High Real Estate Prices Push Millenials into RVs and Trailers

Real estate is broken. Houses which SHOULD cost $90K are on the market for $680K, and they sell for that higher price.

For Sale, 2 BD, 1.5 BA, on street parking, EZ yard, 0.17 acre

Nobody with a minimum wage job, or even double that with dual incomes, can afford to buy a home and raise a family with a mortgage based on that price. Normal people cannot buy homes on normal incomes in normal places.

Why are prices still so high? The housing bubble did not burst all the way, only half, and inflation is making the prices come back up, exploiting desperation, greed, and ignorance. Home prices are supposed to be based on market price, on the ability to pay a mortgage. They aren't. The ARM mess screwed it all up.

The problem with communities that won't pay enough at the jobs that maintain them is those communities gradually lose the people who do that maintenance. Working a job with falling wages is great motivation to go elsewhere. The ones they get to replace the locals drive in, cheaper, and do a less good job because it isn't there community, just another contract, and contracts are all about the money. Without young families, those communities age, and those aged people eventually require medical care, and then funeral services. These communities that became destinations for the retired gradually get poorer and more depressed without the vitality of young families. Without good enough wages for good enough employees, businesses close and pretty soon that community dies. The medical staffs are the last to leave.

Here in the West we call those Ghost Towns. I've met people who worked in Bodie before its final resident left and the town turned over to the state and become a tourist destination. People think of ghost towns as cute. They don't understand its an actual outcome for locations without drinking water and geographic value to remain populated and supplied. San Francisco doesn't have its own drinking water, and is only valuable as long as its harbor remains important for shipping. The "brain center" is BS. They don't have any smarter people than anywhere else. When that con runs down, they'll pull out the rest of the big companies, and without those, the area will collapse like Detroit. So owning a house in the Bay Area is a bad idea. Its doomed. Renting there is a better idea, until you can relocate with all those 2000 businesses that already fled the Bay Area in the last 5 years. Follow them to the Midwest or Texas. Dealing with heat and tornadoes isn't fun, but its more cost effective than Socialists who want to tax every exhale here in California.

Millenials I know are getting to be more open to the ideal of material Minimalism. That means owning as little stuff as you can. Its a rejection of the materialism of the ARM-Housing scandal. All the garbage from Walmart is just trash now. Minimalism opens up the possibility of mobile living. Mobile living can be as low-rent as getting your stuff down to fitting in your car trunk, something travelling salesmen do. A bit more might be down to a light Teardrop trailer towed behind your car or SUV, if you go that route. They're not fun to sleep in, but better than a tent and they don't weigh much.

Built from common plans and a basic metal trailer underneath.

Or even a bigger travel trailer, parked at a fancy park for the duration of a work contract. An RV works too, for the right kinds of work. Contract labor jobs protects you from the worst sorts of managers, many of whom are the dominant examples today. Bad people with a little bit of power tend to take personal joy in emotionally and physically abusing employees because they CAN. I have had several bosses that actually coerced female employees into sex with them in exchange for favors, or more often, as blackmail payoffs to overlook performance problems on the job. It was really a kind of rape. Don't stick around for these kinds of bosses. They exist, they are common, and they like to hurt you.

Do the job, get paid, move on. Too many of the jobs I've done only deserved that much time in a community. Since we're in a post-community world, leaving the wastrels to die of their greed, well that's fine. We gave them so much, and they mostly left us with debt. A pity. I suspect we'll see a lot of Millenials becoming Work-Birds, sort of like snowbirds, but working various kinds of jobs and making the best of their travels. For now the most common kind of workbirds I see here are Trimigrants, migrant pot field workers. The come to town to grow dope, often in restored or cobbled together RVs, but I think that eventually such things will spread into more legal forms of employment, and it will become useful for towns to offer nice trailer parks for these sorts of mobile yuppies, who want to make an honest living but can't buy into a community which believes a 3 Bedroom house deserves to be worth $680,000, but whose grocery clerks earn only minimum wage, and only get 20 hours a week so no benefits, F-U very much. This is a story I see again and again here in the Western states. Its irritating and tragic, but its just how things are. We adapt, and I hope to live long enough to see my state freed from the abusive Baby Boomers and violent socialists. This place was better in the 1980's, even with all the loonies running around. At least the parks were maintained. Sigh.