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Comment by nilkn | Hacker News Reader

Affordable housing is out there -- quite a lot of it too. My parents paid $140k for their house a few years ago in flyover country. $300k would be going overboard. My mom's a nurse and my dad is basically an account executive for a food distributor in the area -- both thoroughly normal middle class jobs. My guess, though, is many folks here wouldn't be willing to do either of those jobs or they wouldn't be willing to live in middle America. If you want an interesting, trendy job in a hot urban center where you're constantly surrounded by the best restaurants, parks, bars, museums, and more, naturally you're going to need to either make a lot of money or make sacrifices in your life.

> No amount of stop-the-rat-race mentality gets me a house for $300,000.

Note that the median price of a home in the US is somewhere in the $250k - $300k range.

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Back in the 50s the beats hung out in North Beach because it was cheap. In the 60s and 70s the hippies all had old victorians out in the Haight Ashbury because it was cheap. San Francisco wasn't some obscure fly-over country place, it was a cool place to be.

Where is cool + cheap now?

Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans

New Orleans

Montreal

Kansas City

Pittsburgh

I bet you can pick out almost any medium-sized city and find some "cool" neighborhoods that are pretty affordable.

Are those kind of people busy hanging out on youtube now?

Are there enough creatives in meat-space to attain the critical mass necessary to generate those places like in the past? Or are many of them staring at their phones all day?

We aren't ready collectively to confront these types of truths about the new way of life we have slowly settled into over the last 10-20 years.

Yeah, but you're comparing a house in the city to a house in flyover country. If you want to make a good comparison, i'd say --

What was the median price of a home in the US in 1980 vs 2020. Then, what was the median salary in the US in 1980 vs 2020. Thats the real comparison.

No reason to note that houses are still cheap in some far off country, thats not really a convincing argument.

> What was the median price of a home in the US in 1980 vs 2020. Then, what was the median salary in the US in 1980 vs 2020. Thats the real comparison.

Per the St. Louis Fed [1], the median American home price in 1980 was ~65k. The median American home price in 2019 was ~320k. That's an approximately 4.9x increase. Also from the St. Louis Fed, the 1980 median American family income was ~21k, and the 2019 median American family income was ~86k. That's an approximately 4.1x increase. So it looks like median house price has increased about 20% more than median salary.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEFAINUSA646N

Yes and the interest rates in 1980 were such that the mortgage P&I payments on a 1980 mortgage were $1106 per $100K borrowed vs $422 per $100K @ 3% today.

65K borrowed in 1980 cost $719/mo. 320K borrowed today costs $1349/mo (both are principal and interest only).

$719 in 1980 is $2258 in 2020.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US - I picked 13% as an approximate (somewhat low even) average rate for 1980.

[1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Yeah the "whats my monthly" being about the same doesn't quite capture what's happening though.

Compare what happens when you get a raise or a small windfall and try to pay your mortgage off early.

I'd pick "small amount, high interest" over "massive amount, low rates" if that were an option.

That option requires governments to not be printing massive amounts of money, though.

I am planning to refinance again (back to a 30-year mortgage) and won't be in any hurry whatsoever to pay it off early. Borrowing money at 3% nominal with the (hopeful) prospects of economic growth allowing inflation to return means that I expect/hope to be borrowing that money at negative real rates in the back half of that loan.

Something else to consider: how does the median house today compare to the median house then? Is it bigger and better? Same? Worse? Perhaps expectations have changed in 40 years.

The question is :will the accounting job still be there in five years? Or will the office or job) move to the city?

Thats what's happening the last five years.

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