Here's a tweet today about the high cost of renting:
I’m not a big RETVRN guy but we really do need to get back to the time when urban housing was so cheap and plentiful that any kid could show up in San Francisco or New York and find a place to live that they could afford on entry level service sector wages. https://t.co/OQnXCrgkSD
— Max Dubler 🏳️🌈 (@maxdubler) February 3, 2024
Solid data is very hard to come by,¹ but in 1950 a one-bedroom apartment in a mediocre neighborhood in New York City cost maybe $60 or so. An entry level urban job paid about $180 per month and a crummy blue-collar job paid less than that. So for young workers rent took up anywhere from a third to nearly half of their income.
This is better than it is today—average rent in New York is now about half of average entry level pay—but it's not "any kid could show up" better. If you were an unskilled high school grad who bounced into New York in 1950, you could maybe live alone at the Y or in a single-room cold water walkup on the Lower East Side. Otherwise you needed roommates. It wasn't that different from today.
And New York City is pretty much the worst case for rents. Things are better almost everywhere else in the country.
¹What is "average" rent? In which neighborhood? What kind of apartment? Does it include rent-controlled apartments? And what's an average "entry level" job? How much did they really pay? How do you account for the large rise in college-educated young workers? Reliable statistics just don't exist for this stuff.
NO, Kevin, you simply do NOT understand that things were better in the Old Days, before all those hippies and Ronald Reagan and Trans people wrecked things for Nice Normal People. And also puppies and ice-cream sodas!
You forgot to mention the brown people, local and imported.
You couldn’t pay me to live in NYC. Just read the NY post! It’s a hellscape. No one from America would go there.
https://nypost.com/2024/02/03/metro/nyc-school-kids-arrested-over-caught-on-video-bus-beatdown/
Ten middle schoolers were arrested for allegedly assaulting a Coney Island classmate in a brutal, caught-on-video bus beatdown. The victim — who one fellow student later callously declared “deserved it” and “shoulda died” — could be heard shrieking in pain as a pack of kids collectively rained punches on him in the Jan. 26 incident, footage shared with The Post and posted on social media show.
Poor kid.
I would pay YOU to not live in NYC.
You couldn’t pay me to live in NYC. Just read the NY post! It’s a hellscape. No one from America would go there.
1) NYC is one of the safest places in the country to live. And yes, I'm including suburbs and rural areas in that.
2) Thank you for confirming for us your failure to comprehend that anecdotes are not data, especially lurid anecdotes designed to grab eyeballs.
3) Can New Yorkers get that promise from you in writing?
Wow - you really have no sense of humor at all.
The difference between then (50s) and now: SROs, or the lack thereof.
Boarding homes, single room occupancy with shared bathrooms, unrelated people living together, and even basement apartments are all zoned out of existence in most places.
Home building dropped after the bank crisis in 2008 and never fully recovered. Rise of air-b&b and hedge funds buying starter homes eats into the market, though varies a lot by region.
The bottom line, today is one of the most expensive times to buy a house. It's also one of the most expensive times to buy a car. (Pandemic parts shortage meant greater profits when selling fewer cars--and the companies really liked that higher margin).
When I graduated from college, I bought a battered, 900 sq-ft, postwar house set in a vast sea of identical houses ranging in size from 900-1200 sq-ft. Those houses are still all there, but they've almost all been hugely expanded. What was once a seedy neighborhood is now pretty attractive and substantially more expensive.
There were flophouses all over lower Manhattan which provided basic shelter, a private room, shared bath, for a dollar a day. The Upper West Side was full of SROs. There were a lot of marginal areas like the East Village where housing was very cheap if dilapidated.
Still, it was hard to find affordable housing in the first few years after the war since so many GIs were looking for places to live. However, construction was underway, and the construction boom continued through the 1970s.
By the 1960s, there were popular areas that were relatively expensive. For example, the east side in the 60s was very popular with young adults who shared apartments to be close to nightclubs, restaurants and other amenities. The first TGIF and Serendipity 3 was in this area. There were still a lot of cheaper areas within a few miles and accessible by bus and subway.
Heh, pulling levels, driving trucks, hauling bricks, that was then this is now. The world of work is ENTIRELY different than it was then. I know what of I speak. I'm a professional firefighter. The blue-collarest of them all. And I'm willing to bet that the kids of yesterday would blanche at what we he have to know today. Not to say they couldn't get it, just that the pipeline wasn't there. OTOH, today the older firefighters complain that the kids of today barely know any of the tradecraft that their fathers did. But they wouldn't get hired unless you could be a paramedic, a report writer, computer literate, etc. It's literally apples and oranges.
It's so bad, that only heavily taxed areas can even support professional firefighters. Volunteers are still the mainstay in this country. Just like every other job, not paid squat. How can you live in a city with squat, unless you squat.
I live in a small town, 10,000 pop., on the edge of the SF Bay Area. We are mostly middle class people. We taxed ourselves to fund a fully staffed fire department. It all depends on where your priorities lie.
Good point. I wonder how many firefighters live in town... or near town...
See my point?
Added: 10,000 means one engine, one ambulance, probably jump companies,a chief officer and maybe a secretary or two. If there's more then it's not a middle class town or there's some major industrial or business magnet there.
Tiburon?
I wish. Tiburon is in no way middle class.
About our fire department. Two engines and a 1998 E-One 95' Aerial Platform. I don't know about the ambulance, probably one with mutual aide from our neighboring towns.
That's impression for such a small tax base. Is it a hybrid professional - volie composition?
Also I wish too. Everytime I passed the Golden Gate easting and looked north it was wistfully.
