I think the word "rely" is doing some heavy lifting here. Still being on your parent's family phone plan doesnt mean youd be destitute if they werent helping you out.
I don't know, that one doesn't seem as benign as your making it out to be. I would say if you're having your parents subsidize your phone bill you're still not technically living on your own.
theres plenty of people making 6 figures at 25 that still have their parents pay their phone bill because they get a family discount. i dont get your point
>> Still being on your parent's family phone plan doesnt mean youd be destitute if they werent helping you out.
I think there's some important things like this that should be considered. In the late 90's early aughts, I didn't need a laptop, smartphone and 24/7 internet access with 1GB download speeds or half the technological stuff kids need these days to be a contributing member of society.
Now those are all standard items for kids growing up. When I was in college in 2000, life was pretty easy. I paid $350/month for rent, cable, heat and landline phone. That was literally my entire financial costs for the month. Beer, going out to the bars, random things here and there? Easy to cover when you're making $10/hour working 35 hours a week.
Now? Your basic needs will consistently run $1,500 for all of the stuff you need to function into today's society. Having your parents covering some of that in order for you to live on your own I think is not abnormal any more.
As a Gen Xer, we had it really good. I've started to realize kids these days are put at a massive disadvantage because we require everything to be accessible via the internet and smartphones.
37% of survey respondants say they would need to use a credit card to cover a $400 expense. They wouldn't be destitute, they just don't immediately have the cash.
It also cites another study that put the number much lower, at 8%.
I think that the vast majority of people who are "relying" on their parents for finances actually belong to the upper class. Family Feudalism has bred two consecutive generations of entitled shitheads, and these people are gonna have the wheel soon (if not already) in the US politically. This has concerning potential consequences.
I may have ended up that way if I hadn’t gotten into software as a teenager. Luckily a did and the timing was right for me to make some sort of decent career out of it.
I did live independently prior to going into software, but it sucked and was fragile and likely would have fallen apart long term. I also doubt I could find a similar living situation as a young man with no credit or much money to his name. Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.
> Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.
Rental approvals are ridiculous. We're renting an apartment while we remodel our house.
We've taken out mortgages, refi'd mortgages, and (by now) taken out 3 HELOCs in a row (2 of them subsequently closed as we needed to re-file for more $). While there's a lot of paperwork involved, it feels pretty easy. "Promise to pay us back? Cool!"
Filling out apartment rentals was awful. The rejections, the tiny paper forms asking you about creditors and bank accounts, how much money you owe each of them every month, personal references, "supervisor's phone number", have you ever been to jail, ever failed to pay rent for any reason, previous landlords' contact info. Look, I get that rent is an unsecured obligation (vs a mortgage), but every step of it was gross and accusatory.
The stock market isn't the economy. Those are different things. If you are new to this area, the Wikipedia article is good for basics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy
Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes:
- "x% of what? what is the denominator?". Without that number, the claim is meaningless.
- surely it cannot be the entire population, so it has to be a survey.
- how many people participated in the survey? what was the distribution?
Here is that info for this study. I found this in the PDF version of the study report [0] referred to at the end of the Northwestern page [1].
> Methodology
The Harris Poll conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews among the general U.S. adult (18+) population between January 5th and January 21st, 2026. Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth individuals (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).
Typically surveys are adjusted for sampling biases before reporting. That appears to be the case here. So there is usually some attempt to account for the biases in the sampled population.
The impulse to ask "what population was sampled?" is good but its not always a straight line from there to "these results directly reflect that sampling bias."
In fact, from the page you posted: "Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income. A full methodology is available."
I would presume that the headline number attempts to account for sampling bias.
I’ve certainly seen trust fund kids who’s success is anchored on “daddy gave me a sweet job at his company” and others who’d be dead or in prison if it wasn’t for the constant money poured into the legal system by their parents.
There’s a huge spectrum. I’m mid 40s and my wife grew up much wealthier than I did. We have done quite well, but I I’m a bit frugal, like to save, despise waste and excess, and therefore don’t like traveling like they do. I like traveling but all the fancy upgraded experiences at every turn is what I refuse to spend money on. But we don’t go without, we “rely” on my in laws to upgrade our travel (or that’s how my wife has structured the relationship with them, they pay for everything and we cover the drinks is basically how it works out). I’m not a huge fan of it but they don’t care and it keeps my wife off my back lol, so whatever. We travel with them a lot but even when we don’t I think my wife uses their card to pay for it. It’s between them is what I say, I don’t want to be a part of it as it feels like we’re taking advantage of them but apparently they’re fine with it. Is this fitting the definition of “rely” because it’s nonessential
You are reading gp’s comment correctly as it was written, but it omits the next line in the source study: “Data were weighted to be representative of the US general population.”
They oversampled in major markets where they work and in high-net-worth populations (who they service), but their claims are for the overall US adult population.
Oversampling like this is pretty routine in survey research. It improves the precision of any subgroup analyses you might want to do, and, to a first approximation, it doesn’t really bias the weighted overall-population claims in one direction or another.
Europe in general maybe outside of some CEE, DACH, Nordics/Benelux is pretty fucked for the youth. Without help from parents or inherited housing you're fucked. You get American CoL with African wages. Joking of course, but you get the point.
it blows my mind when anyone ever reads $x.99 as $x out loud. i often cant keep myself from muttering "$x+1" and its taken decades of practice to keep myself from looking at them like they have 2 heads
figured it out since i learned to read so it seems so childish to hear adults make it
turns out ppl like me are the weird ones and most people just truncate at the period
Related - any time a study is based on gathering the opinions of a random subset of the population, I also instantly dismiss it. The average person is a moron. I don't care about random people's subjective opinions, I only care about objective data. People polled in the 16th century would have said the sun orbits the earth; that doesn't make it true.
Another reason the denominator is important is that "parents" are (hopefully) completely a subset of "adults". And not all adults have living parents. So who is counted:
- All adults
- Adults with living parents
- Adults within an age range
- Adults without children
or what? This really belongs in the title. Without it, as you say, the statistic is meaningless.
33% of GenX is still depending on their parents? That's shocking... I'm at the young end of GenX at 49yo. So, a slice of the population that is fast approaching retirement age is still reliant on their septuagenarian or octogenarian parents for money? Wow.
OK, now I'm questioning the whole thing... it also claims 17% of Boomers reliant on their parents. So, we have some substantial number of 62-80 years olds relying on their 90-100 year old parents? Seems unlikely.
Maybe you're not familiar with the entire economy? There are a lot of households that depend on retirement checks of the oldest members and households that don't have traditional work but may have family homes, businesses and farms still in the name of the oldest relatives. Different groups would have different results as far as whether they will inherit independence or become destitute if parents die.
