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Comment by ourmandave | Hacker News Reader

So, is college still worth it? In the most simplistic terms, yes.

Let's look back at homeownership. Attending a four-year college — even if you borrow, and even if you do not graduate — still increases your chances of owning a home, compared to people who never enroll.

But if the new economy demands that workers have the ability to flow to job opportunities (like dragging-n-dropping them on a spreadsheet) then home ownership is an anchor.

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Remote working needs to become a standard practice. It's the only way to escape the neverending rise in housing in places like SF, and give people the ability and stability to settle down in a place they love, raise a family, and invest in their housing.

Think about all of the coming job losses to automation ... what if high earning tech workers could stay in their communities, and spread some of that SV economy around.

More people need to realize this. Not only does it allow people to put down roots and let local economies everywhere grow, think of the benefit of getting all those cars off the roads. Less CO2, less traffic, less need for new roads (a big CO2 producer on it's own).

If policy makers really wanted to make a dent in fixing our problems, subsidizing remote work positions (within US borders) would be a huge benefit.

Yea, at this point I'd only get a home if I was comfortable with severely limiting my job prospects. Even in the same metro area I've moved apartments after getting a new job so that my commute is around 30 minutes rather than the 1-1.5 hour commutes a lot of my home owning coworkers have had

I'm in the same boat ... except I ended up buying to insulate myself from a ridiculous housing market since there are lots of jobs within a 30min trip of my place.

The glorification of home ownership really baffles me, although I still ended up purchasing after careful consideration of things like:

http://jlcollinsnh.com/2013/05/29/why-your-house-is-a-terrib...

This is the situation my wife and I are looking at as well. We don't have kids yet, we want to put down roots and barring another housing market collapse, the area we currently live in is getting expensive.

We paid off huge student loans first, instead of getting into housing. Housing doubled. We're priced out of our local city.

Also .. I highly suggest that if you want to buy a place, do it before the baby arrives. After the baby, you are so fully absorbed in adjusting to your new life, that taking time out to go house hunting is a herculean task. Every house we bid and lost after the baby represented a much higher cost and led us to bid more than we thought the house were (to the tune of 50K in my opinion - we still lost the bloody bidding wars).

I agree. Most of the high earning young people I hang with basically have to be willing to uproot for opportunity.

However, owning a house (I think the term home is something distinctly different) could be used to facilitate moves though. I don't have to be in the same state/country as my rental property (though countries are starting to crack down on foreign rental property ownership).

Is property management cheap in your area? We rent a couple of apartments, and hiring a property management company would be ruinous, unless both the rent and our personal time was very expensive.

I would pick a rental area which has a college (or colleges) or with a large rental market. In my experience, the presence of a student rental market keeps prices down for property management, but high enough to make rentals viable. However, each person's situation is different.

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