Poverty doesn’t spring up all at once. It is a relatively rapid transformation, but it still takes about a decade to really unfold. The disastrous American future, and of our own, is being prefigured even now as the ability of the American economy to maintain living standards is rapidly falling away. This describes the present, but it is a present that will overtake more and more as their ability to afford diminishes as the productivity of the US economy itself diminishes. New Grads Can’t Really Afford To Live Anywhere, Report Finds. This is still a curiosity, but it is not far from being the reality of an American economy that is losing ground:

Life after college graduation is thrilling… until you try to find somewhere to live. Entry level salaries coupled with sky-high rents in the country’s most desirable cities often makes finding a place more of a headache than a happy ending.

As experts at Trulia found, new grads can’t really afford to live anywhere among the country’s 25 largest rental markets. While the median annual income for new grads ranges from about $16,000 to about $41,000 in these cities, the income needed to afford median rent is two to three times that — assuming grads don’t want to spend more than 31 percent of their income on rent.

You can see this on the map below: A purple circle is how much money recent grads typically make, and a yellow circle is how much they’d need to make in order to afford median rent. The bar chart tells precisely how much more they’d need to make to afford rent — and the numbers are not pretty.

At worst, this effect means just .1 percent of rentals are affordable to new grads in Portland, Oregon. At best, it makes just 18.6 percent of rentals affordable in St. Louis, Missouri.

Any way you slice it, it’s a pretty rough welcome to the “real world.”

This is not just recent grads, of course, but will be a problem that anyone moving house is going to have to face. They just won’t be able to afford what everyone could not all that long ago everyone could.