“It’s all your boomers’ fault! “ declared my second son, after I inquired about his house-hunting escapades. “They own two or three houses as investments and have ruined it for us.” Seeing the look on my face, he then quickly backtracked, “Not you mum, just your generation.”
It was nice to know I wasn’t instantly vilified and tarred, feathered and associated with my fellow boomers. I had for a nanosecond thought about cutting him out of the will.
The declaration from my well-educated son had been spurred on by someone writing a letter in a daily newspaper, asking a financial guru how he/she could keep their primary residence and beach house, and access the Age Pension. Son was both bemused and furious at the nerve of the person and, somehow, I copped some of the wrath.
The high cost of housing and the lack of affordable rentals is, of course, a continuing discussion in the media and no doubt in many boomer households. Many of us wonder how we can help our adult children even put a foot in the housing market, let alone purchase in a suburb near where they work or wish to live. It seems to be a problem in many Western countries and the need to find a scapegoat is high on the agenda for many disenfranchised souls.
But is it all our fault? I do concede that as a proportion of income, the cost of housing is far greater than we had to endure. The ability to get a loan and to pay the exorbitant sums that are being asked for houses seems both absurd and terrifying.
Another friend’s son had had a chat with me about his house-hunting exploits too, and he quickly bemoaned the fact that he had a huge HECS debt that was a burden for his loan applications.
I realised that my generation did not have this burden, thanks to Gough Whitlam, and I felt more than a level of guilt that I had sailed through my early adult life free of debt. Now, of course, this HECS debt is being taxed at the rate of CPI and with inflation raging, many young adults are accumulating an even bigger debt. It is demoralising to say the least.
But in conversation with other boomer friends, another aspect of this situation arose. “Well, we only had cast-off furniture, we didn’t go out for dinner, no Uber Eats for us, we didn’t get our nails done” came the factual refrains from my friends attempting to malign the younger generation’s spending habits. It all had tones of avocado on toast, the metaphor of the old denouncing the young eating breakfast out instead of sitting at home with Vegemite on toast. The common view was that our children needed to pull their heads in more, save like crazy and make do with a very basic house and lifestyle. For a while. Perhaps until we dropped off our collective perches.
So, each generation is blaming the other for the housing crisis, when it seems to me that the problem has been an attitudinal shift in how we view housing. Instead of seeing the need for a place to live, a sanctuary from the barbarians at the gate, society now sees housing as an investment, a way to make money, to increase your wealth at the expense of the community. Greed rears its head.
I have no reassuring answer though. Perhaps we should push for changes in legislation that limits the number of investment properties or change the taxation laws regarding housing investments. But blaming one generation over the other solves nothing.
Is it fair to blame the baby boomer generation for the current housing crisis? Or are young people pointing the finger unfairly? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
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