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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

This is a great write-up, and as someone who spent time being poor-ish, it really resonated.

What I realized from my own life experience: the US sawed the bottom rungs off the ladder in the 1950s when it suburbanized. There is no affordable housing or transportation in 95% of the North American land area, and virtually every societal problem we deal with either stems from this or is made worse by it. Then the healthcare disaster is the cherry on top.

The US is a great place to live and work with tremendous upward mobility —— but only if you can stay above the event horizon which is reliable car ownership and insurance coverage (health, home/renters, auto). If you fall under that, you will need help or a lot of good luck to get back out.

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I noticed this after spending time in developing countries. They are set up much better for being poor. Trivial example: you can go into a pharmacy and buy two aspirin. Some people can't afford 100 at a time, and don't need that many anyway.

Or rent: you can get a place to live for only $60/month. There's no running water, but it's clean and dry and it has a lock on the door. The cheapest place you can find in the US is a lot nicer, but also much more expensive.

Buses have no route maps, no shelters and no doors. They might not come to a complete stop when they pick you up. But you can ride for 25¢.

The US has a kind of minimum standard of living, but it comes with a minimum cost of living. If you can't afford that, you end up with nothing.

This is what's ridiculous about much of the zoning and building codes here. People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.

The liberal approach is to subsidize to maintain that base level, because of an awareness that the social outcomes tend to pay dividends in higher social unity, better health, etc.

Some people would rather pay for private security than for policy that makes muggings less likely, I suppose.

Is this what California, San Francisco, or New York do?

<State>, <City within the same state> <city within the same state with the same name as the state || state with the same name as the city within the same state>

.... yesn't???

They are all liberal governments with large GDPs or gdp per capitas who could implement any of these welfare programs if they chose to.

Not really, yet.

Pay for security rather than progressive social welfare policy?

I take it you've never heard of the NYPD or LAPD? "But they're not private security." Boy, I guess you got me there.

All sorts of things are like this.

The older I get the more I realize that you can't regulate the things wealthy societies do into existence. If everyone can't afford building code things collapse when you mandate that. If the economy is underpinned by bad working conditions or child labor things collapse when you regulate them. If people can't afford to eat at restaurants that follow some new code then they simply won't and those restaurants will fold. If you restrict the supply of some trade through licensing in the name of quality then you just get amateurs doing the lower dollar work for cash. A society has to be able to afford to do the things it mandates. People have to get wealthy enough to reliably afford "right" before you can legislate away "wrong".

> People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.

People don't want poor people to live near them. That is the root of most of the zoning issues, it's not because they are actually worried about the quality of the housing stock that the people would live in.

I've seen some research on "relative income happiness" that suggest having poor(er) people nearby should increase happiness. Perhaps it doesn't apply if the income cap is to large...

Or perhaps people aren't actually rational utility maximizing machines and might not properly anticipate the utility benefits from the change.

Science is descriptive, not prescriptive. So no psych/social science research would ever claim that people are rational utility maximizing machines since they're descriptive by their very nature. And if people were rational utility maximizing machines such an effect would not be observed since happiness affected by social comparison is irrational. I don't understand how you came up with such a straw man.

I'm guessing sorisos is spot on with their last sentence. There's a big difference between being a millionaire surrounded by middle classers and being a lower classer surrounded by extreme poverty. Often times with happiness research there are caveats and ranges to keep in mind but the nuances tend to get lost in the headlines.

The reason is a fear of decreasing property values, not any inherent property of the people nearby.

> People don't want poor people living in sub-optimal housing, so instead they force them to sleep outside or live with abusive people.

No, mostly people don't want poor people or sub-optimal housing in their neighborhoods, for a variety of financial, perceived safety, and emotional comfort related reasons.

If it was just not wanting poor people to live in suboptimal housing, there'd be a lot greater effort to provide non-sub-optimal housing to poor people. There are definitely people with this concern, but it's not the driver of housing and zoning policy.

Technical fix: aircrete dome homes. E.g.: https://www.domegaia.com/

Beautiful, cheap, easy, fast, durable (fire- and earthquake-proof, "It will not rot, rust or decompose in water.", etc.) and regular folk can make them with "backyard-scale" foamers and construction technique.

