Well, right, which is why the parent said it was a "very coastal/urban-centric view."

What he's describing about Dallas is true for the nearly 200 million Americans who live in the Midwest and the South. Cheap housing is the norm in the United States. I'm not bothered by people on the coasts complaining about housing costs, but you look foolish when you make generalizations about your generation that don't apply to the majority of the country.

For that matter, get an hour west of Boston and prices, while they may be higher than the national norm, aren't anywhere close to the Bay area stratosphere. So much of the discussion about housing prices here is about a very narrowly-defined set of urban areas--mostly on the coasts--plus the SV suburbs/exurbs.

It's even unclear how real the urbanization trend is as opposed to a preference for a small set of dense locations by college-educated people in a specific age range.

I have seen articles all over the place and comments all over this forum that suggest we all want to move into apartments in the city. I think a lot of it is propaganda by the real-estate industry as they are making ridiculous amounts of money by selling apartments. Governments also benefit as they can save money providing infrastructure.

I don't know about propaganda but, for whatever combination of cause and effect, urban living in a mostly narrow set of locales is more preferred than in the past by a demographic that is well-represented here. However, the pricing complaints are about San Francisco, not Detroit.

39% of the US population lives in a coastal state, that's not insignificant either. Most of those people have a problem with affordability, you can't just shrug the problem away.

There is more demand for housing in the coastal states. So the prices are higher. People should react to expensive, high-demand housing in the same way that they react to every other type of high-demand, expensive luxury good.

Which is to say:

If you can't afford to live in a coastal state, then what you need more than anything else is a U-Haul.

Those of us born in coastal states might have an issue with that. Affluence and gentrification destroy the character of interesting communities. Careless indifference deserves no place here.

It's not careless or indifferent to acknowledge that the demand exists. It is a fact of the world. A fact that, yes, I understand, you do not like. But I haven't seen a single proposal that does anything to realistically address it.

The demand is there and it's not going away. Whatever you're hoping for, it's too late.

Bringing a massive amount of supply to market would solve it, but because of nimby and other reasons it will never happen.

Never say never. They just passed a law in California which makes it much harder for NIMBYs to prevent development. State-level laws can do a lot to curb NIMBYism, as the state government is concerned with having a healthy economy and doesn't care much about local efforts to fight change and development.

absolutely, just commented on something along these lines a few comments up. https://youtu.be/5GoAGuTIbVY?t=146 and another good commentary on a comparison of what percentage of income was spent on housing early in the 20th century vs later https://youtu.be/bbPYedkDU8Y?t=152

Right. High prices or lots of new housing. Pick one.

>I haven't seen a single proposal that does anything to realistically address it.

The solution is trivially simple: build a lot of public housing.

If you have a hard time imagining what any part of that plan might look like, take a look at Singapore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore

Or the South Bronx. [1] But, sure, build a bunch of concrete high rises for tech workers on Treasure Island.

[1] https://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-rise-and-fall-of-pu...

They implemented racial quotas to prevent ghettoization.

>Sure, build a bunch of concrete high rises for tech worker

I guess SF's bus drivers, restaurant servers, etc. don't deserve somewhere affordable to live because it might spoil the "aesthetic"?

I was just listening to some Thomas Sowell on Uncommon Knowledge earlier who commented on the artificially inflated prices for these select areas: https://youtu.be/5GoAGuTIbVY?t=146

Is it cheap relative to incomes in that area ? Sure, lots of cheap houses in areas with low incomes. So?

Yes.

You're getting 1.5x the income (usually with longer hours) and paying 5x for the house.

You're also paying more for other random stuff like groceries, eating out, gasoline, electricity, etc.

You're also paying lots more for taxes. Some states have no income tax. Some states have no sales tax. Some have neither!

Well, maybe 1.5 the salary, but I bet total comp at Google in SF is way more than 1.5x best Ohio employers. But there is also California weather and NY culture that account for part of the cost of living premium. Don't think that has any value ? Great for you, you can live in Decatur. Ilinois.

Of course, but Google is an outlier in just about every sense. Most people in San Francisco don't earn the equivalent of Google's total comp.

Also, what's this nonsense about Decatur, Illinois? St. Louis and Cincinnati and Nashville and Pittsburgh and so on all have a bunch of pre-WWII, walkable, interesting neighborhoods, with little restaurants and bars and people putting on poetry readings and bands playing in basement clubs and jazz quartets playing at wine and cheese parties and concert halls that host national acts and major sports franchises and yuppies and hipsters and Python Meetups and comedy clubs and big pretty parks and coffee shops and whatever else you can think of.

No, they are emphatically not like San Francisco or NYC. But don't be silly. Millions of people live in those places. Did you really think they're all just skipping stones and waiting to die?

