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Comment by graaben | Hacker News Reader

I haven't really seen much written on this (maybe I'm just not looking) but what does the future look like when only the top 10-20% can afford a home? Do 80% of families rent forever with no real possibility of being able to buy a home near an economic center? What does that look like for the broader society when so much of the American dream and self-worth is built on being a homeowner?

I live in LA and I think about this a lot when I see the only homes for sale here going for $3-4+ million. How much longer can this continue?

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I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand we have a massive wealth/power gap and I desperately want myself and every other human to have a shot at owning a single-family home in a desirable area with all of the comforts of modern life.

On the other hand I know that we are overtaxing the world's resources and short of some massive changes in our system many middle class folks in the western world are going to see a drop in their quality of life as globalization continues and our living standards average out with those of people in developing nations.

A mass-affordable Los Angeles is geometrically impossible. The single-family house and car culture are central to what it means to be "LA" and there are fundamental scaling limits on those.

LA was zoned for ~10 million as recently as 1960. While I think you're right that the problem is probably intractable—who would want to give up their house for an apartment, unless maybe a dense, walkable area appeared overnight?—I wonder if there are legislative solutions, like rolling back Prop 13 (which will probably never happen).

But people don't have to give up single family homes to create density -- we just need to build more of everything else, wherever we can, to increase housing.

No one is coming for existing single-family homes -- they can peacefully co-exist alongside properties that house 5x the amount of people.

It's not impossible, but people are stubborn and the voices of home owners/drivers dominate the conversation over anything else.

Those things are scalable -- LA's light rail network is one of the biggest in the country and it's incredible efficient. Over a million people (of a city of 4 million) use LA Metro on a daily basis.

There's no reason LA's fundamental character as a city would change if we allowed duplexes in already dense neighborhoods or as much BRT as possible. But instead we've prioritized voices like the Bel-Air Homeowners Association or some NIMBY idiots in Santa Monica to make policy decisions and are stuck with environmental review on projects that demolish, say, 4 parking spots to build 40 affordable housing units.

When you increase population density significantly, the nature of a place changes.

In other words it will no longer be the same LA, but rather LAtropolis .. so gp is right about the physical limits.

I'm not even talking about mass-affordable, I just mean being able to buy a home on less than a $600k/yr income. Do wages and housing prices continue to grow at 20% YoY indefinitely in cities like this, eventually pricing out everyone except the ultra high net worth?

As long as there are fewer homes coming available than ultra high net worth people who want to live in them, absolutely.

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