‘Sticker Shock’ in Los Angeles Housing | Hacker News Reader

‘Sticker Shock’ in Los Angeles Housing

nytimes.com

65 pointsprostoalex134 comments

Yep, our days here are numbered. Every thread on our community FB group has a hordes of people fighting any new construction (including housing) tooth and nail, even on lots filled with stripmalls, decrepit crackhouses, or asphalt parking, keeping LA decidedly third-world--it boggles the mind.

Our rent went up 7% this year alone.

I wonder if this is a general problem, where property owners in an area have both the power to influence the local government's land use policy and an incentive to limit new construction in order to create artificial scarcity and drive up the prices of their own property. Is this guaranteed to exacerbate any housing shortage anywhere'

Seems like a local governance 'problem'. Are homeowners more likely to vote than renters? Or do homeowners and landlords outnumber renters and get the rational outcomes they want?

Retried & unemployed people have the time to participate in local politics compared to the employed people with young families. On top of that they have the highest financial incentive to NIMBY to reduce their personal risk in their house equity since they have fewer earning years left and more value to capture.

Over a large amount of people, this imbalance leads to older NIMBYs to become a naturally occurring political force in local politics.

This is very much true.

If renters and young people were more engaged in local politics this wouldn't happen.

It's baffling to me how engaged people are with Federal politics, where many of the issues are distant and may never affect peoples' lives, while at the same time they have zero interest in local politics, which affects their lives closely, directly, every day.

Additionally municipal government is so approachable and citizens have incredible access. You can just email people and they'll get back to you. You can go to meetings and address council directly. In my town of 600k+ I've coincidentally came across a councillor on the street multiple times.

Federal politics is very much like sports, while municipal politics feels like a boring necessary tar pit that sucks up time.

These people won't be engaged as retired people, simply because of time. They make the personally rational decision to do their jobs. Also people don't want to necessarily invest in local politics if they feel they may be gone in a few years. A retired person if fairly likely to be in the same town many years from now, possibly the rest of their lives.

I see comments about how approachable it is... Just go to the meetings, etc.

Unfortunately digital participation is still not a big thing yet.

I'd love to attend meetings in Redwood City where i live but many start at 6 during the week (think there may even have been some as early as 5 or 5:30).

I don't typically leave the office till 6 or a bit after that, and then I get home to things like needing to eat dinner and other family obligations.

If they truly wanted higher participation among younger and less wealthy demographics they would have these meetings on the weekend where people can have a much greater chance of avoiding conflicts with work and other basic life needs during the work week.

Or make digital participation in these sessions a priority.

Many local political events such as voting, council meetings, townhall meetings, school district meetings, etc. are usually scheduled to allow for the desired audience of the event holders. If such meetings are scheduled at times that younger, working adults cannot attend, it's because they don't want you there.

If you're property owner you want things to improve around you as it increases value. Problem is there an older class of people who vote and attend city council meetings that don't want things to move forward. They squash things like building high density housing right next to a metro stop. They fight things like extending metro lines and almost killed the purple line extension. In our case, they fought fiber(FIOS) in our neighborhood and won because they didn't want the streets dug up.

Its so bad that some wealthy municipalities spend a significant fraction of their budgets lobbying or fighting development in court. The government of South Pasadena, for example, a town of about 25,000, spends millions of dollars a year in legal fees to block the 710 freeway expansion. This expansion would break a huge bottleneck in the area and LA county went as far as coming up with an underground freeway plan costing a billion dollars a mile (paid for by the state and TARP!) but even that was shot down. I think they finally gave up after decades of court battles and all of the houses bought along the planned expansion are being sold by the state.

Meanwhile, the school district cuts millions from its budget every few years (from five schools), road and other infrastructure maintenance is years behind at best (roads are crumbling and El Nino took it up another level), and the emergency services have turned to donations to meet their stagnant budgets.

Hmm .. Mountain View is an interesting example. The area near whishman park has no grocery stores or restaurants. I ran into an old timer in an Uber recently and he mentioned people did some of this zoning on purpose .. I.e. the need for a car to survive. As a young person, it seems weird that I bike home from work, and then take uber to get groceries. But yeah .. things are messed up in zoning big time.

