Loading ...‘Unconscionable’: Baby boomers are becoming homeless at a rate ‘not seen since the Great Depression’ — here’s what’s driving this terrible trend
Many baby boomers across the country are now coming to terms with the hard reality that working for your entire adult life is no longer enough to guarantee you’ll have a roof over your head in your later years.
Thanks in part to a series of recessions, high housing costs and a shortage of affordable housing, older adults are now the fastest-growing segment of America’s homeless population, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal
“The fact that we are seeing elderly homelessness is something that we have not seen since the Great Depression,”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/unconscionable-baby-boomers-becoming-homeless-103000310.html
As far as what’s driving the trend, I have my own theory: they are unable to tell their children “no”.
About 10 years ago I began to notice how many 30-somethings were starting out: not in a crappy apartment like we did, but in a house of their very own. Turns out that it had become the norm for Mommy and Daddy to provide the down payment, and then with historically low mortgage rates the offspring could make the monthly payments. And if they happened to fall behind on a payment because they felt they needed a Caribbean holiday? No problem, Mommy and Daddy would cough up the funds that month.
Even now, I am constantly hearing friends (now in their seventies) complaining of how they had to pay for the repairs on their daughters car “because she spends everything she makes”. Some of them are still helping with monthly mortgage payments, free babysitting, a carload of groceries, that kind of thing. All of their offspring have homes and families of their own, but have been conditioned to think that the parental teat can still be drawn from at any time.
When I was starting out, if my car broke down I took the bus. We began our married life in a small ordinary 1 bedroom apartment, not purchasing any real estate until we’d saved up the down payment. There were a lot of tent-camping vacations and peanut butter sandwiches taken to work for lunch . Neither of us would have dreamed of asking our parents to pay for our vehicle repairs or our rent or our vacations or whatever.
Now? The bank of Mom and Dad is handing out cash at all times. Is it any wonder some of our generation has nothing left?
Excellent Point GMG.
All part of that thing we call Human nature.
Our generation has been hard working and prosperous and coddling ….and here we have the inevitable result