Hacker News Reader

Comment by s3nnyy | Hacker News Reader

"Significantly, planning cases were based on speculative logic – not actual demand"

The same happened now in some parts of Switzerland with residential buildings. In some areas, rents are dropping because there are too many buildings and too few tenants.

View on HN

That sounds fantastic tbh. I never understood why there's any reason housing should be 30%+ of average takehome, and not, say, 5%.

(It's because we make shortages and that's what people will bear, of course, but why make shortages?)

Because it makes rich people a lot of easy additional money.

You can find housing that’s 5% of an average SEs salary. Spoiler alert, you’re not going to like where you have to live.

More importantly your employer won’t like it.

Yes, but I meant an average person's salary.

I did this, in a sense, though I paid cash (mortgage would've been ~5% of takehome though). But I work remote which helps.

If you're okay with living in a shared accomodation and have to skills to do remote work it's doable.

It's mostly environmental and zoning regulations. Lots of California cities like punishing their citizens with environmental or historical regulations with cities like SF being the poster child of the latter and LA as well as San Diego having a lot of the former. Somewhere along the way it got decided that memories of the past and swamps matter more than making it as east as possible to provide infrastructure so now infrastructure is lagged.

Because everyone wants to live down town in big cities. Not enough space.

I don't. I like nature.

That presumes we can't build new downtowns though. We can't, but it's self imposed.

This sounds like a pretty good short to medium term situation for wage earners, so long as it doesn't lead to long term disinvestment.

Do you have a source for this? For the most part, rents and real estate prices have been increasing.

eg https://www.luzernerzeitung.ch/wirtschaft/mieten-koennten-we...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com