https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4611-Esper-Ln-324-Austin-...
I'm somewhat familiar with the area as I like to go to events at Circuit of the Americas often.
It's out there. There's really not much close nearby other than more houses. It's not like there's a lot of outdoorsy stuff, almost all the land around there is owned by private entities, almost no public park lands so it doesn't even have the "but at least there's nature!" aspect to it.
Expect at least half an hour drive each way to go to anything "Austin", in good traffic.
But, I do have to hand it to Austin, a part of why it's cheap is because of their aggressive construction.
It might be worth just downloading the data from the Fed yourself and having the coding harness of your choice build whatever data visualization you want:
And I'm not even sure where the part is on the site detailing this '23% fall' mentioned in the title is. Cause there certainly isn't any historical data provided on the page...
But I don't see data for 2022 on the page? I searched for "2022" and found nothing?
What makes it odd to me is that real median incomes for both individuals and households rose 6.2% over that period. That includes all people, but what I can find specifically on younger people is even more optimistic.
https://fortune.com/2026/09/22/gen-z-wealth-income-vs-boomer...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mehoinusa672n# https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Edit: someone linked the data below. Seems like 2022 was an outlier. All numbers in 2025 dollars. 2019 17.8k 2022 42.7k 2025 32.8k
So from 2019 to 2025, median net wealth for people under 35 increased by 84%.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/scf/dataviz/scf/chart...
Now, if you add my partner, we could add another 1,500 square feet to the living space, you know, because of "stuff," and then we'd need to double the garage size for her art studio and project space.
And that doesn't include the space we use for a berry garden, fruit trees, and vegetables.
The pandemic created a ton of wealth for whomever would've had the most money in the market at that time and the most stability, to the point where there's basically no chance anyone else reaching those same ages after the pandemic could catch up without some miracle. Ya it's still better in real dollars than 2019 by a significant amount, but it would need to be even more significant for it to be optimistic, imo.
Edit: Looking at the The Fed chart you posted a bit further, there hasn't been a similar relative drop in any other 3 year period from 1989 onward. The closest period overall would be 2004-2010, and secondly 1995-1998. That's... pretty dramatic
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/04/nx-s1-5760948/high-housing-co...
https://eyeonhousing.org/2025/04/house-sharing-is-not-just-f...
And that prediction would have been dead wrong for much of the past 4 decades, except for the post pandemic inflation surge, but that's the exception that proves the rule. Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The Dow, the Dow right now
Is over fifty thou
I don't know why you're laughing
That's what we should be talking abou
The Dow, the Dow right now
S&P is almost seven thou
The American people need to know this,
Need to know, how is the Dow?
That's $7k per year, which they have to save from the surplus after paying their rents, groceries, healthcare, university debts and everything else.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/median-weekly-earnings-by-...
THEN it will go quite far
quite far to teach you you have been played out of your youth and now you are poor
One of the best aspects of “youth” is your health to be fair which can often be enjoyed cheaply - I.e. gyms/ hiking / healthy food doesn’t require a ton of lifestyle creep.
And I say only because it's a lot of money, and it's not a lot of money... if you have to pay rent, or mortgage payments, or car payments... car will be reposesed, credit score will go south really fast, and everything is tied to the credit score, so they know how low they can drop the ball and you will still accept because you are in need.
I want you to remember, the american dream... one person working as a mail man can bring food to the table, pay the mortgage while the wife raise the kids and kids go to school, you retire 40 years later with social security giving you enough for the basics...
Then this is for someone with university debt... so this is the case for someone with a title... what's the situation for the other unlucky 95% of america?
I doubt most of Western Europe would agree with you. They seem to feel a lot happier and healthier. They have better social mobility, and less household debt.
I don't think the problem is growing expectations. Being able to own a home and affordably raise a family are extremely old expectations. If anything, people seem to be forced into compromising more and more.
> They seem to feel a lot happier and healthier.
