Comment by karmelapple | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karmelapple | Hacker News Reader

I'm not seeing the word "money" show up in that article or in these comments nearly enough.

Hosting someone involves some money for the food and drinks to be consumed, sure.

But hosting also requires the hosts to feel up to the task of hosting by feeling that their home is adequate for hosting.

Having a home that's adequate for hosting involves money. And these days, lots of it.

In 2025 in the USA, the average age of a first-time home buyer is 40 years old. [0]

The average 27 year old who might have bought a home in the 1970s [1] and hosted people there is now probably renting until they're 40 years old.

Not that you can't host when you're renting, but there's more potential issues that aren't there when you own a place, including:

* a higher chance of having roommates, which increases the logistics of planning, and also potentially intruding on someone else's hope to have a quiet night in * probably less space to host

So I think it seems reasonable to include the housing affordability crisis as a contributor to this, too.

0. https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/first-time-homebuyer-med... 1. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/azizsunderji_the-median-first...

Ya it's a real thing. At 35 y.o, I've hosted people in the 600 sqft basement my partner and I rent, but realistically all of our space fits about 3 extra people and all of that is in the same space as the kitchen. Some of my friends have older places with more space and better layouts for such a thing, but they're also spending quite a lot more and still need decent dual incomes usually to pull it off. They also tend to position themselves as "hosting" type people. With such volatile careers, it doesn't make sense to extend ourselves unnecessarily and don't plan on having kids or getting married. This place was a reluctant upgrade after getting kicked out of our studio, so at this point we consider it a luxury to have any separate rooms at all. We don't have any upward mobility to look forward to in the next 5 years, and although I'm generally satisfied in life, typing those words feels a bit depressing.

To be fair, if owning a place or renting with more space was the most important thing to us, we could hypothetically move to a lower CoL area, but we ultimately find that a rather poor tradeoff that would only save a marginal amount on net anyway. We're thankful to have those close friends that have the space and enjoy hosting.

Canada fwiw.

I mean, there is a sliding scale what "hosting someone" means. Most of this thread seems to assume classic dinner parties where you prepare all the food for the people, and they may include aquintances.

We often host a group of good friends, and it's more like a potluck. Brunch is especially easy, as everyone can bring some random dish and there is little coordination necessary. It's also pretty cheap, we don't really spend much more money than we would on regular breakfast. Dinner may be a bit more expensive as we usually do the main (meat) dish.

As they're all good friends we don't have to prepare the place either, they don't care when it's a bit messy. We're lucky to have a big place, but every now and then also go to other friends where people have to sit on the floor due to lack of chairs when there's more than 8 invited. It's fine (and I'm in my 40s, it's not a bunch of college kids).

How many friends might not physically have the room in their home though?

> people have to sit on the floor due to lack of chairs when there's more than 8 invited

It's fine for you and the hosts and your friends (and for me, for that matter!), but how many people think that's unacceptable and will just not have people over if that's the solution?

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