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Comment by oceanplexian | Hacker News Reader

There’s no rule that you should be able to afford a house on a middle class income. In fact in many countries, particularly in Western Europe, it’s unimaginable that you would be able to afford a detached, single family home on a middle class income. Lots of people in that situation will live in apartments, row houses, or condos for the rest of their lives.

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You can't compare Western Europe to the US. Maybe to specific regions or super-urban areas, e.g., the LA to SD corridor or the Bay Area.

In which case the two are comparable: there are few if any middle-class families in the bay area that own their homes except by inheritance or some other luck (gift, lottery). Even condos and other high-density housing are all but completely out of reach for all but the top 10% of income earners. And those condos are almost all studios or 1- or 2-bedroom units that are very tiny.

> there are few if any middle-class families in the bay area that own their homes except by inheritance or some other luck (gift, lottery)

Plenty of middle class people bought nice homes they could afford in the bay area in the 90s. Although I suppose you could consider this "luck".

Or a different definition of “middle class”.

The Bay Area wasn’t the economic centre it is now, then. It was closer to a boomtown, and even that effect was constrained.

And plenty of middle class families bought homes in Detroit in the 1950's that nobody wants any more and are either abandoned or torn down long ago.

I suppose you could consider this "bad luck".

Maybe there should be? Maybe not single-family detached homes, but people need to own something

"... there are few if any middle-class families in the bay area that own their homes except by inheritance or some other luck ..."

This is a ridiculous statement.

There are plenty of middle class (by Bay Area standards) folks who have bought houses in Fremont and San Pablo and San Leandro and Hayward.

In fact, even in Marin there are parts of Novato and weird pockets of West Marin (Forest Knolls ?) where this was, and continues to be, done.

They are boring places and middle class folks working boring jobs have purchased homes there year in and year out for the past 25 years. Yes, they had to make choices and sacrifice some things for other things in order to do this.

Perhaps the ability to do that is comparable to a lottery win ?

I’m surprised anyone has heard of Forest Knolls! I grew up there. It definitely used to be weird and relatively affordable for the middle class but not really any more. Last year someone bought a house in the neighborhood for $1.3 m. It was worth $350k when my parents moved to the area about 25 years ago. The new owners have a pair of new Porsches in the driveway. Maybe that counts as middle class in the Bay Area these days but it’s still not obtainable for the vast majority of Americans.

$350k in 1997-dollars means that 25 years ago, it was worth $627k in today-dollars.

Adjusting for inflation, it's doubled in real value over 25 years, which works out to <3% APR. It's a decent return, but we've also ignored 25 years of property tax and maintenance. (on the other hand, we've also ignored 25 years of effective rent)

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that $1.3M isn't worth what it used to be but it sounds big in our head because we remember a time when a dollar went a lot further than it does today.

Just running some numbers into affordability calculators. Buying a house at $350k probably had your annual income between 70-80k which was about the top 1/3 of households 25 years ago. That was middle class. To afford $1.4M you're looking at an annual income around 350k. That's about the top 2%. Even if you stretch your budget more and have a hefty down payment you're still going to probably be in the top 5% of income to buy that house.

You wrote: <<there are few if any middle-class families in the bay area that own their homes except by inheritance or some other luck (gift, lottery).>> That is a bold, sweeping statement with no supporting evidence provided.

I Googled for about 10 seconds to find some statistics about Bay Area homeownership.

  Zoomable map to visualise California homeownership (very cool!): https://dig.abclocal.go.com/california/homeownership-maps/BayArea_homeowners_zip_map.html

  Homeownership Rate (5-year estimate) for San Francisco: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOWNRATEACS006075

At a glance on the first link (zoomable map), the Bay Area looks similar to SoCal (LA/OC/SD). Why do people think homeownership is so low in areas of California with lots of good jobs? It isn't. To be clear: I doubt people on this discussion are interested in homeownership rates in extreme suburbs (2+hours away) and rural areas.

> There’s no rule that you should be able to afford a house on a middle class income

Here in the US, if one was asked to define “middle class” from a lifestyle perspective, probably the first thing that comes to mind is “homeowner.” I don’t think it’s possible to separate home ownership from class distinctions in the US social strata.

