Should Young People Move Somewhere More Affordable?

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's this little debate rankling conservatives, and I think it's
very important for us in California, where there are some
conservatives who are trying to make this point that there's
this rise on the right of a lot of disaffection,

(00:21):
and that this disaffection, particularly among young conservative men, it
has a lot of elements to it. It has sort
of generational elements to it, sort of gen Z and uh,
sort of gen Z versus the baby boomers. That's a
lot of it, and it's resulting in different kinds of expression,

(00:42):
expressions of different kinds of political priorities. Now some of
this is expressing itself in gen Z latching or some
small percentage of gen Z latching onto. And I say
that loosely because I don't think every gen Z who
is a conservative is like hanging on every word the

(01:04):
guy says. But there's a lot of angst within the
conservative movement right now about people like Candace Owens, people
like Tucker Carlson, people like Nick Fuentes, And I don't
think all three of them are the exact same thing,
by the way, but there's this shift of fairly prominent

(01:24):
people sort of of the right. I guess I don't
know that Nick Flinn doesn't even really fits that well
on the right, who are weird and anti Semitic and
getting into weirder and weirder conspiracy theories and blaming the
Jews for everything, and it's getting weird. But there's a

(01:46):
lot of disaffection now. I mean that's in weird foreign
policy stuff, but there's a lot of other fights happening
on the right, a lot of it stemming from disaffection
on the part of young men and this sort of
hopelessness among certain segments of young men looking at the
state of our economy, where it's almost this thing of

(02:10):
like the economy can do well, the economy can do poorly.
I'm almost at a point where I don't even know
what it means right now, as just in my little
economic circumstance for me and my family and even running
my business where I think I'm doing fine, but everything

(02:32):
gets more expensive every single year. Nothing gets cheaper. My
kids were saying, to me, wasn't Donald When's Donald Trump
going to make the prices the price is lower? And
I was sort of like, no, I don't know if
he can not even when will he. I'm not sure

(02:52):
what amount you know, we had this massive spike in
inflation under Biden, and you know, you get obviously run
for office, and they make all kinds of grandiose claim, well,
we'll get the prices lowered, we'll get the Well they
ain't lowered, And I think it was sort of an
unrealistic you know, it's Donald Trump is not the first

(03:12):
politician to make sort of pie in the sky promises
about what's good about the wonderful things that are going
to happen if he is elected president that don't all
necessarily come to fruition. And I don't think it's I
don't necessarily think it's fair to expect that Donald Trump
is going to make the prices of things lower. I

(03:33):
think he could reduce the rate of inflation, and that
you know, the rate of inflation has kind of gone down,
I mean to a certain extent. It was going down
on its own after the sort of huge spike in
the Biden years. But that's the problem, is like we
had this what seemed to us an artificial and unfair

(03:53):
inflationary jump in the price of everything, and it's not
going down. And I see all these ways and reasons
that are sort of outside of Donald Trump's control for
how they're not going to go down even down to like, okay,
well pork, okay, buying pork, buying bacon, pork chops, ground pork,

(04:17):
Like that's just going to be expensive for the rest
of forever now because California passed a law about how
pigs need to be raised in order to be sold
in California, and the entire American pork industry has to
sort of bend to California's will in this regard because

(04:37):
California buy you know, California just has a ton of people.
So if you're a pork producer in the United States
of America, you now have to raise your kit your
pigs in accordance with California law in a way that's
more expensive. So port's just going to be permanently more
expensive now. It's more expensive for reasons that don't have
anything to do with anything Donald Trump can even control. Okay,
that's just one example out of many. President Trump imposing

(04:59):
ten tariffs on various kinds of goods is also going
to make the cost of things more And maybe that's legitimate.
Maybe that's a long term net positive thing if it
involves protection of certain kinds of industries and allowing those
industries to stay in and thrive in America and over
time building up America's industrial base or whatever. But I

(05:24):
guess my concern is, you know, Donald Trump's gone January twentieth,
twenty twenty nine. A different administration can completely flip whatever
his tariff policies are. I think whatever kind of long
term benefit is going is purported to come from the
Trump tariffs, I don't know that the tariffs are going

