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Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>Housing is already affordable in the United States compared to other countries when you compare median house price to median income.

Ditto. As an European I envy how affordable real estate is in the US compared to Germany for example. My US boss at the time had bought a nice big house with a garden in the suburbs of the Dallas-FW area, way cheaper than something similar would have cost in the suburbs of Munich, where our office was.

Case in point, most of our US colleagues had big houses in Texas which they owned, while most of the Munich team lived in small apartments which they had to rent. Quality of life is nice in Munich, but the real estate market there is crazy compared how good the US has it.

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>As an European I envy how affordable real estate is in the US compared to Germany for example

You're comparing apples to oranges. You're comparing one of the cheapest major cities in the US to one of the more expensive cities in Europe. According to Zillow the median home price in Dallas is just under $300,000 but the median home price in Seattle where I'm currently renting and trying to buy a home is 3 times that at $900,000. So please don't tell me how good I have it in the US with real estate. With how large and diversified the US is, a more fair comparison would be to compare Dallas real estate prices to say a city like Bucharest and compare Munich real estate prices to a major US city on the west coast (San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle) or the northeast (DC, New York City, Boston).

In Seattle, the average sale price per square foot is $535 [1] while in Paris, the average sale price per square meter is 10208€, which is twice as high.

Prices in Paris are pretty much the same as the prices of SF, but the salaries are way lower (3x lower, and the taxes are almost as high as the ones in California).

So yeah, I'd say you have it pretty good in the US :-)

[1] https://www.noradarealestate.com/blog/seattle-real-estate-ma....

1 sqft is about 1/10th of 1 sqm. Even by your own stats Paris looks affordable compared to Seattle.

Unless you made mistakes in the units of the stats you provided.

10.7 sq ft in a sq m.

10.7 x $535 is $5,724 per square meter in Seattle.

Which is less than 1/2 of the $11,686 per square meter in Paris.

Your math is wrong, Paris is still twice as expensive

530 USD is less than 1/20th of 10208 EUR.

My mistake, I didn’t read the sqm number correctly, despite coming back to check.

Still not comparable - Even in say Thessaloniki, the price of a large SFH in most cities in the US (we'll leave off NYC and SF) will be comparable to the price of an apartment in a block of flats. And then you have to think about income...

You're saying that the European equivalent of Dallas is ... Bucharest? Really?

ChuckNorris89's point is that his boss is able to afford owning a large home in Dallas, a major US city, while he and his colleagues in Munich can only afford to rent much smaller apartments in Munich, a major German/European city. Telling him that a "more fair comparison" would compare Dallas to Bucharest won't change the reality ChuckNorris89 is recounting.

>You're saying that the European equivalent of Dallas is ... Bucharest? Really?

Strictly in terms of how their cost of housing compares to their larger geographic areas (US and Europe), yes. Both are less than the median. In all other aspects, no. I personally haven't visited any European city that's as equivalently awful as Dallas.

My point was you can't just look at Dallas and assume that all real estate in the US is affordable and that everyone in the US looking for affordable housing has it easy. The problem is ChuckNorris89 took Dallas then applied it to the US in general in their comments.

It would have been equally incorrect if someone had said, "as an American I envy how affordable real estate is in Europe compared to California for example. I have a bunch of colleagues that live in Bucharest and they can live in very cheap houses while I'm stuck in a small, extremely expensive apartment in Los Angeles. Living next to the beach is nice in Los Angeles, but the real estate market there is crazy compared to how good Europe has it."

You're being disingenuous. Implicit in ChuckNorris89's comparison is that both Dallas and Munich are major cities, whether in their countries or on a worldwide basis. Both cities are, overall, pretty nice places to live. They are, roughly speaking, comparable. And yet, the cost of housing difference is significant. That was ChuckNorris's point.

Cool and Bucharest and Los Angeles are both major cities in their respective countries and on a worldwide basis and yet the cost of housing between the two is significant. So based on my anecdotal experience I can therefore conclude that all real estate is cheap in Europe. And if anyone challenges me on that statement I'll simply say that won't change my reality and then tell them they're being disingenuous. Or more aptly someone else will say it for me.

You're missing that houses in USA are basically built with wood whereas in EU its bricks and concrete, that makes a huge difference in price.

The insane real estate prices in some parts of Europe are mostly due (besides the monetary policies, NIMBYsm, regulations, and inherited wealth) to the scarcity of land in that desirable location, and less about the quality of what's built on it. And I'm not even talking about beach front properties in the south of France.

Ive seen many old houses for sale in Germany for ludicrous money, that you'd basically have to tear down and build something livable.

Construction costs are negligible compared to land costs in urban areas. And the cost of land is set by demand.

Construction costs have very little to do with current asking prices.

It is all about what the market can bear (and it can bear a lot these days, thanks to incessant money printing)

Build a european spec house in Dallas and it will still be way cheaper.

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