I know the precursors to these folks, who, in the 80s lived in the very same neighborhood. They are all now living in the suburbs, very middle class (of the various strata). Communal living is just too much at some point. We need our own caves, no matter what the group dynamic.
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Then it is pretty much like the editorial work in the slice.
The government made huge investments in public education in the 50s and 60s, giving rise to a surfeit of students with time and flexibility to show up at protests and go on the Freedom Rides.
Where did the money come from?
The churning factories of the 50s and early 60s gave families the ability to put their children in college. Back up to 1944 and youâll find that college was for the wealthier Americans. After WWII we saw the flood of people attending college with the help of the GI Bill Of Rights, something my father benefited from.
From the mid 60s to early 70s colleges themselves provided most of the grants because of financial assistance from the federal government through the Higher Education Act of 1965.
The fed money started to dry up in the mid 70s after rising oil prices and rust belt manufacturing started facing foreign competition. Good jobs left or were lost. Family incomes declined. Public support of education declined. Grant money dried up and was replaced with private (fed subsidized) loans. Student debt began and has continued to rise.
College was far from free in the 60s. I remember my brother giving up his room for my aunt so she could stay with us and be able to afford to go to UNI in the mid-late 60s. We also provided a car and some cash to help my dadâs youngest brother - the only one of 7 brothers lucky enough to miss the Korean and Vietnam wars and thus not eligible for the GI Bill.
Housing and cars were cheap and college was pretty much free for anyone who got in.
No cars and houses werenât cheap. What we had was a society that still manufactured goods and was still paying decent wages. College most emphatically was not âpretty much free for anyone who got in.â
The 1960s movements were born out of excess, a generation with too much time and certainty
The civil rights movement and the movement to end the Vietnam war ?
The poverty rate was 22% in 1959 , the year I was born. That rate is now 14.5%
Those 60s movements that led to Medicare, Medicaid, Public Housing Assistance, The Higher Education Act were born from need. Many people were poor and hurting.
The 1960s movements were born out of excess, a generation with too much time and certainty
What an embarrassingly simplistic right-wing memeâŚ
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People have been doing this for a long time. In fact the group which owns the articleâs communal home has been doing this sort of thing since 1971. The early years were its brightest with 20 homes and the numbers have crashed to just 8 homes now.
Contract sales with cash down, also known as land contracts or installment sales agreements. Under redlining it was the only way to buy homes in minority areas.
There have been TONS of people who have had to give up the middle class dream, and theyâve been around for more than 30 years.
Society just ignores them because they arenât trendy or alt-stylish.
Theyâre called âpoor.â
Or âhomeless.â
We donât write articles containing personal profiles of them - we write laws banning them from sidewalks, prohibiting people from feeding them, jailing them for their illnesses, and allowing the conversion of their neighborhoods into zones for high-rise condos.
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âAs Republicans continue their relentless efforts to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, people in their 60s, 70s and 80s may be adopting the same life style to survive.â
You know, I have been hearing that for 35 years. Your view point is not revolutionary, or inspired. You even thinking like that is a victory for the right. Young people never change.
Many folks are now completely stuck in a particular living situation in places where rentals are completely outpacing their fixed incomes. Add the increasing cost of food, utilities and transportation many are seeing groups as the only answer to this cruelty of urban life. The problem is a lack of experience with these types of arrangements. As models grow in number, one would hope this could become an ever increasing solution. I guess we need development of an app.
I was looking at a grocery store bulletin board today and saw two separate ads for room mates to share household expenses in large Victorian houses.
Then I went to craigslist for Grand Rapids. There were multiple communal type homes, at least six or seven,
This was typical:
Hi! My name is Michelle. Iâm 26 years old, a pretty chill person, and looking for responsible roommates. The rooms are well sized, and the house is in Alger Heights.
Deposit: $300
Rent: $400 per month + utilities
Lease term: Month to month
Laundry: In-unit (FREE)
Parking: Street
Pets: 2 kitties
Smoking: No
Bathrooms: 1.5
Bedrooms: 5 total (1 open)
Please let me know if youâre interested!
This is nothing new. Nothing new at all - for the less affluent in our society. Iâve seen it all my life.
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While this is a charming idea, needless to say it isnât a new idea. Itâs how the devastated and povery stricken dealt with their desperation in Pre WW Europe. Itâs how families in urban ghettoes have been living for centuries. But what it also is, is giving up standing up to the oligarchy. Because the only people who have ever been able to shake the corporate tree into freeing up some of the wealth they stole from your community, and convinced you it was never yours to begin with ⌠is by taking the risk and standing up to them. And todayâs US American simply isnât that inspired, that strong, or even particularly brave to do it.
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This sort of thing has been around for a long time. I used to know a women who had lived in this kind of arrangement back in the 40s in DC. The article starts out talking about how remarkable this is and then talks about the authorâs experience with something like this, but at no point do we find out how they came to this and how they workout things.
Millennial special pleading seems to be reaching a point usually reserved for boomers. Incomes have been stagnating, and for many people, declining for over 40 years in the US. Many of those people are late boomers (those who came of age in the 70s when college degrees began to lose some of their guarantee of upward mobility) and Gen-Xers who have learned to expect that they would be lucky to even approach their parentsâ standards of living. Although college educated folks are part of that group, most are people without college degrees whom I suspect the people write about this stuff donât know personally.They probably have a lot of experience dealing with not only downward economic mobility but the difficulties of treading water year after year after year, which i suspect might be rather informative for the writer if not many of the readers.
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Astute. This is a problem with cultural reporting when the age and class of the writer cloud the reporting on the poorer masses.
From the article:
The basic idea: to share the comforts and burdens of not only property ownership, but the political and economic realities of a household. Or, if you wanted to be cheeky about it: No gods, no masters; no bosses, no landlords.
To be realistic, the ânine peopleâ are merely renting a home from a non-profit organization that has seen better times. There seems to be an age and class separation that prevents the writer and editor from recognizing that multitudes of poorer people of the articleâs age demographic have traditionally fallen back upon these sorts of communal arrangements.
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True, Martin. It is that a large swathe of the older householders shun this type of living. I was only trying to suggest it could be made more accessible.
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Why is it necessary for something to last twenty years for it to be considered successful? Whatâs a good solution for one time in oneâs life may not be the right solution for the next. I know people who started out in a group home, have happily lived in single family homes for many years, and are now considering cohousing for their retirements? All have been successful in the sense that they met the needs of a particular stage of life.
I am not questioning the success of their choice of living arrangements. The article is framed as these people âgiving up the middle class dream.â If they live in what essentially amounts to a roommate situation for a period of time and then move into a single family home, that is hardly giving up the middle class dream. indeed, living with roommates before giving into or pursuing the âmiddle class dreamâ is extremely common⌠so much so that I have a hard time understanding why it warrants a feature article on this site.
If they revisit these folks when they are in their 50s and still living the same way, then I will be ready to consider what it was like for them to âgive up the middle class dream.â
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