August 27, 2024 | Inflation Chronicles: The Aristocracy Decrees That Peasants Will Sleep In Parking Lots

I have a dog who wakes up with the sun and immediately wants a nice long hike. Over the years, he’s trained me to accept his schedule, so at the crack of dawn we drive to one of a dozen or so nearby trails that he counts as his territory.

One of our regular hikes starts at a roadside rest that used to be, well, normal — which is to say safe, well-maintained, and frequented by travelers who used the facilities and hopped back on the road. But lately the early morning ambiance is more “downtown San Francisco” than “pretty rural trailhead.” Multiple vehicles tricked out as mobile bedrooms fill the parking lot, and trash seems to be dumped out of windows instead of schlepped to nearby receptacles. It’s both sad and scary, made more so by the fact that the change happened in a statistically healthy economy, with positive growth and low unemployment— at least according to the official numbers. Imagine what roadside rests—and public parks and Walmart parking lots—will look like in the depths of the next recession.

This, alas, is what happens when inflation sends home prices and rents up faster than incomes. It enriches the relative handful who own the housing stock and impoverishes the people who were just getting by before their cost of living spiked.

Here’s a post from Michael Snyder’s Substack that expands on this story:

If Everything Is So Great, Why Are Millions Of Americans Sleeping In Their Vehicles?

Have you noticed an unusual number of vehicles in the parking lots of major retailers in your area at night?  If you look closely enough, you will see that many of those vehicles actually have people sleeping in them.  At this point, millions of Americans are sleeping in their vehicles every night.  This is happening even though we are being told that the economy is just fine.  But of course the truth is that the system is failing all around us.  So if you get to sleep in a very warm bed in a very warm home, you should consider yourself to be very blessed, because vast numbers of people are really struggling right now.

The primary reason why so many people are living in their vehicles is because the cost of living has soared to unprecedented heights.

In particular, the cost of housing has become extremely oppressive.  In fact, housing in the United States has become more unaffordable than it has ever been before.

This week, I was stunned to read about a 33-year-old man named Ishan Abeysekera that is paying $2,100 a month to share a house with 23 other people…

In a city as notoriously expensive as New York, it’s common to see people in their late 20s and early 30s living with roommates to help manage the high cost of living.

But Ishan Abeysekera has taken that to the next level with his current living situation in Brooklyn: a communal building that he shares with a whopping 23 other people.

“When I say I have 23 housemates, people are like ‘What? That sounds wild,’” Abeysekera tells CNBC Make It. “But actually, it’s quite nice.”

That is nuts!

Who would pay that much to live with 23 total strangers?

Of course most Americans can’t afford to pay $2,100 a month for housing.

For example, it is being reported that some flight attendants that work for American Airlines are “sleeping in their cars” because the pay is so low…

Most new flight attendant hires are required to live in cities like Dallas, Miami, and New York, which have high costs of living that they cannot afford, Hedrick noted.

American flight attendants are sleeping in their cars, she said. Some of them fight for trips just for the chance to eat the plane meals, if the pilots don’t take their meals first.

“Our new hire flight attendants are struggling,” Hedrick said, adding that new hires most strongly rejected the 17% hike.

When I was growing up, I always thought that those that were selected as flight attendants had very good jobs.

But those days are long gone.

In this economy, many flight attendants can’t even afford a place to live.

Of course there are millions of others in a similar position.  In recent years, “van life” has become quite trendy, and more than 3 million Americans now fall into this category…

“Van life” or “van living” is a term that is becoming more popular around the country. People packing up their lives, moving into a mobile unit and exploring the states.

According to Yahoo Finance, the number of American van lifers has increased by 63% over the last couple of years, going from 1.9 million in 2020, to 3.1 million in 2022.

In the old days, if you lived in a van down by the river you were considered to be a bum.

But in this economy, living in a van down by the river is just considered to be normal.

Needless to say, there are some “van lifers” that choose the lifestyle because of the freedom it offers.

But there are many others that have been forced into this lifestyle.  A woman named Michelle Rose that used to own a home in Montana is one of them…

Three and a half years ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, Michelle Rose was about to lose her Montana home, was having issues with her job, lost her mother, and put everything she owned into a van to live in it permanently.

“I was like let’s just do this, let’s just sell the house and get on the road and we will figure out things as we go. It has sort of been a by the seat of my pants kind of life,” said Rose.

Michelle says that finances are the hardest part of van life for her, it is a constant worry and finding work is also challenging.

Another woman named Katie that “works as a manifestation coach and at a local coffee shop” admits that it was a tough mental adjustment when she started to live out of her vehicle…

Katie J., who works as a manifestation coach and at a local coffee shop, spoke about the mental legwork she had to work through in order to reach a sense of belonging in the community.

“Van life is fun and cool and saves money and it’s flashy on Instagram and stuff,” Katie J. said, “but it will bring up a lot for you to work through when it comes to not having roots somewhere … I’m a black woman and I’m already rare in Truckee as is, so to be also living in a van, I had so much stuff around that, so much shadow work to do around the limiting beliefs and feeling like I’m not supposed to be here, and I shouldn’t be parking here and I’m gonna get in trouble.”

A lot of these people have jobs, and a lot of these people would not be officially classified as “homeless”.

But the cost of living crisis has driven them to the brink of losing everything.

Unfortunately, our leaders never seem to learn.  They keep borrowing and spending money at an unprecedented rate, and this continues to create even more inflation.

If you can believe it, our government is even spending “up to a quarter million taxpayer dollars” to teach Iraqi kids how to be climate activists…

The State Department is offering up to a quarter million taxpayer dollars to an eligible nonprofit to teach Iraqi teenagers about climate activism.

Iraqi high schoolers could receive “Eco Action Clubs” bankrolled by taxpayers that will teach them how to advocate for environmental reform in their home country, according to a grant solicitation posted by the State Department earlier this month. The clubs will have several objectives, ranging from developing an “eco-agenda and action plan” which will generate “climate change solutions” to running a social media campaign to increase awareness of the climate crisis.

We are literally committing national suicide, but most of the population doesn’t seem to care.

Every election cycle, the big spenders are sent back to Washington over and over again.

Meanwhile, more Americans are being forced to sleep in their vehicles with each passing day.

See Michael’s other posts here

John Rubino August 27th, 2024

Posted In: John Rubino Substack

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