$100,000 still a lot of money. You can buy a beer in Vietnam for 20 cents. The problem in the Bay Area, where I live, is we artificially limit the amount of housing. So prices move to infinity.
A friend’s mother sold a 1000 sq ft home in Saigon for $250,000. New apartments are often $100k+.
Considering the average wage is $6,000 in Saigon, the housing is outrageous.
These are likely houses marketed towards "investors", aka rich people who don't need a mortgage or have a network of private lenders who specialize in providing credit for the house-flipping industry.
On my parents relatively modest street houses are now selling for $850k. These were houses that cost $400-500k ten years ago. People simply do not make the incomes necessary to make these prices sustainable. I have one friend, of everyone I grew up with and went to University who's making north of $100k as someone in their mid-late twenties. Everyone else is making substantially less. Whereas in the Bay Area half of my friends are making $100k + (and often substantially more than that).
Most international folks who want to move their money out of the country and into real property. This is particularly true of the Chinese and Vancouver, as the CCP basically owns all banks and can snap their fingers and make you poor. But they can't take land and houses in BC. Similar waves of buys have happened with Russians and a few after the new Saudi royalty started flexing their powers.
But it means a nice house in Vancouver (Kitsalano) goes for $2.4MM CAD while salaries lag behind the US. Even at US rates it would be dicey to buy a house unless you had a lump sum to hedge the risk of losing a job.
Glass is a pretty good insulator and generally weather-proof, UV-resistant etc, and cheap to produce.
It's kind of neat if you're ever in the area.
That's Simi.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-af...
Toronto has more construction (120) cranes than anyone else in North America (Seattle & LA second at 50), and prices are still crazy even with a building boom.
* https://www.on-sitemag.com/heavy-equipment/toronto-remains-u...
* https://canada.constructconnect.com/dcn/news/economic/2019/0...
And that 120 is just in the city proper, the suburbs have more towers as well:
* https://www.livabl.com/2019/07/246-cranes-toronto-suburban-c...
First, to talk about the place I know best, cities in the UK outside London are pretty expensive too. The UK has a disproportionate share of the world's expensive cities, despite being a relatively middle-income country. Demand isn't rising fast, it is just impossible to build (usually due to "environmental" planning regulations). That is an unforced error.
Second, there are examples of large cities that don't have these issues. Berlin is probably one of the most well-known examples, they had a ton of public housing. They started breaking some of these buildings up, and guess what...rents are going up.
Third, it is worth getting some perspective on this. There are cities that have almost no land that have managed much higher growth. Property in Singapore, for example, is expensive by international standards but, given per capita incomes and given the population density, they have actually not done badly (particularly when you look at access instead of average price). That is equally true of China (some cities in China have gone for 0 to millions of people...this makes the growth in most Western cities look flaccid). You could even say that New York has managed this reasonably well too (there has been investment in transport infrastructure at least, which is another cause of rising prices in some cities).
It is hard to generalise about this because policy is often made locally. But I think it is also clear that part of the problem is local policy causing a problem in aggregate. That is systemic and unrelated to demand.
How is that a counter example?
> Second, there are examples of large cities that don't have these issues. Berlin is probably one of the most well-known examples,
> and guess what...rents are going up
It seems you are contradicting yourself, or it is not clear what you wanted to say.
> part of the problem is local policy causing a problem in aggregate
Definitely a problem. But I would say there's not many cities that can escape it. As for NYC, which you mentioned, in the last 10 years the average price nearly doubled [1]. While salaries didn't grow that fast.
High living costs are a self imposed problem: housing regulation and zoning.
Had zero problem saving up a down payment in a couple years. Brand new houses were $150k and older, nice home were $90k.
Of course the job prospects aren’t as good as a major city, but housing isn’t a major issue.
Isn't that around the time all the housing price dropped?
> mid-sized city in Michigan
That might not be in the list of the places where most people desire to live.
> Of course the job prospects aren’t as good as a major city, but housing isn’t a major issue.
I think this is not following my comment. The point is not to talk about where affordable places are, but about how affordable places where a lot of people want to go can be.
