You need both capital (which folks don’t have access to) and the ability to absorb risk (which folks don’t have access to).
Similar advice is in the vein of just stay with your parents for free, have a relative invest $50,000 in your business to start it up.
This runs counter to your internal narrative as a self made person I’m sure, but have you ever worked for 40 hours a week and not had anything left after paying for your share of rent, food and utilities? This is the reality that doesn’t seep into forums like this, where the majority is wealthy, college educated, and broadly privileged in some way either through exceptional talent or background.
> let's not have any low-effort comments claiming that there are no good jobs available in those places
I will bite - homeownership is indeed higher in the rust belt, but many folks struggle to find jobs that meet the median without giving up their health and bodies, if they can find steady work at all.
One of the main issues is that a lot of advice is presented as an unconditional, absolute guarantee to success. A college degree was never a guarantee of future success (contrary to great-grandparent's assertion), but the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless. Similarly, the ability to start your own business is difficult for most people, but even for poorer individuals, it is possible to start, say, a cleaning service with very little assets. (At the same time, such businesses are unlikely to make a whole lot of money at the end, but you might be able to move from working class to middle class, e.g.). A lot of contractor businesses--your plumbers and the like--are going to be from the lower middle class or middle class, and you can make some good money there, although that is also likely to be at the cost of your health much sooner than you expect.
This is not a super relevant statement as it can be made with a single example - the rate of mobility is down relative to when those who'd give the advice experienced (which has been compounding for at least the last 30 years, some say since the 1970s).
According to one economist in 2020, in the U.S., absolute mobility, the chance a child earns more than their parents, has fallen from about 90% to roughly 50%. Source: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2020/05/16/two-leadi...
> the push to get everyone to get a college degree has rendered its utility as a helpful marker much more useless
Social segregation also plays a really important role too, and cross class relationships have plummeted - as someone who is doing well but didn't go to college, the relationship building in college is a factor that will work against me my entire life.
I would never say that upward mobility is impossible, or that its not worth it to strive for it. I am saying that dismissing headwinds due to no guarantee of success doesn't really take into account severely constrained actual access to opportunity that continues to become more constrained over time.
Life is usually a struggle. No one should expect any different.
I think this starts to make an inferred narrative about how failure is inevitable and that its excessive complaining, when there is large amounts of data showing how it is genuinely more difficult.
Just your Ukrainian example, it was cheaper to live 25 years ago, the cost of college has gone up ~180%. Since 2001 incomes have gone up 64% while housing has gone up 136%, healthcare up 180%, food up 100% and transportation up 120%. Thats a different playing field.
The point being made isn't that failure has any inevitability. Most people will be able to make it work enough to live, and those who can't due to choices, trauma, disability, drug use, or excessive bad luck are the homeless people you see begging on freeway offramps and intersections. At the economy level its a numbers game. It will never be impossible to make it big, in the same way that some people with every single advantage will end up on the street without a penny.
Today a dreaming Ukrainian is quite likely to instead get ripped away by conscription kidnapping teams and used as cannon fodder on the front, and not even make it to America. The reality changes but the rule of thumb is still good, you do the best with what you have and make yourself ready for opportunity you might not ever get.
¹ Terms and conditions apply.
I am sympathetic to this argument, but there are problems. How do you get homes built if you make this change?
Real estate as "investment" is not helping anything here; it hurts home availability, first because prospective homeowners have to compete with capital that just wants to use those as store of value/for rentseeking (driving up demand/prices) and secondly because this creates incentives against building more houses (because that hurts those real estate "investors").
It's the land under the house that typically appreciates. Land is unlikely to depreciate unless the broader regional economy declines.
When you have a house you get basically a special token to have a house built under the codes, zoning, and other restrictions that were in place when it was built. And possibly the permission to build it all. Also a token that includes getting utilities, etc under the old rules. In many places this may have been done back in the 60s when "a guy and his pickup truck" could just build a house with almost no questions asked, and many of them were done that way. These tokens are generally appreciating (NIMBYism, increasing regulatory challenge, etc), commonly faster than the actual physical materials in the house are depreciating.
Coming back to why the burnt out trailers are worth $100k+ on $35k land where I'm at even though you'll just have to pay to raze them
1) It includes planning/zoning pre-approval, just re-do the same structure on the standing foundation and you won't have to spend a gazillion dollars doing everything back to the new rules.
2) The presence of the house includes the ability to use debt to mortgage the land up to a gazillion dollars. The exact same piece of land magically becomes mortgageable with the burnt out unusuable trailer on it, which let people bid the price to infinity during the covid era, then locked into high rates no one will give up. Meanwhile, I got one of these pieces of land for ~1/3 the price the exact equivalent raw land value was rolled into on mortgageable properties.
Think about it this way. If I build a house with the cheapest, shittiest, materials and the most illegalist of Mexicans 30 years ago. And then pass a bunch of laws that say nobody gets to do the thing I did, and now you need code-magic expensive materials and deport all the Mexicans, require expensive environmental reviews, and maybe even make it harder to legally build. That appreciates the value of my house -- because to substitute my cheap house you have to build an expensive house, so I can just charge almost as much as the expensive house and the market will bear it. Thus you end up with stuff like raw land value prices in my area not appreciating at all, yet house prices massively appreciating.
Hardly. My grandfather was working under union rules as a machinist. No education beyond the 8th grade and what he learned in the US Navy during WWII. He was able to afford a house in a Lower Midwestern city (one that would be considered LCOL) and five kids.
I have a bachelor's degree that's paid for, a decent paying software job, and no wife/kids. Wanna guess how many homes I own in the same city?