Inflated Housing Prices Caused By "Dual Income" Families

I just finished reading a blog post titled The Problem With Women In The Workplace:

Because not only was feminism a dismal failure, but a quantified disaster. Little known fact: Because of women entering the workplace en masse in the 1980’s, the price of homes and vehicles EXPLODED. Why? Because people could charge more for homes and vehicles because working women created the dual income household. No one is going to ask 250K for a home if no one can afford it. So now women are forced to work, whether they want to or not, victims of the economy they created; 95% of them stuck in low paying, dead-end jobs. Most men can no longer earn enough for a woman to stay at home because of the now diluted workplace… over crowded by women.

In other words men, what they are saying is that the $4,000 - $7,000 6-cylinder Ford, Chevrolet, or Pontiac car you could afford in the early- mid-1980s and be generally happy with paying for it through your job and having your wife stay at home to look after the kids, has turned into the $35,000 SUV behemoth Excursion by the mid- late-1990s.

It is also precisely why the ``housing boom`` — created skyrocketing values of homes during the past 10 years in the first place. Because of dual income`` families. But now there is a possible real estate crash caused by something and we might not know for several years in hindsight what caused that.

At around the same time in the 1990s there was the trend of more women entering the workforce and in the government clerical jobs, as reported by Statistics Canada. The CPA the report refers to is Core Public Administration. To quote:

Women gaining ground in the CPA

The proportion of women within the CPA increased continuously from 1995 to 2006. In fact, since 1999, women have outnumbered men within the CPA.

Men still outnumber women in the workplace. However, the gap between the proportion of employed men and employed women has been slowly narrowing.

In 1995, nearly 46% of employed Canadians were women. By 2006, this proportion had grown to over 47%.

In contrast, in 2006, women accounted for the majority (54%) of all CPA employees, up from only 46% in 1995.

Between 1995 and 1997, more men than women left the CPA. Since 1998, this situation has reversed, and more women have been leaving the CPA.

However, during the 11-year period, there were continuously more female than male employees heading into the CPA.

Alongside the above trends there was more suburbanization at the edge of the city. More people commuting further and further to their jobs using more fuel. Public transit ridership took a nosedive, unless you were lucky enough to have rapid transit like a new or expanded LRT or subway line, you were facing a very lengthy commute indeed.

And just how was the public sold on the "need" for an SUV? Well people who bought them "sit higher up" in the vehicle, so it seems more "safe". Baloney. Just look at all the car accidents and tip overs that SUVs had. No, to reiterate, the reason why SUVs were created in the first place was so that it would become prohibitively expensive for the guy to afford by himself. He "needs" his wife to work full-time.

And then of course there are the families who break up (divorce is now more than 50% of marriages)... She is probably more likely to get the car/SUV.

So men, what are we going to do to fix this problem that was created in the mid-90s?

Ladies, do you really need that large(r) vehicle? Do you really need a bigger house? Another cell phone? Or can you get by with something smaller, and instead of a cell phone, going back to wired communications?

To God be the Glory.