Counterpoint: living alone isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A good roommate is as hard to find as a romantic partner, but living with people you like is one of the greatest joys of life.
Sometimes we joke with my old roommate (we live by ourselves, on different sides of the country) how both of us would absolutely move into a 4-bed apartment and be roommates again. We had a very good thing going on for 6 years, but I guess, gotta do the grown up stuff and live alone. It's not serious at all, since we both enjoy our solo-life, but also...
If presented the option of living in the bay area with roommates in my 50s or living almost anywhere else but having my own place, I'm picking the latter every single time.
Suppressed household formation is the reason why increasing supply often doesn't look like it's working. There are tens of millions of people who want to move out of their current situation into a smaller household.
I dunno, I like my parents. I could think of worse ways to live than with them. But to be honest I guess I'd rather have the reverse of my parents living with me.
20 years of 'this is my house and...' is enough :D
I own my home and will be selling it at probably-a-loss next year because I have no use for it anymore. It's far larger than I need and I am no longer partnered. I'll be renting a studio or 1br and am very excited. I would love to sell this place to a young family or couple looking for a starter home.
It would probably take 40-50k to make the house legal to rent (at least, from what I understand about the requirements to rent it). Which would then just mean I have to own it for longer.
Wait wait wait. Building housing is inducing demand for housing. We shouldn't build new houses nor new roads because clearly neither improves anything. /s
Marriage insurance! Pays out in case of breakup. No perverse incentives!
It would be an awesome market though. I wonder if you could reasonably price the risk with a large enough pool.
Tangentially, I pine for the sci-fi world where I could have signed a five year marriage instead of an indeterminate-term one. At 18 I was barely smart enough to avoid the college debt trap. At 23...
According to the article's comments, there was a movie about this exact scenario that came out in 2006. Maybe this scenario is an indicator about housing bubbles.
The assumption is that there is a "idealized" rate of divorce that would exist if all impediments were removed. The actual divorce rate being close to this is a signal of high economic mobility across the economy and vice versa.
I like it tbh, it's a good big mac index.
I would bet there's also an idealized rate of people finding their endgame that is much lower than the marriage rate and getting closer to that trends with high social mobility.
This is actually not an uncommon situation among the lower classes. Even without high housing costs, the working poor often continue living together while divorcing because they can't afford to physically separate. My employer worked on an e-divorce webapp for the provincial government and had to include this scenario in generating the self-filing paperwork: you essentially attest that you're maritally separated but still cohabitating for financial reasons.
Of my several divorced friends, all have agreed that divorce is the most expensive way possible to become a two-house household.
The Tantone's situation really weakens this article for me, rate hikes were entirely telegraphed by Powell, and they bought during the beginning of that spree. Further, you were always going to lose money, there are very few situations in which anyone could come out better in 1.5 years into a mortgage, their plan was essentially wait at minimum 3 years (ride up, -some time passes- , then the ride down, however long this process takes) hoping for an event that has only happened once in the fed's history.
If their situation was removed, I think this would be a decent article.
Real estate agents always have a narrative about why you should buy now. For example, if rates are rising, a good story is that other people are holding back from buying due to rising rates, therefore buyers are sitting out, there is pent-up demand. This was your last change to get in before prices explode when the fed tapers. We know this is wrong with hindsight but it was widely believed. You can’t expect people to predict the course of the bond market.
Real estate agents don't wrap your brain in a plastic bag and throw it out the window over the course of days/weeks/months into a search for what is likely to be the single largest purchase you will probably make in your entire life.
Hindsight is not relevant.
> You can’t expect people to predict the course of the bond market.
If you can't "predict" fed fund rates, then why make predictions on the housing market? The thing that the governments both state and federal is heavily vested with.
I think your reasoning is quite flawed. The Tantone's situation is one of unpreparedness and shortsighted to say the least, which as an insurance salesman looks pretty terrible.
That's all good and well, but people have been living together after divorce for a long time. This article seems to be nothing but anecdotal data. You almost had no choice but to do this before the '60s. Divorce has always been expensive, and people choose to cohabitate for financial reasons. Perhaps people have been cohabitation after divorce at higher rates since the Fed has raised interest rates, or perhaps not. But it would be nice if this article would show some statistical data over the long run on this. Do we even have any reliable data on rates of cohabitation after divorce?
