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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Is it the defining problem of our generation, or the defining problem for West Coasters of our generation?

I don't mean to take any stance on whether it's the singular outlier in magnitude, but https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/04/the-global-housing-cr... makes a strong case for it being broader than a West Coast issue.

It's an interesting article but it doesn't really support the lede (that housing is problematic in Detroit) with evidence. It'd be interesting to cross the median multiple metric for American cities with economic growth, to see the extent to which housing is locking people out of access to opportunity.

It would to me be weird to see an argument that there is a housing shortage problem in Chicago, which has a pretty reasonable median home price, and where the median home is within a much more reasonable commute to the city center than most SFBA homes.

I assume (without evidence!) that this is true throughout the midwest and throughout the 2nd tier of US cities.

It's a problem in many cities around the world that are experiencing housing price shocks. A list of some of these cities: Vancouver, London, Toronto, SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, Berlin, Austin, Boulder, Sydney, Auckland.

And the housing contagion spreads. For example most of the province of BC that Vancouver has similar housing affordability issues. Same with Toronto and many hours away from it. About %70 of the Canadian population lives somewhere heavily unaffordable.

Then you add the problem that most jobs are in these cities and it makes it even worse.

EDIT:

Look at this list of unaffordable metros for example: http://time.com/money/4193804/hong-kong-least-affordable-cit...

The US stands out as having a good collection of affordable metros, the but rest of the world is worse and california is horrible.

Ok, but those US cities are only something like 16% of the US urban population in cities over 100,000 residents.

I was pointing out that it's an international problem not just the USA. Thus making it more of a generational issue.

But the point is that it's not a problem in most of the US, which makes it an issue only for people that demand to live in a few select cities.

I don't know about the US, but my experience from Europe is that many smaller cities have become, at least relatively, unaffordable as well. It seems like almost anywhere with decent density and transportation has now become part of the global credit, property and holiday rental market.

I don't know about those other cities but both Vancouver and now recently Toronto, have rent control.

Yes, real estate prices are heavily inflated but you can rent for a decent price in both of those metropolitan areas. I would find it very difficult to believe 70% of the population around the GTA can not afford to live where they are.

Rent control isn't the solution to everything. If housing is consistently available at a discount to market price, it will fill up and stay full. New entrants to the housing market, such as the younger generation, are still screwed.

It could work if the city is constantly building enough new housing -- but if the city has the will to allow that, they wouldn't have needed rent control.

Rent control isn't a solution at all. It's just a lottery to pay for some people lucky enough to get it.

Not if there isn't significantly more demand that supply. Rent control has worked well to mitigate housing issues in Paris during the last few years. It didn't solve everyone's problems: more and more students are moving to the close suburbs, and getting an apartment can be highly dependant on whether your landlord deems your income stable enough. But it has also prevented rent escalation - which we're currently seeing now that a court has repealed rent control [1].

[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/logement/article/2017/11/28/apres-lil...

The problem is it works in the short term, but makes the problem much worse in the long term. It reduces the returns of future apartments, so fewer apartments are built.

> Vancouver, London, Toronto, SF, LA, NYC, Seattle, Berlin, Austin, Boulder, Sydney, Auckland.

Fortunately there are tens of millions of other metros to live in

I don't think there are quite that many. 7billion/20million (smallest plural 10 of million) get's us 350 people per "metro" this is assuming no one on the planet lives rurally (about half do). There is perhaps thousands of metros on the planet.

On a more serious note, realistically this number is much smaller for each person. After you take into account the ones you could legally live in, ones you can speak the language for, ones with good job prospects. A person in the USA is lucky to have tens of options. For people in smaller countries the options are likely to be under a dozen.

There are studies like this one [0] that argue just about the entire increase in inequality in the past few decards (in Piketty's "r > g" sense) can be explained by increases in the housing market.

It's interesting to hear Chicago doesn't have a housing shortage though, having pretty much all my roots and social ties in coastal cities it does feel to me like this problem is everywhere.

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

I bought a 3-bed, 1-bath, 900-sqft bungalow in a solidly working-class St. Louis neighborhood in 2016 for $72k. I rented a nice 1100-sqft 1-bedroom in a nearby neighborhood for $625/mo a couple years before that. (Rents have not meaningfully changed in those neighborhoods).

