Rent prices are so high that Gen Z can't afford to live alone anymore

So, national minimum wage is $7 something, so homes should be about $77k, right?

Quick history of inflation in America. President Eisenhower started the US/Vietnam War, and JFK kept it going. Ike and Kennedy both wanted to keep it small, but LBJ made a major commitment of troops and air power to deliver a knockout punch. That turned into a quagmire where the US couldn't pull out without looking like losers. President Johnson [LBJ] started printing money to pay for the War, rather than raise taxes. Nixon was elected as a peace candidate. Nixon's Vietnam policy alone is worth several books, but we'll just talk about the US dollar.

Nixon doubled down on Johnson's bombing policy; the US factories were working 24/7 to make more weapons. Great, except the money was all paper. When the Arab Oil boycott hit the price of everything went through the roof. Suddenly stay at home moms were forced to get jobs to keep the family fed. In 1968 'middle class' was one job to support a family, by 1980, two income families were becoming the norm.

Then came Reagan. Big tax cuts for the rich were supposed to make everything golden again. In 1980, $1 million was considered a vast fortune; by 1992 it was what a really rich guy paid for a party.
- None of the timeline matches up with increases in inflation.
  
  https://media.nationalpriorities.org/uploads/military_spending_since_1940_fy_2024_large.png
  
  https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Fig-1.jpg
  
  Direct spending on Vietnam starts to ramp up in the mid-60s and draws down in the mid-70s. Inflation, however, goes through a major shock in the early 70s and another one in the early 80s. None of this seems to match any kind of cause and effect we would expect. Further, the real cost of Vietnam was born decades later, as those veterans draw on benefits such as the VA hospital system. (Which, BTW, is expected to start happening about now with the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq; healthcare costs are a veteran issue.)
  
  And then we have another big increase in military spending during the Reagan years, but no particular increase in inflation is seen. Not even if there's some argument that it'd be delayed by a decade. Not like it had been in the 70s, anyway.
  
  Oil costs are the main reason for these shocks. "Printing money" is a naive libertarian approach to inflation which largely serves people who use money to make money (i.e., billionaires) as opposed to people who use their labor to make money. I was just lamenting earlier today how leftists around here have started to absorb libertarian narratives on inflation, and it's not a good thing.
- Dang.
  
  The working class has been selling itself out ever since the end of world war 2.
- Que the Iraq war part deux. Immediately followed by the Afghan invasion.
  
  Paid for on credit card. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
  
  Don't forget the giant expansion of the government under Bush² either, the TSA, DHS, Medicare expansion
  
  The aughties fucked over the entire upcoming century. Obama swaging the wall street plutocrats after 2008 with, not just the bail outs, but with relaxing corporate control of rental property is looking really, REALLY short sighted about now
  
  Trump repealing Obama's DoddFrankLite is gonna come back and haunt us too, when wall street implodes in the inevitable 2008 repeat, because if you can trust a banker to do anything, it's to suck as much blood out as possible and let the public pay for life support. It's gonna happen again. Guaranteed.
- Suddenly stay at home moms were forced to get jobs to keep the family fed. In 1968 ‘middle class’ was one job to support a family, by 1980, two income families were becoming the norm.
  
  This was not because of inflation, but because women were beginning to be seen as fully human
  
  Frankly between this and "but the money was paper" just makes you sound like some kind of neotraditionalist goldbug.
  
  'Were forced to work'
  
  VS
  
  'Were permitted to work'
  
  I'm not sure what went wrong with your brain to not be able to distinguish between these two. You're responding to someone who said the first version. You clapped back with serious attitude about the second version.
  
  They're not the same though.
  
  SCB is just a contrarian, block them and move on they aren't worth your time.
  
  Yes I am aware that this person used slanted and incorrect language. That's sort of my entire point.
  
  You'll forgive me for not taking someone, who wants the gold standard and traditionalist housewives back, very seriously.
  