On average I would agree. I didn't see extreme poverty like I saw in the US and cost of living is a lot better when you consider that quality of everything is higher; especially in terms of food.
> They have better social mobility,
My experience is that this is not the case. Germany had almost no mobility at all. Even startups are structured in such a way that you can barely even see the CEO, let alone talk to them and society is structured to protect incumbents through regulations and bureaucracy. The only people who get rich in such system (like in Crypto sector) are extremely crony. Feels like they have some really weird agenda. The whole country feels like a giant money laundering scheme.
As for France; the salaries for software engineers were really low last time I checked. Might as well drive an Uber.
I got pretty lucky with one of the (EdTech) startups I was early employee at giving me shares and it grew from nothing to over 1 million active paid subscriptions. Also, I joined a crypto project which rose to $4 billion valuation (joined at like $300 million valuation) but I was only able to get about $30k out of that in spite of hard hustling and leading one of the most important teams. Literally I put pressure on them to get a raise for 1 year and eventually had to quit to show I was serious.
I self-taught myself coding at 14 and have been working non-stop including nights and weekends and saving everything I could.
My net worth now is only $80k liquid at 36 years old. $130k if you include my illiquid retirement fund. So to me, $70k at 33 on a median income looks incredible. I'm not based in the US though. Maybe it's easier over there.
The US Census Bureau says 49.2% of adults 30-34 are homeowners in the US, so clearly many people are figuring out how to save and invest.
I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen in the future, but I'm sure that it's going to be wildly different from the current status quo in a number of countries.
This is how the two party system evolved to sustain the status quo. When people are mad about something, divide the people into two parties and have them each demand a different solution while demonizing the solution of the other party, so that their votes cancel out and then nothing changes.
Extra points if you can get them to demand something unnecessarily polarizing, disproportionate or simplistic when there are better solutions available, because then you can get them to fight against the moderates too.
Notice also that when you point this out to a partisan, they have a tendency to violently agree and then immediately mischaracterize the problem as being that the other party is bad and wrong and the solution is to have everybody do their party's thing.
The American Revolution wasn't radical change from the British system, but thoughtful improvements on it. The French Revolution, and the Communist revolutions were all disasters. The slave revolt in Haiti has produced long-term poor results compared to the Dominican Republic. The American occupation of Japan is arguable, but given that they kept the emperor and one party was in power for the next 50+ years just like before, I have some doubts.
But this site looks like GPT made it, doesn't it? I can see GPT's characteristic green button UI and beige color scheme. GPT 6.1 tends to use a green-toned UI.
What I mean by an emerging industry is one that requires little capital and has few entrenched players—in the end, an industry where new entrants can compete with small initial capital. That's how I'd redefine it.
Because in the IT boom era, there were many technological opportunities. The boss who hired me was one example. But in the case of industrial robot manufacturing, the existing hardware supply chain is, by and large, the one investing.
In the end, what I want to say comes down to this: there are fewer industries open to new entrants.
Because in the IT boom and the construction boom, there were markets that needed less capital than you'd think in the early days. In subcontracting, for instance, you could enter with relatively little capital. But in today's technologically advanced industries, initial capital requirements are far higher. So in the past, even within the same category of industry, there clearly existed sub-markets you could participate in with comparatively little initial capital.
For example, in the old IT industry, my seniors 20 years ago said it took surprisingly little capital. But today's market isn't like that. I think this is a problem that arises as industries become more advanced.
There's a paper I read some time ago arguing that as an industry becomes more advanced, the knowledge and resources required to make a product increase.[1] [1]https://www.nber.org/papers/w27787
no, not really
You could ask Claude to write an article about how water is wet and it'll still be slop.
https://livehandbook.org/higher-education/miscellaneous/inte...
So people are trying to understand what do you intend to really say when you say you don’t see American undergraduates anymore and that it’s all internationals.
[1] https://livehandbook.org/higher-education/miscellaneous/inte...
https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market#--:...