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Comment by Noos | Hacker News Reader

its only bad for knowledge workers in boutique cities. It's actually dirt cheap to own housing in many areas otherwise. It costs 500k just to get a condo in flushing, ny, where a 3 bedroom house in many CT areas is 100k. The issue is wealth should not concentrate as near as it does geographically, and we need to get over the idea of packing everyone into cities and spread out into towns more.

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People do like their house to be close to the place they work and dense cities attract knowledge workers but also need maintenance workers, teachers, firefighters, janitors, cooks, and police. Housing for those people is the problem which the real estate market does not seem to be able to solve, and local governments have not found efficient regulation for except for social democrat systems like sweden and norway.

There's a simple solution... build dense cities. San Francisco feels like country side if you've lived in an actual dense city.

I used to live in Paris which is definitely a dense city, and even though there is much more subsidized housing there than in San Francisco, it is still a tough place for working class people to live.

Sorry, but no. It's a serious problem for lower class individuals and families in many cities across the US. Housing assistance programs are often a non-starter, public/affordable housing waitlists are years-long, and rents in the inner city are not meaningfully lower than in other parts of the city. Which means an absurdly high percentage of your income goes to rent, leaving little else for other basics like food and medical coverage.

And if you don't have stable housing, you probably don't have a stable income, and you/your kids probably don't have a stable school life.

Spreading out seems like an inefficient use of resources until journeys become quicker. If I can go from my place in SF to a supermarket in Sacramento in 10mins - that would change everything.

Some kind of Hyperloop-like network in a Musk-ian future.

500k for a 1 bedroom condo? sounds fair to me.

You forgot the /s

Not really. I'm a native New Yorker, living in Queens, so perhaps I'm biased. But $500K is fairly reasonable for Queens. Of course it'll be more expensive than Connecticut, since you're living in a major city with lots of things to do, etc.

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