I get personal in this episode, in order to ask questions about the nature of what is called the “housing crisis.” Are we all just doom-pilling way too much? As a case study, I talk through the life and history of my parents, and discuss whether or not their life and lifestyle is still available today. I discuss house sizes, mortgage rates, lifestyle choices, lifestyle inflation, and more. Find more content on The Messy City on Kevin’s Substack page. Music notes: all songs by low standards, ca. 2010. Videos here. If you’d like a CD for low standards, message me and you can have one for only $5. Intro: “Why Be Friends” Outro: “Fairweather Friend” AI Transcript Introduction Welcome back to The Messy City Podcast. This is Kevin Klinkenberg. I’m going to do something a little different today and just talk without a guest about the topic of housing in particular and how it ties into a few other kind of hobby courses of mine. Why Challenge the Housing Narrative Really what I want to spend some time doing is taking a contrarian view of how we talk about the so-called housing crisis. And in one sense, this is kind of fun for me to do. One of the things I really loved about my father is when we would have our discussions or debates in the family about various things that were going on, he would often take an opposite view of Almost just for the sport of it. And the truth is, there are a lot of times he was so good at it, you didn’t really know if he felt that way or not. Because he could do really well to argue multiple sides of an argument. And that was really a lot of fun. It was an education for me. It’s something I wish more people would just do generally and try to see an issue from multiple perspectives and try to steel man different perspectives or perspectives that are different from your own. And so I’ve kind of taken to obviously do that if you know me at all. You know I’ve done that a fair amount in my own life. Not nearly as good as my father was at it, but it has been fun to do occasionally. And I really wanted to apply this to the topic of housing. And there’s a couple of reasons for this. And this also ties into a story. I’m going to tell you a little bit of a story about my parents and how they grew up and their trajectory through life, because I think it’s actually very relevant to this topic. And whether or not we have a housing crisis at all in America, or if we do, what is the actual nature of of that crisis. And I want to talk about this because I just see so much online and in person conversation that I just feel like there are too many people, especially too many young people that have been kind of doom pilled on life today and life in America generally. And the thing that I want to start out that I really want to propose to everybody and talk about is the life that my parents had And their trajectory through life is still available today. It is absolutely and unequivocally still available to anyone who wants to choose the life that they lived. And in my opinion, obviously, I knew them really well. In my opinion, they had a tremendous life. They had a great life. They’ve both passed on in recent years. And so I have to talk in the past tense. But by any measure that matters, they had a great life. They lived well into their 80s. They had four kids. We actually all like each other. So it’s not just like a, you know, there are some families where you can say, well, I love my family. But as my brother used to say, or after my dad passed, he would say, you know, that... We didn’t just love our parents, we really liked our parents. And I think if you’re fortunate to be in a family like that, you know a little bit of what I’m talking about. And the four of us as children all... We get along. We’re still all friends with each other and get along. We enjoy being together. We’re all very different people with different interests and different worldviews. In some senses, we had pretty different childhoods, interestingly enough, because there’s a big age spread in our family. So my parents had four kids that they raised. They had a long, stable marriage. They were able to get consecutively better houses as they aged. And then by the time they hit retirement age, they had saved enough money to be able to do other things that they wanted to do. Along the way, they traveled when they wanted to. They really wanted to get out and see the country, see the world. When we were young, that traveling mostly involved just driving around the United States and going to national parks and big cities and seeing the sights. As they got older and had a little bit more disposable income, they would join tour groups and go or sometimes with family to foreign countries and places they really wanted to visit. And I want to give you some context because my parents were not people that grew up with money at all. And I’m going to share some of this because I think it’s important to understand. How they came to be where they were and some of the choices they made and how it might impact choices that young people especially could make today. My Parents’ Story My mom grew up very poor. She spent a part of her childhood living in a housing project in Syracuse, New York. And she was one of five kids and they, you know, her whole childhood they never had any money for much of anything. And they often lived in not the greatest part of town, in Syracuse, even when they got out of the housing project. And my dad grew up in a small town in Kansas called Baser, which is just outside the Kansas City area. But at the time when he was growing up, it was a dusty little town of like 600 people. And, again, one of five kids. And his dad was an auto mechanic, had his own garage, but also just, you know, like people do in Little Towns, did a little bit of everything. He drove a school bus. We helped out with the mail. We did a lot of different things in the town. But it’s not like they ever really had any money. My Uncle George, one of my dad’s brothers, used to say that they were all poor, but they didn’t know it. And part of that is the nature of living in a small rural community. They had a lot of spare time and freedom to roam. And so they probably were able to, you know, occupy themselves with a lot of things that maybe other kids weren’t. My mom’s father, my mom’s parents had a really difficult marriage. My grandfather, her father basically worked in a deli in Syracuse and he And so he worked in a Jewish deli. He was a very, very personable guy, made a lot of his own, made his own corned beef and bagels and everything. And a lot of the customers liked him, but it’s not like he ever really made a lot of money. And he and his wife, my grandmother, had a really difficult time, eventually ended up divorcing. And my parents ended up meeting each other in sort of a star-crossed romance that I don’t really have time to tell the entire story. But it ended up that they met when my mom was visiting a friend in Leavenworth, Kansas. And... Not too long after that, a romance ensued and eventually a marriage. My parents were born in 1935 and 36, so they’re not boomers. They’re sort of, I guess, what you would call as greatest generation. But they were too young to be deeply invested in the Great Depression or World War II. They were little kids, really, when all that was going on. So I guess in a sense what you could say is they had the cultural memory of those things. They grew up understanding what life was like in the Great Depression. They grew up poor. They grew up during the war and they knew all that that was going on and they were very well attuned to it, but they weren’t part of it. And I think like a lot of people who grew up in that era, they were really affected, especially by the poverty of what was happening. So one of the things that we used to always say about my mom is she could stretch a nickel like anybody’s business. She was frugal her entire life. And that really came from growing up with next to nothing. And then for many years... After they were married and started having kids, they were living off basically one salary, not like a big salary or anything, for a long time. And so my mom really had to stretch everything to make ends meet. I’m going to come back to the housing part of this because I think there’s some importance to all this. The Housing Ladder My parents got married in 1957, on Christmas Eve of 1957, and then right after that, flew off to Germany. My dad at the time, 21, 22 years old, he had been working a little bit, but he decided he wanted to enlist in the Army, and they spent two years in the Army. He was basically sent off to Germany. And so obviously, you know, late 50s, a great time to be sent off to Germany. No active fighting or anything going on. And they spent two years there. My oldest sister was born in Germany. And then my next sister, I guess you could say, was conceived in Germany. And... And then born back here in the United States when they came back. So by the time they came back to the United States, it’s about 1960, and they’ve got two little kids. And at that time, shortly after they bought their first house, which was in a not so great part of the Kansas City area. It was in Kansas City, Kansas. It was not a terrible area, but not like the greatest. And they bought a small house. And I’ve had some trouble finding out the exact details in this house, but I think it was probably a two or three bedroom with one bath. It’s since been added on to, so it’s hard for me to know exactly. But in this period of time, 1960 or so, that would have been their first house. And, you know, my siblings are just going to really... I want to mock my lack of understanding on some of these details, but I think by the time they left that house, my brother had also been born. So there were three kids there. And I want to trace