Sure, totally get that, but we're talking about a cohort that is mostly retirement age themselves... How many of those 70-80 year old Boomers have parents left alive from whom to receive those retirement funds? That's why I'm hesitant to believe the number.
I'm the last of the Boomers, and my parents are in their 80s and I was a prom baby (meaning "young parents"). There's no way 17% of Boomers are sponging off Mom and Dad, because the overwhelming odds are: Mom and Dad are dead, and have been for a while now.
OTOH, I guess that doesn't mean someone isn't still cashing that retirement check.
Looks to me like the older generation amounts to roughly 30% of the boomer generation. A couple has 4 parents and half of people are bellow average.
Sure maybe its wrong and people are counting inheritance similarly to living parents, etc, but I'm not surprised at all if the lowest quartile is reaching retirement age broke getting money from any relatives that can help and that are inclined to help.
Are they counting free housing as 'financial support'? A number of states have perverse incentives to delay the legal transfer of a home as long as possible, like with CA's Prop 13.
yeah that's ridiculous. I'm 50 and fully support my MIL (she lives in my garage apartment) and my sister fully supports our mom (she lives with my sister). The boomers i know are completely financially dependent on their children.
Its expensive out there. I used to judge people for not being able to stand on their own but now my mindset is if someone is working 40+ hours a week and sticking to a reasonable budget and not driving a new car then not sure what else we can ask them to do.
Most of these people that are getting help aren't saving for retirement either so its just a long game of desperation. Easy to say get a better job but not everyone has the skills or mental acuity to do that. With that said there are aboslutely a lot of people that have no concept of budgeting and are their own worst enemy
Either way, the idea that the natural and normal state of affairs is that every person can go out into the world and be a perfectly self sufficient but comfortable atomized economic unit without support from their family or society is deeply flawed.
This wasn't the norm for most of human history, and it isn't the norm globally today.
We have a group that promotes a "living wage" construct in Tompkins County that pushes the unquestioned assumption that people who are working in the lowest paying jobs can live 100% alone. It's not something I want to challenge directly, but... It reminds me of discussions about the minimum wage in the late 1980s when it was common for teenagers to work at supermarkets and fast food markets. I think the public never really understood how the
was specifically intended to help out people who were raising a family with low incomes that was economically efficient and how there is some logic to people who are working in low income jobs qualifying for food stamps, it is not just a way "Wal-Mart is stealing for us."
e.g. part of "affordability" is keeping costs low and as much leftie folks want to sweep it under the rug there is a lot of internal class conflict in groups such as women: like the Sheryl Sandberg type definitely benefits from exploiting less wealthy women to do child care work for them and child care is basically problematic because the child care worker is not productive enough to put their own children in child care without subsidy and you don't get the Fordist scenario where the auto line worker can easily afford to own one of the cars they make.
Well high wage implies a cost that has to be pushed on somewhere. It's not crazy to fear that raising wages, sometimes, can cause costs to go up, which can lead to more demand for higher wages. It may really depend on how much slack there is in the system.
What does improve material standard of living is increases in productivity, but the scope for those is limited, see
Like the basic story of the past 150 or so years is that agriculture has gotten dramatically more productive so people can do other things and move into cities with all sorts of implications.
I am not sure - in my experience, I've observed that the more money you have the less people care about relations (their social circle becomes smaller) and healthy co-dependency reduces. This is more true of the young. Human nature tends to be selfish, which is not conducive for a healthy society. Young people becoming financially-independent at an early age may negate opportunities for self-introspection on that - without the struggle to earn a good living, many fail to understand the value of money and good relationships, which often lead to costly and immature decisions.
I don't agree with your characterization of "human nature". I mostly disagree that there is any such thing, and to the extent that there is, it seems to me that it is more like: cooperative, altruistic, empathic within the in-group, aggressive, selfish and uncooperative with the out-group.
The great work of human civilization is to expand the size of the in-group.
Look at any popular religion and you will find a heavy emphasis on sacrifice, selflessness and delayed gratifications (that helps strengthen our control over our base desires). This is because early civilisations (that used a religio-political construct to form societies and nations) recognised that a healthy society only flourishes when humans are taught to fight their innate desire to be selfish. You can observe this when kids demand attention as they become jealous of their siblings or play with toys with anyone - they have to be taught to share, and appreciate it as a value.
Your perspective on the in-group and out-group is relevant of course - it isn't healthy if one is self-sacrificing without addressing their own needs. However the degree of that varies between eastern and western culture. Eastern cultures, which have more civilisational history, don't necessarily see as it in such rigid terms.
That's also incorrect, it's not net worth > $1mm, it's "those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property" over $1mm, which is a much smaller number. The sources I saw said about 4% of US households meet this criteria, but 18% of survey respondents did.
Slavery and massive wealth disparity was also the norm for most of human history, but just like generational wealth transfer, that doesn't mean it's equitable (or sustainable). Personally, I'm concerned that this will lead to greater wealth transfer from poor to rich and the subsequent dissolution of social norms that hold countries and cultures together. But I don't really care, I have nothing to lose here.
It is something to aim for though. The kid feels good about themselves and the parents can enjoy their hard earned money to have a banging retirement. My parents won’t stop traveling. They’ve been to something like 50 countries over the last 5-7 years.
Reminder that black US slave descendants have a median wealth of about $5000 (i.e the equity they have in their cars.) When you consider black crime, consider the OP statistic in light of that. Most black people I know have parents who rely on their support (and siblings, and cousins, etc.)
Whatever is happening to 42% of Americans is happening to 97% (figures drawn from my ass) of black Americans. $5000 is pretty good. I'm from Chicago, where the median black wealth is $0.
What do you call the situation where your parents depend on your support? I helped my dad with a 6000 Euro out of pocket surgery so he can regain the use of his shoulder. And I'm an average working class Europoor, not a stock broker. And my mom is paying some of the bills for my grandma because she can't afford the bills on her ~300 Euro pension.
Searching the internet, one can read more, such as:
> In August 1971, alongside the "Nixon Shock" that severed the dollar's convertibility to gold, the Nixon administration imposed a 90-day economy-wide freeze on all wages and prices. This was the first time the U.S. enacted wage and price controls outside of wartime. Following the initial 90-day freeze, the Nixon administration implemented a complex, multi-tiered price control system on the petroleum industry that lasted for years.
> In August 1971, Nixon was "floating" the dollar, abandoning the gold standard and "freezing" prices and wages.
> Why did America deliberately destroy its own manufacturing industry?
And starts off,
> It did not happen all at once. Americans watched their own country lose it, brand by brand, factory by factory. Every time, the country washanded the same three reasons. (It looked inevitable. And every one of them was true enough to believe. Plenty of those factories were still making money the day they were ordered shut. They closed anyway, on the say-so of men who had never worked a shift in their lives and grew richer each time another one went dark....