Case in point, home ownership rate has remained largely stable for decades at around 65% of the population. That’s despite incomes being more varied in relation to actual value over time.

I was told that middle class in the US is the class that owns tools that they use to augment or repair their home, whether owned or rented. Poorer and you don't have time between jobs to do it or the spare income for the tools, so it doesn't get done. Wealthier, and you just hire it done, because it isn't worth your labor rate.

That’s an interesting take. It sounds intuitively correct, other than the part about “owned or rented”. Generally speaking in the US, the one major advantage to renting is it’s the landlords responsibility to take care pf the property, and on the flip side you are usually not allowed to modify or augment it in any way.

So I’d say if you extended it to incorporate that understanding, it’s pretty accurate.

I would love to buy a duplex, rowhouse, townhome, 3 bedroom apartment or condo if they existed and were reasonable.

Western Europe is both considerably more crowded and poorer than the US.

Dutch to you, to!

Total population / total land area is an irrelevant statistic for country comparison. By population-weighted density the United States isn't significantly less dense than Western Europe.

Unfortunately, directly comparable, prepared numbers are difficult to come by. The 3 most memorable sources I've found are:

* https://theconversation.com/think-your-country-is-crowded-th... - Discusses (introduces?) the concept of "lived density" and provides graphs for Europe. I'm not sure how well the author was familiar with related work regarding population-weight density, which seems to be the more correct term.

* https://ssrn.com/abstract=3119965 - A low-level analytical discussion regarding population-weighted density as a metric.

* https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01167 - A COVID-19 pandemic-related paper which incidentally includes comparable population-weighted density metrics for both Western Europe and the United States.

I haven't looked into things since 2018 (excepting taking note of the 2020 COVID-19 paper), but IIRC census.gov has some population-weighted density numbers somewhere based on MSA and census block (tract?) proximity. It's not easily comparable to available European statistics, but it might be a good place to start if you want to play around with U.S. density numbers.

Maybe there have been better resources published since the above.

More and more Americans have been finding out how poor they are or are getting (relatively) in recent decades.

That’s a sweeping comparison. I’ve visited both and my take would be that Europeans have a higher standard of living than Americans. But that’s just a hunch, I’d be interested to see a breakdown by specific metric and class.

I'd take data over an anecdote or hunch.

Specific breakdowns are harder to find, but top of line numbers are pretty easy to find in a minute on Google: https://datacommons.org/tools/timeline#place=country%2FUSA%2...

I’m not sure GDP is a reliable national wealth indicator in countries with very high levels of inequality and cost of living. Certainly not as a comparator. Plenty to google on that too. This isn’t a criticism of your point - more that we need a better set or metrics to evaluate “wealth”.

You will live in the pod, you will eat the bugs, you will own nothing, and you will be happy

> There’s no rule that you should be able to afford a house on a middle class income.

This isn't really an ownership issue, it is an occupancy issue. Monthly rent needs to cover the expenses of a property including any mortgage, property taxes, etc as well as maintenance, so rents wind up tracking house prices. If you can't house the middle class, a) they're not really middle class and b) you have a societal problem.

Sorry, but isn’t that part of the definition of middle class?

Most of those cities have a lot more density. They were designed before cars existed. I wonder what a fresh piece of earth chopped up and designed for the future would look like economically.

Row houses in any marginally desired area in western Europe easily go for half a million now. That’s firmly out of reach of the middle class.

Western Europe is also way smaller than the united states, so I'm not sure how apt this comparison is.

Don’t forget to mention they still have full health coverage in the EU.

It’s not possible to afford housing or robust healthcare in the US.

Keep in mind there’s no rule we have to tolerate either.

Imagine being a teenager in the US, having just seen how essential workers are treated, knowing in all likelihood your future is an “essential worker”.

Then watch Congress scapegoat Facebook.

“Full health coverage” according to all my EU and especially British friends I would still be on a waitlist for a surgery I had 2+ years ago.

They could lobby their elected officials to spend more on staff, and facilities.

But you’re right, you’ve put me off on the whole idea. Good effort. There’s no way around artificial scarcity.

Zombie argument. This has been show to be inaccurate numerous times.

I'm waiting 4 months to see my GP for a physical in Wisconsin.

In Europe they don’t even normally have physicals! The NHS has never just checked up on me like that - they just couldn’t afford to do it.

