High crime rate lowers property prices. If a group of people starts to tell everybody around that a neighborhood is crime-ridden, then houses will become cheap. The NIMBYs will fly away to their new suburbs. It’ll create total chaos, giving us cheaper homes to finally live in.
That’s the Tyler Durden way. He wanted to create chaos. Could have made his lackeys kill random civilians, but that doesn’t fly. Death gives people meaning, but killing someone discounts their life’s meaning. Property damage is peaceful to Durden.
“The buildings are empty,” Durden said to the narrator while he was disarming the bomb. “Security, maintenance, all our people. We’re not killing anyone, man. We’re setting them free!”
That is the product they are selling–the American Dream. A house in a nice suburb. “Fight Club” is about the “American Dream,” or the lack thereof. Durden wanted to break the banks and cause chaos to set us free from the “American Dream.”
“Fight Club” maintains its relevance to today because it criticizes the thesis of America. We were convinced to strive for the “American Dream,” and think we are individuals that are entitled to the comforts of life. To Gen X it was to become a millionaire, a movie star, a rock star. To their kids, Gen Z, it’s to go to college, get hired in a high paying job and live life by buying anything we want.
But it was never real. Not for our parents and never for us. It is statistically improbable for us to even own a home, a small part of achieving the American Dream.
According to the U.S. Census, the median household income in California is $91,551. The average California home value, on the other hand, is $783,666, which is a 33% increase since the lockdown in 2020, according to Zillow.
Calculating the needed salary for a California home in 2023, one would need $151,000 salary according to Bankrate, to maintain the “real estate rule of thumb.”
Only 22% of Los Angeles families are able to afford an “entry-level home,” while the national average is 53% according to the California Association of Realtors.
The chance of homeownership is becoming impossible for young Californians. The economic strife is compounded with “Not in My Backyard,” or NIMBY activists, who are basically nursing home patients that only care to view the houses that they live in as an investment, rather than a space to build community.
“Fight Club” shows how property owners behaved through Lou, the owner of the establishment the fight club was taking place in. Just like NIMBYs, he felt very comfortable threatening the community, but once Durden coughed up blood, showing the pain Lou laid onto him, he ran away.
When you have a bed of money and comfortability you can run away, like Lou. What Durden and Gen Z have in common is that we do not have the cushion to run back to. We can only endure the pain of unachievable dreams until it is shown to the face of NIMBYs the pain that they caused.
The NIMBYs have caused pain. They desperately oppose affordable housing, new housing developments or sheltering the homeless. This is to keep their housing prices up so they can sell it later.
To Durden, NIMBYs are not Lou. They are the people still hypnotized by the American Dream. They are the ones that he is trying to set free.
“The things you own end up owning you.”
