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Comment by al_borland | Hacker News Reader

When I moved to an area for work I wasn’t planning to live long-term I ended up buying the cheapest sofa in the store. I think it was around $270. After a prolonged illness I grew more and more displeased with it, to the point that I went and bought a better one after I was better. I bought from a place that advertised the inside of the sofa more than the outside. It was all about the build quality and how long it would last. Ended up coming out to around $3k if I remember correctly, but it has a lifetime warranty on everything but the cushions, and even the cushions after 6-7 years of daily use are just now only starting to get to the point of feeling like they are beginning to break in.

Quality can still be found, it just can’t be assumed. I think that’s the case for far too many things these days.

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I've been wanting to buy nice furniture for a very long time... unfortunately the housing crisis has prevented my from ever having a sense of permanence. If I had known I'd live in my last place for nearly a decade I would have purchased nice things, but as it stands, until I have a mortgage of my own, I refuse to spend good money on something I may need to replace next year.

Sofas, perhaps especially, are pretty hard to fit for non built-in furniture. I bought a used sofa off my brother. (Ironically, their replacements ended up being terrible because they lasted about a year with their dogs.)

I was also very lucky though. I thought I could configure the sectional in a couple different ways. Turned out I rolled the dice the right way because I couldn't. And only discovered this after many months because I was on crutches at the time and couldn't do anything about the sofa sitting in my garage.

I'm glad I'm not the only one.

The buying up of precious housing as investments by non-residents should mostly be banned, starting with institutional and overseas investors.

AirBnb should also be banned. And the people who profited off that startup, who must've known they were creating illegal hotels and destroying rental markets, should be hit with devastating fines, maybe also imprisoned.

We should just build lots of housing.

Lets do both :)

I really don't expect that appointing a committee to decide if your use of a space is acceptable is going to improve the problems caused in large part by having a committee decide how space should be used.

I think my committee is good and other committee is bad

>The buying up of precious housing as investments by non-residents should mostly be banned, starting with institutional and overseas investors.

What's the issue with them buying houses as investments, as long as they're being rented out? If that's the case, their net effect on the housing supply is zero.

>maybe also imprisoned.

I find it extremely disturbing that people are effectively demanding for bill of attainders for jail sentences for what are basically zoning violations.

>What's the issue with them buying houses as investments, as long as they're being rented out?

Because it prevents people from owning and now have to be permanent renters because of somebody's greedy rent seeking behavior.

Sounds like the actual problem is that landlords can engage in "greedy rent seeking behavior" at all. Allowing people to opt out, but only if they can afford a 6 figure downpayment and keep 7 figure amounts of their wealth parked in a single non-productive asset that's highly correlated with their job prospects is an imperfect solution to say the least. Everyone deserve protections from "greedy rent seeking behavior", not just the people who are in a position to buy.

How does that happen when all the houses are being purchased as investments to rent out (or not, as often happens)?

Good lord man what first time homebuyer is putting down $100k down payments? I just bought a nice house in a well established in demand neighborhood and my total cost down was less than $30k. No assistance program, no special deal, definitely not a cheap house oof this market.

Are you trying to buy 2M+ houses?

Was your <$30K down a <20% down payment and are you paying PMI as a result? I totally understand that %20 down is a big pile of money to conjure up, but PMI wouldn't have been cheap for us had we been unable to conjure it.

Our cost to close was under $100k with a 20% down payment, but still substantial. And yes, we were first time homebuyers. Obviously we did not buy anything approaching 2M.

With closing costs of $10k-15k, 100k doesn't even break a half million at 20% down. That's (sadly) not even table stakes in e.g. most parts of Boston.

We were ready to drop 20% on the house because like you I was also scared of PMI but when we ran the numbers with the bank the cost was small enough that it didn't make one iota of difference in the long run so we paid 5% down and have a very flush emergency fund.

Someone with good credit and currently renting would be nuts to "wait and save" for even 1 year because the total cost of PMI was like 6mo of our rent and accounting for paying it off over time with inflation it's probably even less than that in real dollars.

