Hacker News Reader

Comment by harryh | Hacker News Reader

More and more people are falling out of a middle class existence

Um, no. This is wrong. Living standards around the world are improving like they never have in human history.

Middle class by definition means that people are able to save and build up assets such that by the end of their career they can comfortably retire and pass down some wealth to their children. i.e. they make money from both capital and labor. Just because peoples standards of living are rising, it's happening in a way that is keeping them a part of the working class who is entirely sustained their whole life by making money from labor and never capital.

The three guys that are sleeping rough in a two-block radius around my apartment - they give zero shits that living standards in Kenya, or Shenzhen have improved 300% over the past 20 years.

Or that you can store 64 GB of data on a card the size of a bottle cap.

What they care about is that rent in this city has gone up ~50% in the last six years, their incomes haven't, and they went from having a home, to wrapping themselves in dirty blankets, and sleeping by the garbage bins in the back alley.

Yes, restrictive building codes that prevent construction of sufficient housing in major cities are a real problem (some days I think literally the biggest problem) in the US. We should really fix that.

Do you mean code or zoning? Code is about safety, zoning is about... well, historically many things, some good, many bad.

Er ya, zoning. My bad. Thanks for the correction.

My city is going through an unprecedented amount of construction. 'Restrictive building codes' aren't the problem.

Vacancy rates are higher then they've been since the recession... Yet rents are climbing 5-15% yoy.

What city? Restrictive zoning is definitely a huge problem when it comes to affordable housing in a great many American cities. I guess I can't say it's universal though.

Seattle, and for a city of 730,000 people, it currently has ~13,000 units actively under construction, another 30,000 approved, and another 30,000 applying for permits.

I look out the window, and it's a panorama of construction cranes. There's more active cranes here, then there are in any other American city.

Oh, and my rent went up 17% last year.

Your personal experience does not reflect what is going on for the city as a whole. Seattle rents are dropping significantly and there has been a ton of publicity about it. This article from close to a year ago is representative:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-ar...

Here is a very recent article:

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/amid-build...

If rents are dropping, and the economy is booming, why is the homeless population skyrocketing?

I may not be representative, but the average rent dropping doesn't mean anything to someone renting a bottom 10%-cost unit.

Average rent may very well be dropping - but the average renter is not someone who lives right on the margin of having a home, and sleeping on a park bench.

You're right about the rent on the low end. These things take time. Seattle, like many other cities, under built due to poor zoning policies for years and years. This deficit doesn't get fixed overnight (or in a year).

It'll happen though if current building trends continue.

Restrictive building codes are not the problem at all that causes low earning people to go homeless. The only significant source of new affordable housing in this country is single family homes (which are just over 2x cheaper to construct than any multifamily home larger than 5 units on a square foot basis) and this doesn't include land costs which are the biggest constraint in the construction of new affordable urban housing.

Zoning reform will at best only make it cheaper for high earning single people and small families to find housing in dense cities 30 years after a reform is implemented. Where, the only real solution is figuring out a way that would allow us to build dense urban multifamily buildings at the same cost per square foot as single family homes.

Look at Japan. They have much less restrictive zoning so.....housing is WAY CHEAPER. I'm not sure why you think that fixing a fairly obvious problem won't help anything.

Japan has a declining population, housing is cheaper in places with declining populations. Additionally, housing in Japan is often much lower quality than it is in the US, where they use electric heaters and various other plug in amenities rather than ones that are built as a part of the unit.

Leave Kenya out of this. Contrary to perception of economic boom in Africa, situation is nearly dire. With 80% of population under 40 years, lack of industries and unprecedented unemployment rates;its a situation nobody knows what to make of. Massive population growth is compounding the challenges

But it's GDP/capita quadrupled in this century, and it now has cellphones and smartphones and bitcoins. Surely, things are all flowers and roses, no?

I dunno about flowers and roses, but life expectancy at birth has gone from ~52 to ~67 in the last 50 years.

I think what we are seeing is world wide there is improvement, but our economic system has a non-uniform performance depending on the state of the region. In a relatively undeveloped area, expansion into basically non-serviced markets is efficient and an improvement.

In a relatively developed area (e.g. the US and many first world nations), it is failing. In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running. More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.

Yes, the opiate addiction is a temporary setback, but improvement is almost never monatomic in every population subset. Worldwide life expectancy continues to rise at a pretty good pace.

I don't think you can blame opiate addiction alone. (Sorry I was adding to the text while you were replying).

'eh sure. It's just the most obvious culprit when there are surely many causes. Regardless, I stick by my overall point. It's a temporary setback in an otherwise very strongly positive trend.

I'd bet money that US life expectancy in 2023 is hither than it was in 2018.

> In the US for example, life expectancy has dropped three years running.

Largely due to obesity and related diseases. People are dying from overabundance. The percentage of people at "subsistence" levels is quite low.

> More and more people fall to a median income that doesn't even let them have kids and send them to college, and seems to be falling to where they can't even pay for minor emergencies. That's not improvement.

Is this at all true? Paying for your kids' college simply wasn't something most people did even 30 years ago, because most kids didn't go to college.

> Largely due to obesity and related diseases

No, the decline is due primarily to drug overdoses, and that mainly from the opioid epidemic.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/28/us-life-expectancy-drops-as-...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com