And here I have the reverse problem in Willow Glen. The commute to Mountain View is terrible, but once I get to neighborhood streets near my house there is 0 traffic and all the local services I need within about a 2 mile radius. I can't bike to work, but I think the tradeoff is personally worth it for all the benefits of living in a walkable/bikeable neighborhood.

I've been told (including by current members of the Mtn View city council) that the lack of a grocery store in this neighborhood stems from city staff who are convinced that the neighborhood can't support one. Many people in the neighborhood are skeptical of this, and expressed a desire for a grocery store (along with restaurants and more retail) at a neighborhood planning meeting this past summer:

http://www.mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/planning/activeproj...

I believe there will be future community meetings, so if you live in the area, get involved!

The need to explicitly allow retail spaces is one of the great absurdities of US zoning standards.

Why not let grocery store execs or entrepreneurs determine if the neighborhood can support a grocery store? I don't see why government would be concerned if a private entity is successful or not (and I'm about as far opposite of libertarian as one can go). Would they prohibit say a Senegalese restaurant for opening for fear there wasn't a large enough makrket?

I live in the suburbs of south bay, and near my house used to be a Mervyns -- a clothing store that had a relatively large building but went out of business nearly 10 years ago. A few stores came and went, but for the majority of those 10 years, it has been sitting vacant. It's too big for the average brick and mortar entrepreneur, but too small for a big chain. Someone should section it off into smaller units, but maybe the construction is not profitable. There's not that much foot traffic in the shopping center for most retail stores to stay in business either.

Makes sense for the government to intervene if the free market can't identify a sustainable business to utilize the space.

Or make them pay extra taxes for abandoned properties. If they can't afford the taxes the government gets the land and building, and can then auction it off to someone who can put it towards a better use.

Direct democracy doesn't work.

One problem is who is actually represented. The dozens or hundreds of families that are priced out of the town, can't vote, because they've been prevented from living there. By definition, local elections are going to favor the people already living there.

I agree with this. The correct way would be to make the entire metro area a 'city' (or maybe a 'megacity') and absorb (and remove) all lower levels of governance.

This way voter representation is on the scale of the locality. It would encourage factoring in the needs of all citizens within that economic zone, instead of factions of shards that battle each other.

Yeah, look at the chaos that is Switzerland: one of the best life expectancy and education in the world, with so low taxes that rich French move there to pay less.

1 success out of how many failures? The people of California are not nearly as intelligent or forward thinking as the people of Switzerland.

Well, Switzerland had centuries of focus on education.

But California seems to do OK according to my metrics: higher GDP per capita and life expectancy that the average in USA. What makes you feel California as a failure?

Switzerland has had many propositions that would have worked in favor of the majority but were actually voted down. Meanwhile, in California, everyone votes in their self interest without caring or considering the consequences.

A lot of things that work in the small don't scale.

This is exactly what the opponents of democracy said during the 18th century, and exactly what China says now "we are too big for democracy".

But well, we have a proven implementation at 8 million people. Let's promote it to all countries of that size or smaller then.

Oddly I've noticed many of them are poor renters who have snagged a rent-controlled place, and it's "up yours" to those behind them in line.

When people say "30% of your income is spent on housing," do they usually mean pre-tax or post-tax?

The article claims you need $145K a year to afford a $2000/month apartment. But assuming that you lose 40% to taxes, you would still be left with $5,250 a month after housing. That sounds a lot higher than it should be for the lower limit of affordability.

If you assume 30% of pre-tax income, and $2000/month rent, you get a required income of $80,000 -- still high, but not as outrageous as the figure he comes up with.

The first paragraph says how much a resident would need to make to spend 30 percent of earned after-tax income on rent for a two-bedroom apartment.

It sounds like he's using a different standard than is commonly used (i.e. 30% pretax is the often cited standard)

Figuring this pre-tax isn't very useful. If you were in the (theoretical) 70% tax bracket and you spent 30% of your pre-tax income on housing, you'd starve.

Sure except taxes aren't that high in California. 30-45% is a much more realistic range for income taxes (state + federal + payroll).

Where are they higher, in the US? It's hard to imagine paying more than that and still not getting free healthcare and 4 weeks min. vacation, as you would in Germany, for example.

The US spends almost as much on public healthcare as EU countries - a couple of %GDP less than Germany but the same as the UK - and then the same amount again of private healthcare. That it gets so much less for its money shows how effective the medical-insurance complex js been at lobbying.