Maybe we got lucky with PMI but googling a bit it doesn't seem that out of line with the calculators.

Al Capone got a jail sentence for not paying his taxes.

There's no bill of attainder involved when you break a law that existed before you were even born.

This is quite common trope here among young generation, feeling left out of property ownership like its some basic human right guaranteed by UN charter. Like previous generations were not left out of same/other stuff as well. That the post you respond to is not flagged tells you quite something... Too often these folks have outright communist mindset to set the world as it suits their current needs, which to somebody like me being raised in pretty hard oppression and practically slavery from russians is a proper insult.

There are whole highly developed countries (higher than US for example in terms of personal freedom, ie Switzerland) who simply don't have home ownership as something usual and folks focus on actual quality aspects of living. Populations are consistently among the happiest (and healthiest) in the world.

Correlation != causation but maybe not joining property rat race (which was always the case, just tools were few and apart for most) has some significant benefits. And if its just about safe investing then we moved topic completely elsewhere, back to good ol' universal greed.

Countries where middle class people rent have pretty "communist" tenant protection regimes. Being perpetually 30 days from a potential eviction is not a position most people can or should be okay with.

Feels a bit pointless to explain basics but I'll bite for the others - I dont know which country is like that, definitely not Switzerland, not Germany, France, Czech republic nor Slovakia (listing personal multiyear experiences).

Neither of them has any (significant) rent control, definitely abolute 0 for young and able, and people have rental agreements which run easily decade(s).

Ie in France its the opposite - owners are properly scared of long term rentals, since rentees can trivially just stop paying and it will take you 6+ month of courts to have an attempt on evicion. They can trash the place and no real recourse. Not empty threat neither, everybody knows such a case personally. Thus everybody -> airbnbs. Blame the system if you grok the situation, french one is one of the worst in the west.

Slovakia and Czech Republic and Germany all have tenant protections. That is not the same as rent control, but you can't be kicked out randomly.

> Too often these folks have outright communist mindset to set the world as it suits their current needs, which to somebody like me being raised in pretty hard oppression and practically slavery from russians is a proper insult.

The cost of houses in my area went up $100k less than 2 years after I bought my house. The cost of food where I doubled in less than 20 years. Rent went up $1000.

Sorry that people wanting "affordable housing" is an insult to you. I'm sure when the Neo-Maoists promise to massacre landlords, the masses of rentcells out there are surely going to take your sob story seriously and choose to live in good American style "practically slavery" and choose not to join them. Surely they think your comment comes across as empathetic and understanding, not callous and dismissive.

Be careful what you say here about businesses that try to "disrupt an industry" aka "operate quasi-legally until someone tries to stop them."

> starting with institutional and overseas investors.

This would do next to nothing. The landlords buying up real estate are mom-and-pops with fewer than 10 properties. Which makes sense, because residential property is a pretty decent passive income that's only accessible to people with wealth but are not a good asset for large institutions.

Otherwise banks wouldn't sell foreclosed homes at a discount, they'd hold onto them if it was more profitable.

(1) https://www.housingwire.com/articles/no-wall-street-investor...

>The landlords buying up real estate are mom-and-pops with fewer than 10 properties.

That might be true, but there are lots of companies that own more than 1000 homes. 1-3 should be the limit.

You might want to read into data like this (1) to get a better view of how much housing stock those companies own as a proportion of the total market (it's very little). The data is kind of hard to get, because many small landlords have incorporated as LLCs/LLPs and they make up the bulk of "corporate" ownership.

But it's pretty clear that the big time owners like institutional investors/REITs/etc own less than 2% of all units.

(1) https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R47332.pdf

Airbnb was never meant to be what it has become. It started out as an easy way for people to rent out a spare room. The name “Airbnb” came from air mattresses on the floor.

It’s the get-rich-quick types who decided to be professional Airbnb landlords. Short term leases make no sense at all to anyone actual invested in rental properties, without something like Airbnb to back it. A long term tenant who pays on time should be the dream of every landlord, but with all the Airbnbs, it’s not even considered.

