For sure. They’re an icon in Texas and other western states. An Italian immigrant family in San Antonio who uses old world Italian leather shoe processes to make exotic skin cowboy boots. I think they’re on their 3rd generation.
Lots of people have their $1k and under offerings, and lawyers, surgeons, oil tycoons, business owners et cetera buy the over the top stuff. It’s a statement. Felt cowboy hats can get surprisingly expensive too.
Lol. Got it. A guy making nearly 100k should be happy his only options to buy a house is a crappy city 2+hours from his job. Don’t forget to close that gate behind you!
My grand parents families all got together in the 1930’s and built a big “hunting camp”. Quotes because its actually a huge house with like 6 bedrooms and all of the etc.s and updates.
A big italian family got together and built each others houses when I was a kid. Really nice too. Marble, hand painted tiles and all the good stuff.
By todays values, the sum of that work is somewhere in the millions at this point, but they also still live there.
One of my professors told a story about driving with a friend and the friend’s mom to another friend’s wedding somewhere on the East Coast. The guy getting married was from an Italian family and his entire extended family was at the wedding and were apparently real close and familiar with each other and everything.
Afterwards, the friend’s mom who he drove there with said, “Seeing the (insert Italian surname) was so nice, I wish we could be like that!” Her son replied, “Mom, we don’t want to be like that.”
The Italians all still lived in the same town or at least general area their ancestors had immigrated to. They, like you mentioned, lived in homes that had belonged to the family for generations. Most probably didn’t go off to prestigious colleges or work very affluent jobs. But they had their homes and their family.
What the son was saying was that a lot of people don’t actually want that. It looks nice, but really, they want to go to the good school. They want the good job. The nice house. To leave the small hometown and move on to bigger and better things. And with decreasing marriage and birth rates, family doesn’t mean as much, nor are families very large even if one does value them.
I dunno, seemed relevant, haha.
Infinite spaghetti glitch
Which turns out to be… living with their parents.
It is. The american dream has changed.
It used to be work hard, build a decent life, raise a good family.
Now its graduate university, land a job makin 6 figs, buy a mcmansion and become independently wealthy from who knows what.
But we have a bunch of resentful brats standing around with their guts in their hands going “Aaaagh! This is not fair!!!”.
No. Its as fair as ever. They just had the wrong fucking dream.
The nuclear family has tremendous wealth building power and stability.
I guess you can cry about it instead.
And pretend like people in the 50’s rolled out of bed and in to their desks (which is actually increasingly common now).
Or get a job outside of the LAX perimeter.
Or suck it up, pay your dues and climb the property ladder in a few years like your predecessors.
Commuting has existed since the advent of the suburbs. There’s always homesteading.
Is the expectation that you have a penthouse suite in whatever LA’s current hotspot is on a median income, because that’s definitely exactly how everybody in the 50’s lived?
It’s fun watching the learning curves though. No cheat codes.
Yeah. I was recently talking to a woman friend from back when, and her take was great.
She said “I love having my daughter here while she saves up a down payment. Hell, she can stay until she has the whole price!”.
The kid is living at home, they share costs, she’s stacking cash and advancing in her career.
I think she’s ahead of the curve!
I agree. It’s a good way to demonstrate financial responsibility before making the big purchase too.
I never moved back in with my parents, I was a little wild for that in my 20’s, but I remember making a conscious decision to move out of a relative expensive rental in the heart of it all to one that would allow more saving investing, but came with a commute and drive to my hangout spots.
It sucked but not as bad as living in a closet with roommates and crying about life being hard in to my 30’s.
My daughter can move in to save money anytime once she’s an adult.
My parents were dead. I paid for my dads funeral expenses, my one brother paid for the casket, and my gram bought the cemetery plot.
I was my brothers caretaker/care coordinator for quite a few years, but also built a residential tree company with my buddy in the mean time.
Then off into the great big world. Paid my way through CC in the winters while doing tree stuff the rest of the year.
It wasn’t the easiest way, but I made it this far, what ever that means. 
.
I fully intend for my son to have it better than me. Fortunately that bar was set really really low.
That’s rough! I’m sorry. I’m glad you were able to pull up.
Thanks. It wasn’t all tidy like those couple of paragraphs but I wouldn’t change a thing.
If you’re an attractive, charismatic, or creative human being you could make a living being an “influencer”
Maybe for some, but there are a lot of younger people who see any dream being linked to financial success as a scam.
The expectation should be that with a good job, you can afford a decent house, with a commute that allows you to raise a family without being an absent parent. I would hope you would want that for people, and would be in agreement that somethings in our country need to change to make that happen.
Unfortunately I’m not gay so I’ll have to pass
So what is the plan? Staying in the 2nd largest city in the country and expecting a house with a 10 minute commute from LAX that costs under $300k for everybody?
Population thinning?
Real estate price controls? I could see a current aspiring politician attempt this in addition to down payment assistance (a whole different can of financial worms when you start pulling that string).
Even if assistance and controls are put in place how do you account for population density and geography?
What is a “decent commute”? I grew up in Houston and would argue traffic is just as bad as LA. Population is close enough and by geographic size it’s the largest city in the country. There’s a joke that actually isn’t a joke that Houston is 3 hours from Houston and this is if there isn’t inconvenient construction or an accident in your path. Most people manage to live within 1-2 hours from their jobs.
I live where I do now because it’s an area I like (the Texas hill country) and I have access to two of my offices, but they require commutes. (I could afford to live near one of the offices, but it’s a deliberate choice to be where I am)
I would imagine somebody in Kansas City or Des Moines has a completely different experience. And this would have been true in the 60’s too.
LA isn’t going to change for you. Go find the life you want. Nobody owes you a $5 house built on a LAX tarmac.