"You're so lucky!"

Do baby boomers not get that this isn't really a choice?

“Wow, we wish we could’ve taken off in a van and gone to National Parks like this at your age! We finally made it here; it’s our 50th wedding anniversary and we’ve been planning this for years, but good for you for doing it now!” 

They meant this as a compliment, probably. And I try to take it that way whenever a baby boomer tells me how lucky I am to be sitting in my van, in a National Park, on a random Wednesday. But it never feels good coming from them: it feels patronizing. 

“Well,” I smile graciously, to show my gratitude and humility before slightly pushing back, “I wouldn’t be living like this if I could afford a home!” 

There’s usually a light laugh, maybe an awkward “yeah, good point,” and always some retort about, again, how lucky I am. I don’t often push back much more than this, recognizing that they may be genuinely impressed and saddened that they couldn’t live this way 30 years ago. These conversations tend to end in a stalemate of knowing that the grass is always greener, but I always wish for a little more perspective from them. 

In August of 2020, when it was really settling in how much this pandemic was going to disrupt our lives, I was still living in DC. In fact, I’d just hit my tenth year of living in the city and was proud to think of myself as one of the ones who “stuck it out,” standing by my community, buying as much locally made food and drinks and merchandise to support all of my favorite vendors. We were told our $10 additional fee on top of a food order was the only way to keep our community members and local establishments open and running - one of the many countless scenarios where economic recovery is thrust upon working-class people to “save the restaurants” instead of relying on actual policymaking. Institutions love to keep us busy hurting each other so we don’t notice how much people in power are getting away with. 

I remember touring a house for sale in my neighborhood of Eckington around this time. I thought, maybe it’s time to put some real roots down and be a grown-up! It was a fairly well-kept row house with a few kitchen upgrades and managed to maintain most of its charm despite the gentrification of the neighborhood. The basement was finished and expected to be rented out to help pay for the mortgage: a concept that has become one of the worst justifications for sky-rocketing home values. No doubt, the kid who ends up renting this basement would pay at least the mortgage payment; the people living upstairs would have had enough wealth to handle a downpayment - in this home’s case, maybe $65,000 - and the rest of that home’s value would come from someone who had nothing to show for it in the end. But of course, this house wouldn’t sell to someone with merely 10% of the total cost. It would sell for about $75,000 over the asking price, in cash, by the end of that week. 1,620 square feet sold for $750,000. This was 2020, before the current housing crisis we’re in. 

Between graduating college and moving off of campus in June 2013 and when I finally left DC in January 2021, I spent about $97,000 in rent. That’s a conservative estimate, and doesn’t include things like unreturned security deposits (for “damages” clearly not worth thousands of dollars); or weeks between leases where I’d have to cover a little extra in rent before someone new moved in; or application fees paid to apartments that no intention of renting to me, for whatever reason, but knew I’d still pay anyway. Let’s call it a hundred grand in rent to make it even. 

It’s hard to sit with that fact sometimes. $100,000 spent and nothing purchased. Not only did I not own anything, but this rent money doesn’t increase your credit score or give you a tax break as homeownership does. None of the 122.8 million¹ Americans who rent their homes have anything to show for the economic commitment they’ve made or the value they’ve added to another’s home. We’re simply expected to do it and be grateful for the opportunity to sleep in someone else’s basement. 

While I could nitpick my own financial literacy and obsess over how much I could have saved in the small margins of my paycheck, the truth was that I didn’t live a particularly lavish lifestyle in my 20’s. Most of the trips I took were tagged onto work travel or the occasional wedding-related trek. My nonprofit paycheck went to two main places: rent, and student loans. Another burden their generation will never really understand but continue to justify not helping to alleviate. I’ll spare myself the heartbreak of calculating how much I’ve paid in student loans versus how much I owed originally. We’ll cry about that another day. The fact of the matter was I didn’t have any real savings, or even the ability to squeeze in some new savings. There wasn’t much to cut down on, to begin with. 

I had three choices in the fall of 2020. The first was to continue paying $1,200 in rent to live with two strangers from the internet who, thanks to the complete flight of renters from the city around this time, were the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel kind of roommates. I was growing so tired of paying someone else’s mortgage and had nothing to show for it. And perhaps more importantly, DC was changing and losing many of the people and places that made it feel like home. The pandemic was a major factor, but other changes were happening across the city that had begun well before I moved there in 2010 for college. I think I knew it was over when they announced that Alexandria had won the bid for Amazon’s new headquarters, just a few Metro stops away from the city. It wasn’t like this would be the first corporation in the area to attract six-figure tech talent, but it was the most visible, and I remember a sinking feeling in my stomach that if I couldn’t buy a house in DC now, I probably never would. 