Making it possible for everyone to live in their most desirable city isn't realistic.
For many residents, building more housing and letting more people in would irreparably change the “character” of the neighborhood. This can mean more crime, traffic, and pollution.
Past a certain density automotive transportation becomes unfeasable and people will be forced to rely on public or other alternative forms of transportation like walking or riding a bike.
Reducing housing costs would mean changing the way we build cities,shifting to a European or Asian model. Whereas most Californians are very attached to their way of living.
Rising housing prices are already dramatically changing SF. If you want to let residents maintain their way of living, I don't see how thats achieved by pricing poorer residents out of the city entirely. I'm sure most residents would prefer to live in apartments in SF than move to another city entirely.
As for transport, cars are already pretty unfeasable in SF with the population as is. Whats so bad about investing more in public transit and biking?
As for crime and traffic, most larger cities in Europe are much cleaner and safer than SF. More residents means city hall has more money to play with, which it can re-invest into schools, parks, the police, public transit and other things. Cheaper accomodation makes it easier to re-house homeless people and it makes homeless shelters more affordable for the city.
Simple: Americans hate public transit and biking, and want to stick with cars no matter how infeasible it is. They'd rather commute two hours, each way, in gridlocked traffic than get on a train. And they don't mind becoming fat because of this lifestyle.
>As for crime and traffic, most larger cities in Europe are much cleaner and safer than SF.
That's true, but I will point out that because of Europe's use of diesel, most European cities reek of diesel fumes, and this is bad for public health there.
It doesn't matter if you are or not. The majority of people influencing city council and other legislative bodies believe it.
Bay area residents, Seattle residents, etc need to get over themselves and accept reality for what it is. They aren't protecting anything but their own sense of self-worth and the "theory" that bad things will happen if a 3 story apartment complex comes into the neighborhood.
The reality is, most of them want their property values insanely high, for when they are ready to sell and move to cheaper cities.
Increasing density will actually benefit homeowners more than the status quo, because then their land becomes even more valuable. If you tear down a million dollar house and put up a four unit condo complex each costing $500K, then you essentially double the value. Holding onto a house that nobody can afford has less investment value than converting your land to higher density. The fact of the matter is that people are more motivated by preserving a lifestyle than they are by money.
Of course not everyone agrees on what an ideal lifestyle is, and some people strongly desire higher density. Ultimately voters will decide what type of growth is desirable.
Just increasing housing density without solving transportation problems will result in a seriously changed lifestyle here, and that is what many people fear. Moreover, efforts to build better transportation in the bay area have been very ineffective. The light rail in Santa Clara County is a good example of this - it crawls through downtown San Jose, has very little ridership, and recovers only a small fraction of operating costs from fares. The jobs have almost always showed up in areas where there is an existing shortage of transit and housing - e.g., Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto. At this point the only feasible solution is to turn 101 and 85 into bus-only roads. No more single occupancy vehicles. Then let the market sort out how to provide transit for employers. That would be massively disruptive to existing lifestyles, but probably the only feasible way to increase transportation throughput in the face of increased housing density.
Most of the readership on hacker news is in the tech industry, but I think the biggest problem with housing in the bay area is for non-tech workers.
Income is extremely relative. Age, health, dependents, quality of life, location, expectations, etc etc. I had a fantastic quality of life on 10k/year many moons ago, for instance. But everything is always changing. I learned recently that the atoms that make up our bodies change in large quantities from moment to moment :-o
The “happiest man on earth” according to fmri studies led by the Dalai Lama at the Mind And Life Institute lives on $50/mo and donated all his money from book sales to helping the poor. Source: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SEUSXW/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
The article doesn't talk about people not being able to afford housing, it talks about them renting in desirable areas rather than buying elsewhere. If anything, it's about a rent/buy price spread resulting from housing inventory being taken up by investors who prefer to own and rent out rather than sell, driving up purchase prices to a greater multiple of rent prices than would otherwise be the case. Which, if viewed as problematic, is not a problem that building more housing solves. You'd have to also make it less attractive to be a landlord.
More apartments, condos, and houses lead to more rental units, which lowers rents, which makes it less attractive to be a landlord.