I wonder if a meltdown in the RE market would have an effect on the expectations of the following generation? In the current environment, a young wage earner has no expectation of being able to afford the type of houses their parents are buying right now. The point of entry is just too high and other demands are being made on their income that the parents didn’t have to deal with.

The young adults I run into seem to have different priorities. Several of them have commented that they could be perfectly happy with the smaller house so long as they could keep the big truck. I’m sure those priorities will evolve as they rack up more responsibilities, but I wonder if the design trends pushing for high-style in smaller areas might take root, in part as a reaction to the excesses of this decade.

Remember the cars of the 1960s? We started out the decade with big fins and massive grills and by the time 1973 rolled around everyone was trying to jam into a 4-cylinder Japanese car. Some of it was energy costs, but I think some of it was backlash, too. It seems like the masses will follow a trend to it’s extreme and then when it becomes too much they reverse course.

Just musing.

I agree with the idea that it would represent a huge shift. I think what I’m driving at here is not so much the effect of having another downswing that costs people money, but the possibility that sooner or later an entire generation is going to come to the conclusion that bigger is not necessarily better. And one of the causes of that will probably be an RE market meltdown that hurts a lot of people.

In the last 60 years each generation has been raised to believe that they could do better than their parents. In our own generation some people have done just that, but many have not. I’m wondering if the kids today are being raised in the belief that they can also do better. Sooner or later a generation is going to start out so far behind that they’ll have no real hope of getting to where there parents are. when that happens, how will they reconcile their desire with their reality? And when a generation decides not to compete with their parents, will they change their priorities?

Social Security is in danger of collapsing before the end of the boomer generation. The kids today will have no real expectation of that entitlement. Career stability is not even in their vocabulary. Marriage today means a 66% divorce rate right from the get. There are a lot more blended families now than ever before and that pace is just picking up.

How will they reconcile their desires with their reality? Will they turn away from the consumerism and all the work and stress that go with that – which only results in frustration anyway – or will they choose a more balanced life that measures wealth by how much they spend rather than how much they make?

How big does a house have to be in order to be big enough? At what point will people no longer desire anything bigger than what their parents had? How high can the tree grow before it’s not doing anything for anyone except sucking up resources?

Good question. I notice that a lot of the drivers of the big 4×4 crew cab 1-ton pickups are kids (raltively speaking). I notice a lot of people in the 40+ age groups who aspire to gravitate away from the corporate career path in favor of a more flexible and family-oriented lifestyle, even at the expense of their bottom line.

I know I’ve phrased it this way myself (probably based on my own biases), but it occurs to me those alternate expectations may be better characterized as being “different” rather than “reduced”. All chosen lifestyles involve some level of compromise and hence carry their own stressors resulting from the downsides of that compromise. One is not more virtuous than another by right; it only becomes more or less of a conflict based on the individuals ability and willingness to live with both sides of the paths they choose. A person who struggles to deal with the downside of “settling” for less isn’t necessarily any happier than a person who has to struggle to deal with the downsides of paying to have more.