Quote:
Originally Posted by Atticus Grinch
All but a handful of people I know are working two professional jobs per household to afford what is relatively* a upper-middle class lifestyle that my parents managed on one salary. When the first 40% of the smaller salary is going to childcare expenses (and convenience foods etc.), many of us are just treading water from a 1980 SoL on one salary. People in my office who started 25 years before me had vacation homes on one salary.
*In absolute terms it's hard to say whether a 2013 household with broadband and four monthly cell phone bills is middle class since the middle class household of 1980 would regard it as more than luxurious — it would be an unattainable marvel.
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If you set aside the revenue side of the equation for your typical family and just look at the expenses, what is more expensive than it was in 1980? In an area like the one you live in, I would imagine that housing has gotten progressively more expensive since WWII. For a long time after the war, you could throw up suburban housing all over the place, so scarcity wasn't a problem. Now you can't do that, and everyone pays more and more for the land (as opposed to the buildings on it).
The obvious answer is to build denser housing, but local zoning prevents that. So instead you see bungalows torn down to build monster houses -- but both are single-family houses.
I hope you appreciate my efforts to turn this conversation to local land use law.
