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>She told me, “I was curious, but I don't know how a single person in America who doesn't have family money could buy anything, I really don’t, if they're not w

• Sangermaine 8y ago
  You seem to be ignoring the second part of her statement: what's your job? Is it a good, high-paying one?
• ForHackernews 8y ago
  The places with cheaper housing also tend to suffer from a dearth of employment options. There are probably a few mid-sized cities out there that have both cheap housing and decently-paid jobs, but I imagine they are few and far between. I don't know how legitimate this source is, but > ATTOM points out that home prices are climbing faster than wages in 80% of U.S. markets. In fact, median home prices increased at a faster pace than average weekly wages in 601 of the 755 counties analyzed in its report. https://www.housingwire.com/articles/47878-home-prices-are-rising-faster-than-wages-in-80-of-us-markets https://www.housingwire.com/articles/47878-home-prices-are-r...
  • JoeAltmaier 8y ago
    They are pretty common. Kansas City. St. Louis. Des Moines. Dayton. And that's just the Midwest. You don't need a great job market; you just need the one job. Works for some people.
    • lotsofpulp 8y ago
      With the market changing quicker than ever before due to various structural changes such as new technologies, consolidation of employers, and globalization, I would not recommend having one, or even just a handful of buyers for what you're selling. This applies to businesses and individuals. I would demand a premium for being in a market where there are fewer buyers and I am subject to more risk of losing my income.
      • deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
    • collyw 8y ago
      In Europe house prices seem fairly tied to employment opportunities. Certainly if you are working in It.
      • malvosenior 8y ago
        Is that true? I know real estate is incredibly expensive in places like London/Paris and most people cannot afford to own homes there based on their working salary (which is usually much lower than the US equivalent).
    • goobynight 8y ago
      Works for a lot of people, especially if they fall into fairly standard, but good service gigs. e.g. vehicle repair, home repair, cutting hair, or working a local pub. Even better if you show up with a pile of cash from a former career.
  • greedo 8y ago
    I live in a midwest college town. Unemployment here is extremely low, has been for decades. Housing costs are relatively low as well. I live in a house that in the Seattle area would be over $1M. I paid 20% of that. There are multiple startups for tech here, as well as government jobs, college related jobs, and other industries. So there's no dearth of employment options. If something were to happen, I can commute an hour to a city with a population of 1M.
• smt88 8y ago
  > I certainly got zero cash from family when I bought a home. Crucially, this is not the least help your family can offer. For many (most?) people in the world, their relatives are actually insecure and need financial support. This is a key reason the cycle of poverty can't be broken by one person getting a good job. I know multiple people who would've easily had a down payment on a house if their parents hadn't lost pensions/savings in the financial crisis. Several years later, that $100k they used to bail out parents would've grown to $300k+ in equity if they could've bought a house in a city between 2009 and 2012.
• latencyloser 8y ago
  This reminds me of when I was working at Microsoft and a colleague said to me: "I don't know how anyone raises a family off less than $130k/year." I laughed and asked him if he'd ever been anywhere in the US outside of Seattle before. Turns out, he hadn't and assumed the insane cost of living we're subject to in this area also exists in the rest of the country. My point of reference is my family's house in a rural area that is about 2x the size of mine (the property is 10x) and costs 1/3 as much. I wish my career as a software engineer better enabled this type of living but, alas, my corporate overlords require I am ass in desk every day in a metro area.
  • blueboo 8y ago
    And so the legend goeth: A friend exclaimed, "how do you afford to buy a house in San Francisco?" I, too, laughed! For lo': huts in the wilderness were mere pennies. He hadn't ever been to the bush, and had assumed the insane cost of living in this area exists in other places with high-paying tech jobs.
    • _range_life 8y ago
      The article wasn't specifically about tech jobs, or huts in the bush you retard. It made a blanket statement, and that's what this guy is responding to.
  • duxup 8y ago
    My first trip out to the valley working for a company out there someone turned to me and asked "So what do people do out there?" I thought he meant "for fun" but he meant regarding jobs or a career. Despite the fact that I did the same job he did... "out there".
  • AboutTheWhisles 8y ago
    The same extrapolations happen with population density. People in LA and New York think the world is overpopulated and everyone is on top of each other. They don't realize that 45 minutes north east of San Francisco there are no houses, no street lights and no cell phone reception.
• Consultant32452 8y ago
  Exactly. I live in a 2nd tier city. My friends who are home owners have very middle class blue collar jobs. Examples include auto mechanic, security system installer, and local delivery truck driver. None of them got "help."
  • ForHackernews 8y ago
    How old are they? I know plenty of people who bought a house 30 or 40 years ago on blue collar salaries. I don't know any <30 year olds who bought property without parental help.
