S4 E40 - The Affordable Housing Hoax: Influencers, Boomers and Reality

Debunking the Housing Affordability Myth

In this episode of 'The Tenth Man', the host tackles the pervasive myth that housing has become unaffordable for younger generations due to the actions of Baby Boomers. By dissecting misleading comparisons often circulated by influencers, the host argues that the quality, size, and features of modern homes have drastically evolved from those in 1970, making direct price comparisons invalid. The episode also addresses how influencers use deceptive statistics to stir outrage and asserts that affordable housing options still exist. The key takeaway is that today's housing narrative lacks truth and is driven by misinformation aimed at generating clicks rather than offering genuine guidance.

00:00 Introduction: The Housing Affordability Myth

00:33 Debunking Viral Housing Memes

01:36 The Flawed Comparison of Houses Then and Now

06:51 Personal Anecdotes: Buying a Home in the 70s

12:05 The Real Issue: Abandoned Houses and Misleading Narratives

15:53 Conclusion: The Need for Honest Guidance

#TheTenthMan #HousingCrisisMyth #BoomersVsMillennials #affordablehousing #AOC #Mamdani

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Transcript

0:11

Across the US young people are being told they'll never own a home, and that Baby Boomers robbed them. Lying influencers and the housing- affordability myth today, on The Tenth Man,

