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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

OK, assume some old lady currently owns a house if SF that would cost $1M to buy. She bought it, say, 50 years ago, say, for $50k. It's an impressive 20x ROI, no doubt.

But does it make this old lady wealthy, if she is not selling her house and moving to Arkansas, where $1M would go much farther than in SF? May it be that she's struggling with her day-to-day expenses in SF?

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Wouldn’t the argument then be that it shouldn’t matter to her if her house goes down a bit in value since it wasn’t liquid wealth anyways?

So it’s a win-win in a way - either you’re rich enough to pay the mortgage on an expensive property in which case lowering property values in expensive locations is a bit redistributive or it won’t affect you really in which case who cares?

Net worth calculators[^1] would put this woman at the 88th percentile of wealth in the US. Yes, I think that counts as wealthy.

I obviously think it's mostly absurd if you think a woman who bought 50 years ago in SF has a house worth only 50K. The vast majority of houses in SF that would have cost 50K, 50 years ago. The average home in 1976 was $65K,[^2] and the median home price last year in SF was $1.4M, at effectively the 90th percentile of American net worth. If you don't think top 10% of wealth in America counts as wealthy, then I don't know what to tell you.

[^1]: https://dqydj.com/net-worth-percentile-calculator/

[^2]: https://imgur.com/1976-article-on-housing-prices-sf-bay-area...

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