Yeah they said concrete would end homelessness. It's not a technical problem, it's a people problem. Places that allow and encourage lots of dense, walk-able construction (like where I live) have low rent, places that don't do this have high rent no matter how cheap construction materials are.

Not a great example. In the US, you can buy small quantities of drugs (or soap or whatever) in the travel section of a CVS, or in a dollar store. Usually this is held up as an example of the difficulty of being poor though (not a boon to the poor), since the unit price is, of course, higher.

The case I'm thinking of is informal. The pharmacist keeps a blister pack of pills behind the counter and will tear off as many as you want and sell them individually. The unit price is probably higher, but not exorbitant. It's probably against the rules, but the pharmacist deals with poor people all the time, and he isn't trying to gouge them.

And I think it's the perfect example. What good is a better unit price if you can't afford to buy in bulk anyway? If you're poor and you have a headache it's better to pay 25¢ for two aspirin than $10 for 100. Part of being poor is steeply discounting the future. The other 98 aspirin might take care of headaches for the next two years, but a lot can go wrong in in that time, and that $9.75 is money you need today.

A lot of cities in developing countries are built around cities/villages of the past. Today, they are redeveloping those, so they have infrastructural problems of the kind where they struggle to rip something out and redesign (unless you are China).

America got a clean slate in 1700s. And completely fucked it up over the years with massive suburbanization. America could have been Europe++ or Japan++ but instead we are a economic meat grinder with soulless suburbia being the pinnacle of a dream life.

Also people live in communities, not fortresses. Look at farmland villages in almost any country in the world and then see the US with sometimes literal miles between single houses. Suburbs are intended to keep other people out more than anything, but also don’t provide practically any services. There’s no corner store inside a suburb, one must exit first.

I am originally from “3rd world country”, now my country is doing better, or worse. Depending on whom your ask. One thing I find very inefficient in comparing costs of living by converting everything to USD. In your example, $60 for our family used to be a lot. For example, it’s an amount of monthly pension of my grandparents, after having worked decent jobs their entire life.

Regarding aspirin, it interesting example. And I would argue, that it’s used to be the opposite: shortages were common, so everyone would try to buy provision, such as food and medicine, in advance. I recently witnesses a conversation, when a woman in her 30s complained that she could not find baby aspirin(or something like) for her kid because it was sold out, and her mother started literally yelling and berated for not having any in her home reserve.

I sometimes wonder if that event horizon is encroaching higher and higher up the economic ladder over time. Most of the people in my personal cohort - with university degrees and good careers - have no problem living a good life in the US. But with the rapid inflation of the cost of healthcare, higher education and housing, I wonder how that lifestyle can possibly become accessible to people who weren't essentially born into it. I think increased stratification in terms of lifestyle and opportunity is not good long term for social cohesion or political stability.

It is called cost disease. Staying above is getting harder and harder.

Politicians all of a sudden care a lot when problems start to hit the second quintile.

That event horizon is shifting: "K-shaped recovery" -- you're either moving on up or moving on down.

Definitely. At least in my generation it feels like the boat is sinking and everybody's scrambling to be above deck. The majority of my high school class is going into tech or tech-adjacent industries for that reason.

This is very much the trend I saw over the 2000s-2010s.

Most of the people in my personal cohort - with university degrees and good careers - have no problem living a good life in the US. But with the rapid inflation of the cost of healthcare, higher education and housing, I wonder how that lifestyle can possibly become accessible to people who weren't essentially born into it.

I know many people who were born into a middle-class or upper-middle-class lifestyle, pursued career paths that didn't involve the tech industry (because they were specifically encouraged to "do whatever you want"), and are now living below their parents' standards of living and will probably always be poorer than their parents.

They aren't bum artists either; they work in offices 8-6, and have 5+ years of experience and sophisticated professional skills. But they are being paid 2011 wages in a 2021 housing market, and it all strikes me as tremendously unfair.

Median house prices in the USA are now above their pre-crash peak, and have been increasing much much faster than the CPI[0]. Something fucky is going on, and I doubt it's all because of the "free" market.

