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Comment by OccamsMirror | Hacker News Reader

Not in Australia. Even rural is expensive.

Recently moved into a four-bedroom home in a moderately desirable suburb of Los Angeles. I myself work in tech field and my spouse is university faculty. Our subdiv is a large tract of homes built 15-25 years ago, all in the mid six figures to just a hair over seven.

At least three of the neighbors within sight of my own house are some sort of residential construction or property trade contractor. Two are public school teachers. At least one paints houses for a living. It is apparently totally possible to work a trade and live a recently comfortable lifestyle. I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm not saying that there is a straightforward path to break in to that lifestyle but it is evidently more than abundantly possible.

Most tradespeople I know can’t afford “hair over seven” figures for a home. Everyone in your neighborhood is house poor. They are banking on equity. They had a sizable upfront down payment.

Like I said, all the tradespeople I know are struggling with lower 6, much less hair over 7.

But do you work in the trades in places where the median home is $800k? Trade wages are probably better in socal.

They do. Median home value here is $950k. All of my trades friends are house poor and asking family for assistance.

House poor and asking for family assistance is something thats common even where homes are $200k. More than half of american home buyers use family assistance. The fact they are in the market at all at nearly $1m median prices on trade wages is incredible, family assistance or being house poor while you pay down to get rid of pmi or not.

I suspect the key to that success is having bought in before the house prices significantly increased.

I know tradies with massive houses and smallholdings within 50 miles of London. I've also lived with tradies in a 4-person semi-legal HMO.

The error bars here are huge.

I don’t quite get why Australia is so expensive. It’s basically all empty land (bigger than the EU and the population of the Netherlands). Shouldn’t it be dirt cheap?

The bits that aren't a desert and people want to live in are actually fairly populated.

Honestly the big stark difference between Australia and the US seems to be immigration. There might be a fundamental lack of a labor pool that might have been building out comparable infrastructure and housing supply that we see in similarly geographic sized US.

How about the following list of 10 cities/towns in Australia with property around 100-300k AUD?

https://www.mpamag.com/au/mortgage-industry/guides/what-are-...

The first town on the list is a place famous for building houses underground due to the heat on the surface being too extreme. It’s also in the middle of nowhere.

The rest are country towns, not suburban ones. Where you need to drive hours to get to anything approaching what you might think of as “downtown”, and even then there’s not gonna be a lot there.

The reality in Australia is that the vast majority of the population lives within 100km of the east coast. It’s not like America where there are literally thousands of decent-sized small towns (tens of thousands of people), there just isn’t enough population for that. Almost half the population lives in two cities (Melbourne and Sydney) and neither of these are affordable places no matter how far out into the suburbs you go.

Good luck painting houses and mowing lawns in Coober Pedy haha

If you work remotely (but don’t need a great internet connection to do so), don’t mind having absolutely minimal amenities, cultural activities (apart from a few tourist traps), international airports etc. within a day or two’s drive… then sure.

Usually these places are cheap because there is little economy (so few jobs), so most of the even slightly ambitious youth escape to the cities or larger towns in the area, which leaves them with ‘interesting’ demographics.

This is an interesting inversion actually, because things like meth and then the associated crime are much more of a problem in the country than the cities here, which is kind of the opposite of what you hear about the cities being dangerous in places like the US.

Here's a write up of number #4: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-18/tara-isolated-rural-b.... There's a reason for that pricing.

#3 Port Pirie is (in)famous for its lead contamination [1].

#5 Queenstown is also contaminated [2]. It's an interesting place to visit, as the surrounds look like the moon [3], since the contamination stop anything from growing.

The rest could be nice?

[1] https://theconversation.com/lead-poisoning-of-port-pirie-chi...

[2] https://www.anu.edu.au/news/all-news/tasmanian-lakes-metal-c...

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=queenstown+moonscape&tbm=isc...

# 9 Charleville - I've not lived there, but I've visited. For a sense of the remoteness, when the International Space Station passes overhead, it's twice as close as the nearest major city.

Sounds like astronomy heaven.

Tara, QLD, is where people who want to be forgotten go to disappear. There are off grid shanty towns in the area, one of which was the site of a fatal ambushing of police officers last year.

https://inqld.com.au/insights/2022/12/14/police-shooting-tra...

There's a reason these places are cheap.