In California we enjoy US levels of public services with European levels of taxation and landowners get rich.

(Taxation doesn't pay for vacation.)

What's the connection between taxes and the amount of vacation you get?

The article says post tax but the standard is closer to what you're saying. For a landlord renting a property, for instance, the safe rule of thumb is typically for your tenant to have a gross annual salary of 40x the monthly rent (which for a 2k rental would be 80k gross salary). Using 145k is way too conservative. Similarly, when buying a house, the debt-to-income ratio is calculated on gross (pre tax) income as well and is 28% for housing costs (principal, interest, taxes and insurance), which lines up pretty well with the standard rental calculation.

Huh, maybe it's time for my family to move on up since my gross annual salary is 80x my current housing payment.

Well there goes your retirement savings... (Assuming that's where your extra money was going).

Or buy a 2nd house, or increase savings. The big problem spending more than 30% is if you're a renter, it make savings, even a rainy day fun let alone longer term or a moving budget, much harder.

The scale changes as your income increases. As you pointed out, someone who makes $145k could easily spend 30%, or even 50%, of pre-tax income on housing and still have more left over than most peoples' entire monthly income.

On the other hand, someone making $40k per year who spends 30% of pre-tax income on housing is going to have a pretty tight budget.

So, these are all pretty rough guidelines, and the best thing to do is to spend an amount on housing that does not compromise your other financial goals, no matter what the percentage happens to be.

I love living in Los Angeles as a single, 20 something, but the thought of trying to raise a family here terrifies me. The median price of a 3 bedroom home is $865,000 which would mean that a large portion of my long term net worth would end up tied to a single asset. When it comes time to put down roots, I'll head to cheaper pastures.

Colorado is calling.

Colorado is full thank you to move somewhere else and transform some other state into california.

Native Washingtonian.

We're also full.

Native? Which tribe are you from?

Here's the Merriam-Webster definition in case you don't know what native means.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/native

Is there a reason you raised the issue of race? Does my race matter? If so, I'd just LOVE to see you explain why.

Your race doesn't really matter, no. But neither does your native-born origin. You don't get to lay an exclusive claim on the arbitrarily defined geopolitical unit on the basis that you happened to be born there.

Except you wrote:

>> Native? Which tribe are you from?

Then you wrote:

>> You don't get to lay an exclusive claim on the arbitrarily defined geopolitical unit on the basis that you happened to be born there.

Why won't you just tell the truth: you don't like it when some people lay an exclusive claim to a geographical unit on the basis that they were born there, but you're fine when other people do it, provided YOU get to make the rules a la: "Native? Which tribe are you from?".

BTW, there's a word for what you're doing. It starts with H.

It was a rhetorical question to invite further discussion. Your assumptions about where I wanted the discussion to go from there are just that, assumptions.

And no, I don't believe that Native Americans have such rights, either. But since you sounded like you believe that you do, it was a comparison that practically begged to be made.

Are you that guy from the UK? I think we've had this conversation before.

No, I'm a guy from Russia who lives in US. But I'm sure you had that conversation before - it's not exactly uncommon :)

Try Minnesota. We're not dicks!

I have my suspicions

You could try Europe, where people have figured out that it's possible to live with lots of other people and still be pretty happy.

This "OMG! Other people! The horror!" mentality is part of the reason why places like LA (and Boulder, in Colorado) get so expensive in the first place. If you do density right, it keeps prices down, and requires less driving because you can put a lot of smaller businesses in the middle of dense areas and have them be successful, and also walk/bike to them. It requires a substantial rethink of our zoning though.

Working remotely in parts of Portugal and Spain is a recipe for happiness and early retirement (speaking as a US citizen). I can't imagine wasting so much take home pay on CA living costs; you'll never be able to retire or own a home outright under those conditions.

As a young Portuguese immigrant in California, I would selfishly ask you not to share this recipe too widely ;)

Places like Portugal - and Italy, where I spent most of the last 15 years - would certainly be helped more than harmed by people moving there with high-paying jobs and paying into the local economy.

That is probably true up to some extent. I just don't want to the country (Lisbon, in particular) becoming an amusement park for tourists (in the style of Barcelona).

