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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> you can rent an apartment with three other people in the bay and pay like 1-1.5k in rent

Working a 60 hour/week professional job to live like a 1890s garment factory worker sounds... unappealing.

I lived with roommates until 30. It was fun, it was cheap, and I was able to save a ton in a very short time which allowed me to have a sizable down payment on a house.

Nothing like a garment factory worker.

In your 20s? Who cares. Living with others can be fun. And those 1.5k in rent places are quite nice, they're just not spacious.

Almost nobody who can afford it chooses to live with roommates after college. People do it because they're financially distressed (relative to their locality). They can't both live alone and save money comfortably. Professionals do it in cities like San Francisco and New York because early-career professionals in those cities are financially distressed relative to property owners in those cities.

I feel like this is one of those "filter bubble" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filter_bubble) scenarios.

There are many young software engineers working at Google/Facebook who would be able to save significantly more than the median US household income per year while renting their own place but still choose to live with roommates.

Only 16% of adults nationwide live with a roommate or other non-relative, and that number is declining since 1995: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/01/31/more-adults-....

You stated: “People do it because they're financially distressed (relative to their locality). They can't both live alone and save money comfortably.”

This is false for software engineers in the Bay Area. Can they save more by living with roommates? Sure.

But they wouldn’t be “financially distressed” or “unable to save money comfortably” if they didn’t - that is easily verified by looking up new grad salaries and rents in the Bay Area.

It’s simply a rational decision - these are people who were living with roommates in college and by continuing that arrangement can save more, live in a better location w/ more amenities, and quite often share a place with friends - win/win/win.

> It’s simply a rational decision - these are people who were living with roommates in college and by continuing that arrangement can save more, live in a better location w/ more amenities, and quite often share a place with friends - win/win/win.

That's true everywhere. Yet the overwhelming majority choose not to have roommates.

There's selection bias in your analysis. People who are attracted to big cities are more likely to enjoy the company of living with other people, and vice versa.

yeah i don't agree with this. i live alone and spend about the same or a bit more as my friends who live with roommates. they have nicer apartments generally but it's a choice thing in our city (NYC). this is people in early-mid 20s working at faang/banking/consulting.

just a reminder:

https://newrepublic.com/article/113176/science-loneliness-ho...

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