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Why don't you move to a cheaper place/smaller city? I don't understand why there are some many homeless people in big cities (i.e NYC). If people would just mov

Why don't you move to a cheaper place/smaller city? I don't understand why there are some many homeless people in big cities (i.e NYC). If people would just move to cheaper areas/cities the whole issue of housing would be fixed.

ioseph 5y ago
* Not everybody can work remotey (nor want to) * Health and Education services tend to be much poorer
hprotagonist 5y ago
My community is here. How is it just that I be forced into exile because “the market” says so? I’ve done no wrong.
- wankerrific 5y ago
  Sorry. You’re going to have to move. Owning is for investors, banks, and other financial entities. /s The best part is that if things go upside down in a few years we get to bail them out.
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    Aren’t most houses owned by their inhabitants, rather than evil corporate entities?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      The threshold for a crisis isn't 50%. For example, our current shortage of housing is 4M-7M homes. That small percentage belays the story of millions of families who are not finding a home. That said, we've past our historical high of owner-occupied homes. That trend is downward. As ever, ~0 rentals are owned by the inhabitant. What changed there is that individual-owned rental properties are no longer the norm.
- itake 5y ago
  I think ppl in your position should either follow the community, and obtain higher pay or relocate in area with people that align with your values. If working 60 hour weeks or reskilling isn’t your cup of tea, that’s fine but we can’t keep everything the same forever.
  - another_story 5y ago
    I don't think it's fair to put the onus on individual people to move everytime they're priced out of a market, especially a market that has been heavily manipulated to benefit the few via lower interest rates and poor zoning laws. You could see this housing crisis coming from years out and the government did nothing but maintain low rates, block multi-unit zoning changes, and allow the wealthy and foreign investors to buy up housing. The real issue is poor and inept leadership.
    - dzhiurgis 5y ago
      > The real issue is poor and inept leadership. I'd guess something like 90% of governors are property investors.
    - flyinglizard 5y ago
      Low interest rates benefits everyone who takes mortgage and in fact makes (leveraged) investment into building more properties a no brainer. There is no bad guy here, just individuals displacing other individuals.
      - another_story 5y ago
        And it doesn't benefit the working poor and younger people who can't afford a down payment. It's not individuals who are keeping rates low.
- tedunangst 5y ago
  How is it you've fallen so far behind the rest of your community's median income?
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    That can happen all kinds of ways. In my case, the economic crisis, then Obamacare's impact on small medical biz, then embezzlement by a biz partner, then my wife developed psychosis & left me w/o a vehicle for a year, eventually agism and most recently housing has increased 70% from last year while transportation costs have tripled.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- BenjiWiebe 5y ago
  I see your point. However, isn't it still preferable to have a home and leave your community, then to have the community but be on the street? I personally would prefer moving to homelessness, many times over, even though I wouldn't say it was fair/desirable/justice that I needed to.
  - bravura 5y ago
    The choice of location is rarely as clear cut or stark as the choice between simply community vs homelessness. For many people, the choice of location involves weighing many competing and hard-to-quantify intangibles and opportunity costs.
    - spiderice 5y ago
      Right, but I personally don’t see a scenario where living on the street doesn’t trump every single one of those other factors. In other words, anything that involves me living on the street is a complete non-starter, regardless of how compelling the other factors are. I get that some people really don’t have the option to just move somewhere cheaper. But if that’s at all a possibility, it seems like that should be a no brainier
      - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
        There has to be a place to live on the other end. That place has to be affordable and safe. There have to have enough funds for the entire family to move. The funds have to last until all of the jobs that pay enough are secured (in our case 3-4). The funds may also need to last long enough for the wage earners' business to be reestablished or can find an employer who's hiring portal doesn't auto-discard 20 year job gaps (that portal may not exist). All this assumes earning family members don't have even the most minor of criminal records. It also assumes family members don't have zero credit (which bar most rentals and many employers) after years of frugal living to save up those funds. God help anyone with medical debt. Just one of these factors can lead to family homelessness, in some city far away from their support systems.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  The curse of mobility I guess: people can move in if they want, bid up prices, which can force out those who were there before. The only solutions are to either eliminate/reduce mobility or move housing out from market influences.
