Is the Housing "Crisis" Real?

I get personal in this episode, in order to ask questions about the nature of what is called the “housing crisis.” Are we all just doom-pilling way too much?As a case study, I talk through the life and history of my parents, and discuss whether or not their life and lifestyle is still available today. I discuss house sizes, mortgage rates, lifestyle choices, lifestyle inflation, and more.Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page.Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5.Intro: “Why Be Friends”Outro: “Fairweather Friend”AI TranscriptIntroductionWelcome back to The Messy City Podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I’m going to do something a little different today and just talk without a guest about the topic of housing in particular and how it ties into a few other kind of hobby courses of mine. Why Challenge the Housing NarrativeReally what I want to spend some time doing is taking a contrarian view of how we talk about the so-called housing crisis. And in one sense, this is kind of fun for me to do. One of the things I really loved about my father is when we would have our discussions or debates in the family about various things that were going on, he would often take an opposite view of Almost just for the sport of it. And the truth is, there are a lot of times he was so good at it, you didn’t really know if he felt that way or not. Because he could do really well to argue multiple sides of an argument. And that was really a lot of fun. It was an education for me. It’s something I wish more people would just do generally and try to see an issue from multiple perspectives and try to steel man different perspectives or perspectives that are different from your own. And so I’ve kind of taken to obviously do that if you know me at all.You know I’ve done that a fair amount in my own life. Not nearly as good as my father was at it, but it has been fun to do occasionally. And I really wanted to apply this to the topic of housing. And there’s a couple of reasons for this. And this also ties into a story. I’m going to tell you a little bit of a story about my parents and how they grew up and their trajectory through life, because I think it’s actually very relevant to this topic. And whether or not we have a housing crisis at all in America, or if we do, what is the actual nature of of that crisis. And I want to talk about this because I just see so much online and in person conversation that I just feel like there are too many people, especially too many young people that have been kind of doom pilled on life today and life in America generally.And the thing that I want to start out that I really want to propose to everybody and talk about is the life that my parents had And their trajectory through life is still available today. It is absolutely and unequivocally still available to anyone who wants to choose the life that they lived. And in my opinion, obviously, I knew them really well. In my opinion, they had a tremendous life. They had a great life. They’ve both passed on in recent years. And so I have to talk in the past tense. But by any measure that matters, they had a great life. They lived well into their 80s. They had four kids. We actually all like each other. So it’s not just like a, you know, there are some families where you can say, well, I love my family. But as my brother used to say, or after my dad passed, he would say, you know, that... We didn’t just love our parents, we really liked our parents.And I think if you’re fortunate to be in a family like that, you know a little bit of what I’m talking about. And the four of us as children all... We get along. We’re still all friends with each other and get along. We enjoy being together. We’re all very different people with different interests and different worldviews. In some senses, we had pretty different childhoods, interestingly enough, because there’s a big age spread in our family. So my parents had four kids that they raised. They had a long, stable marriage. They were able to get consecutively better houses as they aged. And then by the time they hit retirement age, they had saved enough money to be able to do other things that they wanted to do. Along the way, they traveled when they wanted to. They really wanted to get out and see the country, see the world.When we were young, that traveling mostly involved just driving around the United States and going to national parks and big cities and seeing the sights. As they got older and had a little bit more disposable income, they would join tour groups and go or sometimes with family to foreign