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Comment by eikenberry | Hacker News Reader

People need to remember some of these jobs are tied to specific parts of the economy and can have downturns like anything else. I have a couple friends who are electricians and when the housing/construction market went pear shaped a decade back they both had a rough time of it. Turns out lots of electricians work in relation to construction and when there is no new construction there is a lot less work.

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This happened to my uncle, who was a plumber. Most of his work was in new construction and when new construction basically stopped for a few years there wasn't nearly enough work to go around for all the plumbers in the area.

He went back to college and became a math teacher, which he enjoys.

The US has an enormous housing shortage, as seen in the rising housing costs everywhere.

Long term, this will have to be addressed with tons of construction, so it should be a good trade to go into for a young person.

> Long term, this will have to be addressed with tons of construction

If your fresh new trade school grad is 20 years old, you're betting on there being 40+ years of continuous expansion. A welder can't switch to an electrician the same way a C++ programmer can switch to Rust.

I read somewhere there are 14 empty houses for every homeless person?

That might be one of those "true but meaningless" facts.

1. The housing shortage doesn't mainly manifest as homelessness, but as housed people crowding into existing places and rural people not being able to afford to move to higher paying jobs in cities. So the number of homeless is relatively small.

2. The empty houses are in depopulated rural places where there is no reason to live.

A number I see thrown around is that California is "missing" 3 million homes right now, and people keep moving in.

Couldn't SV solve most of the homelessness virtually overnight by financing a hundred or so large homeless shelters or urban camping grounds? If every company pitched in and had it run by competent private firms I imagine they could make a huge difference, more than any taxes would do.

Shelters don't 'solve' homelessness; homes and jobs and ongoing support do.

Sure, except those things, like almost all housing construction, are illegal.

Long term (10+ years) it'll be addressed by the baby boomers dying off. The generation just entering college now is tiny - there's going to be a housing glut somewhere between 5-10 years from now.

This housing shortage could easily have been predicted by demographics - starting in 2003, Millenials started leaving their parents homes and forming households of their own, and starting around 2012 they entered peak house-buying years. The baby boomers are not dying off yet, and the generation that is dying off (the Silent Generation) is small. Thus, not many homes are entering the market for the number of new households being formed.

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