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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

This is an absurd statement.

Median rent in Seattle for a 1 bedroom is $2k. Using the 40x rule someone who makes $80k could easily afford this, which is a low bar for someone with a moderately decent job.

Locking in a low rate alone has nothing to do with whether owning is more affordable than renting. The rate could be 0% but with a sales price high ala 2021-2022 buying mania and then adding property taxes, insurance, maintenance, and HOA the vast majority of "high" cost metros have and will continue to be much more expensive to buy in than rent in whether rates go up or down.

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> $80k could easily afford this, which is a low bar for someone with a moderately decent job.

$80k is not a low bar, and this is insulting to really talented people I know stuck in below $40k jobs.

so rent is now considered a massive burden on everyone because someone making the minimum wage cannot easily afford the median rent in the city they live in?

that’s not how it works at all

Median means at least half of the people cannot afford it.

That means the rent is a massive burden on half of the locals at least, likely many more since the burden does not scale linearly.

Second, check median wage and check the distribution of wages compared to house prices.

We're talking how many millions of people here?

80K is a lot for restaurant work. While $40 an hour is not unheard of in the seattle restaurant area, I would not consider this a low bar to reach in that industry (or many others outside of tech tbh).

The median annual salary in Seattle is around $60K. So $80K is, based on the actual data, a high bar.

This take is an example of a phenomenon I've come to describe as "stat-rot".

Completely missing the point about how people live because of a hyper-focus on median statistics. By definition, the median describes exactly one person to perfect resolution, and the rest of the population only in a binary higher/lower relation. The explanatory power of median statistics is marginally better than mean statistics, but it is not a substitute for and cannot serve to explain outcomes that do not fit the restrictive mold of the "median" person.

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