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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I inherited this beautiful oak dining set from the 1800s. It has immense sentimental value and I badly want to use it. But houses I can afford don't come with dining rooms that fit it. And it's not suitable as an everyday kitchen set.

It came out of a 4000sqft home I grew up in built in 1989 for about 300k CAD. That house is worth about 4x now so despite being more financially successful than my parents, I don't come close to affording it.

I'm left with the heartbreaking reality that there's no room for the dining room set in my future.

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Are you really "more financially successful" if you can't afford the same things, though?

Unless you have different priorities, which is fine. Like I could afford some stuff, but "can't" cause that wouldn't let me afford other stuff my parents never had.

I'm guessing they can afford better in general, just not for real estate, because real estate is generally speaking completely fucked.

Is it, though? Nowadays we keep asking for higher standards, better infrastructures, better access to utilities, communications, commute, etc. Me parents could easily afford a house just after getting married... a house I'm weary of setting foot in, not even remotely built to code, with infrastructures cobbled together over the years.

Maybe a 4x price increase is indeed excessive, but building a house like it was possible 50+ years ago, would be just illegal.

That's mixing realities though. Building a house from 30 years ago is pretty much up to code today. It was a modern house in all the ways you'd expect.

You are right if we go older. But we don't have to go far to prove the point.

There are a lot of places in SV that literally haven’t been seriously renovated since they were built in the 40’s and 50’s going for $1.5M+. 0% interest rates along with NIMBYism and high tech salaried have seriously inflated land prices in CA, at least. I think the first two factors have had a more universal effect, and just multiply the locally available salary range to yield the limits of purchasing power, which becomes the market clearing price of the local homes.

I get the feeling they were talking about something comparable to what their parents had at their age, in location, size, etc. In my experience, this isn't new construction--especially if the location is similar. In the desirable areas (I can't speak specifically to Vancouver, but I imagine it is) they're the same houses; now a generation older.

I could barely afford a house built as a hunting bungalow in 1918, expanded multiple times, in the 60s-70s a lot of unpermitted work was done. Trying to get work done was a nightmare because nothing was to code (some reputable contractors refused to do work). Sure, the appliances were fairly new, the pipes and some of the electrical had been updated, but all of those were relatively minor expenses and most of the upgrades were aesthetic.

Your insurance splits out the cost of the land and "improvements" (the structures) because you're only insuring the house because a flood/fire won't destroy the land. In my case, the cost of rebuilding the house dwarfed the cost of the property itself.

Land value, which is a proxy for better infrastructure, has dramatically increased.

The cost of improvements on land has decreased.

Mostly yes, but it does depend on what you like. Hardwood floors, handmade brick (as opposed to the 9 variations that come out the factory), hardwood weatherboards and nice stonework are not in my price range. Labour used to be cheap and it’s the labour that makes a place somewhere I’d like to be.

That's also why a lot of that antique furniture is so nice, which the current stuff is crap.

Sometimes it’s the exact same home from 50 years ago that’s still out of reach.

Except there are a lot of places where housing is quite affordable. You can argue that economic value has tended to centralize and you'd mostly be right. OTOH, I have plenty of colleagues living in all manner of relatively low-cost small cities all over the place. (Not a lot who are truly rural but that has a lot to do with communications infrastructure and easy access to airports.)

Now I’d like a place where houses are affordable, and jobs are plentiful. Have we found a place like that yet?

You might be surprised if you don't require living in a highly walkable downtown core. In many places, such as Eastern Massachusetts, the jobs are pretty distributed around the area; it's only fairly recently that tech jobs have started to be located in the city at all. And you get an hour outside of Boston and there's quite a bit of housing in the $300-$400K range in many towns. That's not Midwest cheap but it's not $1.5M for a teardown either.

Of course, Cambridge and many areas of Boston proper are quite expensive (as are some of the tonier suburbs like Concord).

Silicon Valley is a bit unusual in that you can't really escape from high prices, in spite of being suburban sprawl, because of the geographical constraints.

I would have said the area I live was that a year ago. We saw the most job growth and lowest unemployment in the country, all while my house was likely worth no more than $150,000.

But the most job growth in the country requires that people move there (here) and they require houses when they arrive. With that surprising increase in demand, I expect I could get $250,000 for my house now, which is a staggering increase in a fairly short period of time.

