this post was submitted on 21 Feb 2026
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Some misconceptions here. The good old days that still existed in the ‘80s and early ‘90s were kinda still there, but the signs of economic retreat were there too. We were offshoring a lot of manufacturing, bankruptcies were tools to get rid of pensions and union strength, and then everything Reagan did to fuck us that just wasn’t apparent yet. They weren’t the good old days that the Boomers had, but they were far better than today.
You could still rent a place for a few hundred bucks on a single job, community college was ~$50/semester not including textbooks. A cheap house in a not so great area was ~$100k, often a lot less. People didn’t use credit cards the way they do now so debt wasn’t as common, it was harder to spend money you didn’t have. You could still claw your way ahead or at least tread water.
2000 was a turning point. The dot com bust, 9/11, offshoring of even more jobs in tech, multiple recessions, endless war, and corporations running out of ideas other than finding ways to extract more and more from the consumer while offering less in return. Every generation since has had to deal with more things being put out of reach.
Even in the 2010s it was still possible in some areas. I bought my first home in 2012, right at the bottom of the market. I bought a townhouse in a half-built development in a rough neighborhood. This was in Houston. The developer had gone under halfway through building the place. It was weird, but the place only cost $92k for a 3 bedroom 1800 ft^2 townhouse. I put 3% down on an FHA mortgage. I literally got into home ownership for less than people pay to get into an apartment lease today. Oh, and the mortgage was small enough that for several years I paid the entire mortgage by renting out the two spare bedrooms. The coastal areas were pretty unaffordable even back in the early 2010s. But at least then if you lived there and wanted to, you could move to a lower cost of living city elsewhere in the US and get established. Now? Everywhere is unaffordable.