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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is a regional issue, not a national one. Most urban Americans do not live in cities with skyrocketing housing costs.

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it's a national issue because it keeps people from moving to where jobs are.

http://neighborhoodeffects.mercatus.org/2017/01/26/why-the-l...

Then the jobs will move to where the people are.

A community near me is booming because telecommuting makes it practical to commute to NYC by train twice a week. Eventually that will lead to new business and economic activity. We shouldn’t be screwing up property rights everywhere because tech companies are too stupid and have too much dumb money to geographically diversify and prefer to pay too much for talent instead.

It doesn't work like that. Stockton and Tracy aren't magically experiencing a jobs boom because we forced all the poor people to move there.

No, that region is over cooked and at capacity.

IBM, GE and other legacy technology companies demonstrated in their heyday that you can run engineering organizations in all sorts of places. Mainframe tech was done in Binghamton, Kingston, and Vermont of all places.

What property rights are violated by blocking an apartment building from being built on a vacant lot? The rights of the owner of the vacant lot.

Out of migratory curiosity, what community?

The one my friend was telling me about recently was Catskill, NY. It’s about 30-40 minutes south of Albany. Some of the market attracted to Columbia County is crossing the river.

It’s a struggling area with a lot of nice cheap property, both in and out of town. The Hudson Amtrak is about a 15 minute drive and 2-2.5 hour trip to Manhattan.

IMO Upstate once you get out of the Hudson Valley is relatively cheap and nice.

I thought one third of the country lived between Virginia and Massachusetts, with nearly the second third living on the west coast.

Something like 80+% of urban Americans live in cities with an average house price below $300k.

The question is where do people in their 20-40s live and also how fast is housing prices growing in those areas. Yes you might live in an area that has houses below 300K but if incomes are low and the annualized growth of house prices is 2-3x the inflation rate you got a problem.

It's not just a SF or NYC problem. Look at what is happening in Denver, Austin, and Pittsburgh. All these cities are seeing dramatic housing price increases.

I live in Houston, with 2.3 million other people. The most expensive area of town is maybe 2$ a sqft to rent.

I live 10 minutes from downtown in a triplex, where the other two units(I own) rent out for 1,900 a month, and my wife and I get 1,400 sqft. I bought it for 200,000.(beautiful neighborhood built around 1910,)

And it's very easy to make 140,000+ here as a developer. It's hard to make google/netflix 300k-400k, but you probably don't need to be as good either.

Every time this discussion comes up, someone points out Austin as if it somehow validates the idea that housing is expensive everywhere. But, no. Austin is expensive, but very few people live there. That's why I provided the statistic. Forget individual cities and look at the macro number: more than eighty percent of urban Americans live in affordable metro areas.

I don't know where you're coming from with Pittsburgh, where the average home price was $125,000 in 2017.

If somebody wants to make the argument that housing prices are a calamitous problem for tech industry employees, that will be supportable. But most Americans don't work for the tech industry (I would not be surprised if most programmers don't work in the tech industry).

> more than eighty percent of urban Americans live in affordable metro areas.

I'm sorry but you didn't prove that. You proved that 80% of Americans live near houses that are under 300k. To prove that 80% of Americans aren't suffering from housing issues you would have to show that 80% of American households earn an income such that with 25% of that income they can afford a reasonable home. I don't know the answer to that.

I perfectly understand that insane housing prices are a local Bay Area issue. What I'm unsure of is what the case is for most of Americans. The reason I say this is because my high school friends set (of whom 0% are engineers and 0% are in Bay Area), a significant portion (>30%) are struggling with housing related issues. I know that's anecdotal, but I'm just asking if anyone has a real data point to indicate if the housing issue is national or not. Citing that most of America has low house prices does not answer that question.

For context I grew up in an area where a 100K house would be considered luxurious so I am perfectly aware of how low housing prices are in America compared to Bay Area. That area also has lost tons of jobs so in order to support themselves, the younger generation has had to move to higher COL cities where there are jobs available (and where they can't afford housing). If you have any references that show that 80% of the population can easily afford local housing then I would gladly agree with your assertion that the housing issue isn't national.

Go look at house price to income ratio rankings. They broadly track house prices, which is to say, Chicago --- which does not have a housing price crisis --- appears in the same place on both rankings, and San Jose appears on the top of both lists.

> but if incomes are low

For most people, housing swallows every bit of the income difference and then some. The difference between making $90k a year and, say, $60k a year doesn't look so bad when the housing costs are 5-10x cheaper.

If your goal is to own a detached home, then the costs are so disparate that most people who could buy a house in the Midwest tomorrow won't earn enough to own such a place on the coasts in their lifetime.

>All these cities are seeing dramatic housing price increases.

Because people from SF and NYC are saying "F it, I'm cashing out while I'm winning" and moving to those places.

For a US election, it really is how many Congressional Districts (House) or States (Senate) is this an issue.

Although, if it is the party of the incumbent is in charge of the municipalities where this is a problem, it might get a bit uncomfortable for the incumbent to place it as a major part of their reelection strategy.

The South is the most populous region with 114 million but includes part of what you mentioned. If you combine Texas (28 mil) and Georgia (10 mil) you would almost get the population of California (38 mil). Florida also has 20 million people.

Is that true? Housing costs are skyrocketing in almost every major city with job growth.

Yes, it is true.

Although as a resident of a rural area, hours away from the city, after many years of stagnation, the local average price has risen by 50% in the last two years.

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