We had Miami Vice, MacGyver, The A-Team, Knight Rider, and Battlestar Galactica back then.
And homes were still affordable places to live in.
My entire extended family mostly bailed out of NYC because they bought houses for $10-25k in the 70s and sold for 20x in the late 80s. That profit gave that generation a vault up the ladder and the prime the pump mortgage policy made a few rich.
With a decent down payment (lets say ~15%) that's still less than 5 years salary even with interest, which would be completely acceptable terms especially since cost of living was way more affordable back then and the population had ~10 million people less than today in the 90s. Just to give you context that's more in population increase than many US states have in totality!
The problem comes from the fact that even with most FHA loans, decent down payments and average(non-FAANG) middle class income wages you're still looking at 15+ years of salary with a home with no repair clauses from banks that bought distressed proprieties on the cheap in the 2008 housing crises, and are selling far above their ATH. And that's assuming you can even get a home into escrow before external demand or Chinese investors fleeing the mainland pay cash for it sight unseen for something they will just at best rent out on Airbnb or let decay as its better than the alternative of keeping it in fiat before the CCP takes it.
Personally speaking NY is exactly what I didn't want CA to become, and slowly it started to resemble it more and more in all the negative ways; the recent lockdowns from incompetent politicians with deluded presidential aspirations only highlighted how much they have in common now.
I'm not a protectionist and I welcome(d) people to come work and live in CA, by my issue is that in the process it stripped a lot of what was good about it away and enhanced a lot of the worst parts instead.
Personally speaking with all of that culture and atmosphere lost I don't think it's worth it. And I think that one guy below was right, California will probably never go back to what it was back in the 90s and I should probably just be satisfied I got to experience it all.
Places change, and places with little historical roots as most of the US tend to change even faster. That’s just how it is.
I recently started a mortgage and the guidance I regularly saw was that your home price should not exceed 2.5 years of your income. And, this is with very low interest rates, esp compared to the 80's.
I don't think I couldn't afford the monthly payments on a house that was 5x our household income, even after 20% down and only 3% APR. Then again, maybe I could, but I'm more conservative with my wallet and prefer to have more cash on hand and other investments.
Your cost of living comparison is apt though. Maybe I'd be more comfortable with my mortgage being a larger % of my take home if everything else were significantly cheaper....
-However, if interest is at 11-15%, chances are inflation was in the high single digits - so as long as wages stayed reasonably level (in real terms), you weren't too bad off.
(In 80s Norway, my parents paid nigh on 20% interest on their home loan - but inflation hovered around the 10-12% mark and you got a 100% tax deduction for interest payments, making debt a good deal for a lot of people. Hence, people borrowed more money than ever before as credit was effectively free. Stop me if you've heard this one before.)
What could possibly go wrong? Sigh.
So does this mean the “crime paradise” was a better more prosperous time for people to live in than tech? If so, what does that say about modern society that our most depraved decade was actually better?
There’s people literally pooping on the streets in California. Do you think those people would be able to afford a toilet of their own if this was the 80s? Was homelessness then as bad as it is now? In our progress forward in technology has tech actually made California worse for people as a whole?
Yeah, I remember the Valley in the 90s... a lof of it looked a lot like downtown LA which I'm was never exactly a fan of.
But being in San Jose back then in the 90s looked and smelled like Chinatown when it was buzzing, Sunnyvale and Mountain View had a certain feel that is completely gone now it felt electric for reasons I didn't full understand and would only come to realize how significant what was happening there was a decade or so later.
I never went to the East bay until recently, but that feels like a very watered down version of what it was back then to me.
I guess it's survivor bias guiding my words, especially since I had close encounters with stuff like that growing up too; but having a choice of which one to deal with I'd stay with 90s CA to raise a family then somewhere like modern Geneva with all its amenities and manicured existence.
