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It's easy to say "don't live in hip cities", but the expensive cities also happen to be where the jobs are. Even in the suburbs of Boston, you'd need to live more than an hour away to find a 1 bedroom for under $1000 today. Even in unsafe neighborhoods. People live with multiple roommate until they're in their 30s.
I graduated from college in 2010 and focused my job hunt on Atlanta and smaller, affordable cities in the South. After 3 months of not getting many interviews, or paying to get myself to interviews in Charleston, Nashville, and Memphis for jobs that turned out to be temp-to-perm, I opened my search nationally. EVERY. SINGLE. INTERVIEW I had from then on out was coming out of Boston and NYC, even though I was really focusing on cities like Pittsburgh, Houston, and Austin. All of my college friends who went straight to work after college ended up in Boston, NYC, DC, or SF, regardless of where they were from initially, because that's who was hiring. The recession may be over, but there are still plenty of unemployed people locally to make finding a job out of town difficult.
I have been looking to relocate for the past 2 years. Unfortunately, 80% of opening in my field are in Boston, SF, DC, NYC, or Chicago (which is why I am really looking at Chicago - it's so cheap!). When I apply to the other 20% in affordable cities like Atlanta, Denver, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, etc., its hard to even secure interviews applying from hundreds of miles away. Not everyone has a job that can be done in Montana or rural Mississippi. In fact, Montana has NO job openings in my specific niche and only a handful in my field.
Rent is not out of control in this country. People just have a bad entitlement complex. You are not entitled to live in Manhattan or San Francisco. Maybe you should rent in a cheaper area that you can actually afford.
It's always hilarious when people say things like "Just live in a cheaper city".
There aren't enough jobs in cheaper cities. Why is that not plainly obvious?
It used to be that there were many small cheap cities with significant numbers of manufacturing jobs. Those jobs got outsourced to slave labor in Communist China, to enrich the capitalists.
It's always hilarious when people say things like "Just live in a cheaper city".
There aren't enough jobs in cheaper cities. Why is that not plainly obvious?
It used to be that there were many small cheap cities with significant numbers of manufacturing jobs. Those jobs got outsourced to slave labor in Communist China, to enrich the capitalists.
There are many resons jobs left the US.
Cheap labor......not near the labor laws.....No EPA to impose regulations.....just a more profitable environment.
Times were different then. The pie is shrinking now less the effects of the current printing binge. You can work harder than others and stay ahead of the shrink. But for those that can't work as hard, 50% are below average, the macro economic situation needs to be changed.
No they weren't. 23 years ago I moved into an apartment and had 2 roommates. That's how the three of us could afford it. In fact, I didn't live in a rental without at least one roommate until I was 28 years old. My first couple years of living alone were real sticker shock. Rent sucked 25 years ago, same as now. The last 5 years I rented, my rent went up every year. That's what rent does, always has. 12 years ago, I fixed my rent issues with a mortgage, but I added the headaches of home ownership.
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Originally Posted by ContrarianEcon
I have proposed this to my business partners.
Being unprofitable? Charging less than the market will bear and losing money so people can afford rent easier? Do you and your business partners often engage in negative profit schemes?
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Originally Posted by ContrarianEcon
Up the minimum wage to keep ahead of the costs.
And stop with crap like "raise the minimum wage" and other panacea foolishness. My last apartment cost $800 for 700 sq ft. That's two full weeks of the proposed minimum wage of $10.10, and I haven't paid any other bills yet. People on minimum wage are not meant to be living alone in preferable locations. If you make minimum wage, you have roommates, or you live with family, or you're homeless. But that was true 25 years ago. My rent in 1991 was $600, for a small apartment in a below average neighborhood. Minimum wage was $4.25. That rent would have been almost a whole month of minimum wage, back in the day you say was easier and more affordable. I made more than minimum and I had 2 roommates. And that's how we all afforded it.
Nothing about renting in the urban centers is any different than it was 10-20-30 years ago. Consider some famous "back in the day" examples. On "Three's Company" of 70s sitcom fame, 3 people with jobs lived in a tiny 2 BR, 1 BT apartment because there was no other way for them to afford to live in LA. Fast forward to Friends, where the girls lived illegally in a rent control apartment based on Monica's grandmother, and the guys lived in a crappy 2 BR, 1 BT because Chandler made serious bank. Oh, and the guy with the PhD from Columbia lived in a glorified studio for the entire series. Fast forward to the Big Bang Theory, where two PhD scientists at CalTech are roommates so they can afford to live in Pasadena. Notice a trend here? Even in fairy tale TV land....rent sucks and always has.
Rent is not out of control in this country. People just have a bad entitlement complex. You are not entitled to live in Manhattan or San Francisco. Maybe you should rent in a cheaper area that you can actually afford.
Seems to me that the middle class used to be owners--not renters.
So are food prices. I just got back from WalMart: I couldn't believe the price I was paying. Last week a qt of milk at our local, independent grocery store was a $1.32> It was $1.66 at WalMart.
A lot of them lost their homes during the recession, for which they are (according to you cons) solely themselves to blame -- i.e. there's absolutely no such thing as "predatory lending."
A huge majority do have themselves to blame: they were willing to pay inflated prices and they were buying homes they knew they could not make payments on. Everyone shares some of the blame for what happened in the housing market a decade ago. If I am making $40,000 a year, have a family and a car payment, I know I can not afford a house payment of say $2000 a month
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