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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Depends where of course. All over the south and the rust belt midwest home prices have been more or less stabilized over the past 35 years or so. Even if they "went up 30% in covid" that could mean they only went up another 30k or so realistically. The land of 70k jobs and 150k 3-4br houses where all is well.

Then you go to the hot markets and salaries for comparable positions are only like 20% more but the exact same home (actually on west coast, subtract the full basement and lot large enough for a detached two car garage) is 10x in price or more.

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My home price doubled over the last decade in my rust belt town (the desirable neighborhood in a less than desirable town). Houses similar to mine going 300k+ and average individual income here is still under 40k I believe. City and county services were in much better shape 25 years ago (when they were underfunding their pension programs). My bus service was cut and will be cut again soon and I went almost two months without garbage pickup at one point last year. It’s not all doom and gloom, I do have positive things to say too (parks and library programs are still quite nice), but things ain’t looking up in the rust belt.

> The land of 70k jobs

What are these 70k jobs in the south?

All over in the right professions. Accountant, probably basically everywhere for example. I imagine it wouldn't be hard to pull 70k doing b2b sales. Plenty other white collar work probably gets you there too. Skilled trades also very well compensated today and in demand as well.

Raleigh-Durham Metro, Metro Houston, Metro DFW (imo not the South), Charlotte Metro, and Metro Atlanta off the top of my head and based on median household incomes.

That said, assuming you could afford a 2k square ft house with a backyard in a highly desirable neighborhood similar to what Palo Alto is today on an average person's salary 50 years ago doesn't seem realistic.

Also, 50 years ago, redlining and race as well as gender based discrimination in most jobs was the norm, so unless you were a white (which itself was a narrower term than today) man, there was a glass ceiling, and most jobs that were supposedly high paying in reality largely limited hiring to a subset of Americans.

Additionally, the rural-urban divide then was more severe than it was today. People from those households like Marc Andressen literally didn't have piped water growing up back then in the 70s (he's recounted the story a lot).

Long story short, I don't buy a lot of the nostalgia for the 70s and 80s I'm seeing in this thread - it's very boomer urban white man coded.

'Household income' would imply that 70k jobs are not at all the norm.

True, but the median American is also not college educated or working in a skilled manufacturing industry, but is true at the 60th-75th percentile in most cases.

my single family home went up 40% in market value during Covid. More property tax should be great for local govt coffers, right? Wrong! Now local govt is cash strapped again. So we have new ballot measures for providing kids with meals, but only from taxes on those making $300k+ annually. Where is the money going?

Meanwhile, the number of vehicles that need mufflers is increasing. It's audible. That is a reliable sign of economic distress.

Nobody can buy a house without a down payment and reasonable job security. The economic gulf widens.

You don't really want inelastic goods such as homes (land value), food, electricity, or gas to go up in value. Those things factor into the cost of everything else, so the net result is that everything just costs more for the exact same experience.

It's not correct that an increase in home value increases your property tax. The town has a budget which then it divides by the sum of all property values, this gives a ratio that is the tax rate per property value.

In theory, your property went up 40%, if everyone else's did too then your taxes remain the same. You can see this by viewing the tax rate over time and seeing that it has declined (but again, that didn't lower the dollar amount you must pay, just the ratio of tax to property value.)

Calculation of property taxes are different across jurisdictions, you are talking like your rules apply to every system in the world.

I believe in the poster's jurisdiction, property taxes are based on a percentage of the property value and are independent of the city's actual budget.

That value is usually calculated from last sale plus no more than some small percentage each year. I.e. if home 'went up in value' but didn't sell tax doesn't change much.

Benefits are the cause of increased cost in school systems:

https://reason.org/commentary/administrative-bloat-isnt-the-...

Benefits are likely affecting municipal government in the same way.

Really a market shaping failure by the federal government here.

> More property tax should be great for local govt coffers, right? Wrong!

Their costs probably went up too.

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