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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>Housing is considered unaffordable if a person spends more than 30% of their income on housing costs—sometimes called being in housing stress.

How does this compare to the overall population? This feels like one of those rules of thumb from a bygone era where housing was cheap and affordable, but today is no longer valid. It's obvious that the authors of the article is trying to push the narrative that teachers are underpaid, but using this contrived way of arguing (ie. housing is "unaffordable" for them according to this arbitrary cut-off, therefore they're underpaid) rather than straightforward metrics (eg. "they make x% below people with the same education levels") makes me think they're trying to mislead.

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The problem isn’t that the 30% rule isn’t a good idea anymore. The problem is that for so much of the population it isn’t realistic anymore.

Also I wouldn’t be surprised if a terms like housing stress based on the 30% rule is part of official terminology. So it can be used for discussing rental rates, morgage prices and legislation.

Looking at averages like you propose isn’t useful if something bad impacts a whole population.

If teachers are not meaningfully different from the rest of similarly situated citizens, then raising teacher pay alone isn’t the answer. (Maybe building more housing is.)

Yep, since housing has became too expensive almost everywhere for almost everyone. Instead of focusing on one specific profession, we should focus on policy, where we actually built more houses (by allowing more to be built and at higher density), make houses houses, not hotels (so ban stuff like airbnb) and make housing-as-an-investment impossible (by eg limiting the amount of houses someone can own in areas with high demand).

But a few rich people would lose some money if we did that, so no, we'll focus on teachers in australia only.

I generally agree, but one small disagreement: housing-as-an-investment can be important for having a robust and affordable housing rental market. Every rental agreement has an investor on one side of it.

Building new houses yes. Buying existing stock as a speculation instrument while influencing policies not very much.

Also, that involves actually renting out houses, not keeping them empty.

The problem is that percentages still only go up to 100. If housing now costs a larger percentage of people's income, plus everything else is more expensive too, that's a huge problem, and a noticeable decrease in standard of living.

My point isn't that housing costs as % of income can go arbitrarily high without any negative impacts, it's that the study/headline is misleading the reader using a definition of "unaffordable" that is inconsistent with their expectations. "Unaffordable" makes me think that the teachers are struggling to meet rent and have to cut non-discretionary spending to make ends meet, whereas the reality (ie. the 30% mark used by the study) is closer to "have less discretionary spending than wanted".

Those marks are still used in many places to deny would-be renters a place as they are deemed 'insecure' by the landlords. At that point, it is effectively "unaffordable" as the supply is artificially staggered and the minimum to enter is higher than the market would dictate otherwise. Most could make it work and still have room to spare. This includes countries with safety nets capable of bailing out individuals who mess up.

Might not be the case in Australia, but it certainly exists.

> plus everything else is more expensive too

But everything else is definitely not more expensive. If you compare household spend from now to, say, the early 60s, most consumer goods are much cheaper on a relative basis, e.g most people spend a heck of a lot less as a percentage of income for things like food, clothing, appliances, etc. It's primarily housing and service costs (education and health care) that have skyrocketed.

I’d be curious how old this rule is - because a lot of other goods have really dropped in price.

Food costs for a household were closer to 30% if income and now that’s dropped to 10%. Clothing and technology has taken a similar path.

Sydney is only beaten by Hong Kong for unaffordable housing. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/10-least-affordable-housing... So probably the rest of the population can't afford to live there either.

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