(05:48):
to be on the books long enough to realize those
long term goods. And the killer is just how is housing?
I mean, my wife Holly and I we feel like
we were the last people on the helicopter out of
Vietnam because we bought our house in twenty nineteen with
substantial help from my parents. I'll be frank with a

(06:14):
three point five percent interest rate, and we're going to
hold onto that interest rate, like you know, grim death.
But I look around at and you know, I have
had tremendous advantages that so many people in my generation
and the subsequent generation didn't have. I had parents who

(06:35):
were very successful who were willing to help me pay
for my college. Holly and I were able to pay
off Holly's student loans. I was able to get some
help with a down payment for my house for my parents.
I have advantages that a lot of young guys in
gen Z don't have. And I think they look out

(06:57):
at the world, how with the car of living, How
real wages haven't necessarily increased to meet those increases in costs,
And I think you see a lot of young guys
were like, I'm never going to be able to afford
a home. How can I afford a home? Especially if

(07:17):
you live in California, You're thinking, how can I afford
to live? Now? The answer comes from certain quarters of conservatism. Well,
move there are places in America where it's affordable to live.

(07:38):
Go move there. Go move to Nebraska, Go move to
you know, rural. Go move to North Dakota. Go move
to South Dakota. Go move to Kansas. Go move to
various places in the Midwest where housing prices are not
that Go move to rural Indiana. Go to these various

(07:59):
places in the Midwest where housing is not that expensive.
And there's I'm really kind of two minds there. Well
maybe I'm just of one mind. I'll let me develop this.
When I was young when I was in college, I

(08:23):
had a sense that Fresno was old and busted, and
I wanted to go off to college and get away
from home and see the country and make my way
in the world somewhere else. That was my thought. I
don't want to stay in Fresno. I want to go
off and go live somewhere more exciting, do something more exciting.

(08:48):
I see my little brother sort of with a similar attitude,
and I eventually found my way back home because I
knew it would be easier for me to find a
job in a tough legal market in Fresno than anywhere else,

(09:09):
and that wound up being true, and especially after Holly
and I started having kids, like the enormous benefit of
being near family and a reciprocal benefit. I mean, I'm

(09:31):
the only adult child who lives near my mom right now.
I think I should stay near her, especially as she
gets older, and I would want to be there for her.
Her being nearby has been Having at least one of
our one of the two sets of grandparents nearby has
been a tremendous blessing for my children to be to

(09:55):
have this wonderful relationship with their grandmother. To for you know,
for us to have someone who loves us, who's willing
to help us. It's this tremendous, tremendous blessing. And there's
a certain richness to my experiences and the development of

(10:19):
my work as it's taken place over the years here
in Fresno, because it's where I'm from, you know, because
my dad worked at Valley Children's Hospital for thirty one
years and developed so many relationships with so many different
kinds of people in town, and that is tremendously enriched

(10:39):
the community that's sort of formed around my work at
Right to Life of Central California and our churches and
all of those things. Being able to work in the
same place where I grew up is a tremendous blessing

(11:02):
and one that I don't want to take lightly. I
think for conservatives to just sort of hand wave away
the difficulties that gen Z faces with family formation, buying
a home, cost of living, which are just rampant throughout California.

(11:28):
It's not like there's anywhere in California you can hide
from that and to wave that away and say, oh, well,
just move to somewhere else, Well, look, are you gonna
tell every young person in California to move somewhere else.
You're gonna tell every young person in the greater New
York City area to just move somewhere else. It's just

(11:50):
as unaffordable there. Every young person in the greater Boston
area moves somewhere else, every young person in you know,
insert your big city, which is becoming more and more uninhabitable,
more and more expensive, more and more out of the
reach of a young person making a middle class salary,

(12:11):
and the definition of what constitutes a middle class salary.
They're young people in New York City making six figures
who are kind of barely scraping by just because that's
how expensive everything is. And you have these young people
who sort of did everything right, did okay in school,

(12:32):
went to college, got their college degree, worked hard, who
are just feeling like certain aspects of the American dream
family formation building a home are just economically unattainable to them.
And while, yeah, I think there's something admirable to a
young person saying well, I'm gonna make this work, I'm

