So, you won’t watch movies on antenna TV (which you use because you don’t have cable), but you also don’t have a TV, and haven’t for 40 years? Interesting.
Is your TV antenna hooked up to a non-existent TV?
Nitpick: The majority of Americans still don’t get an undergraduate degree, although at around 35% currently, the percentage of post-high-school degree holders is much higher than it was back then.
If we interpret “go to college” as meaning “spend at least some time enrolled in college, with or without obtaining a degree”, then you’re right that “most” Americans (over 60%) nowadays do got to college.
I’m wondering if their internet is hooked up to a tv antenna.
Shrink , yes. Disappear, not even close. I’m not sure what you mean by 50’s quality amenities but I’m sure my house qualifies as '50s style. It’s three small bedrooms, one full bathroom on second floor, kitchen. living room, dining room on the first floor. 1200 square feet tops including the unfinished basement. No garage or even driveway. I’d say it was like Archie Bunker’s house except that house had larger rooms than mine. It’s worth at least $600K. I live in an expensive city, but the house was owned by single-income families until I bought it in the late '80s. And so were the other houses in the neighborhood, or at least they were bought by single income families ( in some cases, the wife got a job when the kids were grown).
To add to what’s been said, good luck finding that.
When I separated from active duty I was living in DC and wanted to stay there to be close to my job. My budget was realistically about 275k (in 2009) but even after the housing market crash that was a joke budget. I doubled it to 550k and started looking at what I could find inside the beltway. That price point got you a post-war single-family home, maybe 1300 sq-ft, maybe the kitchen or bathroom had been redone at some point. My wife and I were trying to figure out how we could swing that housing payment with the necessary updates we would need to make. In reality, these were all tear-downs, and we were kidding ourselves.
If we’d wanted to stay in the metro area we would have had to have chosen a 45-75 minute commute, something that I wouldn’t consider a “1950’s quality,” but we would have gotten a newer and bigger house.
We could have looked at apartments, but paying rent and not building equity is not a “1950s quality” either. Condos in the area were more expensive than the houses we were looking at.
Anyway, it seems disingenuous to look at the limited options that were available to us and only take away “well houses are bigger now because nobody wants to live like they did in the 1950s.” We just… can’t, even if we wanted to. Our governments have allowed wealthy developers to do this to our cities.
I can’t find anything as far back as the 1950s, but the percentage of households renting their homes was nearly identical in 1965 and 2016. Edit: And it seems to have gone back down since 2016, based on ownership rates.
I don’t know if that’s true. Relatively speaking to present-day peers, sure. But I’m not so sure that someone doing that sort of thing this day is living a lower quality of life versus their peers of the 1960s.
It’s all in how you define it. It would be really easy to claim that a kid who’s wearing his cousin’s hand-me-downs 1960s-style is experiencing a lower quality of life vs. his peers who are wearing new clothes. But that’s a relative thing- he wouldn’t be looked at differently in 1963, but would be in 2023.
But that is an outlier. No one is arguing that some cities have gone insane in real estate. But the country is full of inexpensive real estate no one wants to talk about because everyone wants to live in San Fransisco or LA or Vancouver or DC or New York.
Here’s a $270,000 home in Des Moines:
Here’s a 50’s style 1104 sq ft bungalow with attached garage in Omaha for $175,000.
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/5806-Pratt-St_Omaha_NE_68104_M79450-58713
Here’s a mid-century hime in Akron for $135,000:
The inflation calculator says that $135,000 today has the same buying power as roughly $13,000 in $1960. In 1960 the median home price was $12,000, so not very far off. And this house is inflated in price. Just five years ago it was $65,000.
With the internet and remote work, it’s even easier now to live and thrive away from the most in-demand major population centers. You can even stay fully connected with friends and family. Back in the day, if you had to move from home the only contact you got was the occasional letter and maybe an expensive long-distance phone call here or there.
Move to Akron or Oklahoma City or Des Moines or any of the hundreds of small cities across America, and real estate costs are just fine. In Canada, move to Edmonton or Monkton or St. Johns, and real estate is pretty cheap. Yet all we hear about is how expensive real estate is in Canada - skewed by crazy markets in the GTA and Vancouver.
Another thing about the 50’s: People moved. A lot. They moved away from farms to big cities for opportunity. They moved because their businesses relocated them. They moved because great transitions in the economy were happening all over the place. So if you couldn’t afford to live in one city, you moved to another.
They also moved because jobs were less stable. In the past, people moved from job to job much more than they do now. In fact, the big increase in real estate prices in key cities coincided with a decline in labor mobility.
