Or rent: you can get a place to live for only $60/month. There's no running water, but it's clean and dry and it has a lock on the door. The cheapest place you can find in the US is a lot nicer, but also much more expensive.

Buses have no route maps, no shelters and no doors. They might not come to a complete stop when they pick you up. But you can ride for 25¢.

The US has a kind of minimum standard of living, but it comes with a minimum cost of living. If you can't afford that, you end up with nothing.

The older I get the more I realize that you can't regulate the things wealthy societies do into existence. If everyone can't afford building code things collapse when you mandate that. If the economy is underpinned by bad working conditions or child labor things collapse when you regulate them. If people can't afford to eat at restaurants that follow some new code then they simply won't and those restaurants will fold. If you restrict the supply of some trade through licensing in the name of quality then you just get amateurs doing the lower dollar work for cash. A society has to be able to afford to do the things it mandates. People have to get wealthy enough to reliably afford "right" before you can legislate away "wrong".

People don't want poor people to live near them. That is the root of most of the zoning issues, it's not because they are actually worried about the quality of the housing stock that the people would live in.

I'm guessing sorisos is spot on with their last sentence. There's a big difference between being a millionaire surrounded by middle classers and being a lower classer surrounded by extreme poverty. Often times with happiness research there are caveats and ranges to keep in mind but the nuances tend to get lost in the headlines.

No, mostly people don't want poor people or sub-optimal housing in their neighborhoods, for a variety of financial, perceived safety, and emotional comfort related reasons.

If it was just not wanting poor people to live in suboptimal housing, there'd be a lot greater effort to provide non-sub-optimal housing to poor people. There are definitely people with this concern, but it's not the driver of housing and zoning policy.

Beautiful, cheap, easy, fast, durable (fire- and earthquake-proof, "It will not rot, rust or decompose in water.", etc.) and regular folk can make them with "backyard-scale" foamers and construction technique.

Some people would rather pay for private security than for policy that makes muggings less likely, I suppose.

I take it you've never heard of the NYPD or LAPD? "But they're not private security." Boy, I guess you got me there.

.... yesn't???

America got a clean slate in 1700s. And completely fucked it up over the years with massive suburbanization. America could have been Europe++ or Japan++ but instead we are a economic meat grinder with soulless suburbia being the pinnacle of a dream life.

Regarding aspirin, it interesting example. And I would argue, that it’s used to be the opposite: shortages were common, so everyone would try to buy provision, such as food and medicine, in advance. I recently witnesses a conversation, when a woman in her 30s complained that she could not find baby aspirin(or something like) for her kid because it was sold out, and her mother started literally yelling and berated for not having any in her home reserve.

And I think it's the perfect example. What good is a better unit price if you can't afford to buy in bulk anyway? If you're poor and you have a headache it's better to pay 25¢ for two aspirin than $10 for 100. Part of being poor is steeply discounting the future. The other 98 aspirin might take care of headaches for the next two years, but a lot can go wrong in in that time, and that $9.75 is money you need today.

Most of the people in my personal cohort - with university degrees and good careers - have no problem living a good life in the US. But with the rapid inflation of the cost of healthcare, higher education and housing, I wonder how that lifestyle can possibly become accessible to people who weren't essentially born into it.

I know many people who were born into a middle-class or upper-middle-class lifestyle, pursued career paths that didn't involve the tech industry (because they were specifically encouraged to "do whatever you want"), and are now living below their parents' standards of living and will probably always be poorer than their parents.

They aren't bum artists either; they work in offices 8-6, and have 5+ years of experience and sophisticated professional skills. But they are being paid 2011 wages in a 2021 housing market, and it all strikes me as tremendously unfair.

Median house prices in the USA are now above their pre-crash peak, and have been increasing much much faster than the CPI[0]. Something fucky is going on, and I doubt it's all because of the "free" market.

[0]: chart https://files.catbox.moe/kvppyj.png and data https://files.catbox.moe/tqj9vb.csv

I'd love to find a FRED-like data source for median rental rates over time and/or an index thereof. I suspect that rents are generally correlated with sale prices on a multi-year time scale.

People taking loans in 2021 sure better hope for the continued devaluation of the dollar. It's the only way to keep the debt burden manageable.