He was talking about living there and working remotely. This is very different from the "let's go hang out and drink for a week" kind of person.

Loved visiting those places, but could never live there. Last time I went people were smoking in pairs in the grocery store. WTF?

You're welcome to pool resources with like-minded individuals, purchase all property that has been developed or is planned to be developed in Colorado, and prevent it from being used by or sold to anyone else.

Until then, the entire state is not your backyard, thankfully.

And it should go without saying, but there's no natural right for things around you to remain exactly like they have always been. Although you do, of course, have a natural right to free speech to grumble about how they change.

I dunno the Denver and Portland trains as cheap and fun urban areas sailed a few years ago (the cheap part). I'm waiting to see what the next rad yet cheap city is... Nashville maybe?

Kansas City. Nashville has been a hotspot for back office outsourcing from the Bay and NYC for years.

I've been really impressed with Richmond, VA. The tech scene is small, but pretty healthy. It's not my favorite weather, but it has four seasons, which is a plus. Great restaurants (some DC restaurant concepts get tested there first).

I haven't spent much time in Nashville, but I've only heard good things from friends that moved there after college.

Yeah, all the californians moved to Portland and caused the housing prices to sky rocket.

Just back from Boulder. Could live there and work there. Denver is like a typical blue collar town, but Boulder has that utopian walkable thing that techies crave so much. The bookstores in Boulder are incredible.

Weather was great this time of year at least.

Boulder house prices are probably as high as East Bay in California at this point.

Georgia welcomes you with open arms. I moved from the DC area where I was spending $1,800/mo for a 2 bed 2 bath 30 miles outside of DC. I came south and bought a 3,200 sq ft home, 12 miles from downtown Atlanta, for $200,000. I've got a nice backyard, two car garage, it's quiet, costs are low, and the weather is nice.

Ive been to Atlanta. I wouldn't describe the weather, especially the summers, as "nice". 90 F with 100% humidity[0], isn't "nice." I grew up with it. It sucked.

Also, I don't really think the Confederacy is a welcoming place.

[0] https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KPDK/2015/9/26/...

When some place becomes a new popular migration destination, its politics usually change pretty fast.

Nope. See Austin. Largest city in the US without its own congressional representative. Instead, it's gerrymandered into 6 other districts to minimize Democratic representation.[0] See the latest disenfranchisement laws.[1]

If you're going to lose, change the rules.

[0] http://www.politifact.com/texas/statements/2013/jul/17/ellio...

[1] http://www.newsweek.com/voter-id-laws-discriminatory-disenfr...

Not sure why you were down voted without refute. Gerrymandering is a known and ignored problem in a lot of states, including my home state of Kansas (where Lawrence is split down the middle).

I just assume it's because it's inconvenient to someone's preconceived political notions. Happens all the time around here.

I've also been modded down to oblivion recently for saying that I don't like exercise because I find it boring. Whatev.

Aren't both Lawrence and Austin big college towns?

Maybe the state does not want its representatives chosen by out of area students who will not be around long term to deal with the outcome of their votes, good or bad.

So the students shouldn't have representation from the place where thy live anywhere from 9 to 12 months out of the year, but instead have repeentation in a place they live 0 to 3 months in? That doesn't make any sense.

Also, Austin is... wait for it... THE STATE CAPITAL, with a population of 912,000 people. UT Austin Has an enrollment of 50,000. Even if we held for sake of argument your statement that college students should vote in "home" districts where they don't live for more than half the year, and for simplicity say that all 50,000 students are not from Austin, what of the remaining 862,000 Austin residents? Don't they deserve to have their city represented, like every other city of similar size?

Calling Austin a "college town" is as nonsensical as calling Boston one.

The reason why college towns get gerrymandered to dilute their representative power in Republican dominated states has everything to do with the fact the fact that college students tend to vote Democratic. This is the same reason why "voter fraud" became an excuse to target minority voting patterns. It's a partisan power to try to create and maintain structural bias into the electoral system.

You actually give an example to reinforce my point. Austin has to be gerrymandered, because it is already so blue - if it weren't, they wouldn't bother. Gerrymandering is moving the goalpost (of what it takes to get political representation), but as a technique, it has a limited range. At some point the supermajority is sufficiently super that no amount of fooling around can suppress it.

My point is that things don't change fast. Multigenerationally, sure. Fast? No. Not even close.

