Comment by jonahrd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonahrd | Hacker News Reader

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Urbanisation is a trend across the entire globe for many more reasons than just wanting to live in a few attractive areas.

And it's absolutely necessary for us to urbanize instead of the wasteful way we use our land, in order to avoid the impending climate, biodiversity, and energy crises.

Anyway --- with this square footage argument. End of the day, I'm still priced out of a house, whether it'd be a big one or a small one. I don't really care about the price per square footage, I care about the ability to get a roof over my head.

Edit: Actually, can you provide sources for this? From what I can find, home prices have been anything but flat, even adjusting for inflation: https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/ I have a hard time believing that in ~12 years we grew the entire housing stock square footage by 33%

I also found some data that strongly disputes your claim that the US is the 5th lowest house price to salary ratio: https://www.statista.com/statistics/237529/price-to-income-r..., in fact it seems to be comfortably in the top 10 _highest_

https://infogram.com/1pqdpn20vkmlelcq6qx7jzwz9pf00g9xnq5

https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/

as for your link - easy, what's understood by "house" in Luxembourg is usually a "Soviet style apartment block". You need to be a billionaire to own a typical US-sized single family house there, these are passed down the generations from the people who were rich 100+ years ago (but granted, they are usually not built of shit).

https://www.numbeo.com/property-investment/rankings_by_count...

This rating assumes same housing everywhere, not just "average house in a given country". In this case, easily U.S. can be among top 5, because being very rich, and as people say here in the same thread "everything apart from housing and healthcare is cheap anyway", a bigger chunk of expenses can go there.

By another metric - "mortgage vs income" - U.S. is 6th best out of 106 large countries. 50% of the countries (that is, omitting 1/4 worst and 1/4 best) are between 1.7x and 5x worse.

Housing is much more accessible in the U.S. than in just about any country, even if you correct by per capita GDP, that is, it is more accessible than the per capita GDP would imply.

Did you by chance look at the charts in this?

For example, the western part of the country's $/sqft going from $140 to $220 from 2012 to 2022 -- including inflation adjustment?

Sorry but, "housing prices have only gone up by 20% in the last 10 years in areas that are hemorrhaging job opportunities and education!" is not a good counterargument.

I see. This article compares GDP vs housing prices, which isn't a surprise that US fares very well because the US is stellar at GDP growth.

But GDP is _absolutely irrelevant_ to the average citizen's purchasing power / income.

The particular chart i posted a separate link for, uses inflation adjustment, not GDP adjustment.

And sure, every country has a growing segregation between attractive, expensive areas and unattractive, cheap ones. That's normal. Fitting into attractive ones is a matter of competition and only the best few will - there can't be a place for everyone there no matter how the economy is doing and how high/low are the taxes "for the rich" (because it's not the rich who are buying up the housing).

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