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Comment by KPGv2 | Hacker News Reader

> In many cities

In like five cities in the USA. I live in a top 10 city by population in the USA (so it's not "flyover"), and the median home price is 288–319, while median HHI is 89. That's easily in the recommended home loan range of 3*HHI.

Look, I'm sorry you can only be happy living in SV, but there's plenty of jobs in the boring parts of America, and the homes are affordable.

All that being said, homeownership is largely a scam, financially. Use your downpayment as a market investment and rent. You'll end up with more money when you retire, and as a bonus, you aren't tied to one geographic location if you lose your job.

The only reason apartments can even exist is because of economies of scale. If you have one rental property, it's virtually impossible to make money (certainly not in a way that outpaces index funds) because you don't have the economies of scale at your disposal.

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Your entire premise is one that's missing important context. Based on the numbers you provide, you're probably in Chicago or Dallas, maybe Austin, but that's pushing more like 400K.

Homes in the median are generally not viable unless you don't have a family or don't care about quality schools. In my city (90K), two houses that are identical but divided by the school district boundary between rank #1 and rank #265 out of 359 is a difference of $300K. One would be within the median and the other well above.

And let me be clear: ALL HOUSING IS A SCAM FINANCIALLY. Rent screws you one way and housing screws you another.

Median income probably also matches closer to Millennials, not Z and certainly not Alpha.

"Quality schools" are almost entirely about the student body, so it doesn't really make sense to say median schools aren't viable for the median family. Obviously you're not going to get a ton of doctor, lawyer, engineer, etc. kids at a median school because the median person is not one of those things, and those people tend to care about "quality schools" i.e. living near each other and away from the median.

Do we really want people to have no association with their city, and encourage them to be interchangeable cogs for whatever business deigns them worthy of a job in some remote part of America, so they can be ready to take whatever’s offered like that’s a good thing?

Most people like putting down roots, knowing the town and people, having a local community, would like to have family and friends nearby.

It's too late. The industrial revolution destroyed this.

I hired a few contractors out of the bay area to another state where their salary was 1/3 a nice permanent home and they ended up scattering to other parts of the country. One even went back to the Bay Area. Yes there are nice places to live besides the bay area.

Mortgage pretty much always costs less than rental per square foot.

Right, but the opportunity cost of the down payment is what gets you. You're forgetting that if you rent, you have a large chunk of cash that you could invest in higher yielding assets.

This isn't controversial. This is what anyone with finance expertise will tell you.

Yeah but real estate is something even people with seriously subpar IQ understand well, like gold. Its a conservative investment in most places, but risk of losing it is next to 0 realistically, which is something folks like a lot. Those that invested 20 years ago in many cases saw massive returns, in very safe manner. Not even going into airbnb and similar.

Also, if your down payments on mortgage are equal to rental fees, you won't save much renting, you just have better flexibility with moving, something great for single folks but families want opposite. In our case, for example we pay less mortgage than we would be paying in rental for same place (can check easily since symmetrical apartment next door is rented).

I don't want risky investments with potentially better returns for me, real estate is good enough.

Finance people are welcome to go live in shoeboxes and invest in higher yielding assets, clears them out of the housing market for the rest of us who value a house to live in over higher yields.

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