Is Life More Difficult for Younger Generations?

(Graph source: “Is a Middle Class Life Still Attainable?” by Tom Owens, Aaron Renn Substack.)

In this episode of Upzoned, host Abby Newsham is joined by Kevin Klinkenberg, an urban designer, planner and executive director of a place management organization. They discuss how a middle-class life — especially homeownership — has become increasingly difficult for younger generations to attain. They also cover the factors that contribute to this difficulty and possible responses.

• Click here for a computer-generated transcript.

  Abby Newsham 0:04

  This is Abby, and you are listening to up zone.

  Abby Newsham 0:18

  Hello, everyone. Thanks for listening to another episode of up zone, a show where we talk about a story or recent piece of media that touches the strong towns conversation that each week, and we up zone it. I'm now back from, I think, like, a month hiatus from doing this. We took some time off over the holidays. So exciting to be recording the first story of 2025 with my friend here. Kevin klinkenberg, Kevin, welcome.

  Kevin Klinkenberg 0:48

  Hey, Abby. Thanks for having me on again.

  Abby Newsham 0:52

  So for anyone who hasn't listened to Kevin before or doesn't listen to his podcast, maybe we can start with doing some introductions. You're somebody who wears a lot of hats, kind of a renaissance man person. I'm going to allow you to do your own intro. Well,

  Kevin Klinkenberg 1:11

  I'm originally an architect. I went I got a degree in architecture and but always had an interest in city planning and urban planning type issues. So a lot of my career has been more on the urban planning, urban design side of things, and I currently run a place management organization here at Kansas City called Midtown KC now.

  Abby Newsham 1:34

  So I'm really excited to talk about the article that you shared with me for today. This is an article that was published in Aaron Rens sub stack, but it is a repost by Tom Owens entitled, is a middle class life still attainable? So this article critiques the growing difficulty of achieving middle class lifestyles for younger generations, particularly Gen Z, compared to earlier cohorts like Boomers and Gen x1. Of the kind of ideas that is brought up in this article is a life difficulty index, which is basically the cost of housing, transportation and Basic Life Essentials relative to income levels, which, as you can imagine, has increased significantly, on average across the US. One example the article talks about is that 2000 a starter life. How they define that cost 3.64 times the median income level. And by 2024 that rose to 5.14 and specifically for college graduates, that index rose 76% over the same period. So there's really a lot to, I think, unpack with this article, especially relating to kind of strong towns, principles and ideas. But Kevin, I want to kind of give you an opportunity to open up with your thoughts about this article. You're somebody who is in the Gen X time frame. I am, personally in the late millennial generation. So I know a lot of people who are in that Gen Z kind of generation and getting out of college or early in their careers. And there, there definitely is a really significant sense of difficulty when it comes to these kind of American Dream ideas of owning a home and just achieving the same quality of life that our parents had,

  Kevin Klinkenberg 3:42

  yeah, I mean, I thought it was a really fascinating article. I loved the way he talked about the data and used comparisons from previous years to try to give a baseline for what the expectations were. I mean, I think as I this issue broadly, like, we kind of tend to fall on, like, one side or the other. You tend to be like the grumpy old person that says, Well, kids are just lazy. They're not working hard enough. And, you know, they all want to, like, sit around and play video games and eat avocado toast and and not put in the work that previous generations did, or you tend to be on the younger spectrum, where you're just like, everything is so much harder. You guys don't understand. It's all so much more expensive than than it used to be. And I think there's a case of like, well, two things can be true at the same time that you know, on the one hand, there's still a ton of opportunity in this country to make your way and and to find good careers, to be frugal and save money and live a good life. There's no doubt there's opportunity for that, but it's all there's also no doubt, and I think the article the author, did a great job of sharing this that I. Things are harder we have made. We have made some of these, as you talk talked about, in these benchmarks of American middle class life, they have become objectively harder to attain than they were a generation or two generations ago. And I hope we can talk about why that is, I think there are a lot of reasons for that. You know, it's not just all lifestyle inflation. I think there is lifestyle inflation. There's no doubt that for a lot of younger people, there's an expectation of a certain like kind of house and everything that has grown compared to what maybe their grandparents owned. But that doesn't change the fact that building a new home, buying a car. A lot of the things that we sort of set out as things that people would might like to own, all of it is harder and more expensive than it used to be. It's it's, you can't deny that, and I think that's had a huge impact on how the young people in particular see opportunity in this country, and how they might or might not be forming families compared to previous generations. It's undoubtedly more expensive, even even accounting for lifestyle inflation. So I think we have to kind of talk about why that is, what it is that we've done that have made things more expensive, and maybe what we can do about it?

