Sobering scenes from the recession | Hacker News Reader

Sobering scenes from the recession

boston.com

24 pointspistoriusp16 comments

I don't understand #15: "The couple and their three children are living in a budget motel while they save enough money for deposit on a new rental home, but are finding it difficult as they pay nearly $1200 a month for the motel room."

$1200 a month is a budget hotel? That'd almost buy you a one-way plane ticket PLUS a month of rent in a decent apartment in small-town Iowa. (Where I live, there's "now hiring" signs all around town, too. Sure, most are not high-paying jobs, but they'd make enough to pay rent and eat.)

Sometimes I think a number of these hardship stories I see in the media are more a case of people not wanting to let go of their city or their old lives and so making it worse on themselves. I suppose that's natural to some extent, but wouldn't it be better to help these people understand their new reality and how they could address it than to indulge their feelings of entitlement to their old standard of living?

$1200 a month is a budget hotel?

Yes. That works out to $40 per night. Even in small towns hotels generally cost more than that.

That'd almost buy you a one-way plane ticket PLUS a month of rent

$1200 would not cover a one-way plane ticket from Sac to Iowa for a woman and three children.

Moving a family is hard even when you have the finances. When the family is broke it is next to impossible.

Well there's cheaper ways to go than by plane. (I admit I also forgot it was a larger family when I was writing that part, so yeah $1200 wouldn't cover that all at once.. at least not by air.)

The point is, they are in a bad spot. They need to fix it. This might involve selling everything they own, using the house down payment they've been saving up, and riding a greyhound bus to somewhere cheaper. Of course it's hard. Life is hard. I guess my point is, just because it sucks and it's hard doesn't mean they deserve to get a free pass from the truth of their situation.

Where are you at in IA?

/iowan that fled to phoenix and now regrets it..

Ok, it's a serious photo spread, but come on: this is a bread-and-butter reddit post.

I love Big Picture - it's a great example of a US newspaper taking advantage of the digital format - but I agree it belongs on Reddit.

I found it on reddit. I thought it might be relevant and interesting to some of the people here.

Exactly - this is #1 on Reddit's home page right now.

The comments say "sadness"...

I say opportunity.

No not for fat cats to get fatter, but simply: from death comes birth ...

HN certainly has some of the brightest minds around, lets do something about it!

I'm a little surprised by the woman in West Sacramento. Sac is my hometown, and my parents still live there, so I visit pretty regularly. $1200 a month for a motel room is about twice the going rate for a studio apartment in that area; for that amount of money, they could rent a decent house in a much nicer location.

Landlords generally won't rent to someone without a job, or with a prior history of eviction, or bad credit.

Generally maybe, and especially currently, but you ought to be able to find something if you look hard enough.

I doubt the family is living in a $40/night motel because it's their first choice.

Yeah, I was about to reply with a sarcastic "yeah, they're probably just lazy." But seriously, it's easy to get trapped in a sort of suboptimal maximum in cases like these. Barbara Ehrenreich discusses it in her "Nickled and Dimed." There are a lot of prerequisites to getting an apartment that can stand in the way of someone living on the edge (deposit, up front rent, credit checks, etc...) so you "temporarily" opt for one of these hotels... which are so expensive that it saps your savings for that deposit/up front rent... which perpetuates the cycle.

In any event, we don't really have enough context here to make a judgment about this particular case.

Probably a good business opportunity for a tough bailbondsman/repoman type: find these people and rent to them. (Obviously, you can offer cheaper rent than a hotel, which has a staff, typically.)

When I lived in Downtown Sac in 2007-2008, we were paying $800 a month for a 3 bedroom apartment (800 sq ft).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com