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cryoshon

it isn't just LA that's suffering in this way... it's the entire country.

the rent is too high. the pay is too low. the costs of essentials are rising.

nobody will do anything.

we're on track for self-destruction.

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Its not the entire country its a few big cities where people want to live. Lots of places have very very cheap housing. Its not just the rust belt - Baltimore has 17,000 empty boarded up houses.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/local/baltimore-life...

I live in Baltimore, work remotely, and pay about $1200 / month on my mortgage. I have an old house on 1/3rd of an acre. Growing up in LA, I was shocked how cheap houses were here.

I'm looking at moving to Austin now. There are a lot more work prospects there for my girlfriend, and housing still seems reasonable compared to what I was looking at in southern California. If you can work remote or score a job in a low cost of living area, it's great. For the most part though, people are going to live near their lords.

>its a few big cities where people want to live

Correction, it's a few big cities that have all the jobs and offer a chance at upward mobility.

This is part of why https://stackoverflow.com/jobs?q=&l=Baltimore&d=50&u=Miles&t...

But this article isn't talking about software engineers. We can afford places like LA - we're part of the problem.

People like us are willing and able to pay rent in places like LA and have been moving there en masse. People who used to live there are being pushed out.

One of the subjects of OP's article was a software engineer who could barely afford their apartment.

There's a reason there are 17,000 boarded up homes. It's not a desirable place to live. Housing follows jobs market, not the other way around.

I'm paying 1k a month for a 2 bedroom apartment and I can get anywhere in Minneapolis or St. Paul in less than 30 minutes. People don't seem to like the Midwest but apartments here are way cheaper for many cities.

There are a lot of small towns that are very livable in the US. Most journalists are in big cities, so you don't hear of them written up, except for the occasional "meth town crisis" piece. I have a climber friend who bought some land in Quincy, California. He designed and built his own house, along with a guest house and garden. He and his family live a quiet life of outdoorsy pursuits, rock climbing and backcountry skiing, while enjoying the small town's community theatre and organic food co-op. Cherry trees line the streets, and they taste really good.

What do they do for income?

I have similar friends, he's a software developer.

Carpenter

No, that's ridiculous. We must all be able live affordably in LA, and on a small peninsula in California, and on an island in New York. If we can't all get cheap housing there, there's something deeply troubling about our national economy. And the laws of matter.

The midwest is also experiencing massive housing inflation. I've seen rent go up 40% in four years and housing has risen at the same rate. I just had to downgrade apartments because rent was going to go up another 10% this year.

Any nice house in my city gets bought up in a week. Anything crappy gets bought in a day.

Rent is definitely rising but it depends on where you are. Even in the Twin Cities some places have skyrocketed but if you are willing to not live in the middle of the cities my experience is that it's pretty manageable.

That's the thing, I live in the far suburbs, like 40 minutes or more from downtown. The complex I just moved from was built in the middle of a field. If you drove passed the complex, in less than two miles the road goes to single lane road that hasn't been repaved in easily 20 years.

Here's your "how cheap can you get a house for" thread for the afternoon:

- 1,477 sqft, EST. MORTGAGE $147/mo https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/408-S-Logan-Ave-Terry-MT-...

- 2,084 sqft, EST. MORTGAGE $77/mo https://zillow.com/homedetails/118-7th-St-NE-Wessington-Spri...

- 1,200 sqft, EST. MORTGAGE $89/mo https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/616-S-12th-St-Tekamah-NE-...

I'm paying 1.5k a month for a 4 bedroom/3 bathroom home on a quarter acre in Portland Oregon. Though that is mortgage/taxes/insurance and not rent. But, you don't have to go to the Midwest to find affordable housing.

Your last sentence may contain its own answer.

The Midwest can be rough sometimes. I've met someone who spent once winter in Minnesota and then immediately moved back to California.

It's really just in-demand coastal metropolises. Almost everything inland is cheap. Hell, even the more expensive inland places like Austin are cheaper than coastal cities like NY and SF.

I'm planning on moving next year, and the top metros I'm considering are LA and Las Vegas. I have a slight preference towards SoCal, but Vegas's dirt cheap cost of living is really, really tempting. Looking at Zillow listings, I can get a house in Vegas (well, Spring Valley technically) that's considerably bigger than my place in Dallas for the same amount for rent.

Be careful. There's water problems in Vegas.

Also I heard its bat country, might want to watch out for that.

Probably not as severe, but aren't there also water problems in and around L.A.? I thought it was a desert too.

LA fixed that by taking Sierra water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct

Vegas relies on the Colorado River, which is very overtaxed for what it supports now (Vegas + Phoenix)

Water right seniority matters. I'm not entirely sure of the status, but I believe Los Angeles has senior rights over Vegas in this matter.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/25/the-disappearin...

L.A. has an ocean for desalination which just isn't cost effective..yet. But it's an option. Vegas is literally desert. Would be wary of buying land there.

looks at prices in upstate NY and the South, and then Midwest

ehhhhh seems pretty damn cheap

To my sensibility, energy-wise, prices are cheap in exactly the wrong places where you want concentrated populations. People are rather expensive (in energy terms) to logistically serve and they are even more expensive to move around, so you want them near waterways and coasts, and more sparse in inland areas, making the inland areas serve functions that require lots of land, like food production and renewable energy production.