  Abby Newsham 6:30

  Yeah, the lifestyle question was one that immediately popped up in my head when reading the article, because it's a lot easier to kind of track and measure changes in the costs of like a starter home, new construction homes, cost of owning a vehicle over time, which I would imagine back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, there was probably a norm where People were really owning one car per household rather than having two or maybe three cars per household. But the thing that was really popping up in my head was this question of basic lifestyle needs and how that might be measured now compared to previous generations, because I would imagine that basic necessities, however that is measured, could be a lot more expensive today, just based on our current culture and economy and the way we live. And I think another thing that I think about a lot is that I do feel like quality of life is still higher nowadays than than it maybe was 4050, years ago, just based on what is, what's available in terms of basic lifestyle needs? But I could be wrong. That might be just my perspective.

  Kevin Klinkenberg 8:01

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know. It's hard to say. I think there's definitely a lot of things that are better. I mean, let's not quibble about that. You know, it's like people have washing machines now, and we have microwave ovens, and we have a lot of time saving and appliances and things that make life easier and better, but also more expensive, but more expensive, no doubt. And cars do a whole lot more things than they did 50 years ago, and they have incredible, expensive equipment in them that that we enjoy, but, you know, it adds to their cost. But even then still, the baseline cost of a lot of things is still harder there's higher than than, I think what it should be. And I when I think about this Abby, I think about like, if we dial it back to the world that we know best, which is, you know, development planning, housing, it's unequivocally harder and more expensive to build housing now than it was 50 years ago, 70 years ago, etc, because of all of the layers of process and that somebody has to go through to build anything. And we, you know, we can talk about what, what in there is necessary and good, and what might not be necessary or helpful, but it's just simply, it's very easy to see that all of the things that you might need to do to build any kind of a house, whether at a suburban location, an urban location, there's a whole lot more rules and process and things that you have to understand, to go through to get it done than what you used to have to have to get it done, and that just adds time and cost to anything that we do.

  Abby Newsham 9:46

  You know, it always blows my mind just thinking about back in the day when people were getting Sears kit homes delivered to their properties and just assembling their homes on site. And. And the way we build housing is so so different. Obviously, we live in a very different society with different people and even abilities to assemble a house. But, you know, I could imagine that just being able to put your own labor into your house also saved saved save money back in the day, of course, you had to expense your time and efforts. But we don't even have that as really an option nowadays. You really have to be like a professional developer to build. And you know, there's the option of building in Greenfield areas or building in places that already have infrastructure and legacy neighborhoods where there's vacant lots, and it tends to be that that the areas that have existing infrastructure and vacant lots are a lot more difficult to actually build housing in, which extrapolates the cost of of our world. Can we talk a little bit about that, some of the differences between those two settings and how that might also contribute to cost of living?

  Kevin Klinkenberg 11:09

  Well, I mean, over the course of many decades, we've professionalized and segmented all aspects of our economy, and there are certainly benefits to that. There are a lot of things that are done better as a result, because they're specialized and professionalized. But there are downsides as well. And you know, for example, in the building trades, in the building world, you used to before we professionalized everything, it used to be really easy, where you could build your own home. And there there were, there's not a whole slew of rules that you had to do that, and that allowed for people at the very, very low end to build very often substandard housing, but they could build housing for themselves, or even at the middle class level. If you were capable, it would be very easy to build and assemble your own home without a lot of hassle. That's just not even allowed in most jurisdictions anymore. You have to hire a professional builder in most cases, and a series of subcontractors, all of whom have to make a profit to make a living. And that has a huge impact on the cost of everything, and that kind of cascades through all of society in different ways.

