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Comment by epsteingpt | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a misnomer. Housing is, actually, extremely affordable across the US - just not in major cities.

You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states.

Agree with the other comment that overbuilding is a reasonable strategy, but if you look at Detroit downtown (mid 2010s) having an overbuilt downtown is bad too.

It's a hard problem.

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Similar things in lots of countries. There are villages in Italy and Spain with near-zero housing prices. The qualifier that needs added is "housing in commute range of jobs".

Stoke on Trent was selling houses for £1 with improvement grants attached! https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/stoke-shows-why-selling-...

And of course if 'jobs' becomes 'there is nothing a person can do that can't be more efficiently done by hiring AI more cheaply, plus you get to treat AI completely differently because AI is not a person' that complicates matters very much.

> You can plunk $10-$20K and get land and a homestead in dozens of states.

In a place where the only jobs to be had are at below-subsistence minimum wage at the dollar store and you have to drive 2 hours to see a doctor, sure.

There's a huge middle ground between Manhattan and homesteading on a $10k property. Here in Atlanta you can buy a 4/3 house for $270k or a 2/1 house for $160k. The rust belt and sunbelt are full of places with cheap housing.

That’s most definitely not $10-20k, tho.

Well we didn't exactly divvy up either housing or employment rationally, so looking through history without state subsidies and development, we're going to see slums pop up where the jobs are. Or just massive homeless populations I guess.

China managed this quite well with the hukou system, which allegedly is going to be loosened over time, but that seems distinctly unlikely to be understood by the powers that be here in the US.

That's actually the same in most countries: the cities where everyone wants to move to (examples from Germany: Berlin, Hamburg, Munich) become unaffordable, and at the same time smaller cities and villages in less desirable areas (e.g. in East Germany, but also in more remote areas of Bavaria) are depopulated - there you can buy a cheap house, but you can't get a job. Remote working would have helped to somewhat alleviate this, but no, now we all have to go back to the office so we can sit there and spend the whole day in Zoom/Slack/Teams calls instead of doing the exact same thing from home...

10k??? Yes because I want to live in east bumfuck in a food desert and drive 40 minutes to the one megamart and where the services barely work and my police/fire/usps is on the next town over 20 miles away.

Did I mention the legions of uneducated anti-Christians who would probably kill me for being queer?

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