Housing is affordable in large swaths of the country. It’s only a relatively few cities where it isn’t.
On the Media's "Scarlet E" series is an excellent exploration of this:
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/scarlet-e-unmasking...
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=1419fe7...
Even from ESRI's map it's clear that affordability drops near cities: Chicago and its collar counties, Salt Lake-Provo in Utah, Madison and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, latter mentioned in the OTM piece. Even cities such as Omaha are visible, and regions such as Appalachian North Carolina.
If you just took a bunch of Wall Street bankers, a bunch of CA VCs and then mapped their cell phone location data over the next several days (July 4 weekend) you'd get basically the same map.
2.8% eviction rate is not a “crisis”. What percentage would be acceptable?
[L]andlords, they had a lot of ways to evict a family. I spent a time with a landlord that would pay you to move and help you move. That's a pretty good eviction, you know, if you've got to get evicted. I met a landlord that would just take your door off. Just imagine you don't have a front door you're living in, you know, anywhere in the country. We need front doors on our homes. That got me thinking, 'gosh, OK there's all these evictions that are processed through civil court, housing court or eviction court but there are all these evictions that no one sees.' They occur in the shadow of the law, informal evictions we call them. So I did a study in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and it's a big issue. For every formal eviction that goes to the court, at least in Milwaukee, there are two informal evictions that are executed....
...the Federal Reserve found that 44 percent of us couldn't cover a sudden 400 dollar expense without borrowing or selling something. And so if you don't have family or friends you can tap, anything unexpected–health issues, accidents, car trouble, reduced work hours–can trigger calamity cascades....
...HUD classifies families that spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent as 'rent burdened.' According to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies, that applies to nearly half of all U.S. renters...
Further down, Gladstone and Desmond discuss the data issue (and problems in collecting it), official vs unofficial evictions, and the disparity between ever-rising rents and flat court proceedings. It doesn't add up.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/scarlet-e-part-one-why (click "transcript")
True, people may earn less in smaller areas but the cost of living is much lower.
Finally, those smaller areas with very low CoL usually don't have many jobs or opportunities. There's a reason people are flocking to cities, and have been for well over a century.
I live in metro Atlanta - not exactly a small town with a lack of opportunity. You can buy a 2800 square foot house for less than $200K not to far out from the city center. But there are a lot of people who go years without ever going into the actual city of Atlanta and live and work in the burbs.
My wife and I just bought a house two years ago in the northern burbs - a brand new build, 3100 square feet, 5-3-1/2 with a large office and all of the trimmings for less than $350K - 5% down because that’s what the builder asked for.
A similar house the large west coast tech hubs would go for well over a $1.25 million.
As far as jobs, I’ve lived here for two decades and have never had a problem finding a software development job.
Despite what people on HN seem to think, the rest of the country is not some vast wasteland where people live in poverty.
I'm perfectly happy to let them keep thinking that.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/05/the-urban-housing-cru...
There is plenty of land in the US. If prices are too high to afford to live there, residents will start moving and businesses move with them or vice versa. More businesses will start expanding to lower cost of living areas.
And they continue to build a disproportionate amount of square footage that is not housing, worsening the housing shortage in the area.
- more people who live in rural areas are homeowners
- fewer live in poverty
So it seems like “city living” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
The biggest issue for us when we were looking to buy a house in the area we wanted were you only had a few choices.
Buy an older cheaper smaller house from the relatively few people who were living in the city before the county started growing. But then you have an old house in an area where there is a rapid expansion of new homes. No one is going to buy a house that would be 40 years old if we did decide to sell in 10 years when they could buy a much newer home. [1]
Buy a smaller condo closer to shops and businesses. But those were more expensive with less space, with the risk of random assessments based on repairs that might come up and we would still lack the benefits of individual housing. Not to mention the higher HOA dues.
From the builders perspective, it doesn’t make sense to build, smaller slightly more affordable homes once you take all of the fixed costs into account. Our house was I believe the smallest floor plan available and we still had 3100 square feet - not bragging it was less than $350. Any halfway competent developer in Atlanta could afford it. This is a well known issue for why new affordable homes aren’t being built.
[1] Also in our case, we weren’t comfortable living in the older parts of the county. We live in a part of Atlanta that made national news as being a “sundown town” as recently as 35 years ago (it was on Oprah in the 80s). But with the influx of a younger demographic the character has changed a lot.
Couldn't that be because the poor tend to end up in urban areas where they have more access to social services?
https://danieljmitchell.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/a-picture-o...
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-30/when-work-punished...
It's a better deal to earn $29,000 than $69,000 due to the loss of benefits. That means people don't strive for better. They avoid promotions.
Some cities like SF have it bad but much of the country has a housing problem.