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Comment by kingmanaz | Hacker News Reader

Usury. Not long ago one high school educated American working a factory shift could support a wife and four kids. His large, hand crafted home is now found in the gentrified corner of town, which today's blue collars couldn't dream of buying a piece of. Today's "middle class" typically live in a chicken-wire-and-stucco tract home built by economic refugees rather than craftsmen, lease to own a $40,000 sedan, and dream of one day paying off their education debt before their medical bills start to pile up after mid-life. Marriage has been, like every other thing in America, reduced to a question of economic efficiency.

But hey, there's always Bing Crosby this time of year to evoke an America that was more than a place to make money.

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You can still have that large hand crafted home if you don't expect to live in the middle of San Francisco or Boston. There are gorgeous houses within two hour's drive of me that cost five figures.

I can't afford my parent's house. But when they bought it, it was surrounded by peach fields, not bustling metro America with top schools.

To me, it is like bemoaning how your Grandma was able to afford a house in Beverly Hills in 1920, but you can't today. How unfair the economy, how cruel the world! Except Beverly Hills wasn't Movie Star City in 1920.

My take is that our nation's appetite for coveted, increasingly scarce real estate has silently grown without our realizing it. Not one of my friends today would consider moving to a house surrounded by orchards.

Right idea, different trend: The boomer generation coincided with the suburban boom, with its emphasis on car culture and mass produced goods. But the sheen of an industrially produced life has worn off, to a large extent: Long commutes and the expense of owning and regularly driving a car don't look as good as they used to. We're seeing a massive move back into the cities, contrary to the (white) flight from the cities in the sixties and seventies. And this means higher real estate prices.

Either way though, it means we live in very different times than even as recently as our parents, which makes "what my parents could afford" a poor rubric. We are looking to live very different places than they were.

it's not that our appetite for coveted real estate has grown. the real problem is that our alternatives to big cities are not good enough. here are your choices. you either live in an environment devoid of culture and community where nothing happens ever, where you live in a split-level townhome across from a stripmall across from a shopping center ... or you find a way to live in the city, where life is happening, even if you have to live in a bathtub.

america's brand of suburban development created this situation. and now everyone has the internet, so they can be in touch with cutting-edge culture and painfully aware of how little is happening in their suburban town. of course, all people want to do is get out of these horrible places.

Firstly the problem is not the location of the house. A similar rise in house prices has occurred outside of expensive suburbs. When your parents bought said house is was worth ~15 years of rent. Today that number is pretty much 60 nationwide (after-tax rental income, disregarding repairs to the house). Same is true expressed in wages. When your parents bought that house it was around 5-10 year's wages of ONE person working, easily payable from 10-20 years of savings. Today, we're talking 15-20.

We're fast approaching the point where mortgages can effectively not be expected to get paid off anymore, because the holder will die before collecting the capital + interest in wages.

It's scary that millennial are the first generation in probably 300+ years for whom, on average, children can't afford to buy their parent's house. Some claim 1400 years, because this has essentially been true (you have to be very flexible with definitions though) in one way or another since the dark ages.

[1] http://www.kiplinger.com/article/taxes/T054-C000-S001-where-...

I'd like to add that in my specific area of the United States, Washington State, we've seen a huge move from international buyers swooping in on investment properties that became available on the market post-2008. There's a big move on Chinese and Canadian investors moving in on foreclosures, low interest rates, and honest to god: cold-hard-cash buyouts (it's extremely rare but in my market it's happened a few times). I'm in my mid-twenties and I feel like my significant other and I have to both be working full-time jobs at $20+ an hour to afford a 3 bedroom house anywhere near a reasonable commute from work. We also don't want to be stuck with the burden of upkeep maintenance, property tax, and unpredictable economy. Back on the topic of marriage; we're still iffy on the idea based off of fear that if our marriage went south we couldn't imagine dealing with the divorce; both psychological and financially speaking... However, our financial situation is a bit different in terms of debt and interest rates. We are both afraid of being to far sunken in debt.

> Not long ago one high school educated American working a factory shift could support a wife and four kids.

Wasn't much of that advantage predicated on what's now regarded as gender/race discrimination?

No. These advantages stemmed from generations of hard work passed down as inheritance, and, from gender roles voluntary entered into through religious preference.

The past is not necessarily a litany of crime, the present is not necessarily an improvement.

Do you think Bing worked for free?

Your post wouldn't be half as funny if White Christmas wasn't still one of the best-selling records of all time.

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