On YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook collectively, there's dozens to hundreds of popular videos coming out monthly of young adults complaining about home prices, sometimes through street interviews, where they interview upper-middle-class-looking old people asking for specific numbers on how much their first home cost, make a face to the camera, and then acting like this difference is some new thing. And then often correlating it to the last 4 years. It's become such a huge trend that even random street people are avoiding the questioning now, like its some TikTok inquisition going around. Trends like that develop on tiktok, and this one is still in full swing. It's not a coincidence this is all happening in an election year is my opinion. But my point is the issue they are complaining about has been going on consistently since at the least the mid-1800s in the USA, when you could 100% buy a 3 bedroom habitable house for an average years wage, compared to a minimum of 5x an average wage that now.
On Reddit I've been seeing some Republicans LARP as Democrats complaining about home prices in subreddits of young people and blaming it on Biden. It's not particularly sophisticated, as in they don't hide their post histories, so if you point it out their post histories to them they just delete their post.
Also I've been browing the r/genx and r/millennial subs lately and the chief price related complaint is home prices, as it would be expected for the most populous demographics in America, but this was not something posting regularly before this year.
But yea neither of the major candidates have made it an issue, but it's being used, mostly starting this year, by young adult supporters and detractors en masse both for political and non-political purposes. Third parties have tried to capitalize on the increased awareness, with the Jill Stein for example putting guaranteed housing as a top 3 priority, as mentioned in a prior post. And that is historical for American third parties. This was not a platform priority in past GP campaigns.
I saw none of this prior to a few months ago. And I was searching for it before, with few talking about it other than vague references to "yea affordable housing is an issue, sucks" among local activists and some think tanks. The only people who I saw made this a big deal on social media before this year to a meaningful extent were small, heavily looked-down-upon, and criminalized/stigmatized groups like UK squatter activists.
