This comment is too simplistic, but I have noticed this scenario playing out with a lot of the younger people I work with. We have a remote org and hire remote, but a lot of the young people we hire out of college have relocated to some of the most expensive cities.

There’s a growing attitude that if they’re already paying exorbitant amounts for housing and have a large amount of student debt, why not go all-in and buy a house that’s an extra $100-500K more than what they could find in a cheaper location?

There’s also a lot of FOMO from people who watched their friends over-extend themselves on expensive home purchases and then be rewarded heavily for it by rising home values. I’ve talked to a lot of younger people who have feel a severe sense of urgency to buy the most expensive house they can afford before they miss out on future gains or get priced out of the market entirely.

If you think house prices only go up rapidly and your entire adult life has confirmed that idea, you also wouldn’t be interested in moving to a boring location and buying a cheap house. You’d want to move somewhere exciting and get the most expensive house the bank will let you buy.

I work remote and the thing that keeps me living in a relatively high CoL city is fear of being locked in if I'm fired and unable to find other remote work.

Getting a mortgage in the country, for a tech worker, is basically a bet that either home values will stay high enough you can back out or that you'll be able to stay remote for the length of the mortgage.

If you lived in a high col city by default doesn’t that mean you live in a desirable area meaning you can likely sell your home? Or are you referring to a lease?

He's referring to if he (or the hypothetical you) moved to the country.

Why shouldn't we expect people who work in cities to be able to live dignified lives in those cities? There are always going to be janitors, home care providers, baristas, grocery store employees, etc. Our daily lives depend upon them. It's insane to me that we have a system that requires those people to exist but barely pays them enough to afford to live.

If workers couldn't afford to live close to those cities they'd move somewhere else. Those cities would then experience a shortage of workers. Wages would have to rise to attract new workers. Costs to everyone else in those cities would have to rise in order to accommodate this. If non-workers could no longer afford these costs they would have to sell their homes and move out. This would increase supply and bring the value of housing down in these cities.

Workers can’t afford to live close, and they haven’t moved elsewhere. Why? Perhaps moving costs money while they never have an opportunity to save for it.

Unfortunately the places where workers congregate is also the places where the most opportunity can be found in the job market and social sphere. Pushing people out of our most dynamic cities so that a bunch of landlords can artificially restrict supply to profit more is idiotic and a failure of public policy.

Assume a frictionless turtle.

You end up with a permanent fight for the impoverished or less well off to move to the city to maybe get some table scraps.

I can buy a plot of dirt for maybe $10k near a city with lots of jobs in my state. The problem is actually building something requires following codes and building regulations. A simple adobe house is doable by hands by a family with the occasional help from extended family or friends. But government say "bad" and I need permits, even if it's on a 5 acre plot with zero chance of any structural failure spreading to a neighbor.

Meanwhile even shithole houses go for $250k+ in part because affordable housing is simply irreplaceable due to that housing being built before such onerous regulations being implemented.

I don't think its onerous safety regulations that limit affordable housing. Its a well documented phenomenon that housing policy is driven to protect past buyers over future ones (NIMBY, using zoning laws to limit density of housing, minimal acreage in cities etc).

A combination of loosening up zoning laws around residential buildings and a land value tax would do lots to facilitate affordable housing, but nobody wants to disrupt current homeowners on behalf of renters and future buyers

You are talking about an entirely different situation of building in an existing neighborhood, not what GP described. If affordable housing is your goal then would not it be better to have it somewhere instead of insisting that either it has to be near the evil NIMBY's houses or not at all? Many people would be fine with a cheap SFH in suburbs instead of a micro-apartment in the middle of downtown.

>onerous safety regulations

I see you interchanged the words I actually used "onerous regulations" and instead addressed "onerous safety regulations." Nowhere in the comment you replied to is the word "safety" found.

But it is true a lot of regulations are made in the name of "safety." What these fail to account for, is that many of these regulations increase expense, so there are tradeoffs such as those who lose healthcare or education opportunities by instead spending it making housing more safe (thus, they may actually become less safe by having a safer house). Or even worse, people who end up homeless because although they could have built an "unsafe" shack, the regulations in all their wisdom deem it's better to be dead of the elements on the street than to live in a sub-par structure.

