this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2024
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Except people are getting squeezed on housing and the basic necessities now, people are having to work long hours just to live. I can't even imagine how my young adult life would play out if I were experiencing it now, paying ridiculous rents and making the shitty wages. Sharing an apartment and affording anything else was hard enough back then, I can't even imagine how people are making it out there nowadays. I got lucky and got into a home when prices were semi-decent, it'd be a severe strain on finances if I had to pay current rates.
Yeah, housing's a huge issue right now. It's almost entirely the fault of the artificial scarcity produced by landlords, and their influence on what kind of housing gets built.
I'm not sure if this was meant to be your point by the way, but I do want to clarify that my original post was not meant to make it seem like the only reason people are struggling with work and finances is because they buy goods they don't actually need. That's certainly part of the equation for some people, but definitely not entirely.
In my opinion, we can see the same effects I mentioned before happening to our necessities as well, but on the corporate decision making side of things, rather than the consumer decision making side. For instance, food is more expensive because companies throw out any produce that looks "weird," even if it's perfectly edible. Housing is more expensive because developers prioritize the highest paying customer class over the average working person when deciding the quality, pricing, and size of housing to build. I hope you get the idea.
The only real solution to these issues is unions and co-ops, anti-monopoly action, the elimination of landlording as a practice, and a higher minimum wage. Basically all of this has to be advocated for at a federal level, unfortunately, since we can't exactly implement these as independent, personal practices.