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Comment by dkasper | Hacker News Reader

Guessing you’ve never looked at housing in random farm towns? They all mooned in 2021 too except the really crappy ones.

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Perhaps not “random farm towns”, but most “old” towns outside significant metro areas have certainly had a rough time. These places grew when population was more distributed and have been bleeding for a long time as people have consolidated in fewer cities. For example, basically everywhere in Pennsylvania outside Philly and Pittsburgh.

It is shocking to see 30, 40k homes in perfectly safe areas, albeit in what feels like a ghost town. These tend to be small and run down but they’d still be 200k+ in a large metro and who knows how much somewhere like SF or NYC.

Between 2000 and today property in the rural area I grew up in has gone from 1k/acre for non-prime farm land to 7k/acre for the same kind of junk property. Its an insane jump and has mostly happened since the pandemic (it was creeping up before that, but it really jumped during the last few years)

Exactly what I’ve seen. I don’t think anyone can afford to become a farmer at these prices unless they already own the land

Even before these price increases in property there was no money in being a farmer. My grandfather had 100 acres of asparagus (bought when property was cheap in the 60s) and even with migrant labor doing all the real work, him and my grandmother had to have full time jobs. It brought in a profit don't get me wrong, but not enough to make it worthwhile as a full time pursuit. The root problem as I see it is that farming scales very, very well. The bigger you are, the cheaper your inputs become and the better you're able to negotiate sale prices. For example to farm 80/100 acres, my grandfather had to have a big Case tractor just to run the various implements that are necessary. That thing cost 100k+ and would have been just as happy doing the work on a thousand acre farm as a hundred acre farm.

Home values have gone up on paper due to real estate speculation, which CPI doesn't care about. It instead measures how much you would need to pay to rent an equivalent apartment year over year.

How much you think your house might rent for. It’s a bad metric because people who aren’t in the market are out of touch by quite a bit

Never heard “mooned” used in terms if rural real estate. It isn’t exactly Dogecoin

But you understood what they meant, right?

Plus it's shorter than saying "skyrocketed to an irrational extent, similar to what happened in the crypto market craze" and hence more expressive. Now, you might not agree that it quite did that to the same level as dogecoin, but that's a different matter than whether or not "mooned" is a good choice of words here. Personally I think hyperbole is useful and fun sometimes.

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