Hacker News Reader

Comment by appplication | Hacker News Reader

Very curious what living standards you’re thinking of

A 1963 house is what we'd think of today as a starter home. Available medical care was very limited, so you don't need modern health insurance. No braces for the kids. One small car, and it can be a really old beater and still be better than 1963 cars (no seatbelts or catalytic converters back then). One landline phone, no internet, no cell phones, etc.

The "he lived in Daly City" thing is a bit of a red herring. Daly City was not a 15 minute drive from the center of the hottest industry in the world in 1963. So substitute Fresno.

Anyway, if you can find a woman who wants to be a SAHM to your five children in a Fresno starter home, where she clips coupons and cooks meals from scratch with no appliances, you can achieve a 1963 standard of living pretty easily on a schoolteacher's salary.

> A 1963 house is what we'd think of today as a starter home.

Not every house at that time was a post war levitown style shack. AC wasn’t even terribly uncommon in 1960s construction.

That's more like the top decile than the average. The top decile in any era has it pretty good.

Most of the "life is too expensive today" complaints are some flavor of: Grandpa was a 90th percentile income earner and I am a 50th percentile income earner, so even though my life is objectively much better than Grandpa's in many ways (childhood vaccination, clean air, seatbelts, etc) the loss of status is much more salient than the gains in material well-being.

Only 12-15% of the country had AC in 1963.

And even if you "had AC" it typically wasn't central AC. Even when I was growing up in the 1970s our only AC was a window unit in my parents' bedroom. On hot summer nights we would go and sleep on their floor.

Residential units? Or does that include businesses too? Cause 12-15% for residential units sounds high for 1963.

Air conditioning was extremely uncommon in my neighborhood when I was growing up in the 80s. I didn't personally know a single family that had a/c until the 90s. The only places that were air conditioned in my neighborhood in the 80s were businesses. I'm sure it was more common in the South.

Levittown-style homes for returning WWII veterans were poor quality -- "little boxes all made of ticky-tack" as the song goes, but even high quality homes of the midcentury were still tiny -- the average size of a US house in 1960 was 1,289 sq ft -- basically apartment sized. And typically only had one bathroom

https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...

"little boxes all made of ticky-tack"

That song is about Daly City,[1] where some of the original houses still are pink, green, blue, and yellow.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boxes

I grew up in the 1960's. We lived in a suburb of Detroit where my father was a mechanical engineer who worked on drive trains and suspensions for Cadillac. My mom was a homemaker. We had one car. The house where the six of us lived was 1/3 the size of the one just my wife and I live in today. We had a black and white TV that got the network broadcasts, a single dial phone, a washer, a dryer, a stove, a toaster and a small refrigerator. My mom had a plug-in steam iron. My dad did the lawn with a push rotary mower and trimmed the sidewalks with hand clippers. We kids had bikes and board games. I did not know anybody with air conditioning. The most luxurious things we had were time, leisure and the outdoors that nobody minded us losing ourselves in for hours at a time. This isn't nostalgia by the way. I wouldn't go back. But if you could, somehow, you'd be shocked at how much less of nearly everything material there was.

Where can you find a starter home today on your grandfather's salary?

Fresno, like I said above. Go on Zillow and you'll find plenty of very nice 2BR and 3BR houses in Fresno that a teacher or auto mechanic can afford.

If you mean "where within commuting distance of the hottest industry in the world can I find a reasonably priced home" then yeah obviously you can't, but SF wasn't that in 1963.

It’s interesting to look at places like Westchester that were already upscale decades ago. Here’s the first listing I found in Scarsdale, NY, which has been an affluent Wall Street suburb forever: https://www.redfin.com/NY/Scarsdale/12-Stoneleigh-Rd-10583/h.... Sold for $645k in 2003 and $1.25 million this year. That’s 3% appreciation per year over the last 23 years. It’s exactly the rate of inflation.

Hudson Valley real estate is the best kept secret in the US. Plenty of places with good schools and a sub-1hr train commute to Manhattan can be had for under $500k still. Westchester is cooked, but add 15-30 mins north to your commute and it's still extremely accessible.

> The "he lived in Daly City" thing is a bit of a red herring. Daly City was not a 15 minute drive from the center of the hottest industry in the world in 1963. So substitute Fresno.

This is a key point. I grew up in a nice middle class neighborhood 20 minutes from DC. Back then DC was the murder capital of the country, there were no tech jobs in northern VA, etc. Today it’s much more expensive, but it’s also full of tech engineers. The town has moved upmarket. It’s not a Honda Accord, it’s an Acura.

People vastly underestimate the savings a woman clipping coupons and cooking meals from scratch can bring.

My wife comes from a lower middle class family so she’s a big deal finder and coupon clipper and cooks at home. We spend $1,100 a month on groceries, for 2 adults and 3 kids. Lunch for me most days is some bread and cheese, or a hot dog, or rice with an egg over it. She goes to three different discount grocery stores and if we eat beef it’s from Grocery Outlet. Sometimes a packaged item from ALDI (like their pulled pork).

That's heroic. I hope you tell her so (though you sound like you would).

I try to! But my family is the opposite, so at first I was offended, like "do I need to make more money?" LOL.

I don't underestimate it, I know pretty clearly what it's not worth because it's all my SIL-SAHM does in life. It's possibly the difference between them being homeless or hungry, but the last few years of inflation have obviously offset whatever it had been worth before. They'll never penny pinch themselves out of poverty. It's the behavior of a household not thriving.

How naïve

Here’s a counterpoint

https://americancompass.org/2023-cost-of-thriving-index/

That is just a huge mess of tautologies. Like the way they measure the housing you need to thrive is by the 40th percentile of rent. But today's apartments are much nicer than apartments in 1963, so the 40th percentile is buying a much better product today than in 1963.

This makes "thriving" a constantly moving target, because by definition 40 percent of people have housing that sucks too much. This does reflect realities of human psychology (our happiness is mostly about relative well-being, not absolute well-being), but it is not remotely useful for comparing material living standards over time.

Size of house, availability of food and clothes, percentage of population that receives an education, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com