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Comment by dcosson | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it’s really that intractable. The traditional middle class lifestyle in the US for the past several decades involves getting married, probably having a few kids, and buying a 3 bedroom house to live in. Probably even in the towns you’re thinking of, that describes a middle or upper middle class lifestyle.

The thing that’s crazy is that this can cost 2-3 million dollars in many places in the Bay Area. The housing crises in affluent cities is absolutely the driving factor of our growing inequality issues. It’s been shown in different ways in many studies. We need to build a lot more housing if we hope to make any real progress on these issues (and in desirable places like the Bay Area it probably requires shifting the ideal to be a 3 bedroom condo rather than a standalone house).

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> The thing that’s crazy is that this can cost 2-3 million dollars in many places in the Bay Area. The housing crises in affluent cities is absolutely the driving factor of our growing inequality issues.

how can this be so? i agree it sucks that {insert middle class profession} can't afford a 3br in the bay area or NYC, but how can that be the root cause of inequality across an entire nation? there are tons of affordable 3br houses around where i live (mid-size coastal city).

i see that it is a bad thing for service workers the wealthiest cities to be pushed ever further from their place of work, but this seems like a more local problem.

I also don't agree it's the root cause, but certainly it's a big contributing factor. Buying that 3 bedroom house in a more affordable area might be a smart idea, or it might severely limit one's economic mobility. Most of the jobs that mint new members of the upper / upper-middle class are based in big cities. Living elsewhere might mean trading class mobility for housing security, a trade-off that some don't have to make.

> Most of the jobs that mint new members of the upper / upper-middle class are based in big cities.

i feel that this claim is exaggerated. anecdotally, i live in a suburb of a midsize city. i rent a 3br house for under $2k a month and there are tons of tech companies within a 25-45 minute drive of my dwelling. an entry level job at any of them would easily put a person in the high end of middle class incomes for this area.

to be sure, companies in the wealthiest US cities offer experienced employees compensation that is unmatched anywhere else. but for entry level and/or average skilled developers, it seems like SF, NYC, etc. are the only places where you aren't guaranteed an upper-middle class lifestyle.

As with anything there is obviously some debate and disagreement. But growing inequality is basically the result of capital's share of income being higher than labor's share for the past several decades. When you look at where these consistent outsized returns for the wealthy are coming from, it turns out it's mostly housing [0].

You bring up a point about how can this be causing inequality across the nation. Well if you think about it there really isn't consistent inequality across the nation, wealthy people by and large tend to live in or around big expensive cities, where their returns are consistently driven higher than they would otherwise be thanks to housing prices. It's not only NY and SF that have housing issues, it's more pronounced in these places but lots of cities across the country are seeing housing costs increase quickly.

[0] https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/deciphering-the-fall...

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