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Comment by erklik | Hacker News Reader

Considering Work from Office is the norm, good jobs that have career growth are largely on the East Coast i.e. Melbs, Sydney. Both are "too expensive" ... so where else should people move where it's less expensive and they can easily find a job there?

I am genuinely curious where you moved.

> The thing that strikes me about Australia's property prices are, who will be the generation to pay prices like this again? I personally can't imagine the prices to eventually go anywhere but down.

I imagine the opposite. Price will keep going up and up. It's a ponzi scheme, it's literally "too big to fail". The government cannot allow a fall in prices so it will simply never come.

Regarding who will pay again? No-one, land will concentrate amongst the few who already own land and can use that equity as leverage, while the rest of us will live via rent. I am 80% sure that most people born after 2000 will never own a home.

View on HN

Viva la revolution.

Or alternately see the 'homeless' problem in the US which IMO is a combination of lack of mental healthcare, broken or absent social integration and support policies generally, a lack of common space protection laws or enforcement of them, and a failure of civic planning to provide enough places people can afford to call home.

The US doesn't have a severe homeless problem as is so often portrayed. The US rate of homelessness is comparable to or better than Canada [0] and far better than France (which has about 3x the homelessness problem of the US, with ~330,000 homeless and 1/5 the population of the US).

People on HN think the US looks like San Francisco. California has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the US.

"About 582,000 Americans are experiencing homelessness, according to 2022 Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) data."

That figure is lower than it was before the great recession bubble burst for example. It's up slightly, a few tens of thousands, since the bottom in ~2015-2016.

The Housing First program dramatically reduced homelessness in the US. Many regions of the US have followed it to great success, California has largely refused to. The US rate of homelessness actually declined throughout the era of the great recession, when the severe economic hit would have been expected to produce a large surge in homelessness (especially given it was in part a housing collapse) - the reason for that was the Housing First program (which began under the Bush Administration and was successfully continued during the Obama Administration).

When you point out to people that the US homelessness problem is better than the dire situation in eg France, they lose their minds in my experience, but that's due solely to ignorance about the actual data and context. They can't fathom that a massive welfare state system like France has would still have immense homelessness.

[0] "Canada's national database estimates that there are approximately 235,000 homeless people across the country, but that number triples when emergency room health-care data is considered."

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/canada-homeless-p...

> People on HN think the US looks like San Francisco. California has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the US.

That’s just the general shtick here. You take your own SV bubble, extrapolate it to the whole country/world/etc., and when challenged, accuse the challenger of being in a bubble, with some self righteous flavor to land it.

The homeless problem in the US is almost entirely the result of real estate speculation. Housing can’t be both something everyone needs to be able to afford and something that guarantees obscene returns in locations where the vast majority of jobs are located. The two are diametrically opposed. Wealthy liberals don’t want to see their selfishness as the cause of so much the poverty and suffering they see around them, so they invent all kinds of mystifications and exaggerate other factors to claim this isn’t true. But it is.

Just to tease out some balanced viewpoints, what kind of mystifications would wealthy conservatives invent as a cause for homelessness?

By far the worst homelessness problems in the US are all in very blue cities, not red voting areas. It's not even a close comparison, all the worst cities in the US for wealth inequality and homelessness are particularly blue. The dramatic intensity of poverty and murder that deeply blue cities have produced is terrifying, as is the fact that it has continued uninterrupted for so long. At some point someone should start asking some questions. San Francisco has been a microcosm of that severe dysfunction.

…those questions are all answered by wealthy liberals profiting off real estate speculation at the expense of everything else. You can’t have a functioning society where someone’s right to make obscene returns on a single family home is privileged over people shitting and dying on the streets. When you do, you end up with the severe inequality and dysfunction of California’s cities. Trust me, I know. I live in one. But this trend is playing out all across America, red or blue. California just did a speed-run of the consequences of “fuck you, I got mine” by passing a suite of especially terrible laws in the 70s while being one of the world’s largest economies. Most red-voting areas are nowhere near as economically productive as California, so they haven’t (until recently) been able to draw the same level of speculative investment.

They'd bring up that poverty is the "necessity" in the phrase "Necessity is the mother of invention." though perhaps in lieu of invention, industry.

In neither case is either correct. Rather poverty exists in a strata of manmade architecture that defies scrutiny. Some elect it, others have it thrust upon them, and there is of course every space between and above those statements that make up a much larger space.

Wealthy conservatives in the US largely subscribe to Social Darwinism or something like a Calvinist logic of god having ordained their success. Essentially, “the homeless are homeless because they deserve to be homeless.” It’s self-serving and tautological, but so are most ideologies based around on a defense of the status quo.

This is why we must implement a land value tax as Henry George proposed. People should not be able to profit from squatting on / hoarding land.

Where I live we already have property taxes indexed to the value of the property, and a tax on secondary dwellings that are not rented out.

The problem with property tax instead of land value tax is that a parking lot operator pays a lot less tax than the 30-storey apartment building next door. This is despite the fact that both plots of land have the same neighborhood amenities and same development potential. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqQhoZgFZgk

Nothing stops the tide. The pressures of systems like this build up until not even the government can stop it. The biggest dam in the world cannot stop dead in it's tracks even the tiniest trickle of water. Something will give, could be the entire financial system collapses, could be guillotines, but the government is not omnipotent.

> Something will give

Usually, the government soft-fails through inflation and deflates the bubble.

But Australia can't do that with their housing market. If they try, prices just go up. Real estate is monetized, people need to park their devaluing dollars somewhere. The more they try, the more they price their own people out of their own country.

> If they try, prices just go up.

It depends on the unit prices are measured in. They may go up, or tread sideways in AUD, but that doesn't mean they're actually appreciating

Until their currency collapses. Each nation lost their currency for many times, no exception :)

Not sure. Any historical example for housing specifically.

Even these kind of collapses work out better for the rich than the poor.

Maybe, if they "see" it coming and hedge accordingly. But in general, inflation works in favor of debtors against savers

Generally when the debtor goes into bankruptcy they give up the asset. Some other 'wealthy' person buys up the for pennies on the dollar. So while a particular rich person loses, in general the wealthy come out ahead.

Inflation enables debtors to default in real terms while still meeting their contractual obligations. They (er, we) end up paying debts back with money that's worth less, assuming we remain solvent in nominal terms (as the govt, currently a very large debtor, is guaranteed to do)

This is why remote work is so important. It’s not about not going to the office. It’s about breaking real estate.

Prices will stall and inflation will erode the actual value of real estate.

> I personally can't imagine the prices to eventually go anywhere but down.

People have been saying that for years. It's gotten a lot worse rather than improving though.

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