I don’t know if this is the fault of the early investors, but I’m all for pulling the rug out from under the the people who own dozens of properties for the sole purpose of doing Airbnb. They are likely extremely leveraged, due to the low interest rates from years past, so they’d be screwed and be forced to sell fast.

I agree on the international investors as well. Priority should always go to people who will actual live in a place. All those multi-million dollar places in NYC that sit vacant are a horrible. What’s the point of housing if no one is there to live in it.

I’m 40 years old and trying to buy a home in a high COLA city with my partner and our child. We are currently renting. Everything is either absurdly priced or surrounded by people of color and crime.

This realization has convinced me that it’s not a supply problem. I go on Zillow and there’s HUNDREDS of affordable condos and single family homes and 2 flats on offer. I can buy many of them cash. But they are in the ghetto. And ghettos are not some sort of act of god or timey-wimey opopsie-dasie. They are deliberate creations of a society.

Similarly, I look on Zillow at houses in second-tier cities an hour or two drive and everything is reasonable. My partner and I work in person five days a week, and yet millennials and Gen Zers working remotely except for once a month have no legitimate reason to be in high COLA markets except for their love of marg towers.

It’s not a supply problem. It’s an “I’m a racist white person and I’m okay with the carceral industrial complex” problem.

All the crime I see in these areas that frankly makes living in them a threat to my female partner’s survival is due to 60+ years of stupid welfare policy and 50+ years of the War on Drugs removing fathers from homes and incentivizing criminal culture.

Good furniture holds value especially buying used good furniture. If it doesn’t work out next year you can sell it for about what you paid if you haven’t destroyed it. Hard wood holds up to abuse much better than the particle board stuff too.

Quality ain't cheap, and cheap ain't quality.

In furniture, you definitely get what you pay for...or not. I've found anything <$300 is going to be nothing but fake materials like manufactured woods (if not even just veneer covered cardboard) and horrible cushion/fabric.

Anything decent doesn't really start until ~$1k, and anything in the $3k range you mentioned starts to become heirloom quality. As with anything, these are YMMV, but serves as a fast basis for my experience

Unfortunately the premise of the article is that you can now easily drop $1k+ on a sofa that looks good on Instagram, but is constructed of particleboard and falls apart when you look at it sideways.

You can drop way more than $1k and be stuck with something that's really kind of crappy.

You have to know enough to know who is actually building the good stuff, and who is building good-looking marketing.

I have bought things online and been burned by the not know the who part. I'm now to the point that if it is anything I will be spending a lot of time on, I'm not buying it unless I can see it in person. One vendor's medium firmness might be another's firm. Other furniture is less critical to me, so I haven't put the in-person only rule for that stuff

In-person seems like it should be a hard requirement for anything a person will sit on. There is no way to tell anything just by looking at a picture.

The sofa I got had one in-store that was cut in half at all levels, so the construction and materials could all be seen. Any company doing that is probably going to be pretty solid, and if not, it should be obvious.

> In-person seems like it should be a hard requirement

should but yet online sales of furniture is not a small market

A lot of people these days are into the mode of order online. Certainly there are a ton of podcasts that offer deals on some of the online furniture companies. I don't think I'd personally do it but then my parents probably wouldn't have ordered a lot of stuff online that I do. (But furniture and big electronics appliances are arguably much more of a hassle to return than other things.)

I’m actually much happier ordering appliances online vs furniture- because appliances I can evaluate in multiple ways that don’t need me to sit on it.

Unfortunately some very comfortable furniture turns out to not be long lasting, as I discovered, even when moderately pricey. Steel frame sofas can bend and break under repeated use because the steel is so thin - if you can bend it by hand, it will fail eventually.

Well, yeah, appliances. Even if I order one at my local Lowe's, as I just did, it's not like I'm going to run a bunch of controlled dishwashing tests with it.

Durability of furniture is harder to measure even if you try it out.

YMMV also includes adjusting for today's $. My $300 is today's $1k. So it still stands

Did you last buy a couch in 1982?