I don't know. NC already changed fast enough that I would hesitate to call it multi-generational.

HB2 says otherwise.

HB2 is only one piece of the puzzle. The state did vote for Obama in 2008, and presidential elections are a big part of political representation, too (in fact, the 2016 one may well even take care of HB2 in a roundabout way, via SCOTUS).

I lived in Atlanta for two years while I attended Georgia Tech. Never again. They still have a monument for the Confederacy. I'm sorry, but you lost.

Ugh! As a kid, I visited Atlanta during the summers of 1990 and 1991. My Yankee ass was not prepared for the laser light show at Stone Mountain. The encore was a celebration of the Confederacy, complete with a laser portrait of Gen. Lee in his most resplendent military regalia. People began chanting the South will rise again. That's when I realized I couldn't live anywhere in the South besides Miami.

What other nation state tolerates such salient scenes of seditious activity?

It was an explicit reconstruction policy. The government wouldn't prosecute the traitors for treason, because we were once again a big happy family. This is why 10 Army bases are named after confederate generals[0]. Sometimes, even after really crappy generals. (See Fort Bragg [ibid.])

The modern movement of embrassing "southern heritage" with the confederate flag, holidays, and monuments come from an reaction to the civil rights movement. Stone Mountain in your example was the site of the founding of the second Klu Klux Klan, which was then purchased by the state in 1958. The site and the history of memorial are deeply entwined with the KKK. I truly urge everyone to read the Wikipedia page about this site if you have any doubts about this.[1]

[0] http://time.com/3932914/army-bases-confederate/ [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Mountain

Cost of living and real estate prices are what keep me away from living in California again, even though I grew up there. Grew up in Thousand Oaks (due north of Malibu), but got married and started my family in Oak Park (west of Chicago). We'd be happy to have you here! Take all the money you would otherwise spend on a house in L.A. and instead, spend it on extending your startup's runway, and/or 3D printers, Arduino, and making robots. It worked for me! With O'Hare airport nearby, you're always a frequent, direct flight away from the coasts if needed.

Funny enough, I recently moved from Schaumburg (having lived most of my life in the Chicago suburbs) to St Petersburg, FL to get away from the high cost of living in Illinois (and the winters!).

No income tax (helpful in high earning years), much lower property taxes, and I'm 15 minutes from one of the top rated beaches in the country.

Yeah, but how many high-paying tech jobs are available in Florida?

I work remote for a Bay Area startup, close to market rate.

If I instead worked locally, DevOps jobs are a plenty. Sure, not at $130K-$150K/year, but plenty at $100K-$125K/year, which affords more purchasing power relatively than me making market rate in the Bay Area. And I get much more time with my family working from home.

There is no amount of money in the world worth trading quality of life.

Which is exactly why many people would never dream of leaving SF for Florida.

To each their own. I'd rather retire at 35-37 then have to try to stick it out in the tech industry in my 40s and face the ageism that comes with that.

What is it that attracts you to SF? I've been there lots of times for conferences and it has always struck me as a so-so place to live, but in my experience there are so many places that are so much better. Cheaper housing, closer to nature, better mountains, better beaches, less fog, better weather, less taxes, fewer californians ;-)

San Francisco is a fantastic place, but I'm convinced that comments like this one that assume it's so much better than everywhere else that you'd have to be crazy to leave are evidence of a deep (probably not even conscious) need to justify the high cost of living.

If San Francisco didn't cost so much, people wouldn't feel the need to defend it in such ridiculous ways.

Lived in Chicago most of my life and moved to the bay a couple years ago.

What you might gain in affordability you lose in weather and employment options. Also, corporate culture in the Midwest is typically as dated and conservative as it gets.

The sooner you leave LA, the sooner you can start saving for the things you want to do.

I lived there for 6 years, now I do remote work for an LA based company and travel. Best decision I ever made.

B-build A-absolutely N-nothing A-anywhere N-near A-anything

Nominal interest rates are zero. We are living through the largest debt bubble in history. How is it surprising that assets are all incredibly overpriced?

Yes, of course it will end in tears.

But what would cause it to pop? There is still insane demand in popular areas, in large part because that's where the jobs are. I could only see that becoming more true in a down market.

You have answered your own question — it will pop when jobs stop growing.