> Its a well documented phenomenon that housing policy is driven to protect past buyers over future ones (NIMBY, using zoning laws to limit density of housing, minimal acreage in cities etc).

>A combination of loosening up zoning laws around residential buildings and a land value tax would do lots to facilitate affordable housing, but nobody wants to disrupt current homeowners on behalf of renters and future buyers

Agree on all accounts here, the stars really align against new entrants.

Fair enough, but constraining supply of housing in desirable places by placing absurd obstacles on those that want to build more units isn't a human right either.

It's not just the hip spots anymore. This comment is pretty out of touch.

Plenty of homes available for <100k here: https://www.zillow.com/detroit-mi/

It's alright man, we'll agree to disagree. Housing is artificially constrained by treating it as an investment opportunity. Your solution is to pick up and leave everyone and everything you know because someone else decided that housing should be used as a game at the casino.

I know it's allowed, but is this what we want for society? I hope not.

I clicked a handful of those and every single one of them looked like they needed roughly 75-100k worth of repairs to make them livable. Then on top of that I would be worried about my safety if I lived there. Not the best example.

You're arguing in bad faith and you know it. The same phenomenon has been happening has been happening in rural places as well.

I'm not arguing anything. I'm pointing out that there are affordable places to live and the issue isn't supply but it's that you don't want to live there.

It is a problem of supply. You're probably a person who believes in free market economics. In every market high prices are a signal that supply is constrained relative to demand. As for the quip about it not being a right to live in 'hip' cities, it shouldn't be a right either for NIMBY homeowners to obstruct housing production.

Your need for shelter could be adequately (and cheaply) met in many areas all over the country. You aren't entitled to be sheltered wherever you find desirable.

I hope you get shown similar sympathy when your house value crashes

I don't view housing as an investment. I look at it as I need a place to live. If I make money on it after I'm done living there then that's great.

If that's the case, why not just rent?

Some non-investment reasons: stability, locking in your cost of living for many years, the ability to remodel your home to make it look the way you want it to, and no risk of being forced to move because the home you live in gets sold and the buyer wants to live in it themselves.

In Japan, houses generally depreciate over time, yet the home ownership rate is still 60% because the other benefits of home ownership are so attractive.

If you know you want to live in a particular area for a long time, and you can afford it, home ownership is usually an attractive move.

You'll never finish paying rent, but you will finish paying your mortgage eventually. Also, your mortgage payment won't increase much while you own your house (just the part for property taxes), while rents will often go up (and sometimes down) with the market. So if you are in it for the long term, a house will provide stability after 10 or so years. And that isn't even considering the fact that it is your place to make for your needs vs. your landlord's.

You’ll never stop paying. Pick rent or property taxes. Obviously property taxes are less than rent in your typical case. But it’s not even an order of magnitude difference

No, it is around...a third where I live maybe? Or maybe a 4th of what rent would be like. But I can always sell/downsize and retire to somewhere with cheaper property taxes, which is something I couldn't do renting. Rents don't do that.

But watch the rent to home price ratio. There is definitely a point where renting just makes more sense, like when I was paying $1000/month on something that the landlord was trying to sell for a $1 million. Ya, buying in that case would be purely for speculation.

Because after 30 years of paying rent... you own nothing. After 30 years of paying a mortgage... you own land and a building.

OP said that they don't view housing as an investment thus owning the "land" should absolutely not matter. They might as well rent if its cheaper.

AFAIK an investment is when you put money into something expecting it to increase in value.

Buying a house just so that at the end you own it is not an investment, that's just a purchase with a loan.

As a big naysayer of Detroit, the place is finally starting to bounce back because of the intended and unintended contraction.

This does not even factor in the NIMBY-ism of many progressive cities. People argue that housing is a human right and time and time again refuse to allow permitting changes that build more affordable, multi-family homes in their backyard.