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Comment by imaginenore | Hacker News Reader

Which I wouldn't consider rich. Moderately wealthy, but not enough to even buy a 2br in SF or Manhattan.

You are right but why is that something to strive for though? Most people here say they want to become 'rich' to achieve freedom. Why would your artificially make achieving that freedom harder by wanting to buy a 2br in Manhattan or SF? In many other, cheaper places, you have the freedom and thus achieved 'rich'. I am incredibly puzzled by the need to live in the most expensive places on earth; how does that benefit your quality of life? This is my lack of imagination maybe, I am not trying to judge here.

>>>I am incredibly puzzled by the need to live in the most expensive places on earth; how does that benefit your quality of life?

You have the causality in the wrong order. They are the most expensive places on earth because they improve your quality of life, not the other way around. The price is derived from demand which is derived from a desire to have access to many goods, services, and experiences not available in many other places.

I can speak personally to two other cities I've lived in where housing costs are quite high (though lower than SF and Manhattan): DC and Santa Monica / West LA.

My fiancée and I lived in DC for 5 years in a wonderful expat bubble. While I'm am American, the vast majority of our friends were from all around the world and worked at international development organizations. The extra money we paid for housing was worth all the interesting experiences.

Los Angeles is no different. It's easy to find interesting experiences and food through its diverse populations. There is a fundamental aspect to the nature of cities, viz. that there is a good to density itself. It enables humans to get value out of the shear existence of interacting with other humans in interesting ways. You need enough demand for an experience to support the existence of many experiences (e.g. You can't have a live punk music scene in a town of 100 people. Or even if somehow you do bc the entire town loves punk, it will be at the expense of those people being into other interests. Having enough people with enough wealth and distributed across enough interests/cultures/foods/music tastes, etc facilitates access to way more possible experiences. That, at least, I why I love large American cities.

That is a good point, but those experiences can be had in other, much cheaper cities around the world. Why pick exactly the most expensive ones. The experiences can be had in most big cities I have been, the goods + services are getting there but i'm not personally not too driven by that but can see others might be. For all these things I can see your point, just not why pick the most expensive ones?

And I guess it also has to do with the phase in your life; I value freedom above goods & services handy. The satisfying experiences I have in cities all over, also cheap as chips cities in Asia and cities & villages in Asia & Europe. For people making so much money it seems that freedom is within reach if only compromise on the place of living is made. But you make a good points; I made/make decisions based on those points as well at some times; just now I value freedom more than other things.

Those areas cover probably max 0.1% of total land area in the USA.

Since these are some of the most sought after real estate areas, it seems these areas would be the preserve of the top 0.1%, or 1%. Back of the napkin maths here I'll admit.

The good news is there's still a huge chunk of the country where you would be considered wealthy by land value prices.

> Those areas cover probably max 0.1% of total land area in the USA.

Much less than that. I did a quick calculation and Manhattan + SF is 0.0018% of total US land area. Might be 0.1% if it's only developed land.

> Since these are some of the most sought after real estate areas, it seems these areas would be the preserve of the top 0.1%, or 1%. Back of the napkin maths here I'll admit.

1.6M live in Manhattan, 800k in SF. That's 0.8% of the population.

  Which I wouldn't consider rich

Perhaps this is a sign of the severity of income and wealth inequality: that even having more income than 95% of the country isn't enough to be considered 'rich'.

Manhattan is a big island. You can buy a 2br (and not in a terrible location) with 150k/yr.

Richer than 95% of people in your country is not rich?

I agree with you. But speaking as someone who is in "the 1%", my experience is that most Americans don't define wealth by numbers, they define it by how jetset a lifestyle can be.

Of course being richer than 95% of the country makes you "rich"; that's near tautological. But that's not really the perception. Rather, the perception is that you're rich when you no longer need to work at all and can simply do whatever you want. That's really fuzzy, and I'd agree that it's indicative of wealth disparity in America that this has become the predominant conception of wealth.

My point is that you two are probably talking past each other without meaning to.

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