At first the suburban house as bottomless bank account was a result of “natural” forces like the baby boom and white flight. But people came to assume it, and then demand it. Politicians have obliged since homeowners are an extremely large and powerful demographic. Prior to 2008 we at least pretended to have a private mortgage industry. Now we don’t even bother with a fig leaf.

People who can't handle technology don't have a chance nowadays.

But the thing about markets is they are great for the winners, and terrible for the losers. And one of the effects of technology is that it allows scaling such that fewer providers can serve the needs of many more consumers. The confluence of these factors is that you can have markets where a handful of winners can essentially serve the entire world. I don't know where that is supposed to leave the rest of the population.

Although we fight a lot about #1, #2 strikes me as a thornier problem.

This just isn't true. The majority of the US has cheap housing. The person who wrote the article lives in Pheonix where you can get houses for 200k or under. Like this perfectly good 3 bed 2 br for 200k:

https://www.redfin.com/AZ/Phoenix/8520-W-Palm-Ln-85037/unit-...

Housing costs are out of control in a handful of places in the US. In the rest of them it's as cheap as ever. Or even cheaper given the very low interest rates.

It can be stupid cheap to live in the US. Rent a room for $4-500, buy a late model Toyota for $5k, and eat like a poor person. It's pretty easy to accumulate enough money to break the cycle of poverty.

The big pitfall is health. If you're sick then yeah you're pretty screwed. But outside of that as long as you avoid unplanned kids, jail, and drugs it's pretty smooth sailing

For a month:

Room - $500 Food - $200 Health Insurance - $0 w/ Obamacare subsidies Other Necessities - $200 Entertainment - $100

So we have $1,000 left over and have to deal with transportation. Our target is something like this 2009 Toyota Matrix with 100k miles for $3,900:

https://phoenix.craigslist.org/wvl/cto/d/peoria-2009-toyota-...

If we have $3,900 in the bank great. If not, life is going to suck for the next ~6 months while we save every penny and rely on the bus until we have the cash to afford it. Once we have it then we will have reliable transportation and can budget about $500 a month for car expenses including replacing this one when it breaks down. Leaving us:

Room - $500 Food - $200 Health Insurance - $0 w/ Obamacare subsidies Other Necessities - $200 Entertainment - $100 Car- $500

For a total of $1,500. $500 left over to accumulate some savings and/or pay for stuff we missed.

Next goal would be to use one of the many down payment assistance programs (https://www.arizonadownpaymentassistance.com/down-payment-pr...) to buy a home like the one I linked to. Then we rent out a room or two for ~$500 reducing our housing expenses while building equity.

As long as we don't get sick, don't have a kid, and don't start doing drugs we're going to be sitting pretty nice after a few years.

A good used Toyota or Mazda or Honda will run for YEARS and huge mileages with only basic maintenance - like one oil change and new windscreen wipers every year levels of maintenance. Nothing breaks. These sorts of used civics or corollas etc that are maybe 5 -8 years old can be had for £3-6k or less (in UK at least). I've owned several over the past decade or two and they never have anything major wrong with them in terms of mechanical breakdowns. I have only got rid of them when I have "upgraded".

Running costs are negligible beyond the cost of fuel. Insurance is usually low as they are cheap to repair with plentiful parts etc. I pay about £300/year for my 2011 Toyota a(nd that was a year after a claim to replacing the catalytic converter that someone stole). Beyond that I estimate about another £250 a year for basic servicing, MOT (UK annual roadworthiness checks) and replacing consumables like bulbs or the odd tyre.

As I think about it, if we define affordable as "costing under $500/mo all-in" (since that would be a little over a third of one month's work at minimum wage), it would surprise me if even 1 in 20 homes met that criteria.

Always confused by this notion. People act as if the US is the only place this is possible but not only is it possible in most of the western world, there is in fact BETTER mobility in the much of the western world relative to the US. The US isn't even in the Top 10!

https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-where-intergenerat...

For you, it seems that "tremendous" means best in class. Where is the cutoff, 1st, 3rd, top 10?

For others, being in the top 10 percent of 195+ countries is quite significant. For the average person in the rest of the world, being in the US would provide a significant and meaningful increase in their economic mobility.

I mean in fact it's worse than people think and you are no longer likely to make more than your parents when a few decades ago you had a 90% chance of doing so.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w22910

Never expected such a ra-ra USA #1 vibe on HN. Especially in the face of data that says otherwise.