> Same-sex couples also became legal, adding even more two-income households.

I'm no expert, and it seems likely that women joining the workforce in large numbers would increase housing prices due to increased purchasing power, but this seems like a bit of a stretch. unless you go back to the times of wide-spread lynchings, wouldn't same-sex couples have lived as "roommates"? also forget about couples, two or more acquaintances sharing a housing unit has been legal and common for quite a long time now. I'm skeptical that this is a significant cause of shock to the housing market.

I don’t think this is entirely true. Keep in mind that while earners have increased, households used to be much bigger, with more children and more extended relatives living together. And children and even young unmarried women used to work. So purely single income households weren’t a particularly long time.

A bigger issue is that a lot of formerly big housing, at least in New York, has now been subdivided, since the whole is less than the sum of its rents. You are also seeing a large rise in people willing to be roommates with people they don’t know, so if you have three income-earning singles they’ll outbid a two-income family. And students are a special case of that, since the rents will go as high as their student loan balances can sustain.

Roommates are mostly a side-effect of banning SROs. If the NIMBYs had their way they'd be illegal too. Urban singles needing housing isn't new.

It's also no longer socially taboo for single roommates of mixed genders to live together. And of course people are staying single longer, meaning that there are now more urban singles.

that may be a part of it, but I doubt it's the whole story. people don't just need a small room and a bed; they need kitchens, bathrooms, etc. these can be shared across a floor or a small building, but there's only so many strangers that can share a kitchen before it isn't useful to anyone. it's hard to imagine this being better than at least having the chance to find 3-4 people to split an apartment with.

I don't understand why this is getting downvoted. IIRC it's the entire data-backed thesis of Elizabeth Warren's 2003 book the Two-Income Trap.

CityLab recently documented the rise and fall of the SRO:

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/02/the-rise-and-fall-of-...

If you don't know about Elizabeth Warren’s book, it probably sounds like something from the Proud Boys or the Promise Keepers.

It'd be great to agree on the facts, even if people can't agree on how they feel about the facts or if anything should be done to change the facts.

> "Women entered the job market due to birth control and legal changes..."

the argument that dual-income households becoming necessities for home ownership and raising a family is plausible, if unsupported.

but the quoted causal relationship above is not even plausible, let alone supported. women entered the job market because they wanted to realize their ambitions and support their families, just like men. other societal changes may have aided or hindered that ambition to various effect, but they don't form the driving force as you state.

> the argument that dual-income households becoming necessities for home ownership and raising a family is plausible, if unsupported.

"Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap, explained Before she was a politician, Warren wrote a controversial book about family life and economics.

The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:

* The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting.

* Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities.

* Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on."

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t...

> women entered the job market because they wanted to realize their ambitions and support their families, just like men. other societal changes may have aided or hindered that ambition to various effect, but they don't form the driving force as you state.

Regardless of why, increased labor participation from woman joining the workforce in greater numbers than previously [1] was going to drive inflation for inelastic goods and services like housing, childcare, and education. It now has become a prisoner's dilemma: participate in the treadmill or find a way off.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2017/women-in-the-workforce-be... (PDF, page 2)

A Two-Income family also is a significantly less mobile family.

When you want to move, both partners need to find better jobs at roughly the same time. And that just doesn't happen very often. And, if you are already established with support networks because you already have kids, rebuilding those networks can be almost insurmountable without one of the parents literally taking time off to put that support network back together.

Holy shit I never thought about it like this.

yah, that's good supporting evidence for the 2-income trap.

incidentally, my first foray into student loans made me realize a similar trap formed by government guaranteed student loans combined with the inability to discharge them via bankruptcy. those factors practically guarantee rising educational costs due to risk-free money flowing to both educational and financial institutions.

As a Northern European it does seem a bit of a bad deal that women are expected to work but there isn't much of a guarantee for parental leave, affordable child care or even vacation. But I guess there isn't that much precedent for such things.

That expectation is rather cruel. For decades, women who make motherhood their "careers" have been looked down on as somehow inferior to women who pursue careers. Even the terminology used to describe such women is disparaging and loaded with shame and disappointment, as if the woman in question had chosen or had been forced to choose an inferior option. That she is in some sense a failure for prioritizing her children over her career.

It’s perverse that in our (supposedly) liberated world the standard that women are held to is men.

Isn't that what equality was supposed to be?

EDIT: Anecdotally, it seems that equality was strived for and it's not turning out as great as a lot of folks hoped for. Educated women don't date down like men did/do which makes finding a partner in itself much more difficult [1], women want the same career opportunities as men while also taking leave that puts them at a disadvantage, which is unavoidable; you will be at a disadvantage to someone who is willing to not take their leave to focus on their career, regardless of gender, and men usually take less or no paternity leave even when offered [2]. A lot of people raced to find success and actualization in the workplace, and it is turning out poorly [3]. We have housing, childcare, and education cost inflation due to more dollars chasing the same amount of those necessities. [4]

I want to be absolutely clear that I support woman having equal rights, equal pay, and should never, ever be discriminated against. I shouldn't have to say that, but you know, the Internet. The above paragraph are my observations as an armchair anthropologist.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-... (The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates finding a like-minded man)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19878117 (HN Thread: After men in Spain got paternity leave, they wanted fewer kids)

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20468767 (HN Thread: The Loneliness Epidemic)

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20474292 (My HN comment above citing the Two Income Trap)

That's how everything turns out, though. Once you achieve all the things that you thought will make you happy, you'll find new things to be unhappy about, usually in the details of the stuff you just achieved. That's the nature of emotions - they couldn't actually cause motion if you just sat there content with your lot in life. Only thing that'll do that is drugs, and even then you tend to build up a tolerance to them.