So if said kids are relying on their parents for support... how are their kids going to rely on them? The idea behind generational wealth is that there is something left to pass down. If you have nothing to pass down, because both you and your parents spent it all, then you're fully on your own to support yourself. Somewhere along the line the bill always comes due.
Health care costs at the end of your life can eat everything you've ever saved and more. Cost of maintenance on housing is increasing and property insurance rates + HOA rates are going up. This idea only works under ideal conditions.
These numbers are a nice snapshot, but I see no comparison to historical numbers in the article. I know many families who have had intergenerational support happening from older to younger and vice versa.
The premise of TFA along with the entirety of the comments are eloquently embodied by the misfit troubadour and grunge philosopher Todd Snider in Statistician's Blues [0]
This seems to be some self-help for the well-off (and their kids) to not feel bad about such dependence, but totally ignores the large population whose parents aren't affluent enough to support their children. Or may even need support from their children. I don't think the feefees of the well off is the gravest issue here.
In my experience, poorer families tend to live in multigenerational housing at a much higher rate. So this doesnt seem to be true. Less affuluent usually means more sharing of resources, not less.
> STOP spending on immigration programs... to improve situation for kids of the people who built out the western civilization
The common misconception that the US Government is wasting money on immigration is pushed by Trump and FOX News, who both lie regularly. For example, see [1] about how Trump rejected a report produced by Federal researchers. The report is available [2].
Overall, the refugee resettlement program gives the country back many times what the government spends. And even if you just focus on the expenditure, the bulk of it is on border enforcement and imprisonment, which goes to domestic private companies.
As to your love for "the people who built western civilization", I'll just leave it up there. Your connotation is clear, and it doesn't reflect well on you.
[1] Trump administration rejects report showing positive impact of refugees
[2] Rejected Report Shows Revenue Brought In by Refugees. SEPT. 19, 2017: A draft of a study rejected by Trump administration officials that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.
The question that was ask in the survey was: How financially independent you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)
I understand that YC is questioning the results of the survey. The YC community is very privileged; and i bet, if we do the same survey in this community, 20% or less of adults rely on their parents.
Also, the first thought I had was "what %age of adults are 18-30". Not that a 30yo should be dependent on their parents but I'd assume that people answering yes skew younger. And to your point about YC, that's also a young skewed demographic.
I also thought that YC might be younger, but then i remembered that most (successful) founders are 40+. Do we know something about YC demographics? Aside from the fact that it's obvious that a great many of them come from STEM fields. I did not find anything about it.
The hacker news crowd is also more than just Americans. Some of us live in welfare states and/or societies with strong trade unions, which we know we can rely on instead, if we ever come to a situation where we need it.
I think you have it backwards. Poor people cannot rely on their parents because their parents are poor too. Every person I know who grew up rich relied on their parents until… well, forever. Privilege is being able to rely on your family.
I also think that educated and wealthy parents are better able to support their children; from education and financial literacy to real estate and plain money. However, I do think that this support makes the children more independent when they're adults.
It is more nuanced than that. I know of a family where one of the children are fully dependent on their parents, and three are fully independent. The one dependent has a law degree.
It's a kind of free insurance: if a bad financial event happens, you're protected against the worst downsides.
If you're from a poor family and break out of poverty, you're still in a worse financial state than someone from a rich family, even holding income and assets constant. You've got to effectively self insure (by taking fewer risks; being more conservative in investments; cutting down on rich people expenses that help with networking) to plan for the worst case scenario. And rich kids don't even realize how much their families' financial status enables and drives their behavior.
And that's not even starting to count financial expenses to take care of aging parents who can't afford to take care of themselves.
I lived with my parents until I was 20 and they helped me out until I was 22. My girlfriend's kids are on the same path. Though even with people in their 30s and 40s I think it's common to get help for unexpected big expenses because a lot of people don't have adequate emergency funds.
My 20-something son is living with us but he does pay (some) rent.
I half expect to have to apologize for this, like when I was growing up people would think you are a loser if you were in this situation. Today people think we are really smart and the people who are paying more rent than they can afford to live around that are losing.
I can’t understand morally or financially how can parents charge anything of their children. Not judging it, just honestly can’t understand it. Isn’t it the parents’ responsibility to build the foundation for their children and keep building it until it’s there? I am viewing it from a moral angle where it’s the parents’ selfish choice to have a child so they must take full responsibility until a child is or feels that they can be independent.
I think this is driven by both culture and the grade of economic development of the country you live in. In my home country of Italy, it would be considered kinda crazy to charge your kids rent. There are very practical reasons behind it: high youth unemployment, low salaries when you're just starting your career. Rental apartments are also really expensive in big cities and you just can't afford one without getting a roommate (or a partner with a job). So people end up staying at home longer to save money for a down payment, and the parents are totally fine with it.
I live in the US now, and here, where it is (used to be?) easy to land a well-paying job fresh out of school, it is considered quite common to charge your children rent if they decide to stay at home. My feeling is that staying at home in the USA carries quite some stigma for both the kid and their parents. American culture puts a lot of value in self-reliance and financial independence, and the general idea is that you failed as a parent if your kids aren't able to afford their own place.
(I also have a feeling all of the above is changing dramatically, given the current cost of living crisis in America.)
Agreed. I think it's wild that such a position seems relatively common in the US (though at a surface level I understand that it's just a cultural difference).
The only situation in which I would consider charging my kids 'rent' is, if as adults, they were being irresponsible with their life, e.g. being a NEET and not helping out around the house. Even then I would hold the money in a separate account to gift back to them later.
I think it's parents' role to always be a source of almost unconditional comfort and security for their kids. Though this requires that kids also do their best to maintain and respect that relationship.
He's paying a fraction of market rate rent and has saved a lot of money.
He's eating food out of the communal pool and it's a running gag at local restaurants that he eats two entrees. I think it's fair that he contributes something, like he is working, except for this summer when he said "take this job and shove it" because he was working for a crew where the foreman was twice his age but didn't have any sense for construction. Instead, he's doing a lot of work around the farm to fix things up, some of which is stuff we need and some of which is stuff he wants.
He expects to inherit the farm, will probably move to our other house if and when he is ready to co-habitate as opposed to getting on the housing ladder in the conventional way.
I paid discounted rent to my parents once I had a job and still lived with them. Really not a whole lot. I think of it not as a payment for existing but as a contribution to the household and if I couldn't pay for some reason, they wouldn't have evicted me.
That's the way it is where I live, too. It might not be "fair game", but if people really want to help their kids, they should do everything in their power to get them into the housing market ASAP.
