoy the fruits when you are older"? ;)

This would be accurate if remuneration were proportionate to how much you struggle, but from my observation of life, it really is not. There's no shortage of people who bust their asses for wages that I wouldn't be getting out of bed for.

That an ungenerous and frankly dismissive reading of the article.

Joe asked his dad for the $15k loan to start a business, not go on vacations. He used his dad's retirement lifestyle as a goal for his future retirement. He used his dad's historical entrepreneurship as his current goal of starting a modest small business. Nobody of sound mind would even think you could live like a retiree on $15k.

Joe's own dad wasn't even as dismissive as you're being. He denied the loan because he considered it a form of coddling his son. There's no evidence in the article he thought his son would use it to attempt to live his retirement lifestyle.

Edit: clarifications

I’m the only person in my friend group able to afford a house in the foreseeable future and that’s been because of various strokes of luck (and some hard work of course).

My wife’s situation is the same. We’re all in our 30s.

And we’re talking any house here. Not the ridiculously expensive ones in major cities.

Som have confided in me that this feels hopeless, things keep getting more expensive, money keeps feeling like it’s worth less etc.

The general feeling at this point is past resentment with them. It’s more of accepted hopelessness.