    • ijpoijpoihpiuoh 8y ago
      Where do the people you know live? That might inform the probability of being able to buy a home with or without parental help. I just picked a metro: Baton Rouge. Median home price there is around $160k, although naturally there is plenty of inventory available for less than $100k. Some of it's in pretty dismal shape, but, looking at Zillow, there are non-zero houses in this category that look livable. The median HHI in Baton Rouge is $45k. So it would take about four years for the median family to save up enough to buy something that's at least livable, assuming they can save ten percent of their income. I couldn't say whether blue collar people make at, above, or below the median, but it strikes me as likely that at least some of them will be able to purchase a home in this type of metro.
      • ForHackernews 8y ago
        I grew up in the midwest. Most of the people I know are in Iowa, some in Illinois and Missouri. Saving up a down-payment is a significant obstacle, I think. I know that in some areas, you can get a rural development loan that requires a much smaller downpayment, but my friends don't want to live in the boonies and it would lead to a pretty miserable commute for them.
        • AlexTWithBeard 8y ago
• ben509 8y ago
  Responding to your quote: Working in finance, I can report that we do not have magic money machines. You could narrow "finance" to mean professional traders who do extensive market research and take large risks, sure, they make a lot of money, but they also get wiped out periodically. They're not very different from other entrepreneurs who make a big investment into their area of expertise and takes big risks, often failing many times along the way. That is pretty much the "self-made" story, and one thing I do see working in finance is that most people are way too risk averse for it. That's not a bad thing in aggregate, the conservative majority's instinct for stability is an important buffer against all the breakage the risk takers cause.
  • CPLX 8y ago
    I'm not saying it's an easy job, by any means, but there's not a ton of risk involved in taking an entry level job at an investment bank and trying to work your way up to MD or similar. And that track most certainly pays plenty well, even if you doin't quite get as high as the boardroom.
  • donaldknuth123 8y ago
    Hedge Funds literally print money. 2/20 is guaranteed money, 2% on all funds managed so you win regardless of the market and 20% of any gains when you beat the market. Easy.
• stcredzero 8y ago
  >She told me, “I was curious, but I don't know how a single person in America who doesn't have family money could buy anything, I really don’t, if they're not working in finance or they're not a doctor. ” This is kind of like that cartoon of a New Yorker's view of the US, where Manhattan looms large, then there's New Jersey, and at the fringes there is the rest of the nation. I met this veteran taxi driver in South Carolina who had bought a big Federal era house north of the state capital, for only $20,000 back in the late 90's. Everything about the house needed fixing, and there was no heating/ventilation equipment functioning at all. He was living there, however, and he was putting all of his extra money into buying construction materials, so he could eventually sell it for 20 times as much. I also knew a waitress/barista in Ohio who had bought a duplex, was living in one half, and renting out the other. She had done all of that on $5/hour plus tips and sweat equity. Both of the above examples happened in the 90's. This Kirsten Dirksen video is basically a documentary about how homeowner's interests and their affect on local laws have basically ossified our society. (This is set in Sonoma, which is not overcrowded in the least.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8x4CWBMsPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8x4CWBMsPg Basically, homeowners have thrown up roadblocks to keep "the wrong element" out of their neighborhoods, which also locks out the young people of their own group. The big irony is that this happened much more in liberal California than it did in conservative Ohio and South Carolina.
  • gamblor956 8y ago
    The big irony is that this happened much more in liberal California than it did in conservative Ohio and South Carolina. Not sure where you've come up with this bizarre and selective understanding of US history. Ohio is notorious for racially-based restrictive covenants on housing. There were entire neighborhoods where deeds had restrictions preventing their sale to blacks. They got the idea from southern states like South Carolina. These restrictions are still on many of the deeds in Ohio and South Carolina, though they are no longer legally enforceable.
    • stcredzero 8y ago
      Not sure where you've come up with this bizarre and selective understanding of US history. Ohio is notorious for racially-based restrictive covenants on housing Note that I was specifically talking about the unintended impacts of such laws on the youth of one's "own" group. California is singularly bad about that. (I have a different view on these things, outside of the usual polarization. So people tend to project a "side" to my comments which isn't intended and actually isn't there. As a non-white person whose parents experienced ethnically based exclusion, such projections make little sense to me.)
• TuringNYC 8y ago
  >> I certainly got zero cash from family when I bought a home. For a lot of wealthy friends, this was the case, they were self made (first order) and paid their own way (first order). The really valuable thing they received was the safety net and contacts such that they werent exposed to the spikes of unfortunate things that can happen. For me, if I cant make mortgage for 6mo, i'd be in trouble and there is no family member to help out. There is no uncle at a hedge fund who can suddenly get me a job. I'm in the general pool of candidates and only have those opportunities and the ones I create myself. That makes be reach less, it made me take more conservative jobs earlier on in my career, etc. My risk tolerance and hence potential rewards go down
• wardbradt 8y ago
  Are you talking about "View from 9th Avenue" [1]? If so, that is a great analogy because it depicts no housing in the rest of the country. [1] https://condenaststore.com/featured/view-from-9th-avenue-saul-steinberg.html https://condenaststore.com/featured/view-from-9th-avenue-sau...