When I grew up, that was seen as pampering kids. They'd never "learn" how to be financially responsible, etc. if they always received help.
But, let's be honest, in many places the housing market is now so expensive that people could be saving for 5-10 years just to afford the down payment. And by the time they have enough, the market will have appreciated even more, so they have to save for even longer. I have peers that got into the housing market 20 years ago with help from parents, and their properties are now worth 5x - 8x of what they paid.
I am early 30s. I realised this about the time I finished university and thought I might be expected to move out. The housing market was already pretty insane.
I got a job that required me to move when I was 25, though, and what I realized after that was that living with your parents constrains you. I don't know how your relationship with your son is, but while I lived with my parents, they expected to know where I was going and be home for dinner, and even if I refused to tell them, I'd feel that I was judged for it, so I usually avoided it. Living by myself means if I want to go to a party or just buy something weird or get into soldering, I can just do it without worrying what my parents will think. I think delaying that stage has been really bad for my development.
He comes and goes as he pleases but is usually pretty open about it. Also he has plenty of space to do construction projects he wants, he'd probably like to keep playing guitar past 11pm but there are limits!
Now it is not a good situation for sex for anyone involved but we have a lot of land so there's nothing better than a love nest made from glamping gear at least in the summer.
When I was a kid, we never had a ton of extra money, but my parents were very supportive-- they paid for most of my college expenses, for example. Their outlook was that us kids shouldn't have to work-- "school is your job". (However, both my sister and I _did_ have jobs while in school).
However, I never _asked_ my parents for money. I had a good education and a well-paying job, and was able to turn IPO money into a house down payment. In the end, we struggled to close the deal, and my wife and I both asked to borrow money from our parents. Of course they were happy to do so, but I still remember it as feeling so hard to do -- just something that I "shouldn't" have to do. And, of course, it also made me reflect on those who didn't have family support to fall back on, let alone jobs that paid well.
Loan was originated in 2014. Our particular circumstance was that it was a run-up in home valuations in a short time period that caused appraisals to start coming in short right when we were trying to close. 20% down turned into 10% down plus a small shortfall.
Downward mobility is almost entirely caused by housing costs, which are a self-inflicted problem. We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.
I live in an expensive area and I'm always shocked by how many of my friends who cannot afford to buy a home (or even a condo) are NIMBYs. These are people in their 20s through 40s who have been earning since college, can't afford to buy, yet get annoyed whenever there's new construction that "alters the character of the neighborhood". Talk about false consciousness. I can at least understand people who own a home feeling this way.
I really hate this “we don’t build enough housing” narrative these days, because it implies this is a simple supply and demand problem, which it is not. I see so many progressives repeating this line, apparently not understanding that they are suggesting unfettered capitalism (up zoning…) is the solution.
The fundamental problem is we simultaneously want our housing to be affordable and good investment. It can’t be both.
I can't think of a good reason as to why people would want housing to be a good investment except if their own wealth depends on it or they want to preserve the wealthy character of their own neighborhood. It takes away investment from local enterprise, local government, which would spur innovation, salary growth, better infrastructure, municipal services, etc.
Those aren't really two different arguments. Wanting housing to be a good investment is one of the reasons we have a supply problem because it incentivizes people to vote against allowing more housing to be built. But at the end of the day the high cost of housing really is a simple supply problem, it's the reason for that lack of supply that's more complex.
A big political problem with YIMBYism is that almost by definition it will take years to see the effects.
If you champion it as a politician, there's a very large chance you get all the flack for new developments, but the next guy gets all the credit for affordable housing.
Texas seems to be the only place that actually does it, and I honestly have no explanation for why.
Yes, this is a real problem. Also, in high-demand areas, building more will lower prices compared to the counterfactual but that doesn't mean prices will actually go down. This makes it a harder sell.
I highly challenge this. For a region, industry booms drive upward movement. And regions that are only held by one industry when it busts build rust belts.
Ideally, you have industry for a region treated like a well balanced investment portfolio. But you have to internalize that balancing investment portfolios is is a protection against downside risks. And it specifically loses against the lucky portfolio that was heavy on something during a boom.
So, the question heavily looms on if the regions we are looking at are diverse enough that they can sustain some downturns.
I may or may not meet your definition as a nimby 28 year old. I am all for housing, just not the type being built in my area. Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom. They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k - and those low income units go away as soon as the building gets sold to another corporation.
I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods. I want real public housing. Housing should be a human right. As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.
Almost everything you said is a typical NIMBY talking point:
> Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom
A nebulous definition of "luxury", and totally ignores the fact that people with money can get what they want anyway, pushing those with less out. So yes, more "luxury" builds help.
> They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k
Many purportedly want more low income housing, often at absurd rates like "100% affordable" knowing that projects like that will never pencil out. It's a way of saying "No" without actually saying it.
> I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods.
Okay, so build some? If you can't build what you want then why stop others from building what they can with the budget they have?
>As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.
It's literally illegal in most places to build more densely due to height, parking requirements, discretionary reviews, etc. impacting everyone interested in building more units (Like for a multigenerational household as seen in elsewhere in the world). This is not just impacting corporations seeking to extract profit.
It's all talking points on both sides. "Build more housing" being the one true solution has become a religious tenant in a lot of wonkish circles. I see it repeated uncritically every single time this topic comes up on HN and similar spaces.
The reality is that demand is always going to far outstrip supply in certain areas. You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso, even if you raze the city to the ground and replace it with some yimby paradise that houses 25% more people. The extra supply might lower costs to some degree in the short term but the induced demand will ensure they stay above what someone on an average salary can afford. Everyone seems to understand this when the topic is freeway expansion, but not with housing.
The actual solution for housing costs is a lot more complicated and multi-pronged, but that doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker. There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at, so it gets dismissed; and suggesting someone move there is practically treated as a human rights abuse.
Dramatically increasing housing density does have adverse affects for existing residents. It's fine to say the tradeoffs are worth it, I'm not saying it's never the answer, but even acknowledging that it's a tradeoff usually gets met with dismissive insults from the yimby crowd.
Isn't SF infamously a SFH zone that makes no sense? If you razed the whole city and rebuilt it like Manhattan, you wouldn't have 25% more inhabitants, you'd have 25000% more. And if you improve public transit (I heard BART is some that's pretty good by American standards but not by European standards?) you can drastically widen the area that feels like the core city (just take a look at Berlin which I'm familiar with) giving maybe another 1000% multiplicative increase.