[0]: chart https://files.catbox.moe/kvppyj.png and data https://files.catbox.moe/tqj9vb.csv

> Something fucky is going on, and I doubt it's all because of the "free" market.

At first the suburban house as bottomless bank account was a result of “natural” forces like the baby boom and white flight. But people came to assume it, and then demand it. Politicians have obliged since homeowners are an extremely large and powerful demographic. Prior to 2008 we at least pretended to have a private mortgage industry. Now we don’t even bother with a fig leaf.

After the 2008 crash, it became politically impossible to let house prices drop, so the government will basically do anything to prop them up. Too many elderly voters who depend on their home equity to fund their lifestyles. I think we'll look back at 2020 as the moment the same political pressure happened to stock market prices.

21st century is: we're turning everything into a market, far fewer easy but well-paid jobs, if older people had to actually face the brunt of it they would lose their homes.

People who can't handle technology don't have a chance nowadays.

I feel like this concept of turning everything into a market has much more downside than we would like to believe. It's often sold as democratization: i.e. "anyone can just go on youtube and be a content creator now - you don't need a production company as a middleman!"

But the thing about markets is they are great for the winners, and terrible for the losers. And one of the effects of technology is that it allows scaling such that fewer providers can serve the needs of many more consumers. The confluence of these factors is that you can have markets where a handful of winners can essentially serve the entire world. I don't know where that is supposed to leave the rest of the population.

The theory of it is good—-the more efficiently the human race can produce goods and services the better. If ten people can provide the entire world’s stand up comedy needs that frees up all those other people to do other valuable things. The issues are: 1) distributional (i.e. wealth gap) and 2) people get value out of the work itself and not just the compensation.

Although we fight a lot about #1, #2 strikes me as a thornier problem.

In my peer group people are focusing on the monthly payments, rather than the loan amount. And mortgage rates are like half what they were in the last housing bubble https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US

My peer group is probably a bit younger, and they/I are all renting or are relatively new homeowners. The "sticker price" on houses matters to my group a lot, as does monthly rent.

I'd love to find a FRED-like data source for median rental rates over time and/or an index thereof. I suspect that rents are generally correlated with sale prices on a multi-year time scale.

The market rent has a direct influence on the value of a home - it's one of the standard home appraisal methods.

Leaving them with no room to refinance in future, since rates practically cannot drop further for mortgage lending to be viable.

People taking loans in 2021 sure better hope for the continued devaluation of the dollar. It's the only way to keep the debt burden manageable.

Serious question: why would they care about refinancing if their rate is low? Regarding dollar devaluation: I don't there there has been a single year since we abandoned the gold standard where the dollar didn't devalue. And the Fed has explicitly okayed higher inflation going forward.

If they didn't care about refinancing they wouldn't care about mortgage rates.

>There is no affordable housing or transportation in 95% of the North American land area

This just isn't true. The majority of the US has cheap housing. The person who wrote the article lives in Pheonix where you can get houses for 200k or under. Like this perfectly good 3 bed 2 br for 200k:

https://www.redfin.com/AZ/Phoenix/8520-W-Palm-Ln-85037/unit-...

Housing costs are out of control in a handful of places in the US. In the rest of them it's as cheap as ever. Or even cheaper given the very low interest rates.

It can be stupid cheap to live in the US. Rent a room for $4-500, buy a late model Toyota for $5k, and eat like a poor person. It's pretty easy to accumulate enough money to break the cycle of poverty.

The big pitfall is health. If you're sick then yeah you're pretty screwed. But outside of that as long as you avoid unplanned kids, jail, and drugs it's pretty smooth sailing

The author of the submitted article spent multiple paragraphs describing how it is not pretty easy to accumulate enough money to break the cycle of poverty, so if you want to maybe write a long form explaining how to effectively and realistically do so for people in this situation, that’d be great.

The author spent multiple paragraphs giving excuses why it's hard. The way out doesn't take that long to explain. Say we have someone netting 2k a month or 24k a year:

For a month:

Room - $500 Food - $200 Health Insurance - $0 w/ Obamacare subsidies Other Necessities - $200 Entertainment - $100

So we have $1,000 left over and have to deal with transportation. Our target is something like this 2009 Toyota Matrix with 100k miles for $3,900:

https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/cto/d/peoria-2009-toyota-...

