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Comment by ntnsndr | Hacker News Reader

There is no abundance like being able to afford housing while you are still young enough to grow a family. Chatbots and streaming services are no substitute for that.

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Are you willing to forgo your abundance and live with the things you parents and grandparents had in order to get that house, or are you wanting both? It's always hard to have both.

How is that relevant? Houses aren't more expensive because of improved technology. They are more expensive because we chose to make them more expensive via certain developmental policies like car-dependence and suburban sprawl.

It's a mixed bag. At the time, car-dependence and sprawl were the solution.

They still are, anyone claiming we can move away from them is ignorant. They're city folk who have never seriously tried living in a rural area in the US, or had a need for getting to other cities on a regular basis.

I wouldn't go that far. It's also possible to do denser, transit-oriented, actual urban, development. Which is what happened naturally everywhere prior to WW2.

I'd also say that the "rural vs. city folk" dichotomy is nonsense for several reasons, not least because The Sprawl is not at all rural. Indeed, continued sprawl destroys rural areas, converting farmland into tract homes, parking lots, Home Depots, and Starbuckses. Rural towns -- actual towns, with Main Streets, the stuff of Small Town America -- used to exist, and sprawl is its enemy.

But, yes, continued development is absolutely necessary. Home building has not kept up with population growth.

You're just wrong here.

In a rural area your grocery store may be a 10-15 minute drive or more, good luck establishing a bus route for that.

I think we're talking about different things. I'm talking about the process that turned orchards outside San Francisco into Palo Alto, Mountain View, and I-280. I'm talking about what turned Connecticut or New Jersey outside NYC into a collection of parking lots and onramps. That which shat itself all over Virginia horse country outside DC. The entire essence of Dallas and Houston -- of basically all Sunbelt cities. That is The Sprawl. Each of those places could be a Tokyo or a Paris, but it isn't. Americans lack the organizational capacity, the taste, the standards, and the ambition.

I'm not talking about Hiko, Nevada or Rapelje, Montana.

yes, if you turn a rural area into a non-rural area, suddenly you can do things that you can't do in rural areas.

In other news, water is wet.

So your answer is no, you're not willing to forgo the abundance your parents and grandparents never knew at the same age. Asking how is relevant is just a deflection.

Have 1 phone per family, get married at a young age, have 1 TV that's small or maybe no TV, no computer, no game console, 1 crappy car that you know how to fix, cook cheap food at home, then buy your crappy starter home of 2-3 bedroom with 1 bathroom.

Somethings cost more some cost drastically less. At 22 you probably owned more clothes than your parents did at that age. You probably owned more if everything than they did. We live in a land of abundance of trivial trash that no one is willing to give up to get that house they go on and on about. This is trash the previous generations never had as an option or they would have fallen prey to it as well. So apparently we have much more disposable income than prior generations even if we don't have the same income levels.

if you add all those things together, they don't even come close to the increased cost of housing. My middle class parents had one TV and entertainment center growing up and it cost around $2k and that's early 90s money. we have 3 big flat screens now and they don't add up to $2k and that's in today's dollars. We certainly eat out more than they did, but groceries were a lot cheaper back then too. This isn't a "Dave Ramsey" type problem for most people. All the avocado toast and Starbucks you could possibly eat and drink won't add up to being able to afford a $1 million starter home.

This is a very silly comment when you look at actual prices. Even adjusting for inflation house prices have doubled or tripled in a lot of places while wages have remained stagnant.

No amount of scrimping and saving will overcome the fact that the house I grew up in is now $600,000 more than they bought it for when the average wage is like $55,000.

I’m not even a generational doomer type. Millennials and Gen Z will probably broadly be ok in the long run. But pretending that not owning a house is a problem of excess is just stupid when looking at the math.

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