There's a bunch of people living in cities that they'd rather be towns than cities :) Heretaunga Hastings is working through stuff like that but has made a lot of progress. Lots of new infill developments are walking distance to the centre, there's reasonable public transport and will be 2 story with small or no section. Sounds puny, but compared to most houses round here 2 stories is up, not out :)

They're also trying to work on getting more apartment style stuff right in the centre as well, it'll take a while and a fair bit of effort for folks to embrace it but proper cities are vibrant and exciting because people live and work in the middle of them.

Every generation has their struggles, so it can be hard to understand what it's like for others. If I felt like I had a hard life then someone started complaining about how easy my generation had it then I would probably get pretty defensive.

Elizabeth Warren wrote a book (about 20 years ago) called The two income trap about the problems for families caused by the move to having both parents work. She isn't advocating for families to choose to only have one parent working, but rather for wider societal change and some specific policies. Disclaimer: I haven't actualy read the book, only the wikipedia page.

He uses an "average house price" of $893,639. That is being massively skewed upwards by urban centres. Rural houses are still relatively affordable - a quick search on Trademe finds perfectly acceptable houses in small towns like Ashburton for $300k, and if you get out into rural areas it gets even cheaper. He's also assuming that farmhand would have bought an "average-price" house back in the 90s - in fact rural houses were cheaper back then just as they are today.

Using the Westpac Mortgage calculator he used, a couple each on the median income of $61k ($29 an hour) could afford a property at $809,687 with a 20% deposit. To give him credit, that is still pretty much unaffordable for most people and something we should all be appalled by, but it is nowhere near as terrible as the picture he is painting.

I know nothing about them.

Vince has some extremely questionable views on things like culture, race, history and politics. According to him, ultimately a lot of things come back to "the Jews". He is a contributor to the far-right fringe disinformation outlet Counterspin Media.