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Comment by FireBeyond | Hacker News Reader

Effectively, you need to be earning nearly twice the median household income[1] to afford a house.

Our economy is deeply broken.

[1] Just under $71,000/year as of 2021.

This is the trend everywhere in the Western world. At some point we need to think about what all those countries have in common and start making strategic choices to move away from it (hint: it starts with Reagan, Thatcher and other local equivalents in the 80s)

Neoliberalism in the Presidency here in the US started with Carter, a.k.a. "The Great Deregulator" in the 70s.

And it wasn't just adopted/pushed by one political party . . .

It's not really the economy in general. It's just cities. Most major US metro areas have under-built housing compared to demand every decade since the 1970s, and all of it is entirely self-inflicted through zoning and permitting.

The only real hope of progress here is for states to start outright overriding local laws around housing, as California has been increasingly doing.

The laws that have been passed in California will not have any meaningful impact on affordability, so I wouldn’t look to them for hope or progress. It would take decades and decades of building at a level not seen since the postwar era to undo the damage done to the state by real estate speculators and Proposition 13.

Nothing is going to instantly change housing availability, but shrugging and giving up now will make things way worse in those future decades.

Lots of things could instantly change housing availability (e.g. banning investment funds from owning homes, direct state construction, abolition of zoning), but none of those will happen because they would cost real estate speculators money, as well as the politicians they bankroll.

If you go far enough away from the nearest city that housing prices drop, median income drops as well. I'm not saying I'm surprised that housing in NYC is expensive, but I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia (specifically in one of the cheaper areas that's still close enough to commute into the city) and housing is expensive here too.

Housing is incredibly expensive everywhere in the US because every major metro area is short on housing [1]. It really doesn't matter where you go specifically because anywhere that people might want to live, for any reason, suffers from the spillover effect from all the people in high-population states who will never be able to afford homes there.

[1] https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives... - take a look the linked report

Our houses do have the most sqft in the world of any large nation (other than maybe Canada).

Of course, you have to consider the incentives for builders when it comes to house sizes. A lot of cities have lot size requirements or setback requirements that make it pointless to build smaller houses because the lot has to be a certain minimum size anyway.

This is also why rowhouses are so expensive: people like them, but in most US cities nobody is allowed to build new ones.

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