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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Move to another city. Leave your small-town life. Chase your dream. Live alone. Pay more per capita to landlords. Pay more per capita for basic services, for staple foods. Pay businesses to do the household chores that you can't handle alone when you're also working a full-time job, and don't have a family to spread them out among.

Buy more stuff to fill that emotional hole. Consume.

Live in an apartment. Never see your neighbors. Wonder why you can't make friends.

Fly home once or twice a year to watch your parents slowly die of loneliness in the small town you left. And to watch them slowly become strangers to you; what do you have in common? Their only friends now are the talking heads on Fox News and you're a big-city liberal.

Eventually, fly home to bury one of them. Probably the other one in anywhere from a few months to a year.

It's the American dream.

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Don't move. Stay in your small town. Narrow the scope of your dreams, dial down your ambition to something more reasonable. Jettison idealistic principles, come to terms with self-imposed limits on your potential using elaborate rationalizations. Opt-out of the status game by creating a new I-don't-need-status game. Struggle to find opportunity in a stagnant or declining economy. Struggle to find a compatible partner in a significantly smaller dating pool. Earn less. Pay less for lower quality food from chain restaurants. Pay less for housing with limited access to natural or cultural wonders of any kind. Explore and experience less. Settle. Compromise.

Make some friends. Go to your friends' funerals when they die from opioid overdoses. Make some new friends. Go to the local bar with them, listen to the same songs. Every weekend.

Your parents die anyway.

It's the American dream.

(I don't think either of these depictions are helpful or accurate).

Leave the small town attitudes and pervasive small town social control. Live in close contact with people of many backgrounds and experiences. Learn to be your own person. Earn substantially more in the city, so pay a smaller percent of your wages for basic services and staple foods. Have access to a set of services which are unsupportable in sparse populations. Have your parents become assholes as they are propagandized into xenophobia by a giant foreign corporation.

> Pay more per capita to landlords.

If you run the numbers, no one should want to be a landlord. Atrocious ROI. Homes are horrific investments if you live in them and still terrible even if you rent them out. I would encourage anyone who thinks otherwise to model this out for any major city/region to convince themselves.

Renting is a great deal. You pay less, get better ROI on what would have been the downpayment by investing it elsewhere, and there's someone contractually obligated to deal with most things that can go wrong. And if you're in California, chances are you benefit from a lot of regulations that protect tenants as well.

If you live as a renter in California, you are almost certainly not getting "a great deal", and the regulations that benefit you are probably only in the form of being protected from meaningless eviction and substandard living conditions. If you're an owner of property in California, OTOH, you're likely taking advantage of a tax rate that was calculated on your property's value 39 years ago.

I would strongly encourage you to look closely at the numbers. There are so many involved that nothing short of an actual model of all involved factors is enough to demonstrate the true return profile.

I might post mine here for reference when I get home later. It unequivocally demonstrates that it is far better to be a California renter than a California homeowner (at least for LA/SF). And yes I accounted for a locked in property tax rate. It’s still not even a close contest.

I will note however that the Case-Schiller index is at historical highs atm and this is a substantial driving factor in the current calculation around homeownership. That may change with a correction in the real estate market.

This is exactly what I struggle with every day as I work in the city at 27. It's just a bunch of experiences usually without true depth because of the devaluation of one to one connections in the big hustle and bustle.

Then my parents get older and older and I think is this it, will I just work here until they pass away and also my good friends in other cities or towns aren't as good friends anymore because I can't feasibly visit them all every few months.

So I end up with like 300k, mid 30's, and not many close connections.

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