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> The best thing for the economy

The best thing for _the people_ is to structure the economy around them, not the opposite.

I stated nothing about urban vs. rural living, more the ownership structure. Renting as an issue, not urban as an issue. Though it may well be, yes.

Didn't rural living become relatively less attractive more than it became unaffordable?

Like, people weren't driven off by land prices, they just went to work in cities because the income was much more attractive.

Sure. We may talk like it is a binary issue, affordable or unaffordable, for simplicity, but reality is a spectrum. There are people who can easily afford to live somewhere, there are also people who can afford to live there but are on the cusp of it being unaffordable, and there are those who truly cannot afford it. Colloquially we may refer to those who are only the cusp of unaffordable as being among those who are actually in an unaffordable situation.

Nevertheless, no matter how you want to categorize things, it remains that some simply could not afford to live in rural areas. Along with the urbanization movement came the growth of farms. If you have a parcel of land that an actual farmer wants to grow his farming business with, how are you going to compete if all you have a lowly job in town with no particular need for that land beyond wanting to live there? He wants and needs it a lot more than you do.

It's not a whole lot different today. A single plot of farmland will sell for well over a million dollars these days. Unless you have significant wealth behind your name, how would you ever begin to afford that, unless you actually have plans to farm it and can roll the cost as a cost of doing business? To simply buy the property to live on? Not going to happen.

The term "unaffordable" I think is too general here. The parent post seemingly defines it based on mortgages and income multipliers.

It assumes this model of people having to trade labour for their housing, in money, incrementally per week/month/whatever, rather than having absolute (ish) dominion over a bit of land and then trading their labour for objects to put on that land (e.g. maintenance of the property).

In that sense, if a home in a rural area costs $5000, it might "unaffordable" if there are no jobs nearby and we assume the person starts with zero capital.

I would expect the model for most _actually_ rural living (aside from people buying holiday homes or whatever) would be that the property is owned outright. Affordability concerns then come from things like being able to run a car, health insurance, etc.

>I disagree. The entire urbanization movement took place because housing became less and less affordable in rural areas, where the vast majority of the population was living. That push into urban areas, and everything that went along with executing that growth, brought us the best economic times we've ever seen.

For people living homeless in horrid conditions it's not "the best times", it's worse than their ancestors making their living in rural areas...

>The best thing for the economy is to have them leave to where they are now needed in 2019.

The best thing for the economy is to see people advocating the above go broke and homeless themselves. That would give some perspective to advocate better policies...

Hang on, the problem Goodman has is not that she's not needed where she is: she has a job. Her problem is that there are literally no houses there that she can afford to rent or buy.

The free market 'economy' answer to this is that if she can't afford to rent a house or flat, she's not needed.

Absurd? Of course. If that were true, then there would be no supermarkets or corner shops or petrol stations or chicken shops or.... etc, in the entirety of London, a city of 10 million.

Because no-one wants them right, there's no demand, the workers aren't needed. Hang on...

1. Why is that absurd? A company that can only find customers for a widget at $1, that costs $2 to make, continuing to produce that widget because it is 'needed' is the only absurd idea I see here. Clearly the widget isn't needed, even if people are willing to buy it at below cost of production. Doing a job that costs more to do than what is paid back in compensation is no different than our hypothetical widget.

2. Most people in low-wage jobs are subsidized by someone else with a higher income (spouse, parent, etc.). They don't need high wages in order to afford to live. Thanks to that subsidization, they can afford to work for much less than someone who would have to live unsubsidized, while still maintaining a comfortable lifestyle. Those who are not fortunate enough to be subsidized have to compete against them. The mere fact that there is competition means that someone is going to lose, which means someone isn't needed.

3. Price is, as always, a function of supply and demand. If more people were needed for the jobs you mention than is currently being supplied, price would fundamentally rise, shrinking the affordability gap that exists for those who are unsubsidized in low-wage jobs. The jobs are low-wage quite simply because there are more people willing and able to do the job than there are jobs. Which, again, means that people aren't needed.

Finally, this is not an all or nothing situation. Not needing some people does not equate to not needing all people. The role of the economy, and price by extension, is to find that balance.

