Born Since 1980: Housing Costs Outpaced Wages

Men born since 1980: wages stagnated, housing prices soared

In 1999, someone moving out paid 30,000 pesetas for a three-bedroom apartment in a good area, on a salary of 90,000. Exactly one-third of income. Today, that ratio is a relic: cited rents consume between 60% and 80% of net income. The conversation about men born after 1980 always returns to the same point, which is not the usual one. It is not that they earn little. It is that everything else moved first.

Why does rent now consume the entire salary?

The arithmetic is simple and devastating. If in 1999 a salary of 90,000 pesetas supported a rent of 30,000—one-third—applying the same rule to the salary now cited as the most frequent figure, around 1,500 euros, would leave a three-bedroom apartment at about 500. Finding one is the hard part. From there comes the corollary that closes many discussions: if rent or a mortgage cost 400 euros a month, much of the conversation about youth precarity would vanish. The problem is not the salary, but the price.

Mandatory service, temp agencies, and the 'mileurismo': a sequence no one chose

The timeline can be dated almost year by year. The last to complete military service or its civil alternative. Then, entering the labor market through ETT (temporary work agencies), with temporality as the rule, not the exception. And then those who, instead of working, chose to keep studying: they graduated just in time to face the 2008 crisis. Mileurismo (earning 1,000 euros) stopped being a joke to become a ceiling. Home ownership, meanwhile, moved further away, first the bubble and then poorly paid temporary employment. One case summarizes it: whoever managed to buy, did so already at forty, when the downhill slope begins.

Welder, forklift operator, engineer: what job ads say

Here the numbers fight each other. Someone tracking job ads on a portal found a maximum of 1,809 euros operating a three-way forklift, and a second of 1,755. Conversely, welders in a shipyard area average 1,500 euros in the best-case scenario, and there are plenty at 1,280; senior technicians—draftsmen, surveyors, site technicians—do not exceed 1,700. The exception is the welder in a family business, reaching 2,500 or 3,000 euros in exchange for twelve-hour shifts. The conclusion anyone drawing the table reaches is uncomfortable: studying more does not guarantee earning more. The full breakdown, offer by offer, draws a picture much less friendly than economic reports.

The part not measured in euros

The diagnosis is not just economic. Childhood and early adulthood between 1980 and 2010 are remembered as good in almost all stories, even if they were not rich: music, cinema from 1980 to 1999, relationships without smartphones, without social media, and without apps. To illustrate what was lost, The Apartment by Billy Wilder is recalled, where an unqualified clerk paid about 15 dollars for a flat in a good area of New York with a salary of 65 a week. The figures are cited from memory, but the order of magnitude is the message. The ratio between rent and salary was reasonable for a long time in many places. Here, it ceased to be so.

Born in 1980, born in 1986: two worlds in the same decade

The birth date acts as a border. The early eighties caught four or five years in which certain trades paid above many degrees, and still saw the bubble burst with some margin. Those born after 1985 have known nothing but adjustment. Cases appear within the same family: the older brother with a permanent contract, affordable mortgage, and life on track; the trinc, with only a few years' difference, stringing together temporality, salaries that do not rise, and rents that do. And below them, those who came after look at the eighties with the same distance with which these look at the seventies.

The point where analysis gets stuck

From here, explanations diverge, and none close. Some argue the design was deliberate: that those who know in advance what policy will be applied buy before prices rise, and the rest arrive at the auction late. Others blame education, arguing that degrees with real outlets place people well; against this weighs that many who studied what they were told to study are not better off. And there is a third line attributing wage pressure to the arrival of labor, a very repeated thesis not backed by any data throughout the discussion. On pensions, however, there is uncomfortable agreement: the population pyramid was explained in school in the late eighties, and nothing was done. It was not an ideological problem, it was arithmetic.

With these differentials, internal migration or the fall in birth rates should be massive, and both remain marginal. Everything gets stuck there: theories abound on who paid the bill, and there is a lack of explanation for why the bill remains unpaid.