I don’t believe average rent was $500 in 1990. In 1995 I was paying $450 per month to sleep on a couch in someone’s house. I eventually saved enough for all of the moving expenses and managed to get a tiny 1 bedroom apartment in a terrible part of town for $485. When I found a roommate I moved to a better part of town and our two bedroom apartment was $700 per month. That was like 1996. This was all in a fairly affordable city. So pardon my suspicion, but I think this post is creating a rosier past than the one we lived through. Also, minimum wage was $4.25 an hour everywhere. Now it’s $15-$20 per hour in most major cities. Overall I think the poor are making more comparatively, but the middle class are worse off, and it’s a shrinking economic status group.
Quick Google for the Census Bureau only turns up median rather than mean:
Median is probably a better value here since it’s going to reduce outlier effects.
Looks to me that median rent in most states in 1990 was closer to $300-400 per month than $500.
My 2007 apartment was $475. It is now $1,485.
Rents were fairlyish stable until the housing market crash.
That apartment was $790 in 2010. The rent hike was a long time ago, and since then it has just more or less been following inflation/gouging patterns seen elsewhere.
I will acknowledge that shit went crazy after covid too. My rent went up 22% in two years, and house prices were going up hundreds of thousands of dollars within a year.
Yeah that’s true. I was lucky enough to have gotten a mortgage right before covid so I haven’t personal experience on rent hikes as a result, I recognize.
Have you seen the price of a decent piece of avocado toast though?
1990: “We don’t do that, do that yourself at home. GTFO”
I can get 4 avocados for $5, a loaf of good sourdough for $5, and a dozen aggs for $8. $18/week ($3/day) and I can eat a healthy breakfast of avocado toast with 2 eggs every day.
That $72/month is what’s breaking the bank, not my $2500/month rent.
Yeah they can be finicky. I live in the mountains in CA and they’re definitely fresh, but you can tell they’ve travelled and the altitude here turns them shitty real quick so it’s a delicate balance of getting just the right ones that’ll be ripe at the right time in sequence to eat before they go to hell the next day.
I literally had avocado toast today. You know what made me start? I did the math, and avocado toast costs about as much as a bowl of cereal. They’ve been gradually hiking the price of all the essential items like cereal and milk, but the luxury goods haven’t gone up as much. There’s no such thing as “cutting corners and saving up” anymore.
The bit about avocado toast is not making one for yourself at home for $2. It’s about going out to eat for every meal and ordering an overpriced item at a hipster brunch bar in a liberal city. It has nothing to do with the fact that a piece of bread and an avocado are fairly cheap on their own.
Not defending the out of touch piece of shit that said it, just trying to give context.
Avocados are $3 each here and half the time they’re bad. Must be nice living somewhere with affordable avocados.
Do you use an entire avocado for your toast?
Where I live it’s $5 a gallon for milk (let’s assume 1/10 gallon for breakfast cereal so $0.50 per bowl)
Then it’s like $1.00 /100g of cereal, so you’re probably looking at $1.50 for a bowl of cheerios.
Where I live I can get avocados for $1.20 each and a loaf of bread for $4.50 (14 slices?) so if I use half an avocado for my slice of toast that’s less than $1.
Even with avocados at $1 each it’s still way more expensive than a bowl of cereal. Unless you buy brand name cereal at MSRP or something.
Costs and nutrition estimates
- milk - $3-3.50/gallon
- avocado - $1-1.50/ea
- cereal - $0.10-0.20/oz @ Costco - so I guess $0.35-0.70/100g?
- bread - $2.50/loaf, 22 slices per loaf
The internet tells me that 125ml milk to 30g cereal is the proper ratio. In freedom units, that’s ~30 servings per gallon or $0.10 of milk per bowl, and 30g is a little over an ounce, so $0.10-0.20 cereal per serving, leading to about $0.20-0.30 per serving. For avocado toast, a slice is about $0.11-0.12, so avocado toast is about $0.61-0.87.
Looking at nutrition (taken from MyFitnessPal and Walmart websites):
- 125ml whole milk - 81 calories, 5g fat, 5g protein
- 30g honey nut cheerios - 113 calories, 2g fat, 3g protein, 2g fiber
- 1 slice whole wheat bread - 60 calories, 1g fat, 3g protein, 1g fiber
- 1/2 avocado - 117 calories, 11g fat, 1g protein, 5g fiber
In total for my area, for an average serving:
- cereal - 194 calories; 7g fat, 8g protein, 2g fiber
- avocado toast - 177 calories, 12g fat, 4g protein, 6g fiber
Normalizing for cost per calorie in my area, I get:
- cereal (whole milk, honey nut cheerios) - $0.10-0.15/100 calories
- avocado toast (whole wheat bread, medium sized avocado) - $0.34-0.49/100 calories
In other words, avocado toast is something like 2-5x more expensive than cereal, depending on where in that range your meal falls. If you’re buying regularly priced cereal (more like $0.20-0.25) and if milk is more expensive in your area, then it’s a lot more competitive, but still cheaper than avocado toast (something like half the price).
That said, neither is a particularly expensive meal, and you’re not poor because you’re eating avocado toast. However, if everything you do is 2-5x more expensive than alternatives, then we have an issue.
You’re also forgetting that cereals contain almost no vitamins or fiber, but avocado does. So, to make up for it, you should eat a salad to your cereals. Then calculate the price again. You will find (I guess) that avocado can compete with cereals+salad.
Well, a multivitamin costs a few cents…
But yes, cereal is certainly less healthy than avocado toast, but it doesn’t really need to be if the rest of your diet makes up for it. Also, there are also breakfast cereals with higher fiber and vitamin content (e.g. most granolas), and oatmeal has 4g fiber in a 140 calorie serving and is cheaper still than most breakfast cereals.
My point here isn’t to decide which is the best option for your breakfast, but to challenge the idea that avocado toast is somehow about the same price as breakfast cereal. There are a lot of options for breakfast that can fit into a balanced diet. The important thing is to find something you like that supports a healthy lifestyle and fits into your budget, and there are a lot of options to get there.
Median income for a single worker in the USA in 2024 is so far $59,228 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In large cities it’s significantly higher. Rent and property values are definitely out control though. There wasn’t nearly enough housing built after '08. I feel even worse for our neighbors to the north.
So your average rent is still only 4% of your average income. You’d still have 48k left over after paying rent.
That’s confusing. Why not use the same time scale? And what country quotes rent monthly? We do weekly here. Monthly rent makes no sense because months are different lengths.
Rent is the US is typically monthly.
As far as potentially stupid things the US does, this is pretty far down the list.