  Abby Newsham 12:25

  Yeah, the article also brought up this idea of, like, credential inflation, which I think kind of falls in line with that idea specifically about college degrees and how the value of them has really diminished due to, like, lower academic rigor and broader access, which contributes to wax wage stagnation for graduates, you know, so, so that's kind of layered on top of this, like professionalization of of everything in our society. And ironically, a lot of people that I know who don't have a college degree are finding ways to make a lot more money with no student loan debt compared to my peers that like myself that do have a college degree. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that something, something I did want to talk about was how housing affordability is also impacted by development patterns and kind of public policy that reinforces our development pattern the cost of housing and development. What I have seen a lot is a lot of different public policy ideas having to do with housing that further increases the cost to actually build a house and makes it very difficult to do even like one off housing or missing middle, smaller scale housing types. Do you think that there are certain, I guess, public policy reforms, zoning or otherwise, that cities should be thinking about when addressing affordability. Yeah.

  Kevin Klinkenberg 14:08

  I mean, we've kind of hit on this a little bit before, but there's, there's no question that the type of housing that is the most affordable to build, we have made really difficult to build for in a variety of ways. And it's not just on the zoning and development side. It's on the financing side as well, and and appraising and everything else, but that sort of, let's say, three story and under wood frame construction is the backbone of the cheapest form of housing that can be built if it's especially if it's a small footprint. And our cities are older cities. If you're fortunate to live in a place that has a lot of housing stock, say, before the 1930s you have a lot of that. And those are, you know, that's what, what constitutes sort of the missing middle. Most of that housing was built in. By the kinds of small and local investors today that do house flips or just don't participate in the housing market at all, because there was very little friction involved with building any of that housing to begin with. In fact, an awful lot of it was built before there were ever any kind of planning or building regulations at all, and they still exist today, 100 years later, and are often some of the more desirable parts of our cities. So anything that we can do to kind of change the nature of that economy, to make it easy to build the inexpensive stuff that is actually fairly easy to build, that that really helps, and I think that can, that can help housing outcomes. The The other thing I would just say, I think, related to your point about development patterns, the one thing that we certainly talk about in our world a lot, but is not talked about broadly in the housing price issue is that the two most expensive household items, typically for most households, are housing and transportation. 100 years ago, that was not the case. 100 years ago, transportation was almost zero for most houses, for most households today, it's many times equal to or sometimes even higher than the cost of housing, simply because of the cars that people are buying and all of the expense that goes with owning cars. And so I don't mean this to be an anti car diatribe at all, but it's just a stark reality that as we have built places where you are forced to drive everywhere that makes the cost of living more expensive. And if we go back to the authors like original comparison, if you think about like the boomer generation as they started coming of age in the 1960s and in that era, we still had fairly intact cities and towns where people had choices to get around that were pretty easy, other than driving. So having that one car per household was actually a viable way to live, because you still could walk to a lot of your destinations. In that era, you had public transportation services that were much better in a lot of cities than they are today, or at least more widely available. And so that sort of attainable middle class lifestyle, uh, goes hand in hand with communities where where people have choices and they have options on how to live and how to get around.

  Abby Newsham 17:40

  Yeah, this idea of a middle class lifestyle, and even, I think we've talked before on the show about the quote, unquote, American dream and everything that's packed into that idea. Do you think that there's a lot of Do you think there's more of a, I guess, cultural and psychological dimension to how we define middle class and American Dream that maybe we aren't thinking about in terms of how our ancestors may have thought about I'm just thinking that, you know, my parents generation specifically, I feel like there was a cultural incentive to be more prone to keeping up with the Joneses, and those cultural expectations are kind of changing with younger generations, where I maybe this is, this is a broad statement, but it just it does seem like a lot of younger people are less materialistic when it comes to large expensive items, like, like expensive vehicles or big houses in the suburbs, that seems to be something that is slowly going away as like a required status symbol. I don't know, what are your thoughts on that? I mean,