Me? I haven't bought a couch. I'm on the same couch I grew up on at my parent's house that was bought circa 1978, so essentially, yes. Solid wood frame. Re-stuffed cushions. My couch can be found in those "If you recognize this, you're old" memes. AKA, I'm old

Edit: re-reading almost reads if I'm still at my parent's house couch surfing. I'm not a zillenial. I'm in my place with that furniture from back then.

I ask because $300 -> $1000 is roughly 1982 to today.

I bought a leather sofa in 2012 that was priced at £389. Today (2024) it’s priced at £899. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And it's not only sofas. People still conflate price with quality, and this is massively exploited.

You can see that from the number of "small brand" insta-entrepreneurs. People will readily shell $80 for the latest trendy item they saw in a sponsored insta-ad, believing they're buying a branded product. In reality, it's the same $20-$30 item sold on TEMU, with a brand name slapped on it.

> Quality ain't cheap, and cheap ain't quality.

The problem here is, that expensive doesn't mean quality.

Buying a cheap ikea piece and replacing it in a few years might still be a better choice than overpaying for an expensive piece, that's the same quality as ikea, but with a different tag on it (both 'brand tag' and 'price tag').

The ikea stuff also seems to be perfectly fine. Almost my entire apartment I ikea stuff and I’m yet to have anything fail. With some of the oldest bits being the Malm draws which are about 15 years old now and still perfectly fine.

Sure, if you move them around a lot or leave them in the sun they will degrade, but just using them as normal they seem to last way longer than you’d think.

All my Ikea stuff has been perfectly fine as well.

A photo fell off the wall and put a rather large hole in a Lack coffee table one time. We were pretty amazed that the photo frame won. It was a $25 table. I could buy many for the price of something nice.

Having small kids around, and seeing how they play, learn to use a fork, etc, I feel like we made the right choice buying cheaper. Plus what kid doesn't want to play at the table mom and dad let them sticker bomb?

I still have the Lack end table I bought for $7 20 years ago.

At some point between then and now they changed how they made them. They have more empty space inside now.

I have seen people using these on YouTube as a server rack substitute. They are still frighteningly cheap after 20 years.

The problem with Ikea is once you have to move them around. Or if you have kids/dogs jumping up and down the sofa, etc.

The particleboard connections aren't very sturdy.

Well sure, but in many cases, you can go to a "proper" furniture store, buy a piece that is a couple of times more expensive than the one from ikea, and get the same particle board and same shitty connections... especially with stuff where the wood is hidden (eg. sofas).

Also the assembly for ikea stuff is usually perfect.. everything aligns to the last millimeter... which again, I can't say for much more expensive furniture pieces.

Agreed, there's a big gap between Ikea and the next step up.

And most people can't differentiate between quality (nor should we expect them to!).

"Proper" furniture stores you find in malls and outlets are generally high margin crap. There's lots of soft scams out there.

There's a reason many people go back towards antiques and similar.

I feel like beds are in the same category. There is a sea of choice, but very hard to distinguish which is actually higher quality... or if the price difference has tangible benefits (better sleep, etc.).

IKEA stuff is also relatively easy to "harden" with some extra strategically placed metal brackets from Home Depot. For instance you can make a particle board bookshelf very sturdy by screwing some L-brackets on the back corners. Corner braces screwed under the shelves will likewise keep them from bowing under the weight of books.

It's a few extra dollars and will make the pieces survive a move and just generally feel sturdier. It's not a replacement for "good" furniture but will make the cheap stuff much better.

yeah, add lots of glue and metal L profiles or some nice decorative wood. Good glue alone makes a better attachment than the screws and nails but you do have to glue it before it gets wobbly

> the assembly for ikea stuff is usually perfect.. everything aligns to the last millimeter...

What? How?

I’ve moved a lot in the last 15 years and always defaulting to ikea for convenience. “Fits together well” isn’t what I’d use to describe their furniture.

>Also the assembly for ikea stuff is usually perfect.. everything aligns to the last millimeter... which again, I can't say for much more expensive furniture pieces.

Probably because the ikea stuff you bought tend to be particleboard and the "expensive furniture pieces" are solid wood. Solid wood tend to wrap/deform more due to moisture than particleboard, which means even if they're drilled with millimeter precision at the factory they end up not aligning when it reaches your house. From personal experience the solid wood furniture I got ikea were definitely not aligned "to the last millimeter".