Actually, half the population is 55+. Mostly retired. We do have several large cannabis companies. A perfect fit for a bunch of Bay Area Boomers. 🙂 Otherwise we're a farming community. No chain grocery or drug stores. Three fast food places and lots of local restaurants.
Ah, weed money. It's like a spigot!
When we lived in MA, almost every town, city, and county had cooperative emergency arrangements with surrounding areas. Our town of Westford had (and still has) three. Depending on size other towns would have 2-5 stations.
When a fire broke out the local stations would quickly scramble engines from the nearest station and alert the other two stations. Escalation was quick. If the nearest station was already out, next nearest was assigned. If the fire was serious multiple stations would respond and the towns around Westford would be alerted and escalate appropriately.
At county boundaries, the network crossed to be able to call on out of county resources, and the same at state boundaries. There was a lot of investment in the response network, and regular planning updates and regular practice drillls.
Unless a town/city/etc. is completely isolated from timely added external resources, hardly any state we've been in (HI, MA, WA, OR, CA, ID) fully funds individual fire stations on their own. That way lies economic madness.
While everything you say is true, the city I work for funds about 50 personnel on the street daily and still has those agreements because they are part economic in nature and operationally dictated. And because the economics cannot support the operational dictates, those agreements are made. That tautological I know, but let's say for the majority of emergencies in your town might necessitate a mutual aid dispatch, larger cities could run 2, 3, 10 of those emergencies simultaneously without even feeling a strain.
I read somewheres a while ago that there are roughly a million firefighters in the nation and 250,000 are professional...
I know personally that some communities can't even fund EMS in any fashion and require a permanent Auto Aid Agreement.
Watch the movie It Happened on 5th Avenue from 1947. It starts with the main character getting evicted and unable to afford an apartment. He moves in with a homeless guy squatting in a mansion, and invites entire families who are living in their cars.
They young homeless people spend the movie trying to get affordable housing built.
Robert A. Heinlein wrote "A Bathroom of Her Own" about1946 or '47 about the post war housing shortage, iirc.
Then there's the 1948 movie Apartment for Peggy in which an enterprising young woman talks a professor out of committing suicide so she and her husband, a student on the GI Bill, can rent his attic apartment. A lot of the plot revolves around keeping the professor alive. The housing shortage was quite serious everywhere then, especially in college towns. (P.S. I'm not making up the suicide part.)
You glossed over a big reason why it's so bad today. This option is no longer available because we no longer have this type of housing:
"If you were an unskilled high school grad who bounced into New York in 1950, you could maybe live alone at the Y or in a single-room cold water walkup on the Lower East Side. Otherwise you needed roommates. It wasn't that different from today."
Is is THAT DIFFERENT from today.
If you were an unskilled high school grad who bounced into New York in 1950, you could maybe live alone at the Y or in a single-room cold water walkup on the Lower East Side.
At least that was an option in NYC then. Or SF. Or Boston. Or Seattle. Or DC. Or Los Angeles. Now it isn't.
These endless "times were so much better then" takes on Twitter are as lame as fuck, for the most part, especially the ones tweeted by rightists. But Kevin does seem to have something of a blind spot for housing. Certainly in our most vibrant, high wage cities, rent seem to have increased a good deal faster than inflation over the last 3-4 decades. And, unlike with, say, healthcare or education, this is down not to Baumol effects, but, rather, induced land scarcity (ie, NIMBYism). And no, rules prohibiting rooming houses aren't different from or merely adjacent to NIMBYism. They're at the very heart of it.
While I dont have any data to contradict this widespread and well accepted position, I do want to say that Im sure there is no problem here and everyone is wrong. I mean, just look at the data that I dont have!
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Hmm, underwhelming.
The US has continued urbanizing, so it's likely that our biggest cities will never, ever be affordable in the ways they were decades ago. Plus, there was a one-time housing realignment due to the automobile that won't happen again: wealthy people left their huge urban homes in the mid-20th century for new estates on the periphery, leaving places behind that were often chopped up into apartments or converted into rooming homes. My grandparents turned their big 1915 house into a rooming home in the 50s. A friend is still removing traces of the many tiny apartments that filled her 1880s home for decades. Even smaller homes saw this happen. Another friend is in a home from about 1900 that was turned into a Duplex mid-century, and turned back into a single home in 2007 (she rented out the extra bedrooms until recently). In college I lived in the bottom floor of a house that was turned into a Duplex. The pantry was our bathroom, I got the front parlor, my roommate got the dining room. It wasn't a big house, but had lots of small rooms.
Our open floor plans today make those kinds of conversions much harder. We no longer have lots of rooms with walls and doors. And we give over much more space to closets and bathrooms, requiring more square feet to sleep the same number of people.
If you want to run away at 18 and have a place to live, try Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Duluth. The cheap housing of 1950 was in places the middle-class and well-to-do had abandoned. The same is true today. But because of cars, those cheap places aren't close to the popular places anymore.
In 1973 my wife and I moved to San Francisco so I could go to school while my wife supported us both. My wife has a college degree, in history. She eventually moved up to assistant to the Traffic Manager for a company, but her first position was as a data entry clerk in the company, at $450 A month. We rented a pleasant apartment for $180 a month.
Last time I looked at the apartment on the internet the rent was $2,600 a month. Just an anecdote, but...
Ah, the movies.
The New York of "My Sister Eileen", "The Best of Everything", "The Last Days of Disco".
The San Francisco of "Vertigo"--goddammit, I'll never get to eat at Ernie's!
"I've been to Paris, France, and Paris, Hollywood. Hollywood's is better."
--Ernst Lubitsch