I now rent a run-down, 350-sqft apartment in NYC for $2k/mo.

People on the coasts seem wildly out of touch with the housing situation in the Midwest. Cheap housing is the norm. It's simply not a problem in most of the country.

Considering that rent in major metropolises such as... Madison, Wisconsin is at the same level as Tokyo (and teachers are definitely being paid less), it's definitely a huge problem.

Almost all major American cities are having the bottom fall out in slow motion, and it ends up having repercussions everywhere. The absurdity of someone having to have 2 jobs to survive being a _real thing people say to people struggling in cities_ is the most American response to a problem.

It's obviously not just "rezone all the things", but the fact that people care so much about real estate, and that there are so many people who have vested interests in making it hard for poor people to be able to live at least somewhat close to their jobs is awful.

I want to believe it's a hard problem (because we haven't fixed it yet). But at this point I have seen soooooo many places outside the US that have almost no problem with this issue that I now have a hard time thinking it's anything other than rich white people wanting what they want.

“rich white people"? Why not just "rich people"?

Because decades of discriminatory lending practices and policy mean that there's a strong racial component to where people live. There's a trite statement about how desegregation never happened in the North, because black people end up basically stuck in poorer areas of town anyways.

The thing about systemic racism is that even if every participant is legitimately trying to give everyone a fair chance, the existing systems (artifacts of redlining, for example) are still biased in a certain direction, and will end up giving discriminatory results.

"Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000."[0]

[0]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-rac...

This looks like a legitimate complaint, but the way you worded it leads one to believe it is some innate quality of being white that makes people do selfish things, rather than circumstance; in this case, preventing poor people from finding favorable housing.

That's a good point. While there are a lot of cases of people in city council meetings saying overtly racist things as justification for these policies (mostly making equivalent poor, POC, and criminals). But I imagine a lot of people are basically just looking out for their own well being.At most being selfish, not discriminatory

There is still the issue that many POC don't even get this opportunity to be selfish, but that discussion doesn't lead to much

I do not believe that an apples-apples comparison between the Tokyo and Madison real estate markets would justify the equivalence you've drawn.

Yeah this might be exagerated. I'm also being very "armchair social scientist" about all of this, but I have heard this narrative multiple times.

It's very likely I'm falling into the trap of the compelling narrative that matches a worldview, but I used to not have this worldview...

There are so many stories that ultimately end up with some narrative like "people with $2 million homes don't want to let other people have $200,000 apartments", and reading that over and over makes me pretty jaded about prospects.

The West Coast has the worst case of this disease but it's a widespread problem especially in cities. Look at house prices vs. median income across the country. Normal is considered 3-4X. 5X is considered high. Today above 5X is the norm, which is considered "loony."

Above 5x is not in fact the norm for the overwhelming majority of urban Americans.

West coast investors seem to think it's a coastal thing. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15742917

Well, it does actually come up pretty quickly and consistently when discussing this generation across the board.

Right, but that wouldn't surprise us if the sampling of that generation we're getting comes principally from Internet message boards, where SFBA-class residents and SFBA-class aspirants are heavily represented.

(I'm not sniping at what Stripe is doing; I think SFBA housing is a worthy problem in its own right.)

Greetings from Sydney, where it's definitely a problem here too.

i'm not a west coaster, or even an american. just a 30-year-old who works a full time software engineering job and can't afford a house.

In this instance, the problem really is bigger than just silicon valley's bubble.

The west coast, well, many urban areas, often are leaders in showing trends then end up spreading more widely.

Yes, the weak and the old are usually the first to fall when an epidemic strikes

Not really. There are plenty of other quickly growing cities that aren't filled with NIMBYs destroying the housing stock (e.g. Phoenix, Indianapolis, Dallas, San Antonio, Las Vegas, etc).

Those cities are at different margins away from fundamental constraints. Because of geography, SF and SV were sort of locked into smaller footprints vs commute distances. Seattle/LA is just behind that with a bigger sprawl/commute margin but they're close to some limit at which property values spike up. Those other cities you name are wider flatter areas, with similarly wider margins, but they might hit other constraints soon... water for some of them. After they hit the constraint, their property values will spike too.

California’s housing issues are caused by uniquely California legal issues, some of which were good ideas at the time. Infill development can use advocates everywhere, but nowhere has such demand and yet so much opposition.

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