stop buying avocado toast

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Squeezed: Why Our Families Can't Afford America by Alissa Quart

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, antiwork, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, business intelligence, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Elon Musk, emotional labour, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute couture, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, late capitalism, Lyft, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, new economy, nuclear winter, obamacare, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, post-work, precariat, price mechanism, rent control, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, school choice, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stop buying avocado toast, surplus humans, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

It turned out that student or educational training debt had put many of the attendees in their predicaments. This made sense to me. After all, more than 60 percent of Americans with student debt are over thirty. While some flippant aristos like to claim, as one real estate developer did, that if millennials stopped eating avocado toast they’d be able to buy houses, a paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 2017 showed that this myth of profligate spending on things like gourmet food is simply untrue. Rather, declining homeownership rates are partly the result of rising public tuition and student debt, which afflicts younger Americans starting to have families.

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more than 60 percent of Americans: “2016 Student Loan Data Update,” Center for Microeconomic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York, https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/databank.html. as one real estate developer did: Same Levin “Millionaire Tells Millennials: If You Want a House, Stop Buying Avocado Toast,” Guardian, May 15, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/15/australian-millionaire-millennials-avocado-toast-house. a paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York: “Household Debt and Credit: 2017 Q2 Report,” Center for Microeconomic Data, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York, https://www.newyorkfed.org/microeconomics/hhdc/background.html.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Available at www.housing.org.uk/resources/people-in-housing-need/ 3 The Problem with Generation Rent social housing shortage in Essex: For ONS statistics on the Essex housing shortage, see Paige Ingram, ‘The Essex towns where there “won’t be enough houses” for everyone by 2041’, Essex Live, 12 November 2019, www.essexlive.news/news/essex-news/essex-towns-wont-enough-houses-3527226 average rental cost of a two-bedroom home increased: ‘Rent prices in Colchester outpace income growth’, Essex County Standard, 13 August 2018, www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/16411459.rent-prices-colchester-outpace-income-growth/ living costs for poorer households: Richard Partington, ‘Living costs rising faster for UK’s poorest families than richest’, Guardian, 25 April 2019, www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/25/living-costs-rising-faster-for-uks-poorest-families-than-richest The length of time a person has to wait: See england.shelter.org.uk/housing_advice/council_housing_association/how_councils_allocate_housing ‘increasing the overall supply’: Emma Lunn, ‘Demand on PRS “greater than ever before”’, Landlord Today, 21 March 2016, www.landlordtoday.co.uk/breaking-news/2016/3/demand-on-prs-greater-than-ever-before tried to extol the ‘benefits’ of renting: ‘Explained: the advantages of renting over buying’, HomeLet, 9 June 2017, homelet.co.uk/tenants/blog/article/explained-the-advantages-of-renting-over-buying more households with children: ‘UK private rented sector: 2018’, Office for National Statistics (18 January 2019), www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/ukprivaterentedsector/2018 badly impacted by the 2008 financial crash: Sarah O’Connor, ‘Millennials poorer than previous generations, data show’, Financial Times, 23 February 2018, www.ft.com/content/81343d9e-187b-11e8-9e9c-25c814761640 ‘scarring’ effect on our wages: Stephen Clarke, ‘Coming of age during a downturn can cause scarring – and it takes up to a decade to heal’, Resolution Foundation, 13 May 2019, www.resolutionfoundation.org/comment/coming-of-age-during-a-downturn-can-cause-scarring-and-it-takes-up-to-a-decade-to-heal/ growing number of older renters: ‘Number of pensioners living in poverty tops two million, with Black and Asian older people most at risk’, Age UK, 16 June 2021, www.ageuk.org.uk/latest-press/articles/2021/number-of-pensioners-living-in-poverty-tops-two-million/ surge in 55- to 64-year-olds renting: Sarah Davidson, ‘Number of retired renters DOUBLES in a decade: Landlords plan to invest in homes for elderly as social care crisis fails to keep pace with demand’, This is Money, 5 November 2020, www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/buytolet/article-8884541/Number-retired-renters-doubles-decade.html the highest numbers of older renters: Ibid. ‘if you want a house, stop buying avocado toast’: Sam Levin, ‘Millionaire tells millennials: if you want a house, stop buying avocado toast’, Guardian, 15 May 2017, www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/may/15/australian-millionaire-millennials-avocado-toast-house ‘the young have never had it so good’: James Delingpole, ‘The gilded generation – why the young have never had it so good’, Spectator, 10 May 2014, www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-gilded-generation---why-the-young-have-never-had-it-so-good ‘QE-fuelled asset bubble’: Quantitative easing is a monetary policy which the Bank of England leaned into after the financial crisis.

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The moniker, which became synonymous with the human cost of the housing crisis, stuck. It made good headlines and fuelled Twitter rows the sentiment of which are perhaps best encapsulated by a Guardian article published in 2017 with the headline ‘Millionaire tells millennials: if you want a house, stop buying avocado toast’. It was a precis of the ‘pull yourselves up by your bootstraps’ mentality of those who had benefited from relatively low house prices in the 1980s, which fails to recognise that it’s impossible to pull yourself up by the bootstraps if you can’t afford the boots in the first place. That article was just one of countless of a similar ilk.

The Theft of a Decade: How the Baby Boomers Stole the Millennials' Economic Future by Joseph C. Sternberg

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And because that was in the left-wing Guardian newspaper, the writer also needed to point out sternly that “brunch has become a convenient scapegoat for structural inequality.”3 The Los Angeles Times figured that a young person would need to pass up on daily $19 avocado toast—and not spend money on any other breakfast, either—for around 15 years to save up a down payment on the median house in Los Angeles County.4 Britain’s Independent newspaper captured some of the irate social media reaction from Millennials who had taken to Twitter—where else—to vent about Gurner’s suggestion: “‘Stop buying avocado toast’ is 2017’s ‘let them eat cake,’” said one. “I was gonna put a down payment on a house last year but then I spent $44,000 on avocado toast,” tweeted another.5 Then came the reaction to the reaction. “Avocado toast, expensive hobbies, car payments and the other splurges hurt our finances in huge ways,” personal-finance columnist Holly Johnson wrote in the Indianapolis Star.

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Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, “Stop Spending Money on Avocadoes? I’ll Have a House Deposit by 2117,” Guardian (London), May 16, 2017. 4. Jessica Roy, “Why You Can’t Afford a House (Hint: It’s Not the Avocado Toast),” Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2017. 5. Ben Chapman, “Property Tycoon Tells Millennials to Stop Buying Avocado Toast If They Ever Want to Buy a House,” Independent (London), May 16, 2017. 6. Holly Johnson, “Yes, Avocado Toast Can Hurt Your Finances,” Indianapolis (Ind.) Star, May 21, 2017. 7. Lawrie Holmes, “Tough Choices for First-Time Buyers to Help Save a Deposit,” Strutt & Parker, November 10, 2017. 8.

Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

Being labelled entitled, workshy, and the adjective one could only imagine to be ‘snowflake-y’, is nothing new (she types, through hard-done-by, you-don’t-understand-us tears). In a 2016 op-ed in The Australian,2 ‘young people’ were generation-splained (mansplaining’s wider-reaching sibling), with the assertion that if we all stopped eating avocado toast with ‘crumbled feta’, and a seemingly insulting ‘five-grain toasted bread’, we could buy houses instead. Now, to provide context, I am extremely privileged to own a house – and it certainly wasn’t thanks to refraining from an over-enthusiastic combination of seeds in my bread, nor from gagging myself in local independent cafés.