Before we get started with today’s column, which is based on a conversation I had with a reader — I want to open up the lines. Beginning next month, I’ll be putting together reader rundowns, where I collect some of the questions/feedback I get from the columns, and work through it. If you want to throw a question in the mix — tap the message button below, or drop an email to dursojosh@gmail.com.
The conversation that showed me how hard it is to talk issues
The backdrop of this week’s column is important. Before getting into the exchange that brought us here — I want to quickly talk about the data that made its way to my inbox hours before hitting publish.
According to a new Pew data, 45% of Americans say they’d choose to live in the past if they could. Only 14% say they’d choose the future. That matters, because how people feel about the past shapes how they interpret the present.
For decades, researchers have found the same pattern. Nostalgia pushes people to believe life used to be fairer, simpler, and more earned. When that belief hardens, the economic pressures of the day stop looking structural and feel moral.
I was reminded of that recently through a reader exchange that began as a disagreement about housing and ended as something else entirely.
I’ve spent a lot of time writing about why people should engage with those they disagree. Especially now, when politics feels so polarized. When the topic is local government, your own hometown, and the services your property taxes actually pay for, that conversation matters a lot.
That’s why I usually respond when someone writes in about a column. Significant disagreement is rare, but when it happens, I’m pretty curious. I know not everyone is going to agree. But I’m usually intrigued to know why or how they got there.
Those exchanges tend to sharpen my thinking. However, this one didn’t.
It slid quickly into the familiar dynamics that have hardened our all-or-nothing politics. It was confrontational. Less about sharing information, more about imposing a worldview. And once the numbers entered the conversation, the discussion stopped moving at all.
I’ve written a lot about housing this year. It’s an issue I care a lot about, one I work on outside of my day job, and a challenge that will shape the future of communities across Upstate. The reader who reached out — after reading several of those columns — dismissed the entire body of work as “junk reporting.”
That should’ve been my first warning sign.
Their first objection was rent data. They insisted Upstate New York apartments “average around $1,100,” and that anything suggesting otherwise was sensationalism. But that figure hasn’t reflected reality in years. One-bedroom apartments across Upstate metros routinely rent for $1,300 to $1,600. Two-bedrooms often push $2,000. Even in Seneca and Yates counties — among the most rural counties — averages are already around $1,300.
That isn’t ideology. That’s what the market is charging.
But this is where the Pew finding becomes relevant again. When nearly half the country believes the past was better, higher prices don’t register as evidence. They register as exaggeration.
From there, the conversation turned to workers. The argument was that people in retail or service jobs should be able to afford those rents if they managed their money better.
But the math doesn’t support that.
A typical retail worker in the Finger Lakes brings home around $2,200 a month after taxes. At today’s rents, a modest apartment can easily consume more than half of that income — before utilities, food, transportation, or healthcare enter the picture. To afford those prices without being severely cost-burdened, workers would need to earn closer to $55,000 to $70,000 a year. The median retail worker earns about half that.
This isn’t about budgeting discipline. It’s about wages and prices moving in opposite directions.
Still, the numbers didn’t move the conversation. They escalated it.
What followed was familiar territory: Personal responsibility, “kids these days,” and a heavy dose of nostalgia. People could afford rent, I was told, if they stopped buying TVs, took on second or third jobs, and toughened up the way previous generations supposedly did. Thirty-somethings, apparently, should just get roommates.
That reaction makes more sense when you remember the Pew data. If you believe the past was fundamentally fairer, then anyone struggling today must be doing something wrong.
But the past people remember so fondly looked nothing like the present. Entry-level wages were higher in real terms. Housing was far cheaper relative to income. And if the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity, it would be around $25 an hour today. For anyone entering the workforce in the late 1970s or early 1980s, the economic floor was simply different.
Nostalgia smooths over those differences. It turns memory into evidence.
And it does something else, too. It lets people treat economic stress as a personal failing rather than a structural one. If the problem is laziness or irresponsibility, you don’t have to grapple with actual costs. You don’t have to confront the fact that New York is short hundreds of thousands of housing units, or that vacancy rates across Upstate are the lowest they’ve been in decades. You get to blame flat-screen TVs instead.
What struck me wasn’t the disagreement. It was how fixed the narrative stayed, even as the facts piled up. Retail employs tens of thousands of adults across the Finger Lakes, many well over 40. These jobs aren’t “stepping stones” in a tourism-heavy regional economy — they’re careers. First-time homebuyers are approaching 40 at the same time home prices are skyrocketing, even in small towns across Upstate.
I’ve seen this dynamic play out in public hearings and on social media for years. Data on population loss, vacancy rates, or pre-leasing numbers rarely moves the conversation. What matters is the story people already believe about who their community is for … and who it isn’t.
That’s the real risk embedded in the Pew numbers. When a large share of the public is oriented toward the past, facts about the present start to feel like a threat.
What surprised me most was how quickly the tone shifted once the data contradicted the narrative. A conversation that could’ve been about understanding became one about grievance. Pointing out economic reality was treated as an attack on an entire generation, instead of what it actually is: An acknowledgment that the math has changed.
That’s what stayed with me after the emails stopped coming.
Not frustration — concern.
Because if we can’t agree on the numbers, or at least be willing to examine them honestly, how do communities make decisions about housing, zoning, or infrastructure? How do we solve regional problems if one side believes the crisis is structural and the other believes it’s moral?
Pew’s data doesn’t explain everything. But it helps explain why these conversations keep stalling out. Nostalgia offers a comforting story. Structural reality demands uncomfortable trade-offs.
I don’t mind disagreement. I genuinely welcome it. But I walked away from this one a little less confident that data alone can bridge the gap. Especially when the comfort of a familiar past feels better than the discomfort of a complicated future.
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