This sounds interesting, how did you calcualte this?
Comment on Work harder, afford less?
lyralycan@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
Yeah I worked this out a few years back. 1955/1985/2015, minimum wages in relation to the cost of a house. In 1955 it was equivalent to £45/h; in 1985 £26; in 2015 £9/h
Nester@feddit.uk 15 hours ago
thenoirwolfess@fedinsfw.app 14 hours ago
A lot of cross-referencing, finding studies/articles and historical archives of both for the time period (conveniently one from 1955 was available) regarding 2 bedroom house prices on average across the Kingdom, and the government’s data on minimum wages. I divided the house cost by the wage per hour for each period, and got the hours necessary to earn that much. I then made a very rough assumption of the ability to save 40% of the total earned and arrived at a more realistic timeframe to buy a house outright.
Once I had the monetary value of each thing I put them into the RBS Inflation Calculator to see their value today. Minimum wages in 1955 were equal to ~£25, but 2 bed house prices were nearly half the price they are now, so for the wages to match the housing market also they need to be ~£48. (I performed this study in 2018 but before an event involving the loss of most of my digital data. I should remake the study so you guys don’t rely on my memory alone)
TrickDacy@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
They asked someone how they calculated something and then you, a completely different person, answered as though you were the person being asked.
Steve@communick.news 13 hours ago
Is it a different person?
Or just a different account?
The world may never know.Nouvellalia@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Hi, Internet, we’re all Internet. It’s like dreaming; it doesn’t have to make sense, it just has to seem like it makes sense. Does this make sense?🙏
Nester@feddit.uk 14 hours ago
Ah ok, that all makes sense to me. Thank you for taking the time to go through it 🙂
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
One thing I haven’t seen anyone talk about in this discussion is the size difference in houses that are being built today vs 1950.
Typical homes being built in the 1950s were around a thousand square feet. Today they’re over two thousand square feet. The kind of homes that would be a starter home for a working class family back in the 1950s just don’t exist anymore.
grue@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
First of all, yes they do. They’re just mostly condos instead of single-family detached houses.
Second, even houses literally built in the '50s that still exist are expensive these days.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
A 1950 single family house was 1000 square foot AND it had 3 or more bedrooms (I’ve seen up to 5). A 1000 square foot condo built today is 1 bedroom, not at all built for a family.
The difference? Basements don’t count toward square footage.
As for cost on existing old homes, they’re expensive today because there are so few of them and they’re in demand. That proves my point.
US population in 1950 was 151 million. Today it’s 342 million. Yet if you look at the data, housing construction has been flat since 1968.
gwl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 hours ago
The houses from the 50s that survived were those which were built better and/or more expensive in the 1950s
The rest fell apart or were knocked down
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 11 hours ago
That’s not really relevant.
There are plenty of reasons for houses to be bigger today; things like improved building techniques, better heating.
Also, I doubt the claim. In my area, when a big old one family house gets torn down, it’s usually replaced by a dozen condos. The average size of today’s houses might be skewed by giant mansions
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
The main reason houses are bigger today: they’re more profitable. Building bigger houses on smaller land nets developers a big profit.
McMansions is what they’re affectionately known as in the architecture world. They’re not proper mansions (enormous 20 bedroom country estates), but hardly any of those exist anywhere.