There are plenty of new problems young people have to face today that they didn’t have in the 50’s. But then, we’ve solved or out-grown many problems people had in the 50’s that they no longer have today.
This house is also listed as having central air conditioning, a very rare luxury in 1960.
The average home price has definitely gone up - but the average you are paying per square foot has basically stayed the same. Adjusted for inflation US home prices are roughly two to two and a half times what they were in 1960, but the average home is more than twice as big. A home is also far likelier to have basically any amenity you can name.
If you are renting, the average apartment rent has gone up a lot too; in 2023 dollars, an apartment in 1960 ran you the equivalent of $700, whereas today average rent is $1200 (I know that sounds fantastical in a big city, but big cities are pricier.) I cannot find a source for how big apartments were back then; it is generally agreed that today the average apartment size is about 850 square feet, which sounds really high to me. I would be immensely surprised if the average apartment in the 50s wasn’t really inferior to the average one today.
Furthermore, people today are likelier to choose to live with fewer other people. In 1960 the average US household had 3.3 people in it. Today it’s 2.5.
People get a square foot of living space these days for less than they used to, if anything.
It would be interesting to see what that house looked like at $65k before the remodel. The opioid epidemic has hit most of rural Ohio, especial rust belt areas like “outside of Akron.” It was likely unlivable at $65k.
Next, consider that the average home size in 1960 was 1200 sq ft, and this house was small even by 1960 standards. And yet, it’s now selling for an inflation adjusted price that’s above average. Do you see what you’re doing?
What would this house have cost in 1960? 5, 6 grand? Maybe? Yes, it’s affordable, but it’s substantially more expensive to a first-time home buyer in 2023 than it was to a first-time home buyer in 1960. Like more than twice as much in all likelihood. And it’s not even in Akron. The 2023 buyer is paying twice as much for… what, exactly?
The house in Omaha is also below average in size for a 1960s house, it’s in a terrible neighborhood with terrible schools, and it’s 50% more than the average home price in 1960. The buyer in 1960 was likely getting a decent home in a decent neighborhood, probably playing below the national average in the process. The buyer in 2023 is getting a decent home in a shit neighborhood and is paying, what, 4 times as much as the buyer in 1960? And for… what, exactly?
And the home in Des Moines is, what, slightly above average in size and like twice as much as the average home price in 1960.
That’s a neat trick, but I’m not sure we as a society are quite at the point where a person can regularly find work where it is irrelevant where they live. Do more people work from home? Sure, but I still think that you’ll find that most people (even those who log in remotely) are within driving range of their physical place of employment.
I appreciate your comments about finding cheaper homes in smaller cities, but you still have to consider the relative salaries and other economic opportunities that come from those locations.
One of the key differences between now and then is the population of the country, notwithstanding the fact that the geography is the same size. I suspect that it’s less feasible to pack up and move to areas of new urban sprawl, and catch the wave of growth, when the nation has double the people.
I’ll admit that this is counterintuitive to my perception of the past, when I understood there to be more middle class jobs that offered pensions upon retirement. If work was less stable, it sort of undercuts the notion of a thriving middle class back then, doesn’t it?
I wonder how this correlates to the increase in population I mentioned earlier. If you aren’t finding new towns popping up, and if more people are in your town taking on work, you might not be as free to find a different employer than when the country was more sparse.
I actually live in an apartment building built in 1969 (I know one of the people who worked on the project). One bedroom apartments in this building are 800 square feet. Two bedrooms are 1100 square feet.
Oddly enough, my current rent is only $750 month. But it’s below market average for my area (after a lifetime of renting I’ve become very good at getting the best bang for my buck)
When I live in Chicago I lived in even older apartment buildings, most of them built between 1900 and 1920. The studio was around 300 square feet, the one bedroom was around 800-900 and the two-bedroom around 1100-1200.
Hope that helps your calculations.
I will note that I do have have expenses I didn’t 40 years ago, that is, computer-smartphone-internet. This is partly compensated by phone service becoming ridiculously cheap compared to the past since they stopped charging an arm and a leg for long distance, but not entirely.
And, often, zoning rules limit the ability of builders to construct smaller homes if they wanted to. Rules put in place by the existing residents of a community who don’t want people poorer than they are moving next door.
I don’t think people moved from job to job in the past more than they do now. At least not if we are talking about the 50s. They might have done more moving while keeping the same employer - I had a relative who worked for IBM in the 60s and 70s and they seemed to move him every couple of years and when the factory my father worked at in NY closed , they transferred him to NJ. That doesn’t seem to happen much anymore , at least not by the employer’s choice.