It probably shouldn’t go without stating that many separated women couldn’t establish credit on their own or open bank accounts. Banks weren’t required to lend to women until the 70s. My grandmother had this issue after she divorced.
Women could most certainly establish credit and open bank accounts and own real estate, even as far back as the 1800s. My great grandmother raised three children as a widow in the middle of the Great Depression. Being a widow was quite a bit more common in those days as war killed a lot of young, married men with children. And disease took quite a few others. At any rate, she worked a factory job, and owned her own house. And ran her own checking account.
There were even programs available to women (and men) for obtaining a mortgage, such as the FHA program established in 1934: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FHA_insured_loan (this program is still around)
The point is that discrimination against women was widespread enough that it required a federal law against it in the 70s to rectify. That doesn’t mean discrimination always happened or it was impossible to get a loan or open a bank account.
Just like the 1964 civil rights act. It’s not that discrimination against race or sex or religion always happened, but it happened enough.
Divorce was a totally different animal before no fault divorce became a thing. The idea of an amicable divorce didn't really exist in the public mind. Divorce itself was also scandalous, if you could even get it done.
The rate of cohabitation was probably sky high because most couples who wanted to divorce just stayed married because actual divorce wasn't worth it.
Housing prices have the potential to be infinite due to the infinite cost of producing redundant land.
The land on which houses sit can't be produced. Someone owning all the existing land would ask for any payments and couldn't be refused unless the consumers wouldn't want to live anymore.
So when we are talking about housing, we have to be careful about qualifying the price as a bubble. There's underlying value underneath that can warrant any price.
When we 1st separated in 2011 my ex-wife and I along with our young daughter stayed in the same house for about a year. It was definitely not the most comfortable of situations but I've had worse living arrangements in my life.
After selling the house we both rented town houses. We should have done more communicating about that because we unknowingly ended up renting 2 doors down from each other. That was the living situation which couldn't end soon enough.
It was obviously not hilarious, but I am trying desperately to respond in a way that seems positive, yet that reflects the humor of the situation without being insensitive. I am failing miserably.
If you've previously survived for one year in the same house I think it'd be possible to see the humor in the situation and just move again one year after.
My sister lives 4 houses down from our parents and did it on purpose but refuses to speak to them or let them see their granddaughter. Some people do weird shit.
Some of this has to do with balancing closeness and distance. One reason why it can get weird is that one motive can be conscious while the opposite motive is unconscious. So for example I might be consciously distant by refusing to speak to them or let them see the granddaughter, while at the same time I show my need for closeness unconsciously, by living 4 houses down.
It's tough stuff and I don't mean to comment rudely on your family situation.
One of my father's cousins swapped wives with his best friend. They were quite amicable about it and continued to be friends including going on holiday together.
My worse living arrangements were before this happened. The severely bi-polar girlfriend who stopped taking her meds and the alcoholic roommate who would become violent come to mind.
I currently live in a refurbished and expanded 19th century farm house on a 209 acre property with a horse farm which my fiancee owns. I retired in August at 54. I spend my days taking care of the property, horses and our daughters while my fiancee is off to the city during the week for work.
They left out the "in the trendy, inner city areas we want to live in" part.
Because whilst housing prices are rising in cities we are also seeing major declines in populations for smaller towns.
And whilst our parents were willing to sacrifice and embrace these towns which in turn became gentrified it doesn't seem current generations feel the same way.
Even if it is it doesn't invalidate the argument. Outside my "city" you can get housing for much much cheaper and have the same commute as if you lived in the city itself.
But at some point you're going to have to give up this notion that population density can be made infinite. At some point you can't simply cram more "work" into a city.
Many big cities in Europe are having housing crises of their own - Lisbon, Amsterdam, London etc. Just today, there was this thread bemoaning the housing situation in Netherlands - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444948
> Sometimes I wonder if Americans travel out of the US at all.
Sometimes I wonder if people know real facts about Europe or just have some rosy imagination or generalize some tiny corner to the entire continent.
And they're still better than most cities in the US in terms of housing, density, and infrastructure.
With its half-million population, Lisbon has better public transportation than my lovely Philadelphia, with its joke subway with two lines. I'd bet Lisbon's trolleys have better coverage than SEPTA has for the whole city in PHL. And, mind you, Lisbon is among the poorest capitals in the European Union.
