Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

It's easy to forget, but housing is affordable for most people in most parts of the US. Here on HN it seems otherwise because we disproportionately live in California and other expensive metropolitan areas along the coasts.

Rising prices of gasoline are the most visible sign of inflation for ordinary US consumers.

View on HN

The issue i take with this is that we’re using measures to define economic well being where we use terms like “most” and then leave behind the other 49% of people, and tell em, “hey, the economy is cookin!”

“In the nation as a whole, 70.3 percent of lowest-income households face severe housing cost burdens. ” [1] (2016)

[1]https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/jchs.harvard.edu/files/ha...

I'm surprised that nearly 30 percent of households earning under $15,000 a year don't face severe housing cost burdens.

Although, do we expect that group of people to be able to easily afford housing in a good economy? I would guess that this group has a tough time affording housing in any economy.

Yeah, agreed. I don’t know what the proper measure of a good economy is. I’m just critical that said measurement is “jobs”.

How many of those households are in remote or dying communities like those in Appalachia built around long closed coal mines? 2000 hours a year at minimum wage is roughly that amount so I suspect much of that group is concentrated in areas where houses could literally be bought for a few thousand bucks and there really isn't any work - think Detroit at the end of the 2000s when people were ripping copper out of the walls.

Depending on how they count households, a few people might also be providing for a large number of house holds, like in a trailer park. With social security/medicare/medicaid/disability, they might be relatively secure in their housing.

> do we expect that group of people to be able to easily afford housing in a good economy?

Yes. Of course we do. Housing is a basic human need (without which, you are homeless by definition). We should expect all people to easily afford housing in all economies, at all times.

We should expect housing to be as affordable as water or food or electricity is, at all times, in all economic conditions. It should never be "tough" for anyone to afford housing.

I agree, but I think that’s a social safety net question rather than an economic performance question.

> but housing is affordable for most people in most parts of the US.

This is a enormously inaccurate. Speaking from experience, housing affordability is one of the top-5 concerns for most people in the vast majority of Midwestern cities right now (and even some Southern cities). There's crisis-level problems in housing in places like Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Louisville, Most of Urban Michigan (Grand Rapids, Traverse City, Ann Arbor, Detroit), etc, not to mention all the obvious issues in major places like Atlanta or Austin or such.

Housing is affordable in dying small cities with no jobs. Housing is expensive "for most people in most parts of the US". In the Midwest, a huge chunk of the 20-40yr-old aged folks here are literally begging for a entire nation-wide housing crash, so they might not have to rent for the literal entirety of their lives.

>housing is affordable for most people in most parts of the US

this is not true.

https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/2021/Out-of-Reach_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com