We should be forcing low-density development residents and business to pay their own way on infrastructure build-outs around coastal and near-waterway metropolitan areas, and increasing population densities of the urban cores to around 25-30K per square mile on average, but the way the real estate business is structurally organized in the US and so tightly interwoven into our financial structures, there are very few ways I foresee how to accomplish that without excruciatingly high residential pricing, and all those ways are very uphill wars on powerful, entrenched economic interests.

If I read you correctly you're essentially suggesting that someone living in a low-cost of living area isn't paying enough for the shipped products they receive by way of major transport hubs?

I'd argue that's slightly evened out by prices that don't fluctuate as much by location. ex: In my midwest city I own a 3br 1500 sqft house that cost 190k and my wife and I gross over 160k. In an SV or Seattle type area we could be double the income and 10x or more for same house so it seems like we're getting a sweet deal right? But plane tickets, automobiles, many smaller consumables, anything you can buy on amazon, higher priced hobby items (phones, road bike, etc), are relatively inelastic to location. So we pay a larger share of our income than if we lived in a high-income area. To a certain extent, fuel as well. I regularly travel to chicago, seattle, and intermittently to LA area and gas prices are only marginally higher than in my low tax red state. While not so static, the cost is a bit baked in there as it's a larger proportion of my income to fuel my car.

That said, I'd have to put real numbers into this to see if my counter argument holds. You may be right that we underpay at a macro level and have some arbitrage. Your message just seemed to suggest it was obvious which I don't think is the case.

> ...you're essentially suggesting that someone living in a low-cost of living area isn't paying enough for the shipped products they receive by way of major transport hubs?

Sorry, I'm not writing clearly enough. Inland areas should have fewer and smaller population centers, and what do exist, should be dense, if we were eyeing our position on the Kardashev and concerned about where our next big energy sources are coming from.

There are also no jobs. Relative to median income housing is actually kind of expensive in many of those places.

Jobs, affordable housing -- pick one.

There are a few bargain markets like Detroit, but not many.

You have to consider it relative to the area's income level. I could rent 2 or 3 detached 3+ BR houses in my home town for what I pay for a 2BR in the East Bay. But, I'd never be able to make the kind of money I make here back in my hometown. If I'm lucky, I could make about 40% what I do now, with a 40 minute driving commute (because there's no public transportation, and the jobs actually in my hometown are not going to pay me anything).

Upstate NYer here.

Prices are generally cheap to average, but taxes are high and the urban areas are on track to complete fiscal meltdown due to the some of the parameters around public safety contract negotiations and other factors.

In my case, my property taxes are about 3.5% of home value.

Also, the environment for commercial development is pretty bleak. If you have a job, it's an awesome place to live and work. But it's hard to get one, and mobility between employers is limited.

It's still an order of magnitude cheaper to live here than SFO and significantly less than the NY Metro or Boston Metro areas.

IMO NYC should be a different state than the rest of NY. Trying to make state laws which work for both seems like an exercise in balancing conflicting needs. Geographically, NYC is in the corner, so it'd be relatively easy to draw one line to sever it.

If I were to reorganize the US, I'd make every CSA and primary MSA a state-equivalent with its own legislative, judicial, and executive branches not subject to the jurisdiction of any state and just leave the states to governing non-urbanized territory and primary µSAs. I think the 35 counties of the New York-Newark, NY-NJ-CT-PA Combined Statistical Area have more in common with each other than they have with the rest of their states, and they should be able to govern themselves as a unit independent of their states.

I've been thinking about this for a while, thanks to the Texas State Legislature making several attempts to override local government and give the finger to local control this year. State legislatures are often heavily gerrymandered, with undue weight given to the rural parts of the state. As such, it's not uncommon for rural-dominated state legislatures to attempt to force their social agendas on the cities, even though the vast majority of the state's population is in the cities. See also North Carolina's HB2. For a while I was thinking that any city over 100k people should be independent of any state, but on further reflection I think just making the CSAs independent of states instead of drilling down to the individual city level would be a better way to go.

Interesting idea, but since states are nominally sovereign, it won't happen barring a revolution.

Calls to mind the Norman Mailer mayoral campaign of 1969 (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City:_the_51st_State)

That would be devastating.

The state government's funding model is based on Wall St bonuses -- already at risk as more and more finance moves to Jersey and D.C.

Looks at job vacancies in those areas.

Doesn't look so cheap when I'm going to get laid off and have to move back to one of the expensive areas afterward.

You can work a minimum wage job in Murfreesboro TN and easily afford a studio. I payed $380/mo in 2009.

The downside being you live in Murfreesboro.

You can rent a 1600 ft^2 house in my town for about $600/mo.

If one is willing to do without the conveniences and hedonism of urban and suburban areas, most of the country is eminently livable on very little income.

People in SF are doing something, and legislators in Sacramento are passing many different bills to help spur the supply of housing.

I would encourage you to sign up for the newsletter here: https://yimbyaction.org/mailinglist/ which will keep you updated on initiatives to help increase the supply of housing.

I've previously linked to steps we can take in California to help increase the supply of housing in CA and encourage you to contact your city officials about whichever of these you feel inclined to. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14195301

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