When I was shopping for a TV console, I went to a "proper" furniture shop and checked out console in the 150 to 200 euro range. Zero consideration for cable management and doors slammed hard when you closed them. Then I went to IKEA and bought a BESTÅ system that totalled like 130€ or something. Soft-closing doors, cable management holes and the lot. Was very happy with my BESTÅ after seeing what other stores had in a similar price range.

IKEA is highly variable. I’m writing this while sitting on a leather loveseat that’s more than a decade old and holding up great. I also have a chest of drawers that, despite my best efforts during construction, immediately began to sag.

Their expensive furniture is good mid-range stuff, the cheap stuff is cheap.

Yeah the cheap stuff is on par with up to 10x cheaper stuff on Amazon (you just have to deal with drop shipped branding and dodgy/no instructions), the more expensive stuff has better quality competitors IMO.

Such as Dwell.co.uk, coincidentally, completely unrelated afaict to OP. They make veneer-grade non-flat-pack furniture (and upholstered stuff) at a mid-high Ikea price. Made similar I think, or any number (including local showrooms) of suppliers of either drop shipped or wholesale manufactured oak+paint-grade, it seems quite common/popular. I have a couple of items from cotswoldco.com for example that have absolutely matching (but differently named) pieces available from an unrelated local independent shop, that I might otherwise assume had a small manufacturing operation too.

Dwell.co.uk is sadly now part of DFS, so whether the quality and range continues...

I realise it's unclear because of the position in the sentence & my lazy phrasing, and doesn't read well, but that was capital-M Made, made.com. As in 'Similar to Made I think, [...]'. (Can't edit it now.)

This is part of the enshittification of everything.

Not long ago you could be a good brand an rely on it being good. Now most of them are just charging for the brand and not providing higher quality.

I am in the UK, I have also inherited Sri Lankan furniture from my parents and grandparents and I have lived there as well. The decline in quality is the same in both those countries. I guess it is global.

Yeah, that's the real problem. My wife bought a bunch of furniture a couple of years ago that was billed online as "solid wood." It definitely isn't. We ended up getting one piece for free because the one they originally sent and then the replacement were damaged. I pushed her to get a refund on it all but I think she had spent so much time looking for good stuff that she was just tired of it.

It wasn't cheap. I believe the coffee table was close to $1,000.

The entire problem is that “decently expensive, good quality, but luxury/fashion” largely doesn’t exist any more.

In the U.S. you can drop ~$5k on a Williams Sonoma et al sectional and get a cheaply made piece of junk. I've been happy with Maiden Home for around the same price. Wirecutter (now NY Times) has a couple good couch-buying articles.

We had an ikea klippan for around 10 years, and had to give it up when moving.

During these 10 years I haven't sat on any sofa, be in office lobbies, hotels, showrooms, friends' home that made me feel like it could be a significant upgrade upon my 400 USD sofa.

Sure that might not be usual, and I actually wouldn't recommend any other Ikea sofa in general (many were crappy when we were choosing ours). But price and marketting ("made in XXXX") is still only one factor in the wether the product will be any good.

A chair is a chair unless you get an actual office chair, but even then everyone copied herman miller already. I’ve sat in five figure chairs and there isn’t any magic there other than its provenance I suppose. So many of the cheap chairs being sold today are actually shameless copies of mid century design chairs that people still pay a ton of money for. You might as well pay literally a hundreth the price and get the same experience going generic eames.

I've purchased two sofas, one for $1200 from a trendy company and I returned it the day after it was delivered. And then one for $3500 from Design Within Reach that is absolutely terrific and built to outlast me. I'm not advertising for that store, I'm just agreeing that quality is still available but it was never inexpensive. Mentally I compare furniture to the quality of stuff my parents and grandparents had, and I remember that the couch my parents bought in the 90s cost $2000 then.

On the other hand I bought the current sofa some 20 years ago for about 600 Euro and it is still performing like day one. Probably a design failure. ;)

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