(12:53):
gonna figure it out, I'm gonna up, i'll move, I'll
figure it out, you know that there is something admirable
to that, to the sort of hustle and grit and
determination and almost almost the pioneering spirit, you know, on
a much lesser scale than the actual pioneers of doing
something like that. And I know some young people who
are doing that. I know some young family friends of

(13:15):
mine where gen Z were. They're all moving to Missouri
or Kansas or Nebraska. Why because there's jobs out there,
because it's affordable to buy a home out there. I mean,
it's not rocket science, but there is a loss. And
for conservatives to act like it isn't a loss to

(13:40):
be near home, to be near family, to value the
place where you grew up, to value rootedness and the
connection that comes with living in the same place for
your whole life. I mean that that's what is concern rivatism,

(14:00):
if not a sort of political attitude that specifically values
things like that. That's the whole idea of the great
of the long standing tradition of conservatism as a political
idea that started in England circle the Glorious Revolution, all
the way through America. I mean, conservatism as an Anglo

(14:21):
American political concept is not so much ideological, it's not
so much ideological commitment to like this kind of policy issue,
this kind of policy perspective, that kind of policy perspective,
it's sort of an attitude of preferring long standing institutions,
preferring tradition, and preferring a certain kind of rootedness to place.

(14:48):
Patriotism love of your fatherland does not only extend to
the nation state that you happen to inhabit. There is
a patriotism from the Latin word patria fatherland. What is
your father In a certain sense, the San Juaquin Valley
is my fatherland, this part of California. I don't think

(15:10):
I've ever identified myself as a Californian. I would identify
myself as someone from the San Joaquin Valley, as someone
from the Fresno area. There's a love and appreciation for
those things that I think are really important. And to
just sort of handwave away, well, you know, California is
going into the crapper Just move like that's a really

(15:32):
unsatisfactory answer to a lot of young people who, maybe
for various reasons, can't move. You know what, if you're
a twenty seven year old guy and you're one of
your parents is ill and you can't move and you
want to start a family, and get married and have
a house, but one of your parents is ill. What

(15:54):
are you supposed to do? Or for various reasons you
can't move. Maybe you've started job and it's not a
lot of jobs in that field somewhere else, or you
know you were an axs to whatever it is. There's
plenty of reasons why the answer of well, just move
is just a non starter for a lot of different
kinds of people. And it kind of makes me sad.

(16:21):
It doesn't just make me sad. I can also see
how it makes people angry when we return the Boomer
versus gen z angst that is developing more and more.
That is next on the John Girardi Show. Okay, there's
a stunning stat about new the age range of home

(16:47):
buyers today, The age range of home buyers today. In
nineteen ninety one, the average first time home buyer was
twenty eight years old. So who are these people buying homes? Well,
it people born in the fifties and sixties. Baby boomers. Okay,

(17:14):
baby boomers maybe early stage gennif but baby boomers. In
nineteen ninety one, it was baby boomers who were the
median age of first time home buyers. Thirty four years later,
the average first time the average first time home buyer

(17:34):
is forty. So your average first time HomeBuyer in nineteen
ninety one was twenty eight. Your average first time HomeBuyer
today is forty. Boomers are by far the largest generational
cohort of home buyers. Forty two percent of homes are

(17:58):
sold to Baby Boomers. That's weird. That is different from
what it was when the Baby Boomers were coming up
in the early nineties, when the Baby Boomers became the
dominant generation in American political and economic life. Basically, the
baby Boomers have been for thirty straight years the main

(18:19):
home buyers in America, and over that time housing has
become so unaffordable that baby boomers are like the only
ones who can afford to buy a house. Why because
they have accumulated all this generational wealth, or accumulated the
wealth they have earned over the course of their lifetimes

(18:40):
such that they're the only ones with enough money to
buy a house, and they're pricing out millennials who don't
have enough money. There's a lot of stuff like that.
Michael Brennan already has this great piece of National Review
this Boomers didn't pass on the American dream In nineteen

(19:05):
ninety one, Boomers took over America. In that fateful year,
the year the Soviet Union dissolved. The Boomer generation, those
between the ages of twenty seven and forty five at
that time, were just coming into real power across the cultural, financial,
and political realm. America was supreme on the world stage.
It was number one in value added manufacturing globally, unchallengeable,

(19:26):
and about to take much of the Soviet Block into
de facto receivership the way it did much of the
British Empire in the years after World War Two. At home,
there was a minor recession, but the American dream was
alive and well. The average age of a first time
home buyer was just twenty eight years old, meaning the
youngest boomers were jumping onto the property ladder with relative ease.