On the other hand, if you're coming from a place where houses are selling for $1,200,000 (the 4 * $300,000 suggested above), then maybe you still see $250,000 as being affordable. We certainly have jobs. Every place of business in the area seems to be hiring.

Correct. Everything else is trivially cheap. Except houses. As I said, the house I grew up in quadrupled in value.

Too bad it’s too cold in Canada to live in a van.

I find myself in the same situation in Canada. Also more financially successful than my parents at this age, but unable to afford a home here in Vancouver.

Either I'm going to be renting for a very long time, or I'll leave this country again. It's kind of sad that Canadians are getting priced out of their own country!

It's not specific to Canada, you'll get the exact same issue abroad: aside from a few exceptions (e.g. Japan) real estate prices in popular locations keeps climbing ever upwards, significantly faster than income does. I'm guessing real estate is cheaper in YT than it is in Vancouver.

True, Vancouver features pretty highly internationally as a desirable city to live in. But there are lots of desirable cities abroad that aren't nearly as crazy expensive. There are no affordable and really desirable cities in Canada - Halifax is perhaps the closest, but that still falls pretty short of the mark (apologies to people from Halifax, but that's my opinion.)

Hah. Just made the Vancouver to Halifax move for exactly the reasons you cite. It’s a great place to be for young families. Affordable, welcoming, walkable, lots of nature close by. No roots here but did the math and took the path that 20 of our friends have taken and left Vancouver. And not even close to looking back.

> There are no affordable and really desirable cities

You can't have one without the other!

You absolutely can if you broaden your world to outside of Canada.

Montreal, Ottawa, Calgary and Edmonton. All pretty nice cities, all are decent sized, fairly affordable and have jobs.

I don't think of Calgary as affordable. And the weather is bloody awful. I spent 13 years there.

It's become much more affordable since the oil recession, although there's less oil related jobs now (but it's good if you're in another industry). As for the weather, it's not terrible, sunny summers and all. But I also like winter, and can drive from my condo to Banff in one hour even.

Montreal.

True, it's not so bad there yet. It's so cold in the winter though - but that's nearly all of Canada.

Montreal Winters are much worse than Toronto's and Vancouver's.

I don’t know how you got your info about Japan, but even smaller homes in Tokyo (according to Japanese standards) can run up to $500,000. If I’d get something similar to what I’d have in the Netherlands we go up to $1.5M.

Japan is bigger than Tokyo! Anywhere outside of Tokyo, even in beautiful livable world-class cities, the prices for Japanese homes are quite reasonable.

For example, this is in a very central and convenient part of Kyoto: https://www.realestate.co.jp/forsale/view/538465

Or this one, for half the price: https://www.realestate.co.jp/forsale/view/438354

Other cities outside of Kyoto are even less expensive.

Indeed. You could easily find places for $50000 or even less if you wanted to.

The problem is any job I’ve ever had is in Tokyo.

Good point. It does depend on the field though.

For software, there's probably not a lot of other options. For mechanical engineering there's a lot of interesting work all over the country.

Should have gone with my second choice of career then :P

Not much work there without fluent Japanese though, so I guess it turned out alright. I’ll just have to deal with houses costing a small fortune.

I've been asking myself, "what Ontario city is currently where Waterloo was 30 years ago?"

I'd move there.

It's an interesting question, one I have been thinking about too. I'm not sure there is a place that combines a strong university town with easy access to (but separation from) Toronto and room for growth in quite the same way. Maybe St Catherines if they make Brock a huge priority? The former industrial sections are much like Kitchener was, just waiting for the right companies to need cheap space.

Ottawa is always going to be a government town first even though it has it's own tech scene, anything in the GTA gets swallowed by Toronto, Barrie and Brantford don't have universities, Windsor is too far from Toronto, but they might be able to piggyback on Detroit's revival if they play their cards right, London is stagnant and has been for decades, Kingston is on the wrong side of Toronto to really take advantage of Pearson, Guelph has already benefitted from Waterloo's explosion and the north is too harsh for many people.

I came to Waterloo for university about 15 years ago and never left. Despite real estate prices really jumping up, the investment in transit and transport through the region might mean south Kitchener and Cambridge are the next Waterloo.

