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Comment by psadauskas | Hacker News Reader

> she will be able to buy a house if she wants one, the economy will always be good for people who are work smart and hard, etc.

Yeah, I don't think that's true at all. Its just anecdata, but I have several friends in their 30s for which that's just not the case. They're smart and work (harder than I do, just not in tech), but the price of a down payment on a home is going up faster than they're able to save, and they already live relatively frugally. We live in a major metro area, not a particularly expensive one, but the same is true for most of my cousins in the same age range spread across the country.

I feel like my age group (mid 40s) is the last one that could afford home ownership, and me only because I got lucky by working in tech. Other people I know that are better educated and work harder than me are just shut out of the housing market, without some kind of windfall.

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I'll add my own anecdata here. My older kids are in their late 20s and one has bought a home and the other is buying a new build home this year.

My youngest is 18, the greatest consumer of social media of my 4 children, and she's convinced she won't be able to buy a home like her under-30 siblings are doing right now.

Sounds very much like a YMMV situation, but it feels like social media has influenced my youngest to believe otherwise.

If someone is convinced that all housing is going to stay/become extravagantly expensive, shouldn't they get into real estate development to cash in on the opportunity? So they can build houses/condos/etc. Seems like they could become architects, or real estate agents, or work for (or own) a construction company. Maybe designing robots that build houses. Or work for a REIT.

There’s a difference between being the owner of a construction business and being an employee. The business owner assumes the risks and upside if real estate is to become expensive, but the employees are mostly affected by supply and demand of other workers - I.e. even if there is high demand of workers in the real estate sector, if there’s a high supply of workers to satisfy the demand, there won’t be a big increase in salary for them.

That said, it does seem people generally are implicitly bullish on housing prices becoming more expensive over time. That’s how to interpret the fact that the first significant investment of many people's savings is a house.

If people held the contrary opinion (that real estate in general are going to deprecate in value) then the idea of buying a house may not be so ubiquitous .

I notice a distinct lack of jobs like plumber or carpenter in that list. In some sense my parents are home builders (I'd say it's like a hobby for them), so I have some familiarity with the process. I even fill in some of the labor on occasion. It really doesn't require a lot of administrative work (though they avoid building in places with lots of codes at this point), but a ton of low-paid labor. I don't think any amount of money could ever get me to do concrete work, and pretty much every job sucks in South Texas in the summer, but roofing is the worst on that count. Plumbing and electrician probably pay a bit better at least, but it's still work that is often done by immigrants, so there is some competition.

I hesitated to use the word "construction" on purpose, because invariably someone on HN chimes in how back breaking manual labor is and how it wears out your body prematurely, etc.. :)

>I don't think any amount of money could ever get me to do concrete work

How complex is that work? Might it be a good candidate for machines/robots?

I'd think if it was amenable to mechanization, that would have happened in the last century or so. I distinctly remember Mike Rowe doing the job on his show "Dirty Jobs" so that might be worth looking up if you want a good picture of it.

There's plenty of machines involved to transport concrete via trucks and pumps and all that, but it always seems to end up with some grunt holding the nozzle and then lots of labor to ensure there are no voids and the surface is smooth.

I don't really know that much about robots, but the thing about houses is that nothing is really terribly exact - lots of stuff is just off by half an inch or something like that, so a lot of the work just ends up being somewhat custom. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing robots would handle well.

Maybe there's more room for it in prefab type construction? But of course there's a mobile home stigma there.

You are totally right housing prices have skyrocketed relative to wages, but you cant just tell kids they are doomed. There have always been good times and hard times and there are always people who succeed or fail regardless.

> There have always been good times and hard times and there are always people who succeed or fail regardless.

That is a weird statement. What does it mean when times are good or bad then?

If times are bad, and it feels like they are, then less people are going to succeed. I'm not sure pretending that problems don't exist improves your odds of being in the succeed category.

“I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.

But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.”

― Richard Feynman

> but you cant just tell kids they are doomed

But you can expose them to broader view points;

Why is owning a house a goal, or dilemma that would lead to depression? This is perhaps the "American" part; how many countries is home and automobile ownership a top coming of age marker?