I could easily live in Lisbon right now if it wasn't for the low EU salaries (and my wife really loving being in the US). My goal is still to claim my citizenship and retire there eventually or in Porto.
And I'm not even considering the really good infrastructure places, like Madrid, with its circular subways (two lines). The wealthiest country in the world must do better.
Context of the discussion is that density solves the housing cost problem. I pointed out that European cities have both a high density and a serious housing problem, which is now impacting national elections (see the example I gave about Dutch elections thread).
Saying they are better than the US is not really relevant to this discussion.
> I could easily live in Lisbon right now if it wasn't for the low EU salaries (and my wife really loving being in the US).
Exactly my point. Lisbon has all the goodies you mentioned (I too liked it when I visited) and yet one needs a US salary to afford a decent house there. Not possible on the median local salary.
Dude, when NYC has half the density of Paris, there is so much more density to be added to cities in the US.
And this isn't building skyscrapers all around. It is building those 4/5/6 levels apartment buildings all over the place, most with some businesses on ground level. There are plenty of opportunities to make these cities cheaper and more livable. What we lack here in the US is politicians who aren't sellouts.
That's disingenuous to some extent. Housing is beyond reach for many folks nowadays and jobs don't follow in the smaller towns you mention and you'd put yourself at risk of being surrounded by no one your age. Of course people want to live close to their social circle.
Anywhere within an hour drive of the SF Bay Area is hugely expensive. Most of California is expensive even away from the big cities. Sacramento is expensive now.
Comparing living near jobs and quality schools to living by a mansion on the beach is quite unfair - people don't solely desire the luxury of cities, they desire the opportunity for themselves and their families.
"Working your way up the property ladder"? The median sale price for a house in Westchester County, NY is seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. With insurance and property taxes and the current interest rate, that's over six grand a month. That's a hair shy of the US median household income (before taxes!). How exactly is a person ever supposed to afford that?
As energy costs go up the cost of living rural not accounting for housing goes up relative to urban life. It’s not as if urbanization is driven by collective stupidity.
Cities have jobs. Cities have opportunity. Cities have diversity. Why should we expect, encourage, or even desire that young people sacrifice economic and social opportunity and mobility?
Why is the response to high housing cost in cities lecturing "current generations" about their choices? There are glaringly obvious problems in many of our cities that make housing so expensive. Is it so outrageous to try to solve those problems, and allow people to be able to live where they want to live?
But why do cities have all the opportunity? Most likely because the capital owning class lives in cities and has been systematically draining wealth from more rural areas via globalization and the erosion of workers' rights. I'm not saying young professionals need to concern themselves with such lofty ideals, but I do think it's a valid to question why there are only a few pockets of opportunity left in the country.
Exactly what wealth are cities draining from rural America?
Is it possible there's a simpler explanation? That the economy of the twenty-first century is dominated by information and technology, and that these demands are better matched to the agglomeration affects of true urban density, where the best and brightest can learn from each other?
I cannot find this reference now—I want to say ancient, possibly Roman—but cities have a brain-drain effect and lead specialization; whereas rural individuals have to do many things in order survive.
> Exactly what wealth are cities draining from rural America?
Obviously it's not the cities themselves draining the wealth, but rather a spiral of excess capital accumulation. It just so happens that many of the people perpetuating this cycle live in cities. Generally, increasing one's capital is done by taking money that was being funneled one place, and funneling it to yourself instead. For example, CVS can open a pharmacy and undercut local competition. Once the local pharmacies close, cash flows that were once destined for local pharmacies go to CVS instead. Local pharmacies would have kept the profits locally, but CVS siphons them from the community into the pockets of shareholders, most of whom happen to live in cities. These city-dwelling shareholders can they pay others to perpetuate this cycle.
> Is it possible there's a simpler explanation? That the economy of the twenty-first century is dominated by information and technology.
Is it, though? Consumer spending is about 70% of GDP. What is your personal spending on tech vs. non-tech items? Personally, I spend vastly more money on non-tech items compared to tech items. The margins are obviously much lower, so they don't have splashy stock tickers.
Density increases exchange of ideas and promoted specialisation, which increases productivity. This has been true throughout history and may as well be the zeroth law of economics.
The actual 0th law of economics is the law of decreasing marginal utility. You can't expect specialization and productivity to increase indefinitely as density increases. Clearly, we're at an inflection point. How can people specialize and be productive if they can't even afford a place to live?
