Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Why Do Old People Live At The Beach?

I'm a lazy blogger on deadline (ok, no deadline, just busy with some stuff today), so I can't look up the actual research at the moment, but I have a dim memory from my academic days of a paper with roughly that title. Basically, the populations of most of the beach communities/cities in California skew a bit to the elderly side. Short version (from memory): prop. 13 gives existing owners preferential tax treatment (can't increase property taxes much), and people who bought before the 70s inflation got their houses for nothing.

Leaving aside the specifics of that issue, the general point is that The Kids Today have it pretty hard. College (even state schools) is absurdly expensive. Real estate is absurdly expensive in most places. Nobody has a defined pension plan anymore, and 401(K)s have worked so badly that nobody even bothers to try anymore. Old Economy Steve had a pretty good run. His kids, not so much.