Yep. And it will be reflexive, since the debt was loaned out against future production, exacerbating the downturn.

Some cities might become safe havens for Chinese wealth, not much individuals can do about that except wait it out and hope that the US government starts working in the interests of its broader population, rather than the already rich landowners in a few cities.

At a higher level, this is why privately issued debt is no way to manage your money supply.

Right, but what will be the catalyst that stops jobs growing? And would it necessarily be uniform to all geographic areas?

The housing crisis was unique in that it impacted people across the nation. Likewise with the dotcom bust since that was all about the public markets.

What would have a similar effect today? If tech jobs are killing other jobs/industries, wouldn't that lead to a situation where the tech market is still really strong with jobs, but other areas decline (and thus housing prices may stay the same in say, the Bay Area, but decline in another impacted area)?

Just trying to extrapolate things out. Yes obviously if jobs stopped growing everywhere at once, things would crash. But what would cause that? It seems more likely that they would stop growing at different rates, and some may even grow more as a result. As such, we might see more weird fluctuations in the markets, but that isn't a popping event per se.

As someone who has been in LA for a while, I think the "sticker shock" isn't coming from the housing cost so much as from the salaries that aren't keeping up with it. If you want to live in a nice location with a short commute then you're going to be paying over 1600/mo for a 1 bedroom. But if salaries were at Bay Area level that would be a bargain, especially given the weather, beach access, night life, etc. that LA offers compared to other cities. Unfortunately, salaries here are not great, even in the small tech scene on the west side.

Its a silly attitude to deny development. There is plenty of room for more people, on the planet, in LA.Just get organized.I live in Venice but friends in Hollywood I see maybe 4 times a year because driving is numbing. Robocars are gonna improve things greatly.That said, LA is full of itself.You will pay through the nose for property that shouldvbe torn down, yet you are not allowed to. I am a Euro transplant and I have travelled the U.S.for the past dozen years and there is hardly a bad spot anymore.You get great food, culture, people many many places. Madison WI, Bozeman, Raleigh, Detroit even, even Texas. Lot of people are stuck in LA molasses.

I'm looking to buy in LA and everything is old as shiz and over 800k :(

Oh well, at least I can rep the 323 and shout tupac lines

Bargain hunting in Compton?

My friend just bought a 2 bedroom in Compton for $600k.

I didn't have the heart to tell him his mortgage will be underwater in a couple years.

elaborate?

It's a house. In Compton. That cost $600K.

If it looks like insanity its probably genius in real estate.

> everything is old

What's wrong with old? In Europe houses are regularly hundreds of years old and it's not a problem.

Having just moved to the Playa Vista area, $2,000 for a 2 bedroom seems like a steal

LA is cheap

Come to the SF Bay area...

Let's not pretend because SF has problems that nobody else's problems are any big deal.

This is also known as the Fallacy of Relative Privation.

Relativity... its a thing ;)

Kind of a tangent, but isn't the Los Angeles area much more populous than the bay area?

Sure the problem might not be quite as severe as SF, but it affects 2.5x the number of people.

LA has more people, but also much more land. The entire stretch from SF on the other hand is surrounded by water on three sides, and the valley in general is... well, a valley. Surrounded by mountains.

To get a good sense of this, open Google Maps and center it on California. You'll get a sense of how different the two areas are in terms of sprawl. LA is basically one big concrete jungle from Burbank all the way to Anaheim. SF area is much more densely packed.

I've visited both, but lived in neither. Yeah, SF itself isn't even a million people, LA 3.4 million. The bay area gets up to 7 million, but greater LA is 18 million. SF did feel much denser.

The sort of standard answer is just build more housing, but the cities are already so congested. Building up would surely lower prices in both cities, but i think it'd make bad commutes worse.

I dunno. If there was an easy answer, people would just do that. For a long time the easy answer was just drive farther. That's becoming less of an option now and it's not clear what, if anything, should be done.

In any case, it's easier to convince 100,000 people than it is to convince a million, and it's easier to convince a million than it is to convince 10 million. Whatever the answer is is going to take some serious politics.

We need what Japan has: a national zoning code.

> The sort of standard answer is just build more housing, but the cities are already so congested. Building up would surely lower prices in both cities, but i think it'd make bad commutes worse.

Build around public transportation and fix zoning.