I'm not sure I understand the distinction you are trying to make? Having a job is not the same as being needed in an economy.

As we know from economics, demand decreases when price increases. Conversely, demand increases when price decreases. Goodman is able to find a job at below the cost of production, so to speak, but if the price were to rise to a sustainable level, nobody would be willing to hire anymore. After all, if people were willing to hire at a higher price, the higher price would already be paid out.

Any business can find customers producing widgets for free. Guaranteed. The hard part is finding customers willing to pay the cost of production + tidy profit in order to show that the market is actually in need of said widget. All Goodman is proving is the former; not brining in enough money to cover the actual cost of providing the job.

> Having a job is not the same as being needed in an economy.

Well, you have to define your context. In Communist Russia there were a lot of un-economical jobs, eh?

To me it seems clear that there is demand for housing that the economic & political system in which Goodman finds herself is failing to supply.

You seem to be saying that there is a dearth of jobs that pay enough money to cover the actual cost of providing the jobs. In that context, I'm saying, let's reduce that overhead. Rather than paying more we could reduce the actual cost of providing the job by building more houses.

That's the whole point of the OP: we stopped building houses that people could afford and now there are people who can't afford housing.

To me the question is why? Why don't we build more housing? Many folks point to "NIMBYism" but I suspect (IANAEconomist) that the real problem is just the tension between cities-as-living-places vs. cities-as-investment-vehicles.

BTW...

> As we know from economics, demand decreases when price increases.

That's merely dogma. It's a common mistake to set prices too low. When I worked for an online marketplace we saw this all the time: people could raise prices and sell more volume. The same piece of jewelry that gathered dust at $15 would sell right away at $45.

>However, we can agree that, generally speaking, people don't like to move.

I don't think that's the problem.

I think most people who are capable of packing up and moving for better job opportunities will take the chance. The problem is people who are struggling to pay rent can't afford to move. They especially can't afford to move across a state, or worse, to different states. This problem is compacted by the fact that most of these desperate people, like the woman in the article, are making money below a living wage and would likely be moving to a job that pays the same or less.

What struggling people like to do has zero meaning here. The problem is what they can do. They're not Berkeley grads who get to make a half dozen phone app startups, get millions in investments, blow it all on downtown SF office space and beer fountains and write a top blog post on HN about their journey and learning from their failures. They're people working day and night to live in a run down shack that has electrified water and costs a thousand fuckin bucks a month.

Something is very wrong with rent in America. Prices aren't correlated to value or demand anymore. People say rent control measures are bad because they discourage further development, but we already have a problem where those who can refuse to build new homes. Those who already own homes and rent them out prefer to leave them empty and to rot than to accept the fact that their shithole isn't worth what they think it is and rent should drop. They know that eventually someone desperate enough will be swindled and forced to pay their absurd prices, only to be kicked out onto the streets because they can't afford the ridiculous price and maybe some other desperate sucker will take their place eventually.

Sure, maybe people could move to far rural communities where rent is cheaper. While their rent may be cheaper, they may also have zero income due to lack of employment. Farms are being consolidated into megaoperations and the number of necessary staff drops. Getting into a city to work is unreasonable since commutes can take hours, and that's not to mention having to do shopping/cooking/whatever with whatever time isn't left.

I feel like we're reaching a point where we need to offer two options: landlords can offer their properties are a price that average people in that region can afford, or the government can seize unused properties in order to solve the homeless crisis. People will say that nobody will want to build new apartments in a world where that's true, but that's already our problem. Laws are made to punish the homeless in America and it's clearly not working. Punish those who cause homelessness and something is going to change.

The issue is that, loosely stated, most people who don't own are spending 30, 40, 50% of their income on rent essentially anywhere.

It's not sustainable in any sense of the word. Their entire life is literally treading water. I've posted about this before - on an individual level if you can't save money you need to rethink your entire life, yesterday.

Of course, if you've already lost, you already have zero capital, well then you're in a very sticky situation indeed.

Any "solution" that involves a huge percentage of the population being actually skint and forced into making a series of incredibly short-term financial decisions is a band aid.

This is what an economy designed for the wealthy looks like. The bottom end of malleable labour pool participants is a 'feature', not a bug.