The Tenth Man: 0:34

There are many influencers in the media circulating those charts that say,"In 1970, you could buy a house with X hours of minimum wage, but today it takes a lifetime." Well, sure if you rig the game. So let's get serious and walk through this one honest piece at a time. Let's start with our source, because this is a classic- a blue check financial influencer named Jeff Rose, CFP. He posted this viral gem:"In 1970 the minimum wage was a dollar 60, and the median home price was$23,000. That's 14,000 hours of work. Today, the median home is$420,000. Divide by 14,000 hours and you get$60 per hour. That's the real cost of home buying power today." And he finishes with,"$60 an hour is the minimum wage we'd need today to have the same home buying power Boomers had in the 1970s." They pretend a house is a constant. A house in 1970 is the same product as a house in 2025. And it's easy to see through some of the errors in that meme, but there are actually some huge flaws in this reasoning that most of us haven't considered. It's not only untrue, the actual truth is the opposite. Now Rose is a certified financial planner. He has the badge, he has the license, he has the professional letters, so he should absolutely know better. But this comparison. This comparison makes him the AOC of financial planning. It's flashy, it's catchy, it's emotional, and it collapses under basic arithmetic because once you examine it, you think, how do they come up with these ridiculous comparisons? It honestly looks like someone abused AI and said, give me a chart that makes Gen Z cry and the algorithm obliged. I truly think that's what they do. This thing is the old bellhop missing-dollar brain-teaser of economics. In fact, let's hear that old favorite. Three guys check into a motel. Room is$30 each pays$10. Bellhop takes the money to the manager who says, actually the room is only$25. Here's five dollars back. Bellhop pockets$2, and gives each man$1. He figures you can't divide$5 between three men anyway. So now each man paid$9. Three men times$9 equals$27. Plus the$2 the bellhop stole equals$29. Where's the missing dollar? Answer? There is no missing dollar. They're adding numbers that shouldn't be added. They're combining categories that don't belong together. We'll break it down at the end- the misdirection, and misdirection is exactly what these housing comparisons do. They combine minimum wage, which most workers don't earn, a silly number, which most countries don't even have, and many states have a higher one. And in any case, it's a minimum you can easily get more often just by asking. Median home price, which hides cheap homes. Why is it the median home price and not the average? Because the median hides the truth. And the myth that the product stayed the same. The numbers feel convincing, but the entire equation is nonsense and I'll prove it. I still have my rotary dial phone from 1978, purchased at Best Products for$38, If I recall correctly. No caller id, no texting, no apps, no GPS, no voicemail. No FaceTime, no photos, no nothing. It dialed numbers. That's it. Now imagine comparing the price of this to the price of an iPhone 15 and saying"Phones used to be affordable, capitalism ruined everything." No phones changed. Expectations changed and capabilities changed. Everything changed. Before 1978, it was illegal to even own a telephone. You had to rent it from the phone company. There were three models and they all did the exactly the same thing. And for the socialist fans, that was a preview. Same thing with houses. A house in 1970 and a house today are not the same product A house is not a valid constant. The standard 1970 starter home was smaller, fewer rooms, one, bathroom, two, if you hit the jackpot, little or no insulation, single pane windows or garage, just big enough for a bicycle and your car, if any garage at all. And by today's standards, a lot of those homes will be described as"needs everything", or"as is", or"do not enter without boots". Now compare that to a modern home. Multi ton HVAC. Walk-in closets bigger than the 1970 bedrooms, high-efficiency windows designer kitchens, and granite everything, every appliance known to man, wifi and security systems, garage space for two or three cars. Comparing the price of those two things and calling it economics is ridiculous. And here's a, here's something wild. You can go to England, Canada, Australia, anywhere in the English speaking world, and the exact same memes circulate. The exact same wage to house graphs. The exact same"Boomers stole everything". The same outrage. Different currencies. Same story. It's a generational narrative. Kind of sad, really. People who aren't even having kids, they're mad at their own parents and grandparents. Well, let me tell you what buying a home actually looked like back then. Before I do that, let me ask you to remember to invite a friend to listen to The Tenth Man to the only podcast where You'll never hear the word"iconic" unless we're talking about an actual icon. And you know, your friends would really like to hear that. Now then my first house wasn't even a house. It was a mobile home. We bought it in 1976 for$2,800. Lived in it for not quite two years. Made some small improvements, paid it off, and sold it for$3,100. That$3,100 was the closing costs on our first real home. And that home? Two bedrooms, one bathroom, no garage. It was in an old neighborhood. It was basic and humble. Absolutely a starter home, and we bought it using a federal VA loan with nothing down. We lived in that for six years, added a room with my reenlistment bonus, doing all the work ourselves. We sold it and made a little money. I actually built a new set of stairs in that. I still have the rafter square and you can see the tape marks on it where I marked them off to cut the stringers. 