Latte with a side of poverty?

When I got my first job out of college, I predicted the economy would collapse under its own weight eventually.  This was in 2003.  In San Diego, where I lived at the time, both housing prices and rents were skyrocketing.  I had what would be considered a "good" job (eight-to-five, permanent, with benefits), and the best I could afford was rent on a converted shed and a 12-year-old rattletrap Honda that I somehow managed to keep alive to go back and forth to work.  Neighborhoods that had been considered unlivable slums only a couple of years earlier were becoming too expensive for even the middle class.  Many of my coworkers were buying homes over an hour away in Riverside County.  They were signing subprime mortgages (which, even at the young age of 21 I could see were a terrible deal) and encouraged me to do the same.
I wonder how many of them were able to keep their houses after 2008.
The Great Recession was almost ten years ago, and according to many economists, didn't last very long.  Great.  Only most people in my age cohort are cobbling together part-time service sector jobs and side stints as Uber drivers, sharing apartments, putting off marriage and having children, and not really enjoying any real prosperity.  The only costs that seemed to have dropped significantly is the cost of gasoline.  Housing is still unaffordable, and tuition costs have tripled since 1999.  We've even coined the term "jobless recovery" to explain it.  The State of The Union is Not Good once again.
And we don't get much sympathy from those who should know better.  The Boomers lived through the "stagflation crisis" of the 1970s, and their parents lived through the Great Depression.  Instead of commiserating with us, or fighting to make things better, all we hear is a lot of blame.  "It's the IPhones."  "It's the lattes."  "It's the avocado toast."
Right.  Because unless you can afford a house, you don't deserve happiness.
According to The Economist, the ratio of housing to income is still over 100 percent.  There was a slight drop after 2008, but not enough of one to be significant. 
But maybe we Millennials are wasting our money on high-end coffee and techno toys.  Lets look at, for example, an IPhone.  At first glance, $700 for a phone is a lot of money, especially for someone crying poverty.  And especially when many people get new phones every two years.  But let's break that phone down, dollar wise.  $700 over 24 months is less than $30 per month.  That's less than the cost of an electric bill, a week's groceries, or a dinner for two in a mid-priced chain restaurant.  Suddenly that phone looks a lot less expensive.
But what about those lattes?  A five-dollar a day Starbucks habit has got to be breaking into the bottom line.  First of all, unless you're buying a daily Frappucino, you're not spending that much.  A tall Caffe Latte is $2.95 plus tax.  So about $3 a day.  Multiply that by five days (assuming that this is purchased on the way to work), and that's $15 a week.  Over 52 weeks that comes to $780 a year.  The median housing price in the United States is $199,800.  Assuming the 20% down payment you need to save before you can even think about a mortgage, cutting the lattes will get you there in 51 years.  Given that the median life expectancy is 78 years, and assuming you start saving at age 18, you will buy that house when you are 69 years old.  Does it sound like a worthwhile sacrifice?

My experience with white privilege

For the past twelve weeks, I have been a student in a job-training program for women.  Graduation day is looming, and I'm going to miss it.
However, I think that I come off as a bit of a shill.  White, Jewish, under 40, native-born, and college-educated, I have to admit that I'm one of the few in the class to hit all those markers.  However, this doesn't bother me in the slightest.  When I was a kid, I went to school in Baldwin Hills.  For those readers unfamiliar with Los Angeles, Baldwin Hills is an upper-middle-class neighborhood in LA.  An upper-middle-class black neighborhood.  I was the poor white kid from the broken home with the crazy, alcoholic father, and most of my classmates were black kids with intact families whose parents were professionals and drove BMWs.  (It was the 80s--decade  of greed and status symbols.)  It was like living in the movie White Man's Burden.  Naturally, given the demographic of the school, we learned a lot more than the usual Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and Civil Rights Movement during Black History Month.  In fact, it took me years to realize that suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony was Caucasian.
Fast forward to today.  I consider myself fairly colorblind, with the upbringing I had.  However, there were a couple of instances where I'm not so sure.
First of all, we had to create PowerPoint presentations for businesses we might like to start.  When I put in pictures, I included a rather adorable one of Thing 1 (since my business was a forest kindergarten for city kids, it was relevant).  My classmate saw the presentation, and asked me if the school was only for white people.  I quickly added another picture, this one featuring two black kids.  It hadn't even occurred to me that my classmates might not see themselves or their children in my presentation.
The other was a little more amusing.  We were planning an end-of-course potluck party, and being something of a queen of the deep-fry, I offer up some of my homemade fried chicken.  It's one of my comfort foods, and I've been told that it's quite good by people who are not related to me.  One of my classmates told me, "Now, you know we're all black women, and we'll know good fried chicken.  It had better be good."  I looked around at my cohort.  (We were divided into three cohorts for this program)  These were women I had been in class with for twelve weeks, and the cohort had only a little bit of change.  I realized, after going to class with this group for three months, that I was the only white person in the room!  I hadn't really thought about it.  To me, they were just my classmates, and race had never really been a factor.  But that is also a form of privilege in itself.  To go through life not having to think about race.