I blame the duration of modern education. It has made newer generations less flexible. Institutionalization. It's a paradox because the Internet has made the pollination of ideas more likely - but we are less likely to do new things, we stay in our boxes.
This shows up in the productivity and entrepreneurship statistics.
It may be true that wages are poor and rents are high - but also we're really not helping ourselves. Rates of self built homes should be increasing among young people but I don't see that. Usually over the years a generation gets richer but I suspect many young people with 'careers' are waiting for a golden goose.
If you are aged > 30 and rent in a major city and earn less than 40k-60k per year - you need to wake up and get out before you become a poor middle aged person. Most people my age from university are living like students a decade after leaving the university. Having to live with your parents or live in a house share cannot be half your adult life if you have a successful career, nor can forking most of your income over to a landlord.
HN's residents are an anomaly in the broader economy and their experience is alien to most of their generation.
Part of the reason for the decline in self-built in homes is advancements in modular home building. They're much better, and more economical than ever before. Even my Dad, who self-built two large homes himself, admitted it doesn't make sense to self-build. One is better off just working more in whatever specialty they do, and getting a modular home.
That's not a joke - there is a steep decline in being 'handy' - I'm doing everything I can to learn how to be but it still feels a bit unnatural. That lack of adaptability is like an extra tax.
I don't think my parents are more handy either, but that's a generation that bought their houses at 5x-15x lower prices so millennials like me could really do with being more hands on.
To put this in perspective, my father bought his house for 40k 20 years ago and now it is valued at least 250k. I earn about the same as he did 20 years ago and I suspect I earn more per hour than my university peers. Bluntly - they're poor - the most sensitive subject you could talk about is how much you earn. That's private.
It's not the cost of equipment that's the problem. The cost of good power tools is lower than before and they're more effective. Materials prices are higher but not that much. The big constraint is psychological, possibly followed up by permissions for building.
There's a weird psychology with this subject - weird to hear it described but it's there.
Somehow not having a house is believed to be less impoverished than going and building one. Count me out! I don't think forking over half your earnings to a landlord is sophisticated. I remember talking to people about the Tiny House concept and I got the strong impression that living in a modest self built dwelling was an admission of poverty.
Yeah to me the Tiny Home concept missed the point, on multiple fronts. Like you said, what's preventing younger cohorts from buying isn't the actual scale of existing/conventional homes, its the ability purchase of the land to begin with. Especially in America/Canada, where's there's still plenty of space for a regular-sized home. Whatever rises in material costs there may be, it can't be enough to overwhelm the loss of economics of scale that a Tiny Home construction would suffer from. After all, every facet of a regular is also going to happen in a Tiny Home - meaning much of the same initial overhead in installing, getting specialists, etc.
> Somehow not having a house is believed to be less impoverished than going and building one. Count me out! I don't think forking over half your earnings to a landlord is sophisticated.
I've never heard that belief - unless in the form of "land rich money poor" self-descriptions. I happen to think forking over money to a landlord is about as unsophisticated as its gets - despite it sometimes being the only tenable option. For many indebted that's certainly true.
I feel the biggest issue with owning a house is the amount of debt recent college graduates are already in. If I didn't have my student loans hanging over me, I would've totally gone and bought a house, or built my own (everyone in my family has built their own, pretty much, so I have a wealth of knowledge to draw on thankfully). But, I can't afford it. I feel that's part of the issue with many people choosing to pay rent over building. Not to mention trying to save so you have a decent down payment size.
That's fixable, you're experiencing that yourself. The Net makes it easier than ever before to learn new skills. It's glorious. My biggest challenge is finding time to pick up all I want to learn. Physical space is also a consideration.
> ...a generation that bought their houses at 5x-15x lower prices so millennials like me could really do with being more hands on.
In the US, and to a certain extent in other developed nations, this unfortunately is much less fixable by being more hands on. You'll tinker at the margins of affordability to be sure, so by all means become more handy because it vastly enhances your house-owning opex costs, and capital improvements can be made with sweat equity. But the core problem space is the dirt is expensive relative to median wages. Fire insurance to replace buildings hasn't grown nearly as fast as the dirt the buildings sit upon; that's your tell that the Millenial cohort is getting completely screwed by the price of dirt.
Staying mobile in your single years with van dwelling is a viable strategy. So is co-op and intentional community living, or extended families. Remote tech work in small villages. Lots of other strategies depending upon personal situations. But you will likely have to ditch lots of conventional aesthetics and sensibilities along the way. This can make it challenging to find romantic partners (4-6' thick insulating walls scream "I'm different" in a not-so-good way to a majority of the population), so there are trade-offs.
> ...The cost of good power tools is lower than before and they're more effective....
If the tool has any life or limb-threatening characteristics, stay away from picking up the cheap stuff made in China or third world countries. Hand power tools can be okay, but for example any tool that expresses a Safe Working Load Limit (WLL) you should only buy US, Japanese, or EU-made for now. Go talk to a few rigging companies in the US, or find a test company and grab some made in China/India rigging gear from Harbor Freight and test to failure yourself, and observe that safe WLL should be about 3x (ideally 5x) less than breaking point.
Plan on a logistical tail of about the the cost of the original tool itself (twice the cost if you are buying used tools) if you are getting into a new tooling area as a rule of thumb. I got a chainsaw last year, and the safety chaps, safety shirt, helmet, face guard, gloves, maul, wedge, fuel cans, sharpening tool, funnel with water filter, etc. are about 150% of what I spent on the chainsaw. Generally, this is the weakest area of information gathering on the Net in my experience. If you are a noob, then plan on digging around a fair bit to find out what else you need to pick up to stay safe. If you are on HN, then you likely depend a lot upon your fingers and your eyes to make a living; with many kinds of tools, those body parts are awfully easy to damage to the point where it is hard to do work in our fields, so take safety around tools seriously, and invest the time into reading up on the right way to work with the tools you pick up.
I blame the duration of modern education. It has made newer generations less flexible. Institutionalization. It's a paradox because the Internet has made the pollination of ideas more likely - but we are less likely to do new things, we stay in our boxes.
This shows up in the productivity and entrepreneurship statistics.
It may be true that wages are poor and rents are high - but also we're really not helping ourselves. Rates of self built homes should be increasing among young people but I don't see that. Usually over the years a generation gets richer but I suspect many young people with 'careers' are waiting for a golden goose.
If you are aged > 30 and rent in a major city and earn less than 40k-60k per year - you need to wake up and get out before you become a poor middle aged person. Most people my age from university are living like students a decade after leaving the university. Having to live with your parents or live in a house share cannot be half your adult life if you have a successful career, nor can forking most of your income over to a landlord.
HN's residents are an anomaly in the broader economy and their experience is alien to most of their generation.