It might be unsatisfyingly simplistic, but if prices are high in an area because a lot of people want to live there, building more housing seems like a fundamentally better approach than demanding everyone who wants to live in San Francisco instead accept living in Mississippi. Even if prices stabilize back to where they were before, it would still be a net win that more people than before get to live in a desirable place for the same cost. I'm genuinely not "sneering" at Mississippi here. But if you want to live in San Francisco, Mississippi is probably not going to be a reasonable substitute and maybe making it easier for you to live in San Francisco is a reasonable policy goal.
But history and lots of examples suggests prices are unlikely to remain the same if you build more supply, which makes sense from an economics perspective. There aren't an unlimited number of people wanting to live in a particular area at a given price point, otherwise they would likely have driven the price higher in the first place. Induced demand is a problem for highways because the cost of driving that particular route at a particular time is essentially zero, which his not really true of moving to a different area.
> You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso
Well, yeah, a human can only run so fast, but San Francisco is not even trying to run — it's barely crawling. Go to the sunset district, or Bayview, or any neighborhood in the western or southern half of the city and you will see nothing but rows after rows of single family homes — and yes, the car is a part of the family. Replace it with something like new york's west village and you will more than double its density.
> There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at
Yeah, just tell everyone to move to somewhere in the rust belt where the only job opening is in public sector health care that may or may not get cut by the current administration, that will help.
That is all that is allowed due to local and state zoning codes. Loosening restrictions on what can be built will bring down costs and all for more types of buildings. The bland housing is all that pencils out for builders at the moment.
They did this in New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern's government and house prices have started to fall, but only slightly so far. IIRC the rules were something like, lots in a certain radius of a train station or town center are mandatory mixed-use zoning, overriding any city rules to the contrary. It was very controversial for the national government to override city governments like that.
> In several opinion polls, Ardern's domestic popularity had reached all-time lows by 19 January 2023...[when] Ardern announced she would resign as Labour leader and prime minister by 7 February. -Wikipedia
Other political leaders might hesitate to follow such footsteps.
It was during the coronavirus pandemic. New Zealand successfully avoided the virus completely for a few years, but conspiracy theorists thought she was just being a Nazi.
If rich people can't buy luxury housing, they buy non-luxury housing, driving up its price. If you don't want rich people driving up the price of affordable housing, make sure there is lots of luxury housing available so they don't drive up the price of the cheap stuff.
People "getting annoyed" doesn't prevent construction of affordable housing. I always see these NIMBY comments but never see anything to back up the notion.
Greedy developers that want the largest profit on a given plot of land is probably where you should be looking instead. Why build two inexpensive starter homes when you can build one luxury home and make a larger profit? (Never mind that the county gets larger property tax returns on the more expensive homes.)
And yet. They build high end homes and they sell them anyway. So there seem in fact to be buyers out there?
It's not just about building more in existing areas. It's about making the construction of affordable housing PROFITABLE for developers; which in this world is nearly impossible. Every tax break you give for building anything just results in luxury developments and the builders keeping the breaks as profit.
Also, you can't just build more in these already built up areas. Many of these areas already have strains on public services and just building up without adjusting for electricity consumption, water, schools, roads, transportation, parking, etc is just creating an even larger more expensive headache.
You have to make building towns / hoas in undeveloped areas easier; and the includes high speed transportation to get to the nearest city hub.
We also have to be alot more flexible on what's allowed to be called housing. We should have more places for people to be able to live in their RV's, cars,
etc safely.
All of this comes down to the economic reality of what it takes to actually build and maintain a home and piece of property in America. It's not a right to own a home because of that economic reality. The main ingredients are cheap land in an area that has access to electricity, water, streets, infrastructure and access to income. If you can maintain a job for long enough you can pay off the land and cost to build. That is the only viable way to own. Expecting those kind of prices in LA or NY near the beach or downtown is delusional.
We have to also, philosophically, be honest about the way time passes and an intelligent species propagates itself. An frankly we can just look in the wild and see the same dynamics. If a species is successful, then there will be lots of individuals. Those individuals will be drawn to the BEST places to live. There are only so many BEST places to live. Do we really want to turn every place we live into giant high rises? This is an honest question and I think people aren't being entirely honest about their motives / vision for the planet.
Are they actually NIMBYs or just annoyed? I live in a major metro downtown full of construction and fully support it 100%, but that doesn't mean it doesn't irritate me. Roads and sidewalks are constantly randomly closing. Every bridge across the local highway is currently closed for the next five years. My wife had every tire on a brand new go flat within three months because of nails on the roads. Our houses are all covered in yellow dust because the gas company dug up bedrock 9 years ago, left an enormous pile on a street corner, which then washed away in rain and still covers half the sidewalks nearly a decade later. Most of the housing ends up becoming short-term rentals, which in turn mostly become party houses, so the streets are strewn with broken liquor bottles all the time, cops are getting called in the middle of the night to break up fights with strippers. My car's hatch got destroyed by a city dump truck a few years back and I've been hit while parked two other times by work trucks. All of my power tools were stolen out of my garage by a work crew because the original builders put me on the same radio channel as the guy two doors down, so my garage randomly opened without me knowing about it.
I still support it. We need all the housing we can get. But I do get endlessly irritated by the attitude on Hacker News that no person could ever oppose rebuilding a neighborhood while people still live in it for a good reason and they must all by miserly hoarders trying to pull the ladder up from beneath them.
> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.
Or maybe we do, but just couldn't keep up with the enormous influx of immigrants for a few years a that ended a couple of years ago. The housing costs have risen due to unforeseen demand, not supply.
Housing is flexible. Lots of poor people in some places live in RVs or trailers. It can't be that nice but they have to save a lot of money (or not, because RVs are expensive too). You have tent cities in non-totalitarian cities but their biggest downside is being illegal and therefore everyone who lives there gets periodically ransacked by police and sent to prison. People used to live 10 to an apartment, which also sucks, and were extorted by landlords but if we remove that part it's better than being homeless, but that's illegal too. It's starting to sound like the root of the problem isn't even a shortage of housing, but the fact that cheap housing is illegal.
California problem. There's no constrained supply in Houston or Austin or a few other cities in the US that are now crashing from over supply.
Another one is Manhattan. There's no space to build so things get retrofitted (office conversions) and new zoning (Hudson Yards) but it's expensive - high hourly rates to pay people on buildings with more 99 units, many many permits required, land is expensive, etc
So it's luxury only in NYC
None of this is NIMBYism.
Part of it is return to office. Why move there if it's too expensive - the answer is you're unemployed otherwise
Part of it is demand. NYC is the closest thing to Europe, where you don't drive around in an SUV to do simple things. The GDP is enormous, so you find jobs. Young people. Etc
Housing costs are a lot more complicated than NIMBYism. There's a strong California bias for obvious reasons, here on HN.