(19:46):
Americans had an above replacement level fertility rate, then, if
just barely, overwhelming majorities believed that in America, working hard
and playing by the rules would grant the next generation
of better life than their parents. Indeed, sixty four percent
predicted their children would achieve that dream. Thirty four years later.
Boomers have dramatically shaped our world. They are now between

(20:07):
the ages of sixty one to seventy nine. We still
have a boomer as president. And what has been the result?
Seventy percent of Americans believe the American dream quote no
longer holds true. About twenty five percent of Americans see
a good chance of improving their standard of living in
twenty twenty five, the lowest since such surveys began in
nineteen eighty seven. Almost unbelievably, boomers are the largest generational

(20:30):
cohort of homebuyers. Today, Boomers account for forty two percent
of all US home purchases. Millennials are just twenty nine
percent of the market. The average age of first time
home buyers is now forty years old. A first time
home buyer is now roughly as close to collecting Social
Security as they are to their high school prom According

(20:50):
to realtor dot com, US fertility rates have nosedived to
one point sixty two per woman. And I guess this
is my concern. I don't see how this changes. I

(21:10):
don't see how this changes without massive systemic change that
nobody in California is willing to make. This is me
talking here, that nobody in California is willing to make.
We'll talk about it more after the break. This is
the John Jerbardy Show on Power Time. I'm getting more

(21:31):
and more concerned, but I mean, I've been worried about
in my whole adult life, but I'm more and more
concerned about the idea that the American dream is not
being passed on, and it's certainly not being passed on
here in California, where the cost of living is so
high that I think it has a drastically negative impact

(21:53):
on family formation, on home buying, on children, on having
more children. We have set up a society in California
that is like getting more and more hostile to children.
And it's a combination of a bunch of different things. Financially,

(22:20):
California has assembled basically a series of different kinds of
policy priorities, most of it coming from the environmentalist movement
that are intended to discourage family formation on the grounds

(22:41):
that families are bad for the environment. I don't think
that's a stretch. I don't think that's a mischaracterization of things.
What kind of houses do families like, Well, they like
single family dwellings. They like houses. If you have a

(23:05):
family and you dare to consider the idea. You might
want more than two children, you don't want to live
in an apartment. You might want a backyard. You might
want some space to barbecue. Have your children run around
and play without being afraid they're going to run into
the street. Want to have them play, not having to

(23:32):
go to a public park in order for them to play.
This is all normal family stuff, and in the eyes
of liberals, it's the most environmentally destructive way of building housing.
This is why liberals hate suburbs and hate suburban This

(23:53):
is part of it anyway, because they look at a
suburban development and look, I'm not saying that all suburban
development is perfect, and I mean, I guess I would
prefer less. You know, I have my criticisms of suburban
housing projects, but they're homes that families like to live in.

(24:17):
It's clearly that there is a demand for it. That's
why people build them. Why because again, people want space.
They don't want to share an apartment complex with strangers
who are a wall away. They don't they want space
for their children to run around and play. They if

(24:38):
you intend to have more than one point six children
in your life, apartments are just not as attractive an option.
But in the eyes of liberals, these are environmental disasters.
They use up too much natural gas, they use up
too much electricity, they use too much water, they use

(24:59):
up too much they liberals view these things as a blight,
and they have made it in California as difficult as
possible to build those kinds of houses, to such an
extent that the Dallas Fort Worth area of Texas is
building more new homes per year than the entire state

(25:21):
of California. And what are the only things California seems
to have any motivation to build. The only things California
seems to have any motivation to build is registered trademark
lower income housing. What does lower income housing mean? Okay,
lower income housing means usually multi unit dwellings, often inside

(25:47):
urban areas, not in the exurbs or not in the suburbs,
that builders can only afford to build because of massive
government subsidization. And it's actually this interesting phenomenon where a
lot of builders they can only build at one end

