You can’t be a bohemian when a one-bedroom apartment in a big city requires making 70 grand. When I was 21, my half of my rent was $200 or so. I had an (awful) former motel room in Ohio for $250 a month in 2010. All that cheap Midwestern rent enabled a lot of reading and writing. https://t.co/abt5OgJowz

— Matt Bell (@mdbell79) April 29, 2023

A friend of mine rented a decent apartment in 1995 for $150 a month. In today’s money, that’s $300 a month. He worked at Blockbuster and had plenty of money for other crap he liked, such as game systems and concerts. Note that he lived alone; no roommates. If he’d chosen the roommate option, his monthly rent could’ve been around only $180 a month in today’s money.

You cannot do that anywhere anymore.

Because of Boomer propaganda and gaslighting and that people don’t recall even recent history, I don’t think most realize just how very cheap housing used to be comparatively in most places.