It’s only a matter of time before the cat gets swapped out for a plant.
81Damn Gen Beta and their plants. They could afford a house if they didn't have 3 whole plants to take care of!
27human children → pets → plants → cut flowers → virtual pets do a comeback → adult imaginary friends
12-> xbox live with the mic turned off
3
SMH you think we going to be able to afford plants in the future! It's going to be the parents as pets:*(..
3We're gonna bring back virtual pets because real pets are too expensive
3EA will fix that. With microtransactions your digital pets can be equally expensive! (If not moreso!)
2
No they need the cat, otherwise their car might get rats/roaches, then who would want to be roommates?
2
What happened to the 2000s?
Al'so, we're apo'strophe's on 'sale or 'something?
77Damn, and we all agreed to never forget
59The 2000s would be hard to sum up in a single photo without breaking the narrative. The family would be well off, getting fat and buying a McMansion. They would likely be just as culpable for the issues affecting those later decades.
2000 - 2008: economic boom combined with lots of deregulation on Wall Street led to the creation of almost a trillion in off the books derivative investments which were repackaged and sold off so much that they became toxic despite looking fine on paper, and made you money. Keeping the whole thing going led to something of an 8% increase in subprime lending.
Combine that with lots of folks from the 90s rampantly speculating on house sales, creating a housing bubble as they try to get rich by raising prices and flipping houses. Mix in even more deregulation and you get a Great Recession setting back a generation, in 2008. All while the folks who pushed the deregulation turn around and blame it on a president who wasn’t even inaugurated until 2009.
24Thanks, Obama.
12
They got 9/11'd
7Should be cookie cutter condos.
2
The American dream is to be a middle man who takes a cut while adding nothing, to have a captive consumer (sometimes literally), or to be to big to fail or regulate.
54"passive income"
hmm.
3I'll take all of them together
2Or to produce value and thereby profit. Exploiting the latent extropic potential of the universe to improve things. And other woo concepts that aren’t level-headed marxism.
1
2000’s, like Gen X, completely ignored.
32Nothing happened in the 2000s. That decade was "woo it's the future!" Then "oh no 9/11!" Then BAM! 2010!
13And now we are permanently in 2019
6
Well, it was kind of turbulent? Artificially inflated so people thought they got homes, then they suddenly didn't.
Its pulling misleading outliers from your data set. In meme form.
6
The apartment in the 90s is possibly the most expensive place to live. Also, this skips the 00s.
23Average new home in 1960: 1300 sq/ft. (without garage)
Average new home in 2020: 2600 sq/ft (+ 2-3 car garage)
Average household size in 1960: 3.4
Average household size: 2.5
Number of households with 2 or more vehicles in 1960: 22%
Number of house holds with 2 or more vehicles in 2020: 59%
Ya'll, I don't know how else to explain this - the reason home ownership and cost of living is expensive is very straightforward. We don't build or accept smaller homes, we don't build enough of them, and we spend far more on vehicles.
Edit: if you want affordable housing, advocate (aka vote, canvas, donate) for candidates in your local government that support -
- Zoning and regulations that benefits smaller home sizes.
- Zoning that permits denser and missing middle development (for less need for vehicles)
- Zoning that permits mixed use development.
- Land Value Tax
- Reduced or eliminated parking minimums
- Bike infrastructure.
22Okay so I'm with you on walkable cities being good, but everything else you said is offensively fucking wrong.
8Care to elaborate on what you felt was offensively fucking wrong?
You agree with walkable cities but:
- Want large houses (needing more space, spreading things out)?
- Don't want denser zoning?? (How are ya gonna walk somewhere with everything spread out)
- Hate the idea of a corner shop. (Love driving just to get a few small food items)
- Dislike taxes (how will you pay for your infrastructure? There's a reason US cities are crumbling, they're too spread out, so land taxes don't cover the maintenance bills)
- Like carparks
- Hate bikes
9
This is a gross oversimplification and in part just illogical. Yes, new small homes would help everyone out. But compare house prices to purchasing power then vs. now. It’s absolutely incomparable to 1960. That’s not because of square footage. And car ownership as an input here makes no sense. The costs of a downpayment and mortgage are simply out of reach for many people irrespective of car count. I say all this as a homeowner.
6Purchasing power is a function of how much you spend on rent, which is a function of housing supply relative to demand, which is a function of the zoning laws comment-OP referred to.
purchasing power is a function of those zoning laws. When you disrupt the free market (like a zoning law that says you can’t put more than three units on an acre of land despite a hundred units being more profitable overall, just an example) people suffer and it gets worse over time. These effects build up.
Government meddling in the real estate market isn’t the only thing affecting that purchasing power, but it’s in the mix.
2It really is not. I'm not saying there are no other economic challenges, but the vast majority of housing costs are effectively caused by this.
Here:
The median home price in 1960 was around 20,000. In inflation adjusted 2020 dollars that would have been close to 200,000.
This puts the price per square foot prices within the $100-150 range.
In 2020, the price per square foot was in the same range.
Wages have remained largely static. To be clear, this is NOT a good thing as productivity has skyrocketed, but is beside the point for now.
Effectively, the reason why people cannot afford a mortgage is massively influenced by the average size of home.
Cars make this fact even worse. On the mid to low income side of the economic spectrum, car ownership can easily cost 30% of household spending. A two car garage easily adds 10%+ to home costs.
1
1980s: Cocaine!
20Pretty sure that's why 80's father is stoked.
6
2030s tent colonies aka homeless camps
16I think you mean prison towers because being homeless is illegal.
4Its only illegal if they can enforce it. And by this I mean fire bottles, car bombs, and whatever else ya can chuck at the police.
1
Honestly you could put 1930s there and it would work the same
1
Fantastic work, especially the hairdos of Woejack and Tradwife are spot-on. Best meme I've seen in many months.
14Did their children die and they just didn’t age? Did they breed for food? That sounds pretty sustainable. Hmmm. Consuming children for eternal life and being green at the same time!
2I get the point but not entirely accurate. The 90s and 00s were the golden age of McMansions.
2I mean, I agree with the underlying complaint, but with the last example makes this come off as a bad faith right wing meme trying to blame the collapse of middle America on "woke" millennials instead of the inexcusable suppression of wages for decades and the greed-flation in every aspect of our lives.
-7How?
Also the last panel would be zoomers the millennials are the ones that could afford to rent still.
5Huh?
2