(26:08):
or the other of the spectrum. They can either build,
you know, California certified quote lower income housing, which the
state heavily subsidizes, which is the only reason why builders
can make money off of it, or they have to
build stuff on the very high end. They have to
build high end condos for you know, the divorced lawyer,

(26:32):
the divorced nurse, whatever. So you get high end condos
over here, you get lower income housing over there, and
there's really not much in the middle. All these new
homes that are being built that you know, they're all
priced in the four hundred and five hundred thousand dollars
a year. Sorry, if you've got a combined household income

(26:57):
of ninety thousand dollars, which is well above the median,
those kinds of homes are kind of getting out of
your reach, you know. I mean unless you want to
do a tiny down payment and mortgage insurance, and the
cost of that is going to just be exorbitant over
the course of thirty years, to the point where we're

(27:19):
now talking about fifty year mortgages. Are you kidding me?
And they just keep going up, up up, Why because
more and more that they because too many baby boomers
are buying houses. Baby boomers with a lot of money
are still able to afford these expensive houses, and the

(27:43):
people who actually need homes, young families. Yeah, they're out
of it. They're out of the game. I mean, they
can't afford it. And California has created this situation in

(28:04):
so many ways. There's all kinds of environmental rules that
make new home construction more expensive. I mean, there was
Jerry Brown just with a wave of his hand, a
wave of the hand really of the California Air Resources
Board just agreed, Oh, every new home needs a solar
panel on it. Okay, that's a cool What is that
fifteen thousand extra bucks to the cost of every new home,

(28:24):
just snap of the fingers. No state law passed, no
debate in the Assembly, no debate in the state Senate,
no witnesses for against, no media coverage, no just California
Resources Board just sort of decided it's better for the environment.
We have SEQUA still on the book, like even the

(28:45):
efforts to amend SEQUA are only for a certain kind
of housing development that is acceptable, that is reasonably moderately
acceptable to environmentalist liberals, in a way that is still
hostile to family. So, for those who don't know, SIQUA,
the California Environmental Quality Act one of the worst laws
that Ronald Reagan the worst law Ronald Reagan ever signed

(29:07):
was legalizing abortion in California. Maybe the second worst law
is the California Environmental Quality Act, the legacy of Governor
Ronald reaganqua California Environmental Quality Act has been weaponized by
environmentalist Waco liberals to stop basically any to stop all

(29:27):
kinds of development projects on incredibly flimsy bases. So if
you're going to start some new kind of construction project,
some new business construction project, residential construction project, whatever, you
have to provide an environmental impact study. And these studies
are very long and very detailed and very expensive to produce.

(29:49):
You need a lot of fancy schmancy lawyers to do it.
State approves it. However, any random Yah it has this
enforcement mechanism where basically any random Yahoo can challenge it.
And it's not according to normal American legal rules regarding

(30:10):
standing principles. Usually, if you're you're only able to sue
somebody for some sort of wrong, if you've suffered some
kind of material harm. Okay, you can't just sue someone
to vindicate someone else's interest. If the example I always use,
if someone crashes their car into agent Squire's house or

(30:31):
producer here on the John Girardi Show. If someone crashes
their car in Agent Squire's house, I can't sue the
guy for crashing the car into my friend Agent Squire's.
Squire's has to sue. Why if I sue, I go
in front of the judge. Well, Judge, this made me
really upset. Well, Judge's like, yeah, but you didn't suffer

(30:52):
any money damages, Your house isn't harmed. Like, no, get
out of here. You're not allowed to sue. Squires can sue.
But with environmental harms, the thought is, well, they're so
diffuse and it's so hard to track, it's so hard
to establish a chain of causality. Well, we'll just let
anybody sue then, So we throw out our normal rules
of standing when it comes to environmental stuff, meaning any

(31:15):
yahoo with a good enough lawyer can stop like almost
any kind of construction project on the grounds that well,
their environmental impact study was insufficient, inadequate in this In
this way, there was construction projects across Fresno that got

(31:38):
stopped because the City of Fresno did, as part of
the whole plan for the city, did an environmental impact
study for Okay, if this place is zoned for residential,
and this place is zoned for industrial basically as a
way to entice businesses to come. Hey, we've already done
a lot of the legwork for the environmental impact study.
You can just piggyback off of ours. Someone sued over