26 years old, I finally built another set of stairs, two years ago. This time I bought the stair guides. And anybody could do that then. And anybody, despite the narrative, anybody can do that now. Starter homes aren't supposed to be glamorous. They're not supposed to be Pinterest worthy. They're not perfect. They're literally the bottom rung of the ladder. But they existed and people accepted them. I gave a list of differences between old houses and modern houses, and size was a big focus, but here's the one big number that you have to look at. It puts everything into perspective, and that is the size of the electric service. The electrical service today is typically 200 amps. My first house it was 60 amps. That's really all you need to know. When we bought our first real home, the electric bill wasn't the electric bill. We called it the light bill. Why? Because all the electricity powered was lights. Maybe a refrigerator, maybe a TV. We had a gravity furnace, a gas stove. No central air. City water. We lived in town, but we literally kept a decorative hurricane lamp on the kitchen table and a bottle of scented oil in the closet. If the power went out, we lit the lamp, read a book and life, basically didn't change. Compare that to a modern home. Now we have internet, wifi, cable, all the electronics that are on battery backup, and we recently splurged on a generator. Now, even though we're making a point here, this is not even the biggest point, it's not the biggest error in this argument. So the activists compare today's luxury homes to the yesterday's basic starter cabins and then pretend that proves something. It doesn't. They pretend that minimum wage and median home price proves something when they do not. And I think you get that. But let me come back to our big difference after we make one more little point. To compare eras honestly, you use a constant, a benchmark that adjusts for inflation and doesn't depend on taste, zoning or HGTV trends. One of the best constants we have is the federal poverty line. 1970, poverty line was$1,687. Today it's about$14,600. Now let's compare apples to apples. In 1970 apples were 29 cents a pound, and that was 0.017% of income. Today, apples are between a buck 62 and two 40 a pound. Or 0.14%. Apples are more affordable. But since an apple a day keeps the doctor away, we probably should use a less healthy example that the food stamp generation can all relate to. So let's compare the price of Big Macs. Compare Big Macs, 1970 to today. In 1970 0.038% of the poverty income. Today, also 0.038. Exactly the same. The millennials and Zoomers can bring home a sack of Big Macs to their parents' basement for the exact same share of their poverty income today, as they did in 1970. Let that mathematical truth sink in. And with that, now we arrive at the flaming smoldering center of the story, the climax, the part where you wonder why all these people lie to us. Detroit, Jacksonville, Gary, Birmingham, Alabama, Kansas City, East St. Louis, Memphis. From the 1980s onward, and especially after 2008, these cities had tens of thousands of abandoned houses. Not hypothetical houses, not imaginary houses. Not a number, but actual houses structurally sound in need of repairs maybe, but absolutely habitable with work. I know. I know people who bought them. Many of these sold for a few thousand dollars or a few hundred dollars. And yes, some for$1. The Detroit Land Bank sold lots for a hundred to$250. Entire neighborhoods were available. And here's the outrage, the part that should make your blood boil. We spent money to throw houses away. We didn't just ignore them. We bulldozed them at taxpayer expense because nobody wanted them. Their narrative was not,"We can't afford a house". The narrative was,"We don't want these houses, tear them down". Here's a legendary moment. Detroit elected Mike Duggan as mayor because he promised to tear down houses faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. That was the whole campaign, and it worked because Millennials didn't want those houses and Zoomers don't want them now. And those are the same people."Reposting Houses used to be affordable". They were affordable and still are. Okay. You just don't want those houses. Now ask yourself this. How do all the houses that were bulldozed calculate into Jeff Rose's formula? What minimum wage do you need to buy a house for a dollar? Of course, those values are not included. He used selling prices not value, and those houses didn't sell. He could easily have looked up average assessed value of properties across the country. He's a finance guy, after all. That would've captured the value of all the ho, the homes that were destroyed, as well as all the homes that are around, even if not on the market, Even if not being bought, sold, or traded. If we include the homes, people could have bought, not just the median homes that they did buy. Yeah, the whole minimum- wage- can't buy- a- house- anymore. Argument explodes. But he chose what he chose, a deception that looks deliberate. The problem isn't housing affordability. The houses are there, they always have been. The problem is deceitful influencers who will do anything for clicks. Jeff Rose is truly the AOC of financial planners. So what does all of this really tell us? Let's go back to the missing dollar riddle. What happened to the missing dollar? Well, nothing is missing. We're just looking in the wrong place, comparing the wrong numbers. The men paid$27 total, nine times three. Of that$27, the bellhop kept$2. So the correct operation is$27 minus two equals 25, which is the actual room price. You don't add the bellhops self tipping to the$27 to try to get 30. You subtract it from 27 to get 25, the actual price of the room. So these two stories tell us the problem isn't housing. The houses are there, they've always been there. What's really missing is truth and clarity. And truth is always the first casualty of bad influencers. Here's a truth older than any housing chart: More harm comes from ignorance than from malice. But the real danger, the one that poisons whole generations, is when you find people who may be both: people like Jeff Rose, the AOC of financial planning. People who don't understand the subject yet, insist on leading the parade with a megaphone. It's one thing for potential home buyers to be ignorant. That's fixable. But when you mix ignorance with ambition, with monetized outrage, with a need to go viral, that's when the damage starts, and that's how we end up with millions of young people convinced they're doomed while standing on the ashes of entire neighborhoods that used to be affordable. Starter homes still exist. Opportunities still exist. What doesn't exist or what is scarce is honest guidance from the people chasing clicks. If you want the truth, not the algorithm's bedtime story, stay here. Stay with The Tenth man, because around here, the narrative never outranks the facts.