Comment by andriamanitra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andriamanitra | Hacker News Reader

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> this is a funny statement considering wages in finland vs real estate prices. ive been told by a top 5% income finn that buying a house is not really possible for most people there currently. you can only inherit. the wages are lower, the taxes much higher, and real estate more expensive.

Income is lower but actually taxes are fairly similar in the lower income brackets thanks to progressive taxation (and I'm not too concerned about the top earners starving). Buying a home in Helsinki – which is the only place in Finland where real estate prices are actually a problem – takes about 9 year median income, quite similar to cities in the US. Outside the Helsinki metropolitan area real estate prices are not bad at all. Either way if you're top 5% income you can easily afford to buy a house.

> of course you probably mean the technical "affordable housing" definition which just means housing for anyone making under median area income. the money to fund these things comes from somewhere, and it seems to typically always be the middle class.

Abundance of apartments affects prices for everyone including the middle class. The only ones not benefiting from affordable housing are (literal) rent-seekers, the people and companies owning real estate purely as an investment.

>Outside the Helsinki metropolitan area real estate prices are not bad at all.

outside the area where 30% of the entire country lives? ok. the actual number of years for helinski metropolitan area appears to be 10, and is higher than boston and nyc which are both INCREDIBLY expensive places to live. note that is generously comparing the actual cities to the metrpolitan area of helsinki.

the next largest metropolitan area is tampere, which is 6.9 years at median salary. this is very slightly cheaper than where i live which is also a very expensive city to live in. the city i live in is straight up not affordable to buy a house in at median salary.

>Either way if you're top 5% income you can easily afford to buy a house.

they are able to, but this wasnt the point of what they said. you have to be top 5% to comfortably own. doing some number crunching with chatgpt (lets pretend its accurate) to own at median salary in tampere requires more than 50% of your post tax income. that's with a 20% downpayment on a 300k house.

if i got any of those numbers wrong, feel free to correct. in the interest of time, they were done with chatgpt. i believe the prompts and data asked for should be simple enough to be accurate.

>and I'm not too concerned about the top earners starving

should also be noted that this top earning income is the equivalent of 80k USD. if they lived in the US they would be making double that. in the us, this is near median in a lot of places, and quite attainable in most.

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