KW is still a place where things make sense - a variety of housing with reasonable income multiples.

Same here. I dropped out of the vancouver tech/law ratrace. Now im working for a government agency on the island. Slightly less pay but greater takehome.

The lovely Vancouver model [0] isn't helping things I'm sure. Toronto isn't as bad but it seems to be getting steadily worse. [0] https://globalnews.ca/news/4149818/vancouver-cautionary-tale...

Even if you have the space, a lot of antique furniture just doesn't fit with modern lifestyles. Even if I had a big formal dining room, as in the house I grew up it, I'd use it once in a blue moon.

The article also notes furniture like rolltop desks. My dad has a beautiful one that mostly serves as a display cabinet in his living room. I'm honestly not sure what I would do with it. I have my own shelving to display things and it would be pretty useless for any actual work I do. (As I kid I really loved sitting at that desk and doing kid-like scribbling at it.)

Furniture of the future >> 1) cabled for power and internet access, 2) holes between seat cushions so that food crumbs fall through, and 3) off the floor by 4 to 6 inches to allow for unimpeded roomba access

I laughed, likely too hard, at this. We’ve got three kids under 6 and our current living room furniture does in fact allow crumbs to fall through and I was praising them just yesterday for that accidental function.

They’re a pretty nice leather love seat and couch we purchased new about 8 years ago. The leather has been a god send for spills and no stains, etc.

Unfortunately our roomba ALWAYS gets stuck on them. If we get one full run a week it’s a minor miracle. So on this very day I finally hit the garage, pulled out the welder and grinder and am giving my couch and loveseat a 1” lift.

Why stop there? Just go for the full Wall-E with hover-recliners for all.

I think you're on to something here...

Large dining tables are cool for tabletop gaming.

Fair enough. If you have enough extra space to have a large formal dining room, you can find something to do with it even if you don't have a lot of big dinner parties. (At one point I wanted to have a billiard room but my (then separated from the kitchen) dining room just wasn't big enough.

A big table is at least fairly multipurpose if you have the space. A lot of other furniture is a lot less so.

Until your wife gets tired of them. Now I have two beautiful well kept GeekChic tables for sale and have a fancy natural wood dining room table with two halves and glass between them. Very pretty but no gaming capability beyond a large mostly flat surface.

If you need to find it a good home, let me know. I have a good place for it in my... oh wait, I'm thinking of the 3000 ft^2 home I grew up in. My 250 ft^2 apartment doesn't have space, or a kitchen, and the rent is 200% what my parents paid on the 1982 mortgage for the 3000 ft^2 :P

I almost want to see it in your apartment for the comedic factor. :)

Here's positive thinking for you... I laugh every time I think about how comically small my apartment is compared to any place I've previously lived, then I sigh. After the sigh, I make myself laugh again because it is quite hilarious. Sigh... Ha!

No kitchen? What?

Unless you count the small fridge w/ a microwave on top :) . It's all good though, because I live across the street from a pizza place.

I hate to ask, but could a creative woodworker cut it down to size? I suppose one could do some business on the side, of buying attractive but huge pieces and figuring out how to repurpose them, since the beautiful old wood doesn't exist any more.

Would you still use it more than once a week if you had a room for it? The trend towards open kitchens has seriously reduced the need for a formal dining room (except when listing a house for sale.)

Interesting that the Canadian economy is also almost 4x bigger than it was in 1989.

It's not. We had a housing bubble that's still working itself out.

Credit has been nearly free for a long time. Cheap money increases buyer leverage, which translates into higher prices. Plus large numbers of immigrants in big cities a big factor. Buying a home is generally #1 focus of new Canadians, They’re a big enough block of market participants to move prices.

Lots of other factors of course. I imagine since R/E market is hyper local, country-wide stats won’t really give an accurate picture postal code to postal code.

Cut it and make it smaller?

It's a set of six chairs and a rounded table that slides apart to fit 14. Part of the sentiment is that my extended family would have Christmas dinner at it every year. Now that I have kids I wanted to continue my generation of that tradition. It's not so much about making the table smaller. It's that the table and the tradition doesn't exactly fit in the kinds of houses in my city these days.

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