Generation why huffington post

And the disparity has only grown wider since the recession. The result is that millennials of color are even more exposed to disaster than their peers. Many white millennials have an iceberg of accumulated wealth from their parents and grandparents that they can draw on for help with tuition, rent or a place to stay during an unpaid internship. According to the Institute on Assets and Social Policy, white Americans are five times more likely to receive an inheritance than black Americans—which can be enough to make a down payment on a house or pay off student loans.

And so, instead of receiving help from their families, millennials of color are more likely to be called on to provide it.

Any extra income from a new job or a raise tends to get swallowed by bills or debts that many white millennials had help with. Four years after graduation, black college graduates have, on average, nearly twice as much student debt as their white counterparts and are three times more likely to be behind on payments.

The median white household will have 10 15 16 69 86 more wealth than the median black household by Want to get even more depressed?

Despite all the stories you read about flighty millennials refusing to plan for retirement as if our grandparents were obsessing over the details of their pension plans when they were 25 , the biggest problem we face is not financial illiteracy.

It is compound interest. In the coming decades, the returns on k plans are expected to fall by half. According to an analysis by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a drop in stock market returns of just 2 percentage points means a year-old would have to contribute more than double the amount to her retirement savings that a boomer did.

Oh, and she'll have to do it on lower wages. This scenario gets even more dire when you consider what's going to happen to Social Security by the time we make it to When millennials retire, there will be just two. When he finally got a job, his co-workers found out that he washed himself in gas station bathrooms and made him so miserable he quit. He got a job at a grocery store and slept in a shelter while he saved.

First stop was subsidized housing in Kirkland, 20 minutes east across the lake. Then a rented house in Tacoma, 45 minutes south, sharing a bedroom with his girlfriend and, eventually, a son.

The first time we met, it was the 27th of the month and Tyrone told me his account was already zeroed out. He had pawned his skateboard the previous night for gas money. The crisis of our generation cannot be separated from the crisis of affordable housing. More people are renting homes than at any time since the late s.

But in the 40 years leading up to the recession, rents increased at more than twice the rate of incomes. Rather unsurprisingly, as housing prices have exploded, the number of to year-olds who own homes has plummeted. You rent for a while to save up for a down payment, then you buy a starter home with your partner, then you move into a larger place and raise a family.

Once you pay off the mortgage, your house is either an asset to sell or a cheap place to live in retirement. This worked well when rents were low enough to save and homes were cheap enough to buy. In one of the most infuriating conversations I had for this article, my father breezily informed me that he bought his first house at I am six years older now than my dad was then.

My first house will cost more than 10 years of mine. They built upward, divided homes into apartments and added duplexes and townhomes. But in the s, they stopped building. Cities kept adding jobs and people. At first, zoning was pretty modest. In the late s, it finally became illegal to deny housing to minorities. So cities instituted weirdly specific rules that drove up the price of new houses and excluded poor people—who were, disproportionately, minorities.

Houses had to have massive backyards. Basically, cities mandated McMansions. But all the political power is held by people who already own homes. Because when property values go up, so does their net worth. They have every reason to block new construction. They demand two parking spaces for every single unit.

True story. The entire system is structured to produce expensive housing when we desperately need the opposite. The housing crisis in our most prosperous cities is now distorting the entire American economy.

For most of the 20th century, the way many workers improved their financial fortunes was to move closer to opportunities. Rents were higher in the boomtowns, but so were wages. Rural areas, meanwhile, still have fewer jobs than they did in For young people trying to find work, moving to a major city is not an indulgence. It is a virtual necessity. But the soaring rents in big cities are now canceling out the higher wages.

Back in , according to a Harvard study, an unskilled worker who moved from a low-income state to a high-income state kept 79 percent of his increased wages after he paid for housing. A worker who made the same move in kept just 36 percent. For the first time in U. This leaves young people, especially those without a college degree, with an impossible choice.

They can move to a city where there are good jobs but insane rents. Or they can move somewhere with low rents but few jobs that pay above the minimum wage.

This dilemma is feeding the inequality-generating woodchipper the U. Rather than offering Americans a way to build wealth, cities are becoming concentrations of people who already have it. Millennials who are able to relocate to these oases of opportunity get to enjoy their many advantages: better schools, more generous social services, more rungs on the career ladder to grab on to. In , the Census Bureau reported that young people were less likely to have lived at a different address a year earlier than at any time since Homeownership and migration have been pitched to us as gateways to prosperity because, back when the boomers grew up, they were.

Over the eight months I spent reporting this story, I spent a few evenings at a youth homeless shelter and met unpaid interns and gig-economy bike messengers saving for their first month of rent.

During the days I interviewed people like Josh, a year-old affordable housing developer who mentioned that his mother struggles to make ends meet as a contractor in a profession that used to be reliable government work. Fixing what has been done to us is going to take more than tinkering. Any attempt to recreate the economic conditions the boomers had is just sending lifeboats to a whirlpool. But still, there is already a foot-long list of overdue federal policy changes that would at least begin to fortify our future and reknit the safety net.

Even amid the awfulness of our political moment, we can start to build a platform to rally around. Raise the minimum wage and tie it to inflation. Tilt the tax code away from the wealthy. Right now, rich people can write off mortgage interest on their second home and expenses related to being a landlord or I'm not kidding owning a racehorse. Some of the trendiest Big Policy Fixes these days are efforts to rebuild government services from the ground up.

The ur-example is the Universal Basic Income, a no-questions-asked monthly cash payment to every single American. The idea is to establish a level of basic subsistence below which no one in a civilized country should be allowed to fall.

They have been intentionally made so. It would be nice if the people excited by the shiny new programs would expend a little effort defending and expanding the ones we already have. It also might be that older people just don't feel as obligated to their email inbox or latest text message that we millennials.

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