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Comment by hiddencost | Hacker News Reader

Rents are still too damn high. The shortage will be over when rent is less than 10% of take home pay for a lower class laborer in NYC.

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> when rent is less than 10% of take home pay

If that were ever true, people would chose to spend a higher percentage to get a nicer, bigger, or better located place.

Unlike many goods, there is practically no upper bound on what you can spend on housing. You can't buy a better phone for $3000, but you can continue to buy a better home up to $50 million (possibly more).

If there wasn't anyone renting at the high prices, then they would sit empty, but someone must be renting them. Otherwise the price would have to come down or they stay empty.

Has rent ever been 10% of take-home pay of a lower-class laborer anywhere in history? Asking because this goal doesn't seem very achievable, but I could be wrong

it was 2% in the soviet union

Except Soviet Union made you work for near slave wages. I would choose NYC over it 100% of the time.

2% of slave wages is actually even more impressive.

explain. if i dont pay my slaves what they are worth, why is it a good deal to take more money from them?

Easy: they weren't slaves, that's just anti-communist rhetoric.

polemic? not explanation.

They were not allowed to leave. Most of their products of labor was taken. They were slaves.

And yes, I'm against communism partly because of that. It's an awful ideology.

I think if you are looking for slaves, you should look at American history. What products of your labor do you keep in this country if you are not a business owner?

I am not a fan of all the choices the USSR made, but you are mischaracterizing a society under siege by the capitalist west.

Ah yea, it looks like that's true. I didn't calculate the actual percentages, but it was very low. Thanks for the heads up -

> Demand for housing also remains heavy because Soviet rents, heavily subsidized by the Government, are very low. A modest two‐room apartment will en for 6 to 8 rubles ($8 to $11.30) a month, including some utilities. A four‐room apartment wil rent for 14 to 16 rubles ($18.20 to $22.30). Apartments in more modern buildings cost more because of additional services.

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/11/11/archives/in-soviet-ingenu...

Sure... if you could actually find something to rent, as the article makes clear.

I doubt it. If we go by the guideline that your housing costs shouldn't exceed 30% of your salary (which I usually understood to be pre-tax), converting that to post-tax for a relatively low-income job is not going to bring that down to 10%.

Sure, that's just a guideline, but it's presumably based on what is (or once was) reasonable and possible to expect.

new york city has also had housing shortages since at least the 1860’s [https://www.nypl.org/blog/2018/06/07/tenement-homes-new-york...]

Average salary in Ukraine is about 25,000 UAH, and average rent in some of the poorer regions was/is about 4000 UAH. So 16% of salary.

That's the average salary country wide. What's the average salary in "some of the poorer regions"?

Also I'm not sure rental rates in a country currently actively being invaded and regularly bombed is a good example.

The situation was actually comparable even before the full-scale invasion.

Fine, but you're still comparing apples to oranges by using the country-wide average salary against the average rent in the poorest regions.

Average salary will be lower in poorer regions though. 10% is a crazy goal.

By 1933 [Social Democrats in Vienna] had built almost 60,000 dwellings, mostly in huge apartment houses... These were built so efficiently that the average cost per apartment was only about $1,650 each; since rent was expected to cover only upkeep and not construction cost (which came from taxes), the average rent was less than $2.00 a month. Thus the poor of Vienna spend only a fraction of their income for rent, less than 3 percent, compared to 25 percent in Berlin and about 20 percent in Vienna before the war.

From "Tragedy & Hope" by Carrol Quigley

> rent was expected to cover only upkeep and not construction cost (which came from taxes)

I think he meant non-subsidized rents.

Aka actual rent because subsidy can make rent for some group targetted for special treatment whatever the subsidizer wants. Subsidized rent is a stupid metric. What matters is the broad situation for everybody

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