Leave Australia :-)

This is the answer. Young people especially need to realise that this country doesn't want them.

Interestingly, as a young Australian, I've thought about this a lot and I genuinely struggle to find a better country to live in.

We have our share of problems, but compared to the problems of other countries, I can't help but feel they're significantly less.

A large part of it being how isolated we are from the rest of the world and all the benefits that provides. Not to mention the low population density of the country as a whole.

It really depends what specific circumstances you are comparing. If you are looking at trades, low skill full time, or casual work, I dont think there is a better place to be. If you are comparing the lifestyle available from a full time skilled job (tech especially) its honestly not great.

Work anywhere in Asia, and while your wage may be lower, what you get for it goes a whole lot further. Restaurants are a focus, but things like a regular cleaner, doorman, club memberships are a whole lot more accessible. Things that are really only available in Australia to generational wealth these days, are available to skilled employees.

Work in western Europe, and the wages are slightly higher, and the cost of living is slightly lower; however the expectation for work-life balance is far better. 38hr weeks are very strict, with an expectation of flex time and time in lieu. with more weeks off, and better access to things like parental leave and study accommodations.

People make poor comparisons to America, because its a very hard thing to generalize. From my personal experience as a skilled full time worker, there is not one metric where Australia is a clear winner, and many where its far behind. The top end of healthcare is better in the USA, and if you factor in the lower taxes cheaper too. Crime statistics are worse, but localized to places I have no reason to go... I would say that USA as country is worse, but if you only look at the experience of someone who already has a skilled job, then you come out far ahead in the states.

I would have to disagree about the full time skilled job comment.

I work remotely for a tech company and to say that you can barely work in Australia whilst earning a very decent salary, is an understatement. 2 - 3 hours a day, at most (at least in tech). Some days you don't even have to do anything. And this is most large companies (although it depends on your rank).

This factor alone makes Australia an amazing place to live, excluding all the other reasons to live here.

Compared to America and Asia, if I have to work 3-4 times harder than I currently am, what am I actually gaining? I'm just losing time to live the life I truly want. No thank you.

The 3 hour day is a rare thing, but I dont think that its more available in Australia than anywhere else... I know more people with that setup in the states, as an anecdote.

And fully remote in the states has the additional benefit of actual high speed internet.

Well all I can say is that I've worked at 1 startup, 1 agency and 2 very large tech corporates here in Australia, and I've been able to maintain only working 2 - 3 hours a day at each of those companies, as well as maintain a few days not doing anything at all.

And I wouldn't even consider myself top-tier at what I do.

Although to your point, I think Australian work culture is very flexible. You can work a lot if you want. You can also do the bare minimum. I've just noticed that there's no enforced standard, aside from doing literally nothing. In a lot of cases, the few people who do work a lot do end up making up for all the people who don't want to work, so it evens out in the end.

Come here to South Africa. In fact a lot of South African "expats" are moving back. Many, many places are extremely decent and lifestyle can be excellent.

It could just be the media, but I've heard nothing but terrible things about South Africa.

Failing government. Constant crime. Water shortages. Power blackouts. Is it perhaps different if you're living in a gated community?

Depends where you live. I don't live in a gated community and I am not affected directly by crime. Power blackouts is called loadshedding and has to do with capacity. Get solar and batteries and you will be immune to that. It's being fixed too.

But what you describe is so limiting, because you're forced in the one area. What if I want to leave the area and go for a road trip? Would I be safe travelling to the rest of South Africa, if there is crime, blackouts and a lack of water?

In Australia I can safely travel to anywhere within the country.

Where do you live btw? Would be interesting to research, happy to look into it more.

Not limiting at all, you can travel pretty much everywhere safety. The crime ridden areas are usually crammed into small spaces. Poor people in SA are pushed into tiny areas. Lots of tourists come here to drive around and go 4x4-ing and so on. I'm near Cape Town.

Yeah, fair enough. Thanks for your time, I'll look into it!

> We have our share of problems, but compared to the problems of other countries, I can't help but feel they're significantly less

Covid camps and police take down for people jogging without masks did not convince you to move? I guess nothing will

Instead of pointing out the problems, which provides nothing constructive to the discussion, can you please provide alternate countries which you believe might be better.

In addition, can you please also outline the problems of these countries, so we can properly evaluate and understand their problems objectively.

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