I'm quite glad I grew up here, because I think I'd be just the type of asshole who'd make jokes about Decatur, Illinois had I not. And you know what? I'd have been wrong.

Sure, they do have all those neighborhoods. The price differential reflects what people are willing to pay for one vs the other. The point about Decatur, Illinois is simply that Decatur Illinois lacks a lot of what SF has, which is why it's cheaper. It's a factual statement, not a value judgement

You'll get no argument from me here. But I think an erroneous value judgement is what's driving that demand. San Francisco is an incredible place. And a Ferrari is an incredible car. But lots of normal people would be better off realizing they can't afford the Ferrari and buying a Camry. It's not as bad as they think.

And to really strain this metaphor, people who have all their wealth tied up in a Ferrari would be a lot better off if they sold it and used the gains to live a comfortable life.

On good trips there, I can certainly understand the attractions of the Bay area (though I'm probably less sold on the city itself). However IMO way too many people, especially in tech circles, have convinced themselves that life isn't worth living if they can't live and work there whatever the other lifestyle tradeoffs. (Which leads to the corollary that someone needs to do something to make it possible for them to do so.)

And they do realize it. I mean most people do not live in the Bay Area and don't plan to move there

? Google employs ~30k people here. The rest 7.5 million should pack up and move to Decatur?

I actually don't see what can be done about it. But it's a bit strange to project Google numbers to the entire generation.

Lots of those 7mln live in homes that they bought many years ago, before the boom. If they sold them and moved to Decatur, they would be very rich.

The discount on housing is far bigger than the discount on salaries

How much higher do you think the incomes for most jobs are in big coastal areas? It tends to be "very little."

Hie much do you think it costs to live in far parts of Brooklyn? Relatively little. Yet you are 1 hr away from the heart of NYC

As my friends who recently moved down here (Charlotte) from Brooklyn who worked in NYC tell me: still way too much, especially to have to deal with that traffic every day.

Rent in Brooklyn got them 12 acres 40 minutes away from Uptown Charlotte, and a house to boot.

I've lived in a bunch of US places, including rural Colorado and the Atlanta, Boston and DC metro areas, and I will say that Charlotte is a special case. People here complain about housing costs and traffic, and I just smile quietly.

But in the flyover states where housing is admittedly cheap compared to the coasts, so too are the wages.

"Cheap" housing only goes so far when your employment is 30 hours per week at the local Walmart for $9/hour. You're trying to pretend this is some "coastal" phenomenon, but you can't get there from here - you can't get the number of young people who have left the nest down from 60+% to just barely over 30% without it involving the entire country.

Young people in middle America can't afford to move out either.

For instance, in Ohio (as "flyover" as it gets :-)) the median household income is $45,749, and the median house sales price is $135,500, or about 3x median income.

In California the median household income is $67,458, and the median house sales price is $405,000, or about 6x median income.

So no, it is not actually true that the lower housing prices in flyover states are offset by lower incomes. Housing in California is proportionally twice as expensive as it is in Ohio.

Less than half of americans make more than $30k / year these days.

http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/25/1-in-2-working-americans-m...

household income != individual salary in many, if not most of the cases.

Right. Households often have multiple incomes. That doesn't help the OP's point, though, since people in Ohio are more likely to live in a multi-income household than people in California.

If you look at per capita income instead of household, Ohio gives $135,500/$26,937 ~= 5, and California gives $405,000/$30,441 = 13 By that standard, California is 2.6 times more expensive instead of only 2.

I agree that it's a country-wide phenomenon. But everything else in your post is almost comically out of touch, which is to say that there are obviously other factors.

Not sure why you say that. GP post perfectly describes my home town in BFE Midwest.

Because it's ignorant of basic facts. The median household income in the St. Louis metro area is $55k. It's $79k in the San Francisco metro, which is obviously quite a bit higher.

But you'd need to earn 159k per year in San Francisco to match the spending power of that $55k in St. Louis. And even that wouldn't be nearly enough to reach parity in home purchasing. Housing is 790% more expensive in San Francisco!

I get that it's fun to joke about flyover country, but the numbers are what they are. People simply are not struggling to move out of the house in St. Louis in the same way that they are in the Bay Area, for example.

Which is to say, once again, that there must be other factors at play.

http://www.bestplaces.net/cost-of-living/st.-louis-mo/san-fr...

Part of my point was to provide what feels like a more typical example for this audience. The parent made an anecdotal reference to imply he is an average HN user, to which I made a counterpoint with my own anecdote asserting I'm closer to an average user in terms of housing cost.

They're subjective but it's important to realize both scenarios and everything in between exist, and to acknowledge when you're only considering the extremities of that range.

That was my whole point. I may be a "typical" United States HN user paying thousands a month in rent, but "typical for HN" is a very small group, and "typical for millions and millions of other Americans" is something very different.