The actual zeroth law would be a corollary of the second law of thermodynamics: scarcity.
> Clearly, we're at an inflection point
This has been claimed repeatedly throughout history. Without knowledge of the future, it is impossible to know whether we are at an inflection local or global. With resepct to any American city, we know we are far from the inflection point because we have counterexamples abroad.
> With resepct to any American city, we know we are far from the inflection point because we have counterexamples abroad.
Such as? There are very few places in the world that match the productivity of the U.S. I don't think Luxembourg counts as a counterexample, for instance (population 640K). Singapore, maybe, but its population is under 5.5 million.
The simple explanation is that many of these communities are the proverbial railroad towns that the train no longer stops at. Their key industries have dried up, and the infrastructure costs are unsustainable for the remaining population and economic activity.
The US overbuilt in rural areas during the late 1800s and early 1900s as the railroads pushed west, others had a major industry that has dried up, and a lot of these areas just aren’t sustainable anymore. But America doesn’t have a system for handling de-ruralization gracefully, you still have to deliver power and phone regardless of whether someone wants to live in the middle of Wyoming. We rarely ever rip up a road, etc. Infrastructure is a one-way ratchet.
On top of that most of americas infrastructure is aging in general and we have a general crisis of insufficient revenue to maintain let alone fully replace it. Everything is built on the assumption that it will catch traction and grow, and when it shrinks then there’s no money to maintain or replace it. This is a general crisis across our whole infrastructure - even apart from de-ruralization we’d have overbuilt infrastructure in most places relative to sustainable revenue.
Cities offer opportunity at the extreme end of the spectrum due to the concentration of people offering scalability. A professional spots team in the city, for example, can attract tens of thousands of paying spectators. "Field of Dreams" might attract a half dozen spectators on a good night. That's the difference between making millions and not being able to put food on the table.
But for the average Joe who will never leverage themselves into those extremes, I'm not sure the data actually shows greater opportunity. My read from the data is the average Joe is generally worse off in the city with respect to job prospects and compensation.
This is an overstatement. In large parts of Midwest United States (and Canada), you can be middle class by farming. That is "opportunity" -- not amazing, but a good, middle class life in a small, safe town. Also, it is easy to own your home in a farming community -- much easier than large city or suburbs. It would better to ask why do cities have so much more opportunity in the 21st Century? Probably due to the structure of a highly advanced economy. Most of the (economically) valuable work in services is done in and around large cities.
As soon as your middle-class farmer children finish high school they will be 1 of 3 (descending, from most likely to least):
- Leaving for the big city/college
- Staying in your small town, but slowly becoming helpless as they fall into bad crowds, bad habits, or both
- Staying in your small town, but successfully continuing the way of life
It is unsustainable in its current form, unless you inoculate your children against modern ideas and technology (like the Amish) or make it more desirable for people to stay. I will point to European villages as a counter example. And then I will point to: lack of cultural homogeneity, the tenuous nature of living in the United States without a stable and growing source of income, and a lack of spiritually-enriching outlets as reasons why people move out of small U.S. towns towards cities.
The first leads to unstable communities. The second leads to subconscious unease and anxiety. The last leads to a restlessness which to leads to various mental ailments like consumerism, that can only be fulfilled by staying on the hedonic treadmill.
I posit that it is not cities that have all the opportunities, but that it is small communities that lack them.
You can't just move to the midwest and become a farmer. Particularly if you don't have incredible financial mobility in the first place. The cost of land alone is immense and that isn't factoring in equipment.
Having come from such a town, I would not describe it as safe. Things are cheap and most of the people who are there are stuck there because they have no economic mobility. Yes, there are plenty who choose to and enjoy it but that isn't the bulk of the population.
Eh. Largely society transfers money from urban areas to subsidize rural ones. Thousands of miles of road and power and other services to sparse populations would not be sustainable without these transfers. And far from everyone who lives out there is a farmer, plenty of people just live on a mountain somewhere, 30 miles from the nearest grocery store, I remember this doing some driving in the Santa Barbara mountains.
Housing prices in cities are rising across the world.
And it's all driven by simple economics. Demand is increasing faster than supply.
Now if young people want to participate in this market then all the best to them. I'm not stopping them. But statistically they have less purchasing power and demanding that the entire world ignore that fact is not realistic.