When talking about trends, we’re talking on the margin. Then as today there were jobs that were absolutely locked to certain geographic areas. But work from home and the internet in general has, on the margin, made it easier to move to where it’s cheaper.
A good point. You have to look at the entire situation. With regard to real estate, mortgage rates matter a lot. One reason real estate skyrocketed in price in some regions in the past decade is that mortgage rates dropped so low. That always has an effect of driving house prices up to a similar overall cost of ownership. In 1960, the prime rate was 5.75%, which I think would have translated into a mortgage rate of maybe 8-9%? Compared to a 3% mortgage, that’s a huge amount of extra money.
For example, a $100,000 mortgage at 3% over 25 years costs $473/mo. The same mortgage at 8% costs $763/mo. In other words, a $100,000 mortgage at 8% has the same total cost as a $160,000 mortgage at 3%.
Any historical comparison of real estate that doesn’t factor in the difference in interest rates won’t be very accurate.
Counterintuitively, changing jobs a lot actually benefits the employee, because salary increases often come with job changes. If you get wedded to a job, chances are you are not doing as well as someone more willing to leave the job when opportunity knocks.
People retired later in 1950, and worker longer weeks. The standard work week was 44 hours, now it’s 35-38. In 1950, 47% of people over 65 were still working. By 2000 it had dropped to 17.5%
The reason is obvious: we are wealthier now than we were then. We chose to trade some of that wealth for earlier retirement, shorter work weeks, and more vacation time. We’ve also used our increase in wealth to create Medicare, increasse social security benefits, lower the retirement age, and to create a stronger social safety net. We also lived fewer years in retirement, and leaned on our children more to help with our retirement.
Something else to consider: Per person square footage in the home has to consider not just home size, but family size. In Canada, the average household in 1951 had 8 people in it. By 2010 that had dropped to 2.5. So when thinking of those 1950’s living standards, imagine 8 people in that 1200 sq ft home.
I had to stay with an Aunt and Uncle once for a few days in the 1960’s, and they had 7 kids. Grandma often stayed with them, and I was there. That’s 11 people. The room I stayed in had three bunk beds for six boys. The daughter slept elsewhere. Dinners were industrial affairs with all the kids helping. Entertainment for the kids was… outside. As in, “Get out, and don’t come back until 9.”
We look at the past with rose colored glasses, but life overall was much harder then. The ‘good old days’ exist only in nostalgia.
Even a regular monthly bill back in the 50s was pretty similar to a decent cell phone plan today, BEFORE long distance.
One of the big demographic changes of the 1950s and 1960s was women entering the workforce in increasing number AFTER they married. Relatively few became doctors and lawyers; most returned to the jobs they had before they married, often “traditional women’s work” such as secretarial and related work.
This return to work was in part prompted by rising inflation.
NIMBYism is the great killer of the American city.
On my local Nextdoor the number one post topic is lost pets, followed by crime. After those, the two main complaints are about homelessness and proposed multifamily development, often by the exact same people. If that’s not ironic enough for you…
That is unusually spacious to say the least, and always has been. I’m curious as to where all that space is; how huge is your bedroom?
Canadian, too. Rich people never want anything built near them ever.
To be fair, I’d change ‘rich people’ to ‘homeowners’. The fact is, bringing a bunch of multi-family housing into a neighborhood that wasn’t originally zoned for it can lower property values, overcrowd local schools, tie up roads, and sometimes raise crime. It can also fundamentally change the nature of a neighborhood.
You can understand why people whose major investment in life is a home in that neighborhood might resist turning it high density. They may have chosen that neighborhood specifically because it was quiet and safe and low traffic.
It may be a social good to move to higher density living, but as an individual homeowner, it can be difficult seeing your nice peaceful neighborhood turn into something else, while the value of your home drops $100,000.
Our first home was in a neighborhood with low density, and zoned for a greenbelt behind the house. It was to be a very green, highly treed neighborhood with lots of privacy. A few years after we built our house, they changed the zoming with almost no notice to ‘zero lot line’ where the neighbor’s fence would back right onto ours, putting their back windows about 60 ft from ours (small back yards). No alley or anything. Zero backyard privacy. And, they changed a couple of light commercial zones into high density residential.
We sold oure house and moved away. Now they are doing the same thing to our new neighborhood. We are planning at some point to leave the city and probably move to a small town or an acreage. I’m tired of being meddled with.