  Kevin Klinkenberg 18:59

  I don't know. It's hard, hard to know. I I still traffic in a world where it feels like there's a lot of Keeping Up with the Joneses. And I hope that, I mean, I hope that's I hope you're right. I think it's not healthy to kind of have that attitude of we have to spend our way to happiness. That's not a good way to live. It's not a good attitude to have towards life, because, as I'm sure you know, you know, an awful lot of the true joys of life and happiness come from, you know, other other aspects of life, besides just spending money. But that's where I felt like the end of this article, where he started giving some recommendations, was really, really almost like the best part of it, and and some really insightful things. And as he, as you, talk about that difference in attitude, it makes me think about, you know, a lot of his advice is kind of coming around to commonplace. I. Is that we're commonplace, let's say 100 150 years ago, or attitudes. And it might be that we're coming back to that. So like just ticking them off real quick. You know, he says, help your kids. You know, if you're in a place where you can help your kids, help them. Don't worry about ruining them, right? Your things are, some of these things are harder, so help them. Another one is, you know, be very cautious about debt, and that makes me think about the whole financial independence movement, which has really been blossomed the last 15 years with, frankly, with millennials who are trying to figure out how to live a good life in spite of higher costs, and that that's cool. And then the last thing he mentioned was embracing multi generational living, which again, is really the historic norm for how families lived before, sort of the poor post World War Two era. And I actually think that's a beautiful thing. I think the if we could get back to families that had multiple generations living together comfortably. There's great just economic rationale, but there's just great social and family rationale for that, and there's a lot of benefits from it, but we got away from that for a lot of decades in the post World War Two, boom,

  Abby Newsham 21:19

  yeah, I love the recommendations around intergenerational collaboration. I think it very much aligns with some of the needs in the housing space. One thing that I was really wondering about, though, is how I mean that really relates to families, and so I think some people have families where that works their Boomer, Boomer parents, maybe own their house, or have, you know, have a house that they bought a long time ago at a low price, and there's some some wealth in that. But how do communities, I guess, create some kind of system of mutual support that extend beyond family structures. I think that's kind of the question of, how do you how do you support people and unravel these kinds of changes beyond the family? I don't know that there's a clear answer to that.

  Kevin Klinkenberg 22:16

  Yeah, there, there, there may not be, and it may be that we can, just as communities allow more diverse types of housing that we may just see that emerge kind of on its own. And you know, the one of the simple things we talk we have talked about a lot, is just allowing accessory dwelling units or ADUs as a normal feature of housing. That's a simple way that we can diversify housing stock in a manner that physically you won't even notice it in most neighborhoods. But it really can offer a ton of flexibility for family living, for multi generational living, or in the case of like our good friend Monty Anderson, he has his roommate house idea, yes, which is not necessarily tied to a family. Could it's just a it's a way for different adults to live together on the same property. And I think there's a ton of benefit in that, but it requires us having a more flexible attitude towards housing types and neighbor neighborhood development than what we've had up till now.

  Abby Newsham 23:28

  Yeah, Monty's roommate house is really interesting because he's brought up a lot, and I think he's brought up on this show before that the the largest growing kind of demographic of people looking for housing is young widows, or, I'm sorry, old widows, specifically women who are living alone and aren't necessarily going to be living in a nursing home. They can live independently, but they may not want to be in an apartment by themselves or a house by themselves. And Monty's model for this roommate house has been really successful because it's a form of suburban retrofit, taking a large, I believe it's a ranch style house, and they have a pool, which is pretty cool, yeah, no doubt. And sharing it with with a group of of seniors, basically, which I think is a really smart model, not just on a, you know, housing development perspective, but also psychologically, to be around peers as you're getting older, I think would be, I mean, that sounds like a really great thing, and I hope that more people start to look more seriously at these models That retrofit large buildings, because so many households are not the prototypical, you know, four, five people, you know, suburban family. There's so many people that are just singles or young couples, for example, that don't need a lot of space and would benefit, I think, from a. From a roommate house or something similar? Yeah,