This bigoted, and frankly deranged misconception about small towns perfectly explains why someone would rather live in squalor and complain rather than move to a small town.
Imagine saying that to the families of the victims in the couple high-profile stabbings in European cities over the last week, where foreign men set out deliberately and explicitly to kill White people.
I moved to a quiet country town, >99% White, and the worst part about it is that my arm is getting tired from waving back to all the lovely strangers who smile and greet me everywhere I go. I really can't imagine any of them wanting to kill me for my identity, which is more than citizens of diverse cities can say.
While I can't speak for all European cities, we know basically nothing about why a man in Dublin (who was white, btw) stabbed some kids. It's a little early to be deciding why that happened.
Hell it’s not even just trendy neighborhoods that are out of reach. Wages have stagnated while housing prices continue to rise. The upshot is that fewer and fewer people can afford a house no matter where they are.
I think the answer is both. We should work to improve city conditions but the reality is that there is a supply/demand mismatch and not everyone gets to live comfortably wherever they want.
The city I grew up in is too expensive for me to afford as an adult. It would be nice if I could, but I've never felt like the world owed it to me to live there because I want to. People moving to cheaper and less crowded areas to try and improve their quality of life is a story as old as time.
> our parents were willing to sacrifice and embrace these towns
Nope, they moved where the jobs were, same as the current generation. The difference is that back in the old days it was legal to build new housing rather than the ponzi scheme house price system that the older generation has voted for.
> And whilst our parents were willing to sacrifice and embrace these towns which in turn became gentrified it doesn't seem current generations feel the same way.
Many of them are/were also simply anti-social, racist, or just moved where they could plausibly drive to a job, and then kept that job for eternity, depending on what generation and which geography they come from, and for some of those, that actually meant moving to the areas we want to live in too, but can't because they all own it and the local government.
Although some people aren't willing to sacrifice certain luxuries, I don't know that living approximately where you already live and work is one of those. This idea comes up all the time of "just move to some arbitrary cheaper place" but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of those places require cars, and are quite isolated. Much of the time the difference in cost is made up in property taxes anyway, because the place is so low-density it can distribute the cost of the town's maintenance in an effective way.
It turns out that places that people want to live, much of the time, are places where other people live, for all sorts of practical and spiritual reasons, rather than in the woods
If your thesis were true, we might expect rent to be roughly stable and similar to inflation over the past few years as they drop in some regions and rise in others.
Instead, national average asking rent has well outpaced inflation.
There are a number of trends which you could point to as possible factors (The rise of AirBnB, large companies buying up properties to rent, etc) but it seems the key issue is a fundamental lack of supply which is driving housing prices upwards, pricing out buyers and increasing the pool of renters.
Since the 2005-2008 housing crisis, new household formation has outpaced single family home construction significantly each year. We're near all-time vacancy lows for both buyers and renters.
A free market should eventually seize the opportunity to build to meet that demand (and new home starts are up this year finally) but the housing crisis caused long-term shifts in the industry which will take time to recover, and then supply chain problems during Covid caused massive material cost spikes which further delayed construction.
One of the homeless studies in San Francisco several years ago found that of first year unhoused people, 20% of them were people that simply broke up with a partner they were living with. The bigger realization was thinking about the not depicted complement of that graph: these were the proverbial strong ones that actually left
I could see that reality spreading across the country.
This is actually a really bizarre concept to me. To me, the reason to divorce someone would be that you are so incompatible that you can't bear to live with them. And this would come after a period of separation where you test out the waters and make sure that divorce is definitely the correct path forward.
If you still get along well enough that you can live together peacefully, you might as well just stay married!
I sometimes wonder how people managed in the 19th century. Many went from villages to increasingly crowded cities. With no savings, minimal or no education. Industrial production was ramping up, but with crazy demands on workers, long hours, no safety standards. Couldn’t get a mortgage and wait for a nice corporation to build an apartment for you. Couldn’t look for a place in suburbs (how would you commute). Somehow our grand-grand-grand ancestors managed. Seems astounding.
On the other hand, in coming times of global depopulation, what will housing situation look like?
They were just less sheltered. I mean many people in countries across the world live in worse conditions.
To be honest most people in America have become so comfortable that they just look for problems to make there lives seem harder than they really are now days.
I would be willing to bet people were also happier back then too.
