Is The Housing Bubble About to Burst?

We, as Millennials and Gen Z, are told almost constantly to cut back, eat less, don’t go out, stop subscribing, wait for your parents, or grandparents, to die, and maybe, MAYBE, you too will own a home one day.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t cut back any more than I have. I don’t have any subscriptions, be it music, television, or food prep, I simply can’t afford any such treats. My money from my main full-time job and side hustles goes toward rent (which increased by 16.8% at the end of the pandemic) my bills (which increased by a whopping 42.03%) and the only luxury I currently have is that really delicious Honey based Chicago Town pizza which is limited-edition anyway, so watch as they take that from me too, which is a frivolous £3.90 in Asda, with a side of Smart Price garlic baguette at 32p each I award myself once a month, as more than that is a genuine squeeze.

Please teach me economics, because, despite all that, I am still failing at life.

Working full-time isn’t enough anymore, and I’m talking the UK and the US, before bringing the rest of Europe and North America into this. The anti-work and work reform subreddits are full of exhausted workers, ridiculous tales of inept management, and jokes at the expense of the worker, who just wants to go to work and get paid and yet are humiliated, over-worked, taken advantage of, or seen as “less-than”.

Take the Applebee's story as just one example of the disregard middle management and HR have for their workers, taking the hike in gas prices, and the desperation of two generations beneath them, to squeeze the life out of their workers. The guy at the top doesn’t have a clue what it means to penny-pinch, to count every dollar or pound, to run the math on every pay-check before considering how much is left for tiny treats, or the slim dream of savings.

SEVENTY PERCENT of Millennials live paycheck to paycheck according to multiple respected outlets so why are we designed to struggle?

Hard question, but do you not love your kids? Your grandkids? Do you not desire a comfortable life for them which doesn’t require them to live on a lack of sleep, on vitamin supplements because fruit is an unimaginable expense unless it’s canned? I love my son, and I would love my son to start his life and have his privacy, but realistically he’ll end up living with me until his 30s, and even then it’s likely we’ll just share the kind of place we can put up fake walls and pretend it’s two apartments.

My mother is still alive and gives me the blankest stare when I explain that I don’t have a chance at life at all. My Gen-X sister, 5 years older than me, owns her house with her partner, “she’s done it, why can’t you?” because, mother, in 1999 when she bought her house the average price in the UK was around £91,000 whereas in the last 20 years, when I considered buying somewhere to settle down, house prices blew up by 264% to an average of £279,000, wages increased by just 94% so my lucky sister can raise her family in comfort, whereas I live paycheck to paycheck in the houses of other people trying not to mark the walls on the faint hope of claiming my deposit back when I inevitably have to leave again on a landlord’s whim.

It’s hard not to feel like you hate us. The cream is being skimmed off the top while we’re left with oat milk due to questionable dietary practices which have left us all lactose or glucose-intolerant, and we can’t really afford oat milk either, but when your budget only stretches to cereal for dinner it’s a luxury one-up from water in our Cheerios. You seem to be forcing those 40 and under into poverty so your twilight years can be spent gloating and confused as to why we’re not pulling up our bootstraps when we’re spending more than 40 hours a week at work.

I tell you, my stomach has hurt for at least four years, cramped from stress and poor diet. You seem to think we’re still eating Tide-Pods and buying NFTs because that’s what you see on social media. You’re convinced we’ve all got RayCons and Hello Fresh and Uber-Eats, we all drive Tesla’s or electric bikes, that we each have £13 subscriptions to Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, AppleTV, Amazon, OnlyFans, YouTube Premium, with £1000 phones and PS5’s.

We don’t, I assure you.

You have been marketed to. A vision of millennials and Gen Z has been sold to you so you can feel comfortable in your 3-bed 2-bath Ivory towers we can only dream of owning.

5.6 million UK residents are on Universal Credit with 59 million Americans on welfare, of which a percentage are subsidising wages because of the rise of zero-hour contracts and the fact that wages have not met inflation and likely won’t for a long while unless workers unite globally to join unions.

Today’s story in The New Statesman suggests there is a possibility the housing bubble may possibly burst, citing reasons such as equity, the desire to own despite the absolute nonsense being propaganda’d toward you that we prefer to rent (spoiler, we don’t), it seems likely that the tide could turn sooner than we hope before we all buy a “tiny home” or school buses and live in car parks.

Would you prefer Russian Oligarchs or Canadian businessmen to buy up all our bricks and mortar, or do you not think it would be nice that that lovely young couple, or that young person with the baby, or your own kids or grandkids, could have it instead? That they can afford to shop at Dunelm or Target, and furnish their own homes, just like you had the chance to do in the 70s to the late 90s. I want nothing more than to go around a home store and take my pick and decorate my house in deep blues and rich golds, but I’m stuck in Magnolia hell with mold creeping up my bathroom walls. Do you just not care what happens to your kids? I get that we were raised by computers, but we’re also craving love, affection, and our own roof.

I don’t think it’s asking too much that each human gets to own a home, that we each deserve to have our own space when people aged 25–35 are still in a house-share and that has crept up to age 50+ and given a cutesy name of “silver sharers” PLEASE. Do we not deserve more than this?

If the housing bubble does burst, and we can realistically own our own home, what is the hardship you will face from that? Please educate me like I’m trying to educate you because as far as I can see it, you enjoy sitting like dragons on the mountain of gold held in financial equity while your own children struggle, which makes you no better than the Bezos’ of this world.