  Kevin Klinkenberg 25:03

  yeah, no question. And there's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of just great social benefits to that, not to mention the practical ones. You know, I often think about the situation we're in with my with my parents, before they passed and we had to move them out of their their house. We were fortunate in a position that I had a sister who could take them in, and had sort of a master suite that they could live in, and so they had a bit of that generational sharing environment, because we didn't want them to be in a nursing home. And so they were able to live out their last days in that arrangement. If we had had something similar at like my my house with our family, it would have been, you know, would have been wonderful to have them here for their last days and to be with, be with their grandkids and everything else. So we just have to get more thoughtful and creative about how we think about housing generally. You know, Abby, there's just one I said one thing that did come to mind as back to sort of the original question about whether things are more expensive or harder or not. I just did a quick check before we came on that I was thinking about the first house that I bought when I was 24 years old, or maybe 25 I bought this house that I've joked about was the not great triplex. Was an old house that was divided into three units, one unit per floor, and I bought that in 1995 for $85,000 now it needed work. You know, it it, but it was livable. It was, it was a nice place that was livable. It needed it needed work. And I put a lot into it over, over the years of living there. But just looking at a strict inflation calculator, that house would be that same 85,000 would be about 180,000 today, there's, there's no, there's just no way that you can touch anything comparable for $180,000 today. Yeah, even as you go to neighborhoods that are lower in quality, but say the similar house, you're still going to pay 250, to $300,000 for the size of place that was and so, I mean, there really is a difference that has happened in the cost of living for some of these things that we really cherish. And I think we've just got to, we've got to be serious about addressing that, especially if we want to encourage people to own as I think we should. Yeah,

  Abby Newsham 27:37

  I do too. And you know, really the thing that I've been wondering about a lot is whether or not this is something, this is an issue with, I don't want to say solutions, but new approaches, whether that will be driven by public policy or just driven out of necessity, like this article talks about you know, multi generational living young people changing their spending habits. I mean, as somebody who's like a younger millennial, the the 2008 situation, definitely, I was a kid at that time, and that that definitely impacted how much money I spent on my education, how much money I have spent on my housing, and, you know, wanting to have as little debt as possible. And I know a lot of people like that, although I know a lot of people who didn't choose those who didn't take that route as well, but I I could imagine that it will be a combination of, hopefully multiple generations working together to redistribute some of some of the support that does exist, and also young people changing their habits and expectations over time.

  Kevin Klinkenberg 28:59

  Yeah, and I think you're right. I think some of that is emerging and has been happening anyway, as people just try to live their lives and figure things out. But we could, we could use some help. And I think, I think the overall message from the article to say, Hey, don't discount this there. There's a difference. You know, we need to, we need to help younger generations and help them achieve what a lot of us were able to achieve.

  Abby Newsham 29:26

  Yeah, so the last thing I wanted to talk about is income levels. Because, you know, part of the conversation is what people are actually making in order to afford the inflation that we are experiencing. There's kind of this split idea about the cost of living, that whether or not there will be some kind of crash where housing will be affordable. Again, I personally don't see that happening. But you never say never. It seems to me. That what is most needed is for income levels to rise with what we've experienced with inflation. Do you think that that is something that's feasible over the next 1020, years, for incomes to actually increase to the levels that they need to be?

  Kevin Klinkenberg 30:18

  I mean, I don't know. We get start to get out of my own depth on that pretty quickly. I think if you look at the track record of, say, the last 40 or 50 years, you would say that one of the challenges is that middle class incomes overall have not risen anywhere to keep up with the pace of inflation. It seems to me it's easier, from a policy standpoint, to deal with the expense side of it and curtail the inflationary pressures rather than the income side. But I don't know. What do I know? I guess I think about it very simplistically, and part of this is the bias of my interest in the financial independence movement, which is, you can control your expenses, and it's you can't really control control your income. You can work hard to improve your income and do smart things that increase the likelihood of higher income and and you made a really insightful comment that for a lot of younger people today, maybe even just coming out of high school, that it's a real question of whether a college degree is worth it, depending on which field, certainly depending on which field you're going into, but the the amount of debt that you might incur, I don't know. I mean, I don't, I don't know what's worth in that regard. And there are a lot of really, really good jobs that can be had with good incomes that don't really require a college degree at all. We have a huge shortage of people in the building trades. There are computer programming jobs that are that people can get. There are all sorts of things that people can do that that, you know, make a middle class income that don't require going $200,000 in debt. So I feel like there are some smart things to do, but, you know, the easiest thing for an individual to do is figure out how you can control your own expenses and then work to improve your lifestyle and income as as you have the opportunity, whether, whether that'll happen on a society wide basis or not. I have no I have no idea. So,

  Abby Newsham 32:32

  yeah, it's out of my out of my scope as well. But a question we're throwing out there, and it actually, what you just said, does make me think about universities and whether or not they'll pivot from the like typical four year college model to offering other options so that they don't lose all of their students in the Next 1020, years. Um, but that's probably a conversation for another episode. I mean,

  Kevin Klinkenberg 33:03

  it's hard to those are, those are big ships, and they're hard to turn and there's a lot of institutional inertia with a big institution, so that that's a tough challenge for colleges and universities and and I think the most likely scenarios you have people who figure out trades that they can do and they can learn quickly, whether it's a physical trade or, you know, a virtual, online trade, whatever it is. And if people can, if, if people can demonstrate that they can do something for six to 12 months and learn a valuable skill, where they can learn a median income right away. Then that's what will put pressure on the colleges.

