Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by munificent | Hacker News Reader

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> it's not as if we suddenly created 20-50% more qualified buyers in that time.

We don't create buyers quickly, but mobility means that a large number of buyers can show up in one concentrated area much more quickly than housing can adapt.

One piece of the US real estate puzzle is that automation and outsourced killed agriculture and manufacturing jobs. Those are the kinds of jobs that have some natural incentive to be spread across the US. Ag, because farms literally take up a lot of space and are spread out, and manufacturing because factories tend to be close to raw materials, ports, or other local resources.

When you get rid of those jobs and replace them with information work, you create a feedback loop with no dampening in it. People want to go where the most jobs are, so they move to the cities. Businesses want to open where the most workers are, so they start companies in cities.

The next thing you know, all the small towns are filled with dirt cheap empty houses because there are no jobs. Meanwhile, every metro area is bursting at the seams.

This makes some sense to me. The solution to housing often put forth is to build more affordable housing. In the context of people wanting to move toward cities where jobs are this makes sense.

But it seems like there is a larger problem of just having tons of housing inventory that is out of reach or untenable to most people. What are the more basic numbers of how many units exist in the country vs. how many people there are? How many second, third, investment, vacation units are there, how many sit empty most of the time? (I'm mostly not talking about true "country"/vanity houses far away from economic centers that will always only be accessible to the rich)

It seems to me that rather than just "build build build" we could do a lot to reconfigure the existing supply to make it fit the people better? Why is there so much "unaffordable" stock out there and continuing to be built? It kinda feels like the affordable housing issue is just a red herring for the larger wealth inequality issue.

> we could do a lot to reconfigure the existing supply to make it fit the people better?

The problem is that housing and infrastructure is, you know, actual giant physical objects. It takes a year of planning and millions of dollars to move a road. You can't tear down a block of single family homes and put a denser apartment building in there until everyone living in them sells. You need to run sewer, power, and roads to make a new neighborhood, and even then you will still have to deal with the impact to nearby schools, traffic, hospitals, etc.

Making places for people to live is, like, many orders of magnitude more effortful than anything we do in the software world.

> It kinda feels like the affordable housing issue is just a red herring for the larger wealth inequality issue.

Yes, this is certainly another piece of the puzzle. For every 100 people who can't afford a thing, there's still 1 rich person who can, and increasingly, rich people are the primary source of profit for businesses. So businesses target them more and more and we end up in today's world where it seems like "no one can afford what's being sold".

It's because unless you're one of the wealthy minority, you're simply not a market participant at all.

Related: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/opinion/disney-world-econ...

Sorry, by reconfigure I meant something akin to artificially lowering prices, legislation to push more homes to be filled by people that need them, allowing remote work, anything leveraging existing infra as much as possible.

My point is that we have the physical problem of housing units per capita beyond solved already, it's just socially/economically out of whack.

Unless there is not something I am seeing, people aren't racing to move to rural New England. Maybe it's retirees, red to blue state migrations, or remote workers. But I haven't seen a ton of evidence of that. People didn't really migrate out here before covid and I don't think enough people have to justify the rise in prices.

Personally I think people that otherwise would be selling are sitting on their homes because of the interest rates and this is causing a strange feedback loop of low turnover causing low supply which in turn causes new buyers to accept the prices (probably with a hope that interest rates will come down and they can re-fi in the years to come). I also think a non-trivial number of houses that on the market due to the owners passing or going into retirement homes are sitting there on the market because prices are so high but the only money the family is out is taxes. Or they are being turned into rental units, since rental prices are out of whack in these areas too.

My point I guess is where I live we haven't seen a big influx of population (probably the opposite) or significant job or wage growth to make sense of the increase in housing prices. I guess at the end of the day people are just stretching themselves further and sending more money to the banks in the form of interest to get into homes that were literally half the price in 2019. Strange times.

I agree that people sitting on their mortgages is part of the story.

I do also think there's a thing where home prices have risen so steeply in metro areas that even rural areas with fewer jobs are seeing prices go up because the market will allow it. Because the cities are so expensive, a house in a rural area can still be a relative good deal even if it's more expensive than it used to be.

What would be the best way to grow some small towns into new metro areas?

City planning certainly isn't my area of expertise. I think it's a fiendishly hard problem. For a small town to draw people in and thrive, it needs:

1. Jobs.

2. Good K-12 schools.

3. Some amount of things to do and cultural amenities.

Remote work can help a lot with #1. I think people are fairly tolerant of a lack of #3 and it's a thing that can grow organically over time. People will also accept fewer things to do if the area is quieter, they can afford bigger homes, and there's more outdoorsy stuff nearby.

But #2 is really hard. You need a strong tax base to fund it, which small towns don't have. They are sort of trapped in a death spiral where if they had more people coming in, they could have better schools with the increased tax base, but they don't, so they can't, so no one moves there.

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