If we have $3,900 in the bank great. If not, life is going to suck for the next ~6 months while we save every penny and rely on the bus until we have the cash to afford it. Once we have it then we will have reliable transportation and can budget about $500 a month for car expenses including replacing this one when it breaks down. Leaving us:

Room - $500 Food - $200 Health Insurance - $0 w/ Obamacare subsidies Other Necessities - $200 Entertainment - $100 Car- $500

For a total of $1,500. $500 left over to accumulate some savings and/or pay for stuff we missed.

Next goal would be to use one of the many down payment assistance programs (https://www.arizonadownpaymentassistance.com/down-payment-pr...) to buy a home like the one I linked to. Then we rent out a room or two for ~$500 reducing our housing expenses while building equity.

As long as we don't get sick, don't have a kid, and don't start doing drugs we're going to be sitting pretty nice after a few years.

500 for car expenses a month? Seems crazy to put away 6k a year to maintain a car that is under 4k. If you need to spend 500 a month to keep the car on the road you need to get a different car.

A good used Toyota or Mazda or Honda will run for YEARS and huge mileages with only basic maintenance - like one oil change and new windscreen wipers every year levels of maintenance. Nothing breaks. These sorts of used civics or corollas etc that are maybe 5 -8 years old can be had for £3-6k or less (in UK at least). I've owned several over the past decade or two and they never have anything major wrong with them in terms of mechanical breakdowns. I have only got rid of them when I have "upgraded".

Running costs are negligible beyond the cost of fuel. Insurance is usually low as they are cheap to repair with plentiful parts etc. I pay about £300/year for my 2011 Toyota a(nd that was a year after a claim to replacing the catalytic converter that someone stole). Beyond that I estimate about another £250 a year for basic servicing, MOT (UK annual roadworthiness checks) and replacing consumables like bulbs or the odd tyre.

It’s hard to find any decent car for under $3500 in many parts of the US, which is a lot to save while paying rent and taking the bus. Those cars you’re mentioning are popular, especially right now and that drives the price up. Then you have liability insurance and to get the minimum with bad or no credit it’s usually around $100/mo. But yes $500/month on car expenses is too much.

I signed up just to respond to you because I live in Phoenix and there is no affordable housing here in a desirable neighborhood. There are no single family homes under 200K in Phoenix. A decent started sized home will cost you almost 300K and good luck finding one. That example you gave is a home that is in an area you wouldn't want to send your kids to the schools, walk around at night, and crime has been rampant in Maryvale since the 1990s and has been getting worse. There is a reason its priced like that. On a side note the home's yard is very small and is near Desert SkyMall which has had multiple shooting and deaths over the last few years. Just google desert sky mall shootings.

Most of the US is rural with no housing, therefore no affordable housing by definition. In most small towns you're even more car-dependent than in a city, and there are no jobs.

As I think about it, if we define affordable as "costing under $500/mo all-in" (since that would be a little over a third of one month's work at minimum wage), it would surprise me if even 1 in 20 homes met that criteria.

>The US is a great place to live and work with tremendous upward mobility

Always confused by this notion. People act as if the US is the only place this is possible but not only is it possible in most of the western world, there is in fact BETTER mobility in the much of the western world relative to the US. The US isn't even in the Top 10!

https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-where-intergenerat...

I guess most people just don't know the numbers and go by gut feeling, mass media and what they learned in (primary/secondary) school many years ago.

Pretty confused by the downvotes. People don't like data?

I mean in fact it's worse than people think and you are no longer likely to make more than your parents when a few decades ago you had a 90% chance of doing so.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w22910

Never expected such a ra-ra USA #1 vibe on HN. Especially in the face of data that says otherwise.

You’re blatantly misquoting the person you’re replying to.

In what way. You would call being 18th in income mobility "tremendous?" I wouldn't.

Why not?

For you, it seems that "tremendous" means best in class. Where is the cutoff, 1st, 3rd, top 10?

For others, being in the top 10 percent of 195+ countries is quite significant. For the average person in the rest of the world, being in the US would provide a significant and meaningful increase in their economic mobility.

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