Then, the second option: moving to a new city. This presented a similar dilemma as staying in DC would: first, most mid-sized cities - your Denvers, your Austins, even my hometown of Raleigh - weren’t actually much cheaper than DC at this point. The cost of living may vary, but with tech campuses popping up left and right, and the general desire to be somewhere cool, all of these cities were flooded with newcomers they could not accommodate. Have you ever tried driving in Austin? That city was simply not engineered to be home to that many people. The second downside to moving was that I didn’t have a city with a concentration of friends or family. And although I consider myself pretty good at making friends, this was during a lockdown period where socializing and building community was actively dangerous. 

The third and final option was to move in with my mom. She and her husband had started renting a house on Lake Anna, just an hour and a half south of DC, in what felt like the middle of nowhere compared to the city. They were building a new home near Charlottesville and had completely lucked out by closing on this new land in April 2020, before anyone knew what to expect. I love my mom, but the idea of being 28 and moving “back home” - even though this would be in a home I’d never been in before with a family unit I had no childhood baggage with - was challenging at best. I needed a game plan, a project focused on what would be next after this homestay. That’s when the #vanlife videos started showing up on my social media feeds. 

“You’re so lucky you get to live like this!” They weren’t wrong. I lucked out on a lot: having a mom who could support me living in her house, having a dad who wanted to help me build it to save money, having a job that planned on being remote indefinitely, having enough time to save for a downpayment on a van before the cost of these vehicles became outrageously expensive. But did they really think I was lucky to be living in my vehicle? Lucky to be 30 and have only this to my name? Lucky to have been pushed out of my community after a decade with no affordable or realistic place to go? Lucky to shit into a box and then dump said box into the ground every other week? 

Did I actually envy their life trajectory? I debate myself on this often. While homeownership is still the most effective method in this country for building wealth, evident by the fact that the baby boomer generation owns about 53% of the wealth in this country compared to millennials’ measly 5%², the lifestyle of their generation is not appealing to me. Work some meaningless job until you hit 65 and then get to live a life you want. Not all of them, of course, but these were the types I’d encounter on a random Wednesday in a National Park. The ones who feel like they truly started living after they retired. A generation that solidified and happily bought into the Reagan economic scam that the American dream was not just attainable but necessary, only to leave their children and grandchildren with bigger societal problems to clean up with a simple justification: “I worked hard my whole life, and now you do, too.” 

That’s actually what they’re saying to me when they tell me how lucky I am. The impression I’m often left with isn’t genuine excitement for me: it’s envy. It’s entitlement. It’s “why should you get to visit a National Park in the middle of a random Wednesday when I couldn’t do something like that at your age?” 

I’m projecting a lot on Bob and Nancy here. (Those aren’t their names but they might as well be, you know?) Maybe I am the lucky one, despite the debt and the impending doom of societal collapse. Maybe this nomadic lifestyle actually was a blessing and if they could do it all again, knowing that the American Dream ended up being waiting until 65 to enjoy your life, they’d willingly do it this way regardless of if they ever got to own a home.

But that’s why I feel the need to qualify the why before showing any gratitude to them. I know I’m lucky to have the tools, privilege, and timing to make the best of my economic circumstance. But they need to know why I’m here, or at least, have one ounce of perspective to understand that this isn’t just some fun vacation I’m taking on top of the life I planned on living. They have at least another “real” home somewhere else, perhaps a second or third stationary home for weekends and vacations - surely, places they could make money off of from schmucks like me. 

I’m living in the circumstances their generation forced me into. And making the best of it. But when they stop me to tell me how lucky I am - with just enough passive-aggressive digs like “you don’t know how good you’ve got it,” or “wow, wish I could’ve done that!” - I take the opportunity to give them perspective. Not enough to ruin their 50th wedding anniversary or whatever, just enough so that they know their frustration that their lives didn’t get to follow this same path should be redirected from me to their own involvement in creating this system. Maybe it’s just easier if I tell them to blame Reagan instead. 

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/02/as-national-eviction-ban-expires-a-look-at-who-rents-and-who-owns-in-the-u-s/

2. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/09/millennials-own-less-than-5percent-of-all-us-wealth.html