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Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

If "buying a home" just means buying a shoebox apartment, why is it important in the first place for starting a family? Doesn't that mean you're just as well off renting?

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buying your own place gives you permanence you can plan around. you know where you will live, you know where your kids will go to school, you know your neighbors and neighborhood your kids will grow up in, and probably most important, you know how much it will cost each month, and you won't get thrown out on your butt because land lord wants to liquidate or have nephew Timmy live there next year.

this type of stability is an important factor for family planning

So renters in Korea actually have to move a lot, and the awareness of this dynamic actually matters in practice, or you're just assuming that much because that's how America works?

Edit: Don't mean to come down hard, it's just that in the kinds of topics I often see people casually assume certain things are "obviously" important for starting families, which it turns out other first-world countries do without just fine.

Ah I see your confusion. You’ve missed that renting is more expensive than buying a home and gets more expensive each year, possibly forcing you to move away from your local area and hence your child’s school. There are some places where rent controls and renters rights can mean renting can work for families. But few places are like Berlin.

That depends entirely on the rent/buy ratio and other factors like transaction costs and frequency of moving. It’s not a “confusion”, especially in places with competitive housing markets like Japan.

Since your following sentence agrees that renting isn’t universally cheaper, then you need to actually bring some relevant information on that point to have a substantive, non-confused comment.

What do you think your comment was accomplishing beyond calling confused? This discussion still lacks any evidence whatsoever that renting in Korea implies frequent relocation.

4-member family house rent/buy ratio in Korea is really high because of its unique Jeonse system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeonse Nobody rents 4 member family house because rent is more than mortgage.

On the other hand, bachelor studio is rather cheap even in the downtown Seoul(like 1k USD per month at most)

Jeonse system is unique in Korea and it really weird. It took me a few years to understand it and it shouldn't really work anymore because the housing price has stabilized in last 4 decades or so.

The point being, any of these commentors here who haven't heard of Jeonse, they don't know anything about housing in South Korea.

In China it's directly tied to you eligibility to nearly all local civil services, since something like 60% of the condo price goes to local government in the form of land sales (70 years rental actually) plus taxes, not to mention the mortgage rate from predominantly state-owned banks doubles that price again.

It's state-owned condo cartel, naturally, prices just keep skyrocketing, hence the "6 wallets for a down payment (the couple and their parents)" meme, but they'll just blame the greedy capitalist developers like Evergrande.

So combining the two factors, buying at least one condo is a prerequisite for marriage now.

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