  You funny. I never mentioned the gold standard or 'traditional' roles. If you're going to put words in my mouth, I'd like them with an order of nachos and a fruit punch.
You can still buy one for that, as long as you don't mind living in Flint and like the taste of lead.
- I got one in a niceish area for that. All you have to do is buy a small foreclosure and then spend literal years renovating while you live somewhere else and run up a bunch of high interest credit card debt paying for those renovations. 🥲
  
  Man you just dashed my only last real dream of home ownership with your reality. I was like yeah I'll just find a fixer upper and make it work. I know better now. Thanks for the heads up.
  
  That's it? Sign me up.

I came in to say something similar. Don’t focus on the price of the rent. The problem is the salary. Rent to salary has been going up and someone is pocketing the difference.

The problem is both.

Edit:

Of course this isn't universally applicable, but in my city there's basically six large landlords that own and manage the types of large, multi-family apartment buildings where the majority of people live.

There's no competition in housing and it shows in the pricing, which has been skyrocketing not coincidentally as the firms consolidate and then all "somehow" price align using the same software market rates.
- That’s not how an inflationary economy works. Rent will always go up in yesterday’s money.
  
  If the market was doing its job, salaries wouldn’t be much behind. So the ratio of rent:salary would be relatively stable.
  
  So you're saying solely blame employers for consistent rent increases that top 10% year over year in some markets?
  
  Employers aren't going to keep raising everyone's salary 10% every year to compete with the amount of greed in housing markets. Small ones can't afford to, and large ones will be punished brutally by their investors for doing so.
  
  Two things can be true: salaries can have stagnated, and rents / housing prices can have skyrocketed as well.
It's both. You're getting robbed both ways. It's not one or the other.

That's $10.39/hr adjusted for inflation.

Imagine if the average home was $114,290 adjusted for inflation.
- Houses were smaller back then and priced more appropriatly because they weren't being bought up for renting and as financial safe-haven by financial entities. The majority of new homes are 2,500+sqft, average new homes in the post-war era were around 1,000sqft. In the 70s average homes were around 1,500sqft.
  
  There are a lot of homes in the 1,000-1,200sqft range that are under $150k. In my area there are about 1k homes under $150k(2/3 under $120k), there are about 3k priced $150-350k.
  
  You referenced the adjusted price and I am talking about $150k homes because the homes under $120k tend to be houses that need $30k in renovations/repairs because the previous owners stopped doing maintenance and haven't updated in decades which leaves first-time buyers holding the bag.
  
  Home prices aren't even the problem, stagnated wages are the problem. The size of homes increasing doesn't help and people demoing reasonably priced homes to build 2.5+sqft homes doesn't help. If builders had incentive to build sane starter homes and wages were where they should be, the housing market would be in better shape for people trying to start a life and own property.
- Home prices and minimum wage not linked and linking them would cause a spiral upward in home prices, as available spending money would go up but supply would not.
  
  ... you mean what's already happening?
  
  Are you serious?
  
  This is not happening in any way the way it would if home prices were somehow tied to wages.
  
  Do you really not understand that bad things can become worse things?
  
  So stop talking about things, they could be worse?
  
  More like "don't offer suggestions that will make things demonstrably and predictably worse or someone might point out how much worse things will get"
  
  Not all solutions are equally valid.
  
  In our current situation, I can't think of many ideas worse than "tie wages to home values" aside from maybe just burning down a fuckload of apartment buildings. It's that bad of an idea.
'Adjusted for inflation ' is kind of a joke. If inflation worked the way the adjustments would have you believe, the average home of today would be $120,000 apx. It's about three times that.
- Adjusted for inflation works to show people how much less they're paying us every year.

And the quality of homes, except for the very rich, was abysmal.

'Abysmal?' Because they didn't have computers and air conditioning? Are you saying that improvements in technology are dependent on inflation?

If you think that they were terrible because they were smaller than the average house today, I suggest you look at the tiny houses and multiple room mate situations people are looking at today. In 1960, If you had three house mates you were probably in prison.