Marco.org

Members of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations were frequently able to afford vacation homes. They traveled there on the weekends, leaving their city homes for upstate/the mountains/the beach/the lake/wherever. Now, a combination of factors has eliminated this for my generation:

• Real-estate prices. We can’t even afford one home. When our parents and grandparents bought their homes, they cost 2-4 times their annual salaries. Now they cost 10 times our annual salaries.
• Overcrowded destinations. Those lakes and mountain towns are packed full now, and the quaint, less-dense places are much further away from where we live.
• Depressed destinations. Those small towns have been gutted and crushed by the departure of domestic industry and the Wal-Martization of small-town America. They’re ghost towns now.
• Gas prices. It’s harder for many families to justify driving 2 hours upstate frequently when it costs $50-100 each trip.

I can see this very clearly in what I know: upstate New York. But I don’t know if it’s universal. Does this apply to other metro areas?