Because boomers are selfish and holding onto most of the wealth, ruining and destroying the generations to follow. It’s a weird phenomenon actually, their parents gave them everything possible, even independence, yet, the boomers do all sort of shenanigans to keep holding on the wealth, and when they can’t, they go on manipulation tactics, as if their lives are the center of universe and all generations after are the minions to serve them.
>all generations after are the minions to serve them
Serve their kids. The money is only incidental to the power structure (nepotism, classism, xenophobia) that they intend to pass down to their chosen successors. They've been working to limit economic mobility, opportunity, and fairness for a while now.
Wait, so you're annoyed that the boomers are using their wealth to help support their kids (the respondents to this survey) instead of just giving it to them and making them trust fund kids?
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of negative things to say about boomers, but I'm not sure how your complaint here really fits the article.
149 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 48.6 ms ] thread"How financially independent you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)"
1: https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
I think there's some important things like this that should be considered. In the late 90's early aughts, I didn't need a laptop, smartphone and 24/7 internet access with 1GB download speeds or half the technological stuff kids need these days to be a contributing member of society.
Now those are all standard items for kids growing up. When I was in college in 2000, life was pretty easy. I paid $350/month for rent, cable, heat and landline phone. That was literally my entire financial costs for the month. Beer, going out to the bars, random things here and there? Easy to cover when you're making $10/hour working 35 hours a week.
Now? Your basic needs will consistently run $1,500 for all of the stuff you need to function into today's society. Having your parents covering some of that in order for you to live on your own I think is not abnormal any more.
As a Gen Xer, we had it really good. I've started to realize kids these days are put at a massive disadvantage because we require everything to be accessible via the internet and smartphones.
https://www.investopedia.com/here-s-how-many-americans-can-t...
37% of survey respondants say they would need to use a credit card to cover a $400 expense. They wouldn't be destitute, they just don't immediately have the cash.
It also cites another study that put the number much lower, at 8%.
I did live independently prior to going into software, but it sucked and was fragile and likely would have fallen apart long term. I also doubt I could find a similar living situation as a young man with no credit or much money to his name. Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.
Rental approvals are ridiculous. We're renting an apartment while we remodel our house.
We've taken out mortgages, refi'd mortgages, and (by now) taken out 3 HELOCs in a row (2 of them subsequently closed as we needed to re-file for more $). While there's a lot of paperwork involved, it feels pretty easy. "Promise to pay us back? Cool!"
Filling out apartment rentals was awful. The rejections, the tiny paper forms asking you about creditors and bank accounts, how much money you owe each of them every month, personal references, "supervisor's phone number", have you ever been to jail, ever failed to pay rent for any reason, previous landlords' contact info. Look, I get that rent is an unsecured obligation (vs a mortgage), but every step of it was gross and accusatory.
- "x% of what? what is the denominator?". Without that number, the claim is meaningless. - surely it cannot be the entire population, so it has to be a survey. - how many people participated in the survey? what was the distribution?
Here is that info for this study. I found this in the PDF version of the study report [0] referred to at the end of the Northwestern page [1].
> Methodology The Harris Poll conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews among the general U.S. adult (18+) population between January 5th and January 21st, 2026. Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth individuals (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).
[0] https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_nwmutual/179168/2026%2...
[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
The impulse to ask "what population was sampled?" is good but its not always a straight line from there to "these results directly reflect that sampling bias."
In fact, from the page you posted: "Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income. A full methodology is available."
I would presume that the headline number attempts to account for sampling bias.
Am I reading this wrong, is this about trust fund kids?
> Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth
Looks like about 1/5 are in the trust fund kid category.
I’ve certainly seen trust fund kids who’s success is anchored on “daddy gave me a sweet job at his company” and others who’d be dead or in prison if it wasn’t for the constant money poured into the legal system by their parents.
Q2630. Do you currently consider yourself financially independent?
Yes: 72% No: 28%
Q2634. How financially independent do you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)?
Fully independent: 44% Mostly independent: 17% Somewhat dependent: 17% Fully dependent: 8% Not applicable: 14%
Then they report 17+17+8=42 = "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"
[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/download/2026+P%26P+Mark...
They oversampled in major markets where they work and in high-net-worth populations (who they service), but their claims are for the overall US adult population.
Oversampling like this is pretty routine in survey research. It improves the precision of any subgroup analyses you might want to do, and, to a first approximation, it doesn’t really bias the weighted overall-population claims in one direction or another.
Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures.
How? Mechanical Turk? Ads? This sort of survey is biased toward people who click on lots of stuff.
figured it out since i learned to read so it seems so childish to hear adults make it
turns out ppl like me are the weird ones and most people just truncate at the period
Another reason the denominator is important is that "parents" are (hopefully) completely a subset of "adults". And not all adults have living parents. So who is counted:
or what? This really belongs in the title. Without it, as you say, the statistic is meaningless.OK, now I'm questioning the whole thing... it also claims 17% of Boomers reliant on their parents. So, we have some substantial number of 62-80 years olds relying on their 90-100 year old parents? Seems unlikely.
OTOH, I guess that doesn't mean someone isn't still cashing that retirement check.
Sure maybe its wrong and people are counting inheritance similarly to living parents, etc, but I'm not surprised at all if the lowest quartile is reaching retirement age broke getting money from any relatives that can help and that are inclined to help.
The 55 and older demographic holds 70% of the wealth in America[1].
The 70 and older demographic holds 31% (almost 1/3) of the wealth in America[2].
1: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/older-americans-control-70-we...
2: https://www.apolloacademy.com/31-percent-of-wealth-owned-by-...
Most of these people that are getting help aren't saving for retirement either so its just a long game of desperation. Easy to say get a better job but not everyone has the skills or mental acuity to do that. With that said there are aboslutely a lot of people that have no concept of budgeting and are their own worst enemy
Either way, the idea that the natural and normal state of affairs is that every person can go out into the world and be a perfectly self sufficient but comfortable atomized economic unit without support from their family or society is deeply flawed.
This wasn't the norm for most of human history, and it isn't the norm globally today.
We have a group that promotes a "living wage" construct in Tompkins County that pushes the unquestioned assumption that people who are working in the lowest paying jobs can live 100% alone. It's not something I want to challenge directly, but... It reminds me of discussions about the minimum wage in the late 1980s when it was common for teenagers to work at supermarkets and fast food markets. I think the public never really understood how the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit
was specifically intended to help out people who were raising a family with low incomes that was economically efficient and how there is some logic to people who are working in low income jobs qualifying for food stamps, it is not just a way "Wal-Mart is stealing for us."
e.g. part of "affordability" is keeping costs low and as much leftie folks want to sweep it under the rug there is a lot of internal class conflict in groups such as women: like the Sheryl Sandberg type definitely benefits from exploiting less wealthy women to do child care work for them and child care is basically problematic because the child care worker is not productive enough to put their own children in child care without subsidy and you don't get the Fordist scenario where the auto line worker can easily afford to own one of the cars they make.