If you're genuinely curious, I'd highly recommend the book "The Road to Wigan Pier" to get an understanding of working class life was like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Isn’t this just a return to the historical norm? The details of how assets are split up, how many kids there are, and the attitudes towards “infidelity” are different but two grown opposite sex adults cohabiting to shelter themselves with less resources all seems extremely normal. If anything we’re leaving a bizarre point in history where maintaining two residences is seen as easier compared to working things out amicably. If anything it should help with the birthrate and demographic issues.
Ex and I tried it until we were at a point we could sell, but then things got worse and I moved out after about 3 months.
It's really tough when you add conflicting emotions and that feeling of limbo into day to day living - especially when there are now blurred lines of how you used to interact vs how you should interact.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadI imagine a much smaller percent prefer that if not for financial reasons.
20 years of 'this is my house and...' is enough :D
It would be an awesome market though. I wonder if you could reasonably price the risk with a large enough pool.
Tangentially, I pine for the sci-fi world where I could have signed a five year marriage instead of an indeterminate-term one. At 18 I was barely smart enough to avoid the college debt trap. At 23...
I like it tbh, it's a good big mac index.
I would bet there's also an idealized rate of people finding their endgame that is much lower than the marriage rate and getting closer to that trends with high social mobility.
I do wonder if it's correlated to the decline in couples having children.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/legal/divorce/divorce-statist...
Of my several divorced friends, all have agreed that divorce is the most expensive way possible to become a two-house household.
If their situation was removed, I think this would be a decent article.
Hindsight is not relevant.
> You can’t expect people to predict the course of the bond market.
If you can't "predict" fed fund rates, then why make predictions on the housing market? The thing that the governments both state and federal is heavily vested with.
I think your reasoning is quite flawed. The Tantone's situation is one of unpreparedness and shortsighted to say the least, which as an insurance salesman looks pretty terrible.
There were even programs available to women (and men) for obtaining a mortgage, such as the FHA program established in 1934: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FHA_insured_loan (this program is still around)
Just like the 1964 civil rights act. It’s not that discrimination against race or sex or religion always happened, but it happened enough.
I find it hard to believe that there were many banks which refused to open accounts for single women or especially widows?
Source: my divorced single-mom grandmother and her incessant complaints about them.
The rate of cohabitation was probably sky high because most couples who wanted to divorce just stayed married because actual divorce wasn't worth it.
The land on which houses sit can't be produced. Someone owning all the existing land would ask for any payments and couldn't be refused unless the consumers wouldn't want to live anymore.
So when we are talking about housing, we have to be careful about qualifying the price as a bubble. There's underlying value underneath that can warrant any price.
After selling the house we both rented town houses. We should have done more communicating about that because we unknowingly ended up renting 2 doors down from each other. That was the living situation which couldn't end soon enough.
It's tough stuff and I don't mean to comment rudely on your family situation.
One of my father's cousins swapped wives with his best friend. They were quite amicable about it and continued to be friends including going on holiday together.
I find the situation to be in equal parts discombobulating and fascinating
I currently live in a refurbished and expanded 19th century farm house on a 209 acre property with a horse farm which my fiancee owns. I retired in August at 54. I spend my days taking care of the property, horses and our daughters while my fiancee is off to the city during the week for work.
They left out the "in the trendy, inner city areas we want to live in" part.
Because whilst housing prices are rising in cities we are also seeing major declines in populations for smaller towns.
And whilst our parents were willing to sacrifice and embrace these towns which in turn became gentrified it doesn't seem current generations feel the same way.
But at some point you're going to have to give up this notion that population density can be made infinite. At some point you can't simply cram more "work" into a city.
Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Singapore would like to have a word with you.
Sometimes I wonder if Americans travel out of the US at all.
Many big cities in Europe are having housing crises of their own - Lisbon, Amsterdam, London etc. Just today, there was this thread bemoaning the housing situation in Netherlands - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38444948
> Sometimes I wonder if Americans travel out of the US at all.
Sometimes I wonder if people know real facts about Europe or just have some rosy imagination or generalize some tiny corner to the entire continent.
With its half-million population, Lisbon has better public transportation than my lovely Philadelphia, with its joke subway with two lines. I'd bet Lisbon's trolleys have better coverage than SEPTA has for the whole city in PHL. And, mind you, Lisbon is among the poorest capitals in the European Union.
