20 Hobbies Everyone Could Afford Until Rich People Ruined Them
Once upon a time, everyone may have been able to afford a house but you certainly don’t see that happening anymore.
Certain similar trends that started to gain traction amongst the masses have recently become too expensive for everyone to achieve. Even van life and tiny house living which were once considered affordable have since been taken over by the more affluent as a hobby. It’s not just housing, there are quite a few things that were once distinctly more affordable that have been recently affected according to folks. We’ve listed some of the most upvoted opinions on the subject, in the gallery below.
More info: Reddit
#1 Quiet out-of-the-way country cabins sitting by lakes. Now they are overpriced Airbnbs.
#2 Burning Man, Collectable Card Games, Retro Video Games, GOING TO CONCERTS…like seriously, just pick a hobby. Once the re-sellers get into it, prices go through the roof, and nobody can afford to do anything.
#3 Living in warehouses in the industrial, rundown side of town.
#4 Being able to afford a house. And even crazier it was usually on only one income.
#5 Unrestricted land. Everything gets an HOA now, and they try to force you into their jurisdiction.
My family fought an HOA targeting my grandmother’s house. She had lived there for 10 years before the HOA was even an idea, or the new area with big houses was cleared for construction before that.
We ended up having Rock in her houses, skirting, and rock in under her deck due to not having the money to fight an HOA she never signed on to.
If an HOA comes out where I live (which might happen in the next 15 years), I will fight them tooth and nail for spite alone.
#6 Thrifting
#7 Many ethnic foods in the US. The really tasty stuff might be dirt-cheap and off the beaten path until the yuppies and hipsters get wind of it, then it’s found in every strip mall at an inferior quality for $30 a plate.
#8 Buying a “fixer upper” home and spending weekends working on it. I was really looking forward to that.
#9 Proper local pubs, affected by expanding cities ( Manchester in my case). Ruined by greedy breweries trying to attract upmarket clientele, or selling out for demolition and the building of apartments that locals cannot afford…
#10 Food banks. My local food bank put out a news article basically saying that rich people need to stop using the food bank as a “life hack” to lower their grocery bills.
#11 Lobster was originally food feed to prisoners
#12 Fajitas. I remember being able to get skirt steak really cheap and sometimes for free.
#13 Ebay. It used to be so useful to get all kinds of cheap or unique things. Then more and more big commercial sellers joined the club and eventually ebay itself forgot about what and who made their platform a success in the first place.
#14 Going to the farmer’s market
#15 Van life and tiny house living
#16 Eating salmon. Fish used to be poor man’s food. Now you pay absurd amounts for the tiniest piece.
#17 Pickup trucks. They used to be much cheaper.
#18 Carhartt. Blue collar workers needed the durability, then celebrities wore “fashionably” and drove up the price
#19 Football (soccer). It used to be a working-class sport played by and watched by working-class people. Then money came into it and the working class was priced out of watching.
#20 It’s interesting reading all of the responses here. Really the underlying issue is, you guessed it – the Internet.
Lots of the things here used to be cheap because the market for them was inefficient… e.g. they were things only known by people in certain communities (certain cuts of meat, thrift stores, certain travel destinations, etc.)
Basically, the internet enabled the masses to “discover” all of these things and drive demand, and thus the price, up for all of them.
Shanilou Perera
Shanilou has always loved reading and learning about the world we live in. While she enjoys fictional books and stories just as much, since childhood she was especially fascinated by encyclopaedias and strangely enough, self-help books. As a kid, she spent most of her time consuming as much knowledge as she could get her hands on and could always be found at the library. Now, she still enjoys finding out about all the amazing things that surround us in our day-to-day lives and is blessed to be able to write about them to share with the whole world as a profession.