What does improve material standard of living is increases in productivity, but the scope for those is limited, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Like the basic story of the past 150 or so years is that agriculture has gotten dramatically more productive so people can do other things and move into cities with all sorts of implications.
The great work of human civilization is to expand the size of the in-group.
Your perspective on the in-group and out-group is relevant of course - it isn't healthy if one is self-sacrificing without addressing their own needs. However the degree of that varies between eastern and western culture. Eastern cultures, which have more civilisational history, don't necessarily see as it in such rigid terms.
That's quite different to your claim.
Right you are.
Whatever is happening to 42% of Americans is happening to 97% (figures drawn from my ass) of black Americans. $5000 is pretty good. I'm from Chicago, where the median black wealth is $0.
https://colorofwealth.org/
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com has been linked on HN may times before.
Is it related to that?
Searching the internet, one can read more, such as:
> In August 1971, alongside the "Nixon Shock" that severed the dollar's convertibility to gold, the Nixon administration imposed a 90-day economy-wide freeze on all wages and prices. This was the first time the U.S. enacted wage and price controls outside of wartime. Following the initial 90-day freeze, the Nixon administration implemented a complex, multi-tiered price control system on the petroleum industry that lasted for years.
> In August 1971, Nixon was "floating" the dollar, abandoning the gold standard and "freezing" prices and wages.
This video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EBEapf3OFw asks the below:
> Why did America deliberately destroy its own manufacturing industry?
And starts off,
> It did not happen all at once. Americans watched their own country lose it, brand by brand, factory by factory. Every time, the country washanded the same three reasons. (It looked inevitable. And every one of them was true enough to believe. Plenty of those factories were still making money the day they were ordered shut. They closed anyway, on the say-so of men who had never worked a shift in their lives and grew richer each time another one went dark....
Most people are just trying to survive for tomorrow.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUK6zjtUj00
My kids are in their 20s and I still support them.
But, I want the government to STOP
- spending my taxes on wars and military - spending my taxes on supporting immigration programs - immigration programs altogether
May be then financial and work situation can finally improve for kids of the people who built out the western civilization.
The common misconception that the US Government is wasting money on immigration is pushed by Trump and FOX News, who both lie regularly. For example, see [1] about how Trump rejected a report produced by Federal researchers. The report is available [2].
Overall, the refugee resettlement program gives the country back many times what the government spends. And even if you just focus on the expenditure, the bulk of it is on border enforcement and imprisonment, which goes to domestic private companies.
As to your love for "the people who built western civilization", I'll just leave it up there. Your connotation is clear, and it doesn't reflect well on you.
[1] Trump administration rejects report showing positive impact of refugees
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/politics/refugees-reve...
[2] Rejected Report Shows Revenue Brought In by Refugees. SEPT. 19, 2017: A draft of a study rejected by Trump administration officials that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/19/us/politics/d...
News lie regularly and I happen to hold the opinion for a while.
Studies also lie, another entity that lies regularly is government! All of them!
When you live long enough you learn to trust your eyes not your ears.
As far as the western civilization goes - it's being killed off. Pay attention.
I understand that YC is questioning the results of the survey. The YC community is very privileged; and i bet, if we do the same survey in this community, 20% or less of adults rely on their parents.
In many cultures multigenerational households are the norm. You may never move out; you raise your kids in the same house your parents raised you.
If you're from a poor family and break out of poverty, you're still in a worse financial state than someone from a rich family, even holding income and assets constant. You've got to effectively self insure (by taking fewer risks; being more conservative in investments; cutting down on rich people expenses that help with networking) to plan for the worst case scenario. And rich kids don't even realize how much their families' financial status enables and drives their behavior.
And that's not even starting to count financial expenses to take care of aging parents who can't afford to take care of themselves.
I half expect to have to apologize for this, like when I was growing up people would think you are a loser if you were in this situation. Today people think we are really smart and the people who are paying more rent than they can afford to live around that are losing.
I live in the US now, and here, where it is (used to be?) easy to land a well-paying job fresh out of school, it is considered quite common to charge your children rent if they decide to stay at home. My feeling is that staying at home in the USA carries quite some stigma for both the kid and their parents. American culture puts a lot of value in self-reliance and financial independence, and the general idea is that you failed as a parent if your kids aren't able to afford their own place.
(I also have a feeling all of the above is changing dramatically, given the current cost of living crisis in America.)
The only situation in which I would consider charging my kids 'rent' is, if as adults, they were being irresponsible with their life, e.g. being a NEET and not helping out around the house. Even then I would hold the money in a separate account to gift back to them later.
I think it's parents' role to always be a source of almost unconditional comfort and security for their kids. Though this requires that kids also do their best to maintain and respect that relationship.
He's eating food out of the communal pool and it's a running gag at local restaurants that he eats two entrees. I think it's fair that he contributes something, like he is working, except for this summer when he said "take this job and shove it" because he was working for a crew where the foreman was twice his age but didn't have any sense for construction. Instead, he's doing a lot of work around the farm to fix things up, some of which is stuff we need and some of which is stuff he wants.
He expects to inherit the farm, will probably move to our other house if and when he is ready to co-habitate as opposed to getting on the housing ladder in the conventional way.
When I grew up, that was seen as pampering kids. They'd never "learn" how to be financially responsible, etc. if they always received help.
But, let's be honest, in many places the housing market is now so expensive that people could be saving for 5-10 years just to afford the down payment. And by the time they have enough, the market will have appreciated even more, so they have to save for even longer. I have peers that got into the housing market 20 years ago with help from parents, and their properties are now worth 5x - 8x of what they paid.
I got a job that required me to move when I was 25, though, and what I realized after that was that living with your parents constrains you. I don't know how your relationship with your son is, but while I lived with my parents, they expected to know where I was going and be home for dinner, and even if I refused to tell them, I'd feel that I was judged for it, so I usually avoided it. Living by myself means if I want to go to a party or just buy something weird or get into soldering, I can just do it without worrying what my parents will think. I think delaying that stage has been really bad for my development.
Now it is not a good situation for sex for anyone involved but we have a lot of land so there's nothing better than a love nest made from glamping gear at least in the summer.
However, I never _asked_ my parents for money. I had a good education and a well-paying job, and was able to turn IPO money into a house down payment. In the end, we struggled to close the deal, and my wife and I both asked to borrow money from our parents. Of course they were happy to do so, but I still remember it as feeling so hard to do -- just something that I "shouldn't" have to do. And, of course, it also made me reflect on those who didn't have family support to fall back on, let alone jobs that paid well.
