More Affordability for Young Adults Starts With Employment

"U.S. office vacancy rate is hitting a historic high of 20.1% as of mid-2024, nearly 40 years after its last peak. This vacancy is driven by two main factors: the permanent shift to remote/hybrid work and a major trend of "flight to quality." Real estate, a major Industry in the United States, is shaken. What will happen to the 7 million able-bodied adults who quit completely from the labor force? First-time home buyers are very low, leading to unemployment for many."

"Even stable, full-time employment struggles to keep pace with today's blistering costs. Young adults are often financially strained despite working a 40-hour week or more. The Economic Policy Institute data shows that real wages for non-college-educated workers have barely budged for decades. Meanwhile, the prices of housing, healthcare, and education have skyrocketed far beyond inflation measures. Young employees feel like they are running on a financial treadmill set to maximum speed."

"Young adults are suffering from a chronic lack of time, which critically shapes their spending habits. Working long hours and often holding down multiple part-time gigs leaves little mental or physical bandwidth for activities like batch-cooking or comparison shopping. This time, poverty is a significant, often overlooked, driver of high consumption spending. Convenience becomes the highest-value commodity, forcing people to trade money for the time they desperately need. This pattern is less about poor budgeting and more about a brutal scarcity mindset enforced by endless work."

U.S. office vacancy rates climbed to 20.1% by mid-2024, driven by permanent remote/hybrid work and a flight-to-quality trend, unsettling the real estate sector. Approximately 7 million able-bodied adults left the labor force, while first-time home buyer activity remains low, contributing to unemployment and market strain. Stable full-time work often fails to match rising costs as real wages for non-college-educated workers have barely grown. Housing, healthcare, and education costs have surged well beyond inflation. Chronic time poverty forces young adults toward convenience spending, creating a scarcity-driven tradeoff between money and time and challenging generational perceptions of necessities.

Read at The Queen Zone