The real test for whether something is good or bad isn't whether people are happy, it's whether they would choose to go back. And I think you'll find that most women are not all that eager to go back to the 1950s. If they are, there are subcultures within the U.S. that can provide that, but those subcultures aren't really flourishing in terms of growth rates.

In the context of race would you measure equality against the standard of “white?”

I should hope not. For the same reason measuring women against the standard of “men” isn’t equality.

Yes, race equality is measured against the standard of "white" - people advocate for blacks to become richer and less harrassed by the police, not for whites to become poorer and be harrassed more (btw, both would achieve the same amount of "equality").

Same for men vs. women - the drive wasn't/isn't to make men work less (and stay at home more, i.e. like women used to be and like my ideal world would look like), but to make women work more.

> Same for men vs. women - the drive wasn't/isn't to make men work less (and stay at home more, i.e. like women used to be and like my ideal world would look like), but to make women work more.

Indeed. My wife is not a stay at home mom because I force her to be. It it her voluntary choice (and I am happy to support her decision and be the sole income earner in the family) that she gets more happiness and joy from raising our children than as a drone at a desk job or climbing an unfulfilling and meaningless career ladder (her words, not mine).

I think what isn't reasonable is when both parents want to work and expect to achieve similar results. You can't have it all, and you're going to be deeply disappointed when you try and fail.

What are the standards?

“Person”...

I apologize. I don’t understand. My understanding was women were fighting to be equal, but men were the bar. What rights are being fought for by women that men don’t have (“people”)? What is the “baseline” for “people”?

I think that the point being made is that in a world with true equality, there is no bar, because each person's perspective is as valuable as any other's. The existence of a baseline necessarily requires choosing a perspective and enshrining that as an ideal to be aspired to, which is a power play on the part of the person setting the standard. There's nothing inherent about reality that requires that: the alternative is that you do your thing, I do mine, each of those things is as valuable as the other, and if our things conflict we work out our differences amongst ourselves (or if necessary, bring in a neutral third party to adjudicate that is mutually acceptable to both of us).

This whole "equality" thing is a big pickle. IMO governments should actively subsidise kids, both via parents (e.g. paying for childcare, school, etc.) and via companies (e.g. giving a company extra money/tax cut for each worker on parental leave, to equalize the amount of value (to the company) of a worker on leave vs. a worker actually working).

All of this assuming we (as a society) actually want people to keep having kids (which, at least in the West, societies/governments seem to want).

None of those things ("guarantee for parental leave, affordable child care or even vacation") seem to help. If anything, the evidence suggests the opposite: there are very few births in the European countries with the greatest amount of those things.

Making it easier/possible for women to join the workforce doesn't necessarily mean that married women will in addition to their spouse, so what made them do that?

I think answering that is more important than focusing too much on what made it possible. Making it possible and easier for women to join the workforce is overall a good thing, it means that single women can compete (hopefully) equally with single men in terms of income and as a result enjoy the same economical freedom without being forced into marriage. But going from that to having homemakers suddenly decide to also work in addition to their spouses is the missing connection, because theoretically just because it was possible/easier doesn't necessarily mean that they needed to. Was it because now couples wanted to earn more money? So it was "greed" that in the end created the inflation and the prisoner's dilemma?

When few women are working, it’s attractive to some because it adds an incredible amount of disposable income. When most women are working, it becomes a necessity in order to get by (because the cost of housing, which is the single largest household expense, depends on what other households are willing to pay). It’s a ratchet that only goes in one direction.

> Women entered the job market due to birth control and legal changes

>> women entered the job market because they wanted to realize their ambitions and support their families

From a historical perspective, women entered the job market because a world war (ww1) consumed the pool of available men through drafting them to die on the front line and having a war engine that increasingly needed more and more resources.

We are talking about a change from ~20% to almost 50% over the time span of 4 years. Neither birth control nor cultural ambitions has that fast effect on society. War does.

sure, women worked during the world wars out of necessity, but they didn't enter and stay in the workforce because of it.

while women working during war helped to unveil the value and abilities of women in the workforce, war didn't drive the shift to 2-income households by itself. if women had no other ambitions, they would have just gone back to "home economics" after the wars and the economy would have stayed the same.

It is indeed true that there are many reason why society continued with both women and men in the work force after the war. One of those were political, as it is difficult to argue first that women and men should shoulder equal responsibility during the war and be included in the military draft and equal right to vote, only to do a 180 degree turn a few months later because the war ended. The writing was on the wall and Women's right to vote got voted in 2 years later. The women military draft however was dropped as the emergency of the war died down.

The president said a month before the war ended: We have made partners of the women in this war; shall we admit them only to a partnership of suffering and sacrifice and toil and not to a partnership of privilege and right?

It is hard to find a stronger sign of a cultural change. 20 years later the second world war started so even if there had been a movement to return to "the old days", it would not have had time. The second world war saw again an major increase in women participation in the work force, including major initiatives for equal pay. Men were being sent to the front line and the factories needed people.

The world wars was the period where the cultural change occurred. Trying to revert the culture back to pre-1914 mindset would had been about as impossible then as it is now. Instead people continued on the cultural path that had been established.

It's not the full story but is definitaly part of it. Without birth control and legal changes, women would not have been able to follow their ambitions; it's difficult to work when you're pregnant for the 8th time and anyway are not legally allowed to without your husband's permission.

Right, but that's like saying "without women we wouldn't have women entering the workforce". Technically true, but not an argument against it.

>The homeless scare away families

This applies to a narrow subset of urban locations

> Women entered the job market due to birth control and legal changes

Legal changes is fascinating euphemism for "not being punished for it anymore".