Environmental disasters are going to happen (especially in top article of Florida) how can a kid take part through volunteering or voting for non disaster policies?

Economic disaster ^^ see above ^^ but yes, America has not grasped with demographic shift with baby boomer retirements; and a future lack of workers; this is where parents can teach children self sufficiency.

The background problem of all this is what have been ingrained in our culture that money = success = happiness. Is not that they will or will not own a house, a car or a yatch, is the sense that they will never be able to be happy if they don’t get any of those. How many people follow careers that they are not interested in the least but they have “growth potential” or are a “path to success”. Now on top of that they see in social media people who “have everything” and are living the life and smiling 24/7 and they don’t understand that everything is just a show, books, radio, movies, tv, youtube it’s all the same, reality is on this side of the screen not in that.

Owning a home is a goal because the alternative is lifetime wage slavery to fund a landlord’s lavish lifestyle.

People don’t want to be exploited and see home ownership as a way to get out of that cycle of exploitation and building enough wealth to someday retire.

Paying mortgage interest is even worse slavery in my limited experience. A mortgage really ties you down.

> building enough wealth

Our current environment looks like that if you are older. Thinking of your house as savings is weird: personally I think you need a house and retirement savings - and safe retirement savings is an oxymoron because it depends on the demographics and economy.

I'm not sure that younger people can rely on the idea that their house will be worth enough because it depends on population demographics - housing is a Ponzi scheme where the older population sells there home to younger people until at some point the youngest person risks being left with something worthless: Japan and Italy have houses for ¥0 or €1 due to aging population.

https://edition.cnn.com/travel/patrica-italy-town-one-euro-h...

> but you cant just tell kids they are doomed

Lying to them when they can see the evidence to the contrary is better?

I approach life thinking that I should do the best for myself and my family regardless of what broad societal problems are. I want to raise my kids to be the same way. There is no way I am going to raise them thinking they should just quit.

It isn't a lie, I don't know what the future will be but I know there will be people who thrive and people who wither.

I’m trying to imagine, as someone that was an adult for the 2008 crash, saying “the economy will always be good for people that work hard and smart” out loud with a straight face.

It would have to be either

a) a complete fabrication or

b) a little play on words where “working smart and hard” is the load-bearing bit of phrasing that implies that any negative impacts from economic downturn would strictly reflect on a person’s work ethic and/or intelligence.

“Don’t worry about the future, your net worth will reflect your personal worth regardless of external economic conditions!” sounds way more depressing than “the economic hardships you were born during and have seen in your short lifetime are not likely to evaporate by the time you enter the workforce”

Relevant to b) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy

> There is no way I am going to raise them thinking they should just quit.

I'm not sure it's a choice between telling them they're doomed and should quit, and misleading them (if not lying), is it?

They are not doomed.

I don't think so either. Perhaps I shouldn't have quoted this particular bit. All I meant was, ignoring the reality is worse than facing and dealing with it.

I'm not sure if you intended it or not, but it reads like a justification of the Nobel Lie[1].

I don't think the truth can be contained once it's out. Truth, of course, wins out in the end.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=conventional+97+mortgage&ia...

Is it easy to find one that doesn't require private mortgage insurance? I remember that being a sticking point when I looked into this in the past few years.

The problem I see with requiring such insurance is that I'd already be paying whatever interest rate on a higher loan amount for the same 15- or 30-year period and it's rather insulting when a high credit score isn't a signal that the loan is low risk. How many years of literally 0 late bill payments do I need before I can reasonably expect a bank to assume that I won't miss the payments that I sign up for? (Undefined, unless one has the 20% up front, then 0.) It's a bit of a joke.

Anyway, I guess that got a bit rant-y; just saying that this feels more like exploitation by banks than banks offering a reasonable option. It lowers one's purchasing power unless one is able to save for a down payment.

I didn't know I was supposed to be insulted by PMI, so I just paid it.

Why should the lender take on more risk because you don't like it?

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