(31:58):
the City of Fresno's general environment environmental Impact study stopped
construction cold for projects all over the city a year
or two ago. And so as a result with that
kind of legal risk, which if your project gets stopped

(32:20):
cold because of a lawsuit, well, time is money. You've
taken out loans to do this. Now you've got to
extend the life of the loan. The loans have to
be longer. Construction takes longer in California than it does
almost any other state, various kinds of reasons, labor rules,
all kinds of stuff. Time is money. Everything is more

(32:40):
expensive here, and so much of it has to do
with the control that environmentalist organizations have exercised over California
law and public policy. The only kinds of exceptions we're
getting to SIQUA nowadays is for urban infill dwellings, urban

(33:00):
infill construction. They passed a law last year they wore
out their rotator cuffs, passing patting themselves on the back
to amend sequel that those sorts of residential construction projects
are not subject to sequel lawsuits. Again, not single family dwellings.

(33:23):
It's urban in fill. So we have a plot of
you know, an unused plot of land in the middle
of a city. They're going to build a multi unit
dwelling there, apartments. Again, it's all stuff that's hostile to
family formation. Why well, because liberals who are dominated by

(33:43):
these environmentalist concerns, they want to have more lower income housing.
They recognize how totally unsustainable California is as far as
not building new housing, including the way that their own
stupid policies are limiting even the construction of more environmentally
friendly multi unit dwellings, and so they make an exception

(34:03):
just for that. But it's still leaving this residential landscape
that's just totally unaffordable to people interested in family formation.
What am I supposed to do? Oh, well that you know,

(34:25):
if I dare want to have more than two children,
or have to have even two children, and I don't know,
would like them to have a backyard. Well, again, all
the new home construction for single family dwellings has built
into the cost the risk that the developer took of

(34:45):
a sequel lawsuit stopping his project cold. It has built
into it the extra cost that labor that organized labor
demands in Californa. It has built into it all sorts
of costs that we can't control. And it's all like
very hostile again to young people when we return. This

(35:07):
is basically it. Whoever solves this problem, whoever cracks this nut,
will control this country, will rule this country until for
the next thirty years. That's next on the John Girardi Show.
Here's the thing about all this stuff about unaffordability, the
unaffordability of California, how hostile it is to family formation. Uh.

(35:28):
I think Michael Brennan Doherty said this. It's very I
think it's undoubtedly true. I think this is what Zorn
Mamdanni tapped into and why he's now the mayor of
New York and not Andrew Cuomo, who doesn't give a
crap about this stuff as a baby boomer. Whoever, in

(35:49):
American politics, whichever of the two sides or whichever candidate
meaningfully addresses the problem of housing affordability can actually make
it affordable for someone with a middle class income who
is a young person to buy a home and thereby

(36:09):
facilitate family formation. Whoever cracks that nut will own American
politics forever. Now. Zoron, Mom, Donnie won on the back
of saying everything's unaffordable, everything's unaffordable, everything's unaffordable. He was

(36:32):
totally right. Everything in New York is unaffordable. I think
his solutions are not going to help the problem. I
think they will, in various ways, exacerbate the problem. They're
already starting to Housing prices outside of New York City
are skyrocketing already. But the one thing I'll say for

(36:57):
him was that his diagnosis was right. He had the
accurate diagnosis, a kind of diagnosis that Andrew Cuomo can't
credibly give as an old fart, corrupt boomer. Zoron comes
on the scene and to young people struggling with all this,
see a fellow young person and they're like, yeah, you're right,

(37:20):
it is totally unaffordable to live here. Now. I think
his prescription, his diagnosis is right. I think his prescription
is wrong. But you can see the appeal if you're
a young person in New York City and you have
no hope of ever buying a home and you're making
six figures and you feel like you living paycheck to paycheck. Yeah,

(37:43):
that's an attractive option. Someone who's gonna cause your rent
not to keep increasing exorbitantly, Like, yes, please, I will
sign up for that again. I think his prescription is nuts.
I think it's gonna make things worse in the long run.
But whoever can actually solve that problem will own American

(38:05):
politics for a generation. That'll do it. John Gerardi Show,
See you next time on Power Talk.