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Well I am stunned, shocked, grateful, baffled, bemused, and befuddled to announce....that we....somehow...bought a house....in Los Angeles....?!?!? (In a pandemic. During historic wildfires. In a hot hot market. I do not recommend this approach.)
I never dared to hope I could afford a house.....anywhere really. Def not here! My iteration of academic career gets paid more in cultural than actual currency. And before that I worked in nonprofits. And before that I graduated into the Great Recession. It hasn& #39;t been pretty.
But more broadly: no one I personally know of my generation has bought a house without family help of one kind or another. Period.
It& #39;s gauche to talk about money but I think people keep quiet because they& #39;re ashamed—either of what they have or (often) what they don& #39;t. I don& #39;t think that shame helps us or others. (I appreciate @annehelen& #39;s work around demystifying $$ for millennials)
Something that for our parents& #39; generation was a big step into adulthood has for our generation become increasingly impossible. For a lot of reasons.
I credit our ability to buy a house in this outrageously expensive place to a lot of things. But generational wealth is one.
It doesn& #39;t look the same for everyone: grandparents who were college-educated; only one set of student loans to pay down; a family gift or a family home or a family loan.
Not everyone has this. Especially Black Americans who have been robbed over and over of the chance to build family wealth by racist policy—from a lack of reparations to redlining to housing covenants.
("When Affirmative Action Was White" is a good read on this.)
I feel the full force of my significant privilege and my own dumb luck. I credit having a spouse who works in one of the few remaining industries with strong union protections that pays anywhere near commensurate with cost of living in this city.
We scrimped and saved. We didn& #39;t travel or entertain much, even in the before times. We had a goal and pursued it. But I don& #39;t think you can "no avocado toast" your way into buying a house. And it& #39;s crappy to tell people they can.
From me to you: you deserve good things even if an unjust and unequal world doesn& #39;t offer you a clear path to them. If this feels impossible for you, know that it felt impossible to me. It became possible for us, and I just can& #39;t believe it.
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