> In any case, it's easier to convince 100,000 people than it is to convince a million, and it's easier to convince a million than it is to convince 10 million. Whatever the answer is is going to take some serious politics.

Sigh, yes.

> What does it take to be middle class in Los Angeles? That was the question Ross DeVol started out asking himself when he began calculating how much a resident would need to make to spend 30 percent of earned after-tax income on rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles County.

I disagree with the author that this is middle class. A two bedroom apartment is the very definition of impoverished lower class loser, just above homeless.

Middle class means a detached 3 bedroom in the suburbs, with biweekly maid service, two financed cars, health care to the point you don't need to worry about it at all, and buying whatever you want at the supermarket.

What middle class does not include is any one of: a mansion, live in staff, a yacht, full time nannies instead of occasional baby sitters, swiss boarding school for the children, a groomsman for the horse, a pool boy, a cabana, a private plane, or zero income tax.

This is what skilled factory workers and teachers had in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Above them, designers, engineers and lawyers, comprised the upper class, or upper middle class.

>Middle class means a detached 3 bedroom in the suburbs, with biweekly maid service, two financed cars, health care to the point you don't need to worry about it at all, and buying whatever you want at the supermarket.

This to me is the very definition of upper middle class.

Middle class (for a family) to means a 2-3 bedroom house in the suburbs, at least two cars (with one likely under financing), health care to the point you don't need to worry about it at all, and food shopping on a very large, but not unlimited budget. Plus the ability to take a vacation at least once a year to a regional destination.

For someone single different rules apply.

> I disagree with the author that this is middle class. A two bedroom apartment is the very definition of impoverished lower class loser, just above homeless.

Apparently I'm an impoverished loser who makes more than 10% of the US population.

That's the point.

> A two bedroom apartment is the very definition of impoverished lower class loser, just above homeless.

Stop trolling. This is the rudest thing I've seen anyone say in a long time and it certainly doesn't belong on HN (but also, it's weirdly classic HN to read things like that here). Socioeconomic class is not defined by who you think is a loser or what kind of dwelling you choose to live in. I would never live in a house like you describe if I were middle class. I would always choose the 2 bedroom apartment. That makes me a loser, just above "homeless"? No, it doesn't.

Stop the insulting nonsense.

I think you're misreading OP's intent. I read it as, "don't be contented and call yourself 'middle class' when by standards of days past you're struggling to get by" or something of the sort. Hyperbole, but not malicious.

I could be wrong though. Some people are just assholes.

It seems like you're wrong. There are a thousand better ways that could have been phrased, which would have had the meaning you ascribed to it, without the poster being an asshole.

That was the feeling I got from it as well. Perhaps could've been stated more clearly, but to me the intent was there.

By your definition of the middle class, a healthy U.S. economy would need approximately 4,000,000 domestic maids to satisfy the biweekly maid service requirement.

It is a lot of good jobs that pay fairly, do not require skilled labor, post-secondary education, or high IQ, and is not difficult, strenuous or dangerous work.

I have certainly done this same work myself. It is an excellent position for people without many skills and/or the desire to pursue education. And it is not an appropriate use of time for those of us who do have more skills. Therefore it is highly reasonable and efficient to outsource these tasks to those unable to make things or to design things, and/or not motivated for whatever reason to seriously pursue and master such tasks.

Or it would require a family to be able to support itself on one full-time income instead of two, so the other spouse can maintain the house.

I'm not sure there's much of an overlap but the 8,000,000 people in the transportation industry who will shortly be underemployed might be in the market for that.

Middle class means you work for your money. Upper class means you have money regardless of how much you work. A family of two lawyers earning $500k a year are still middle class.

Working class means you work for your money. It's even in the name.

Middle class falls between working class and upper class, the bourgeoisie so to speak.

I don't have biweekly maid service, I guess I'm almost there. In my opinion, middle class is earning enough to live in a relatively safe number, pay all your bills, your own house, rent/buy, car, health care, feed your kids and be able to SAVE some. Maybe not much, but say saving 10% of your after tax income.

If you have all of the above and no savings or borrowing on Credit cards, you are a fool.

> biweekly maid service

This is the most shockingly spoiled thing I've ever read on HN. Tops even that dude (Timr?) who said that $250k in SF was near-poverty.

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