NHS Health Check is the equivalent of the Medicare Annual Wellness Visit. It's recommended every five years, starting at age 40, for people without pre-existing conditions.

For people with pre-existing conditions it begins at a younger age and is recommended more frequently, based on the determination of your GP Surgery.

You should get your first invitation to an NHS Health Check around the time of your 40th birthday.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/nhs-health-check/what-is-an-nh...

Physicals are annual in the US and done pretty much every year and covered 100% by every insurance I have ever had.

I’ve waited longer for basic treatment in the US than I did anywhere else in the world and still paid exponentially more.

And all that extra time and money got me was people saying “You should be glad it isn’t socialized health care!” Yeah. If it were, I would’ve gotten treated faster and cheaper.

Both of these things are true. I don’t want to fully derail the larger discussion, but having lived in both EU and US and used healthcare in both, basic care is significantly better in the EU than the US on nearly every facet. The exact reverse is true for specialized care.

Non-essential surgeries tend to have longer wait times (such as hip replacements in elderly people), but conversely, essential care is accessible to everyone at no cost and in a timely manner.

I live in Canada, and recently had appendicitis. My appendix was removed less than 24 hours after symptoms began, and 10-12 hours after I arrived at the hospital. I walked in to the ER (after a very painful car ride), they asked me some questions and gave them my health card, they said how much, I said 7, they did blood tests and I had a CT scan, I waited a few hours, and then I was wheeled up to the operating room, after which I spent the night in the hospital and discharged the following morning. Not once did the question of insurance or payment come up, and I even had a private room after the surgery.

What you describe in your last sentence is one of the reasons I went with Kaiser. Yes, there are still co-pays for most treatments and prescriptions, but they have in my experience never been more than $20. This includes an elective procedure. It seems to share some aspects of the Canadian system you described, such as longer wait times for non-essential care, and a relative lack of choice in which doctor you see. But to me that is an acceptable trade-off for care where no single visit has cost me more than I would have spent on lunch that same day, and has been consistently of high quality.

> Non-essential surgeries tend to have longer wait times (such as hip replacements in elderly people)

Something ridiculous like 70% of lifetime healthcare spending in the US occurs in the last two years of a person's life (half-remembered number from like 10 years ago). The uncomfortable truth is that we spend way too much on hail-mary treatments for people who are almost certainly going to die, and too much on useless shit like knee replacements for the elderly, and far too little on the earlier stages of their life. But nobody wants to tell the elderly "no" because they vote.

Obamacare had the right idea with "death panels". A lot of treatments that happen near the end aren't medically justified by quality-adjusted years-of-life or similar metrics. And that money comes out of the healthcare of younger people, whom the US treats like shit compared to the elderly. Because they don't vote.

But nobody likes the optics of "pulling the plug on grandma".

Vastly different across Europe

What does this have to do with whether or not the housing market is overvalued?

It seems like a thread-derailing comment likely to drag down the quality of discussion.

The EU Apple to US orange comparison you mean? What’s the EU have to do with US home values?

I replied to that comment as well. Affordability of housing the EU (or Japan, or China, or India, etc) isn't really that relevant to the situation in the US.

What does your policing add to the conversation? Unrelated syntax and semantics is not related to US housing

Based on your green account name, it appeared you were new to HN. I commented because the site guidelines include:

> “ Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.”

Your comment, “Don’t forget to mention they still have full health coverage in the EU.” was doing exactly what the guidelines ask us not to.

My hope was that bringing attention to this would help deflate the impending generic argument about health care and help you improve future conversations on the site.

It was just an attempt to be helpful.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I did not see that or a TOS as part of sign up

If the HN communities behavior is to point to a TOS I didn’t agree to at sign up, I’ll go ahead and logout and stay away

That’s some bait n switch, end run around norms, patronizer enabling, dark pattern nonsense.

It's not a ToS, they're guidelines. You're not legally bound, relax.

The point of these guidelines is that _generally_ most people follow them and it stops this place going to garbage like every forum before it, and allows it to stay a place for professionals to discuss topics, rather than us vs them flamebaiting and boring jokes.

You're totally welcome to go, but you're also welcome to stay. If you step back and calm down, you might find you like it here :).

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