I could easily live in Lisbon right now if it wasn't for the low EU salaries (and my wife really loving being in the US). My goal is still to claim my citizenship and retire there eventually or in Porto.
And I'm not even considering the really good infrastructure places, like Madrid, with its circular subways (two lines). The wealthiest country in the world must do better.
Saying they are better than the US is not really relevant to this discussion.
> I could easily live in Lisbon right now if it wasn't for the low EU salaries (and my wife really loving being in the US).
Exactly my point. Lisbon has all the goodies you mentioned (I too liked it when I visited) and yet one needs a US salary to afford a decent house there. Not possible on the median local salary.
And this isn't building skyscrapers all around. It is building those 4/5/6 levels apartment buildings all over the place, most with some businesses on ground level. There are plenty of opportunities to make these cities cheaper and more livable. What we lack here in the US is politicians who aren't sellouts.
In NYC parks are 14% of the city's land area, so it can't account for the whole discrepancy, but it's something!
And of course everyone wants to live close to their social circle. I want to live in a mansion by the beach.
But sometimes in life you have to make compromises especially when you're young and that includes working your way up the property ladder.
"Working your way up the property ladder"? The median sale price for a house in Westchester County, NY is seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. With insurance and property taxes and the current interest rate, that's over six grand a month. That's a hair shy of the US median household income (before taxes!). How exactly is a person ever supposed to afford that?
They get a loan from parents
They rent out their basement
They partner up.
They buy the lower priced 600,000 home and make repairs themselves.
https://cdn.nar.realtor//sites/default/files/documents/metro...
Why is the response to high housing cost in cities lecturing "current generations" about their choices? There are glaringly obvious problems in many of our cities that make housing so expensive. Is it so outrageous to try to solve those problems, and allow people to be able to live where they want to live?
Is it possible there's a simpler explanation? That the economy of the twenty-first century is dominated by information and technology, and that these demands are better matched to the agglomeration affects of true urban density, where the best and brightest can learn from each other?
Obviously it's not the cities themselves draining the wealth, but rather a spiral of excess capital accumulation. It just so happens that many of the people perpetuating this cycle live in cities. Generally, increasing one's capital is done by taking money that was being funneled one place, and funneling it to yourself instead. For example, CVS can open a pharmacy and undercut local competition. Once the local pharmacies close, cash flows that were once destined for local pharmacies go to CVS instead. Local pharmacies would have kept the profits locally, but CVS siphons them from the community into the pockets of shareholders, most of whom happen to live in cities. These city-dwelling shareholders can they pay others to perpetuate this cycle.
> Is it possible there's a simpler explanation? That the economy of the twenty-first century is dominated by information and technology.
Is it, though? Consumer spending is about 70% of GDP. What is your personal spending on tech vs. non-tech items? Personally, I spend vastly more money on non-tech items compared to tech items. The margins are obviously much lower, so they don't have splashy stock tickers.
> Clearly, we're at an inflection point
This has been claimed repeatedly throughout history. Without knowledge of the future, it is impossible to know whether we are at an inflection local or global. With resepct to any American city, we know we are far from the inflection point because we have counterexamples abroad.
Such as? There are very few places in the world that match the productivity of the U.S. I don't think Luxembourg counts as a counterexample, for instance (population 640K). Singapore, maybe, but its population is under 5.5 million.
The US overbuilt in rural areas during the late 1800s and early 1900s as the railroads pushed west, others had a major industry that has dried up, and a lot of these areas just aren’t sustainable anymore. But America doesn’t have a system for handling de-ruralization gracefully, you still have to deliver power and phone regardless of whether someone wants to live in the middle of Wyoming. We rarely ever rip up a road, etc. Infrastructure is a one-way ratchet.
On top of that most of americas infrastructure is aging in general and we have a general crisis of insufficient revenue to maintain let alone fully replace it. Everything is built on the assumption that it will catch traction and grow, and when it shrinks then there’s no money to maintain or replace it. This is a general crisis across our whole infrastructure - even apart from de-ruralization we’d have overbuilt infrastructure in most places relative to sustainable revenue.
But for the average Joe who will never leverage themselves into those extremes, I'm not sure the data actually shows greater opportunity. My read from the data is the average Joe is generally worse off in the city with respect to job prospects and compensation.