I live in an expensive area and I'm always shocked by how many of my friends who cannot afford to buy a home (or even a condo) are NIMBYs. These are people in their 20s through 40s who have been earning since college, can't afford to buy, yet get annoyed whenever there's new construction that "alters the character of the neighborhood". Talk about false consciousness. I can at least understand people who own a home feeling this way.
The fundamental problem is we simultaneously want our housing to be affordable and good investment. It can’t be both.
If you champion it as a politician, there's a very large chance you get all the flack for new developments, but the next guy gets all the credit for affordable housing.
Texas seems to be the only place that actually does it, and I honestly have no explanation for why.
Ideally, you have industry for a region treated like a well balanced investment portfolio. But you have to internalize that balancing investment portfolios is is a protection against downside risks. And it specifically loses against the lucky portfolio that was heavy on something during a boom.
So, the question heavily looms on if the regions we are looking at are diverse enough that they can sustain some downturns.
I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods. I want real public housing. Housing should be a human right. As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.
> Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom
A nebulous definition of "luxury", and totally ignores the fact that people with money can get what they want anyway, pushing those with less out. So yes, more "luxury" builds help.
> They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k
Many purportedly want more low income housing, often at absurd rates like "100% affordable" knowing that projects like that will never pencil out. It's a way of saying "No" without actually saying it.
> I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods.
Okay, so build some? If you can't build what you want then why stop others from building what they can with the budget they have?
>As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.
It's literally illegal in most places to build more densely due to height, parking requirements, discretionary reviews, etc. impacting everyone interested in building more units (Like for a multigenerational household as seen in elsewhere in the world). This is not just impacting corporations seeking to extract profit.
The reality is that demand is always going to far outstrip supply in certain areas. You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso, even if you raze the city to the ground and replace it with some yimby paradise that houses 25% more people. The extra supply might lower costs to some degree in the short term but the induced demand will ensure they stay above what someone on an average salary can afford. Everyone seems to understand this when the topic is freeway expansion, but not with housing.
The actual solution for housing costs is a lot more complicated and multi-pronged, but that doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker. There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at, so it gets dismissed; and suggesting someone move there is practically treated as a human rights abuse.
Dramatically increasing housing density does have adverse affects for existing residents. It's fine to say the tradeoffs are worth it, I'm not saying it's never the answer, but even acknowledging that it's a tradeoff usually gets met with dismissive insults from the yimby crowd.
But history and lots of examples suggests prices are unlikely to remain the same if you build more supply, which makes sense from an economics perspective. There aren't an unlimited number of people wanting to live in a particular area at a given price point, otherwise they would likely have driven the price higher in the first place. Induced demand is a problem for highways because the cost of driving that particular route at a particular time is essentially zero, which his not really true of moving to a different area.
Well, yeah, a human can only run so fast, but San Francisco is not even trying to run — it's barely crawling. Go to the sunset district, or Bayview, or any neighborhood in the western or southern half of the city and you will see nothing but rows after rows of single family homes — and yes, the car is a part of the family. Replace it with something like new york's west village and you will more than double its density.
> There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at
Yeah, just tell everyone to move to somewhere in the rust belt where the only job opening is in public sector health care that may or may not get cut by the current administration, that will help.
Other political leaders might hesitate to follow such footsteps.
"affordable housing" is the same thing as "luxury housing" asides from the rent
sure, you could allow less restrictive builds so that you only get a room with no bathroom or kitchen for $4k but thats not actually better
People "getting annoyed" doesn't prevent construction of affordable housing. I always see these NIMBY comments but never see anything to back up the notion.
Greedy developers that want the largest profit on a given plot of land is probably where you should be looking instead. Why build two inexpensive starter homes when you can build one luxury home and make a larger profit? (Never mind that the county gets larger property tax returns on the more expensive homes.)
And yet. They build high end homes and they sell them anyway. So there seem in fact to be buyers out there?
Also, you can't just build more in these already built up areas. Many of these areas already have strains on public services and just building up without adjusting for electricity consumption, water, schools, roads, transportation, parking, etc is just creating an even larger more expensive headache.
You have to make building towns / hoas in undeveloped areas easier; and the includes high speed transportation to get to the nearest city hub.
We also have to be alot more flexible on what's allowed to be called housing. We should have more places for people to be able to live in their RV's, cars, etc safely.
All of this comes down to the economic reality of what it takes to actually build and maintain a home and piece of property in America. It's not a right to own a home because of that economic reality. The main ingredients are cheap land in an area that has access to electricity, water, streets, infrastructure and access to income. If you can maintain a job for long enough you can pay off the land and cost to build. That is the only viable way to own. Expecting those kind of prices in LA or NY near the beach or downtown is delusional.
We have to also, philosophically, be honest about the way time passes and an intelligent species propagates itself. An frankly we can just look in the wild and see the same dynamics. If a species is successful, then there will be lots of individuals. Those individuals will be drawn to the BEST places to live. There are only so many BEST places to live. Do we really want to turn every place we live into giant high rises? This is an honest question and I think people aren't being entirely honest about their motives / vision for the planet.
afordable housing is a bedrock to ecobomic prosperity, the same as education and healthcare
I still support it. We need all the housing we can get. But I do get endlessly irritated by the attitude on Hacker News that no person could ever oppose rebuilding a neighborhood while people still live in it for a good reason and they must all by miserly hoarders trying to pull the ladder up from beneath them.
Or maybe we do, but just couldn't keep up with the enormous influx of immigrants for a few years a that ended a couple of years ago. The housing costs have risen due to unforeseen demand, not supply.
Self-inflicted would mean the person (or people) suffering from the problem is the same person causing the problem.
But the gazillionaire corrupt politicians aren't really suffering from any affordability problem personally.
Another one is Manhattan. There's no space to build so things get retrofitted (office conversions) and new zoning (Hudson Yards) but it's expensive - high hourly rates to pay people on buildings with more 99 units, many many permits required, land is expensive, etc
So it's luxury only in NYC
None of this is NIMBYism.
Part of it is return to office. Why move there if it's too expensive - the answer is you're unemployed otherwise
Part of it is demand. NYC is the closest thing to Europe, where you don't drive around in an SUV to do simple things. The GDP is enormous, so you find jobs. Young people. Etc
Housing costs are a lot more complicated than NIMBYism. There's a strong California bias for obvious reasons, here on HN.
Serve their kids. The money is only incidental to the power structure (nepotism, classism, xenophobia) that they intend to pass down to their chosen successors. They've been working to limit economic mobility, opportunity, and fairness for a while now.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of negative things to say about boomers, but I'm not sure how your complaint here really fits the article.