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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

That's new, though. It used to be that kids got out of high school and moved into their own houses right away. Only about half of the people from my high school class went to college. The other half went out and got jobs as oil field welders or whatever and had bought houses by the age of 20.

I think it's a real problem for our future that there are now lots of adults who have never lived to see a functioning housing market with plentiful supply. Everyone under 30 thinks its normal that you have to save your salary for 25 years to afford a down payment on a home. It isn't.

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That functioning housing market might have been an anomaly, only lasting a generation or two. Through history it may have been much more common for most people to never be able to afford to own a home.

Anyway, growth is unsustainable: if housing keeps being a good investment for long enough, sooner or later it becomes unaffordable.

I agree it's a real problem, and we may have to get creative looking for solutions.

A possible direction would be smaller apartments in tall buildings. Quicker to build than a house and more affordable. You don’t have a lot of space in them, but when it’s located in a big city, you can spend the time outside enjoying hobbies and entertainments (the pandemic won’t last forever anyways).

The cost of housing is only closely coupled to the cost of land to the extent you haven’t the technology to fit more units on the same lot. The value of land should continue increasing indefinitely as it’s a function of local amenity. Who benefits from the value of land is a deep question.

Or the political capital to get the zoning change approved to build more lots.

> The value of land should continue increasing indefinitely as it’s a function of local amenity.

Decrease in buying population and/or decrease in incomes of the buying population would result in lower prices.

High local incomes are an amenity included in the price of land.

Throughout history, hardly anyone owned the kind of home we got used to in the suburbs. Even when the world population was under 1 billion, most people were itinerant and got housing for being hired help, or were some kind of serfs with a tiny plot.

Communal housing was the norm in much of the world, including USSR, and it’s only recently that China built housing for everyone to move into the cities.

Doesn't change the fact that not being able to buy housing when young (whether detached homes or apartments) in the west is not a function of these countries becoming poorer but of low interest rates & municipal politics driving up housing prices.

What about the population?

At the end of the day, prices rise due to demand (and gentrification, or even more extreme, billionaires parking their $ in US real estate and not even living there).

There is lots of cheap housing in the USA, but no one wants to live there. Someone should start a tech hub in Detroit’s abandoned housing regions, it’s a bargain.

Someone already did.

> Daniel Gilbert (born January 17, 1962) is an American billionaire businessman, investor, and philanthropist. He is the cofounder of Quicken Loans and founder of Rock Ventures.[3]

Downtown, but to a larger extend Midtown and Corktown changed a lot. People want to live there again.

The growth decision isn't made by the younger people, it is made by their parents, who need to make sure that shelter exists for the next generation.

I wouldn't have wanted to buy a house at 20 - the thought of getting tied down with property at such a young age seems rather alarming.

Now at 35 I can't imagine it more readily, even if not quite yet. But even at 30 I chose to go abroad and spend four years in a different country, and wouldn't want to miss that experience.

Ability to buy house at 20 as a norm is the historical/cultural outlier. And even at that period it was not something every socioeconomic group would be able to get nor something possible everywhere.

You mean it was progress?

Probably due to lots of government funding, but Reaganomics has finally righted things back to feudalism.

Success!

Used go be and bow there ain’t enough of housing where 2/3rds of it is u occupied because some think it’s not normal to live with your parents...

Of course we can build more houses, but at what cost to environment...

It probably helped that people settled down with partners at a younger age back then. How many of those 18 year olds were buying houses on their own?

You think it was easier because they were also supporting their knocked-up high school girlfriends? Doesn't seem likely.

That died with the middle class

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