- Leaving for the big city/college
- Staying in your small town, but slowly becoming helpless as they fall into bad crowds, bad habits, or both
- Staying in your small town, but successfully continuing the way of life
It is unsustainable in its current form, unless you inoculate your children against modern ideas and technology (like the Amish) or make it more desirable for people to stay. I will point to European villages as a counter example. And then I will point to: lack of cultural homogeneity, the tenuous nature of living in the United States without a stable and growing source of income, and a lack of spiritually-enriching outlets as reasons why people move out of small U.S. towns towards cities.
The first leads to unstable communities. The second leads to subconscious unease and anxiety. The last leads to a restlessness which to leads to various mental ailments like consumerism, that can only be fulfilled by staying on the hedonic treadmill.
I posit that it is not cities that have all the opportunities, but that it is small communities that lack them.
Having come from such a town, I would not describe it as safe. Things are cheap and most of the people who are there are stuck there because they have no economic mobility. Yes, there are plenty who choose to and enjoy it but that isn't the bulk of the population.
> the capital owning class lives in cities
Cities are desirable places to live, so the capital owning class will buy and develop land there.
And it's all driven by simple economics. Demand is increasing faster than supply.
Now if young people want to participate in this market then all the best to them. I'm not stopping them. But statistically they have less purchasing power and demanding that the entire world ignore that fact is not realistic.
Diversity means restaurant options go beyond MacDonalds and the local bar
Diversity means that if you are Gay, non-religious or into Table Tennis you can find others who are the same
I moved to a quiet country town, >99% White, and the worst part about it is that my arm is getting tired from waving back to all the lovely strangers who smile and greet me everywhere I go. I really can't imagine any of them wanting to kill me for my identity, which is more than citizens of diverse cities can say.
The city I grew up in is too expensive for me to afford as an adult. It would be nice if I could, but I've never felt like the world owed it to me to live there because I want to. People moving to cheaper and less crowded areas to try and improve their quality of life is a story as old as time.
Nope, they moved where the jobs were, same as the current generation. The difference is that back in the old days it was legal to build new housing rather than the ponzi scheme house price system that the older generation has voted for.
Many of them are/were also simply anti-social, racist, or just moved where they could plausibly drive to a job, and then kept that job for eternity, depending on what generation and which geography they come from, and for some of those, that actually meant moving to the areas we want to live in too, but can't because they all own it and the local government.
Although some people aren't willing to sacrifice certain luxuries, I don't know that living approximately where you already live and work is one of those. This idea comes up all the time of "just move to some arbitrary cheaper place" but the reality is that the overwhelming majority of those places require cars, and are quite isolated. Much of the time the difference in cost is made up in property taxes anyway, because the place is so low-density it can distribute the cost of the town's maintenance in an effective way.
It turns out that places that people want to live, much of the time, are places where other people live, for all sorts of practical and spiritual reasons, rather than in the woods
https://ipropertymanagement.com/research/renting-statistics
If your thesis were true, we might expect rent to be roughly stable and similar to inflation over the past few years as they drop in some regions and rise in others.
Instead, national average asking rent has well outpaced inflation.
There are a number of trends which you could point to as possible factors (The rise of AirBnB, large companies buying up properties to rent, etc) but it seems the key issue is a fundamental lack of supply which is driving housing prices upwards, pricing out buyers and increasing the pool of renters.
https://www.realtor.com/research/us-housing-supply-gap-march...
Since the 2005-2008 housing crisis, new household formation has outpaced single family home construction significantly each year. We're near all-time vacancy lows for both buyers and renters.
A free market should eventually seize the opportunity to build to meet that demand (and new home starts are up this year finally) but the housing crisis caused long-term shifts in the industry which will take time to recover, and then supply chain problems during Covid caused massive material cost spikes which further delayed construction.
Why doesn't everyone just move out into the middle of nowhere where it's affordable? Probably because there's not many jobs there?
I could see that reality spreading across the country.
If you still get along well enough that you can live together peacefully, you might as well just stay married!
On the other hand, in coming times of global depopulation, what will housing situation look like?
In very harsh conditions. Looking at the history of the 19th century with all the wars, financial crises, social upheavals and whatnot.
To be honest most people in America have become so comfortable that they just look for problems to make there lives seem harder than they really are now days.
I would be willing to bet people were also happier back then too.
It's really tough when you add conflicting emotions and that feeling of limbo into day to day living - especially when there are now blurred lines of how you used to interact vs how you should interact.