  Abby Newsham 33:47

  Yeah, yeah, totally. Well, we're running out of time, and you probably need to get prepared for this serious snowstorm, storm of the

  Kevin Klinkenberg 33:57

  century. I

  Abby Newsham 33:58

  know that's what they say. I have no doubt we will get snow, but, you know, we'll see if it's the storm of the century. The century is still new.

  Kevin Klinkenberg 34:09

  So, yeah, no doubt.

  Abby Newsham 34:13

  Okay, well, thanks so much for joining me before we get done. I wanted to do this the down zone, if that's okay with you, yeah, sure. All right, so this is the part of the show where we can talk about anything that we've been up to lately, anything on our mind, Kevin, I will just throw it to you, put you on the spot.

  Kevin Klinkenberg 34:30

  Well, I mean, it's the it's been the end of the year and the holiday season, and so that's pretty all consuming. On our end, we still, we have two little kids that are still young enough that everything about Christmas and this time of year is magical to them. So we, we are, have been reveling in that and and it's just, it's nice to be able to enjoy things through through their eyes. I. And I always love this time of year, Christmas and New Year's. It's, it's a wonderful time of year. And it's just, it's fun to it's fun to give as well as receive, and that's a great thing. I've also had a long tradition of actually going out on New Year's Eve and enjoying that as well. I'm still, I'm probably too old to be doing that on a regular basis, but I still, I still love it and and so we like to ring in the new year every year. And one of the fun things that we have here locally that that I talked with you about, but there's a great brewery called Casey beer company, b i e r that only makes German style beers. And every, every year, they throw a German New Year's Eve bash, which is actually timed for five o'clock. So they ring in the new year at five o'clock, central time. And it's just one of those things where it's become kind of a really big event for them. And they do all the, a lot of the German traditions, and it's just unique and fun. And I love stuff like that, where it's just kind of a different take on new year's than than something. What a

  Abby Newsham 36:13

  cool idea. I didn't realize that they run in the new year at five o'clock, but I knew that you guys were going to that I actually, on New Year's Eve, I had kind of a German New Year's Eve. I went to, I'm going to pronounce this incorrectly, but grana, or is that? Yeah? Oh, gruna Or yeah, the restaurant, yeah. I went there for the first time, and I'd never had German food before, and it was awesome. And ironically, our friend Kevin, or sorry, our friend Andrew was at the Grun hour. And was that Austria? Yeah, recently, yeah, so small world, but yeah, no doubt. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Um, well, I am currently in an extended kind of holiday break right now. I am going to Mexico a little bit later this week, on Friday, so I'm going to be visiting Leon Mexico and San Miguel D and day as well, and some other towns in that region. So pretty excited about that, this upcoming trip and to get out of the

  Kevin Klinkenberg 37:26

  cold weather. Yeah, what a what a great time of year to go

  Abby Newsham 37:29

  to Mexico. No kidding, as we have this huge storm coming in, I keep looking at the weather in Mexico. So yeah, six more days and I will be there. Fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Well, Kevin, thank you very much for joining me today. Uh, stay stay warm. Stay safe from from the cold, and I will talk to you next time. Thanks, Abby, good to talk to you. Good to talk to you. And thanks everyone for listening to another episode of up. Sound bye.

ADDITIONAL SHOW NOTES

• “Is a Middle Class Life Still Attainable?” by Tom Owens, Aaron Renn Substack (December 2024).

• Read more from Kevin Klinkenberg on Strong Towns or his Substack The Messy City.

• Abby Newsham (X/Twitter).

• Theme Music by Kemet the Phantom.

---

---

RELATED STORIES

---