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Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

>> The message of the article is we can't have our "housing values are always increasing" cake and eat our "housing is always affordable" dream too.

Replace housing, with salary and you will see why your argument isn't entirely right.

Should salaries/wages increase over time? yes. Should labor and employees remain affordable to employers? yes. Are both possible? yes.

The right question is who is paying, and what are they paying for.

Plus at the end housing is subject to the same laws of economics. Demand, supply equations, timing, value with regards to location and proximity to city enters, school districts etc.

You can't talk of home prices from one dimension alone.

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Replacing housing with salary, it doesn't seem obvious that the answer is yes, though. Quick Google for wage vs inflation came up with this, which appears to show that real wages actually haven't increased when you account for inflation. Maybe I'm missing something, but your point doesn't feel quite as self-evident as you imply. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us-...

On the entire average, wages haven't increased. But you can't apply that argument to FAANG employees who are buying expensive homes in Bay Area, CA. Where very clearly salaries have as a matter of fact increased by a large percentage.

The same is the case with housing. Its not like the entire USA has the same housing prices as Bay Area, CA. In fact its not even the whole Bay Area, CA itself.

The thing is there is something always available for everybody. But one might not get what they want. Just like how every one wants to be a employee at Netflix and earn $500K but can't.

I think you're basically saying that for housing to stay affordable, entry level housing should lower in quality over time. If you buy an entry level house today for price X, and you expect it to be worth X*k at some future time, and you expect other people to still buy houses for X at that future time, then those houses have to be lower quality.

Or maybe just smaller?

If X is adjusted for inflation then the quality can stay the same as long as the supply/demand curve doesn't shift. As population increases, you need to increase supply to achieve that.

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