- timwaagh 5y ago
  I think there's definite limits to that. Like you can't expect to forever stay in Amsterdam center because you happen to live there now. Loads of others want your place and can contribute more. But it's not always the case. For example the outskirts of said city are deliberately underdeveloped because the zoning designation says so which is entirely a political choice to expel the poor.
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  What you did wrong was not keep up economically with the average earnings of those in your community. The market believes that you are not productive enough to live where you currently do. Capitalists believe that you must turn the other cheek for the invisible hand of the free market...
- marcinzm 5y ago
  My view is one shaped by a family of immigrants. In the end life isn't about right or wrong or morals or ethics. It just is. Much of it is out of an individuals control and never was or will be. All you can do is control how YOU react to those factors. You can complain about them and get ground into powder, or you can adjust to make your own life better.
- toss1 5y ago
  Yes, it is sucky to not be able to live where you like, but the attitude seems odd. Why do you feel entitled to live at any particular location (that was not actually inherited)? I've never felt it was my "right" to be able to afford any particular location and/or living standard at that location, and always noticed that it was a trade-off between costs, location, commute/travel times. Same whether it is in a resort town vs out in the styx, or in a major city downtown vs the suburbs/exurbs. As long as I can remember, it's been that way - the workers in the fancy town couldn't afford to live there, unless a big crew got together to rent a house in town. Or, you were looking for a rent-controlled apt or sublet. Just because you or I have done no wrong, does not mean that we are entitled to do what we want, where we want, when we want. "... You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometime you just might find / You just might find / That you get what you need " Welcome to the real world.
  - lostdog 5y ago
    > Why do you feel entitled to live at any particular location (that was not actually inherited)? For me, it's less about my own life, and more about how terrible the world is when people get pushed out of their homes. Most people need stability to have a good life. They do better when they understand their neighborhood. Their kids do better when they can go to the same school system until they are 18. Plus, the employment market is really uneven, so being booted out of a location with good jobs can be a disaster for a family. On top of this, moving is costly by itself, so the cost of moving every year is another tax on those who are struggling. The argument of "you shouldn't feel entitled to this" just sucks. A better lens is "Do our housing policies help or hurt leading a good life." We're not talking about who deserves the latest fancy SUV, but about whether our housing situation screws up many people's lives.
    - mikem170 5y ago
      I agree. I believe zoning is a big impediment. People wouldn't be priced out of their communities if there was more supply of housing at varying prices. Instead current regulations restrict the supply of housing and seem to prioritizing uniformity and property values.
- beervirus 5y ago
  Things change all the time, even if you don’t do anything wrong. Welcome to earth.
- archsurface 5y ago
  Commuting enables this. If people couldn't commute, they couldn't invade your area. I've long claimed one of the biggest problems with the UK is the tube; it enables people to pile into London every day. Get rid of the tube, and people and business would be more spread out, which would in turn get rid of the elephant in the room being the UK is a one trick pony - "What do you have, UK?" - "London.", "What else?" - "London", "What else?" - "London". Oh, and then there's the medieval monarchy nonsense...
- diogenescynic 5y ago
  >How is it just that I be forced into exile because “the market” says so? I’ve done no wrong. Capitalism. The market giveth and the market taketh away. What is the alternative? Nativism? And at what point does a claim to a particular place start? Because I have bad news for most Americans...
jmspring 5y ago
A lot of times, one's proximity to work, friends, family has a non-trivial cost associated with it. Not everyone can be mobile. That said, the other side of the coin with regard to homelessness - some fall in the above; some follow to where the services/ease of access to one's vice/tolerance (also known as compassion) is. With regard to moving to a smaller town. The median income in the county in CA I live in is ~40k/year. The average house price has essentially doubled in the last 5ish years. Income, hasn't changed so much. I bought my place ~5.5 years ago and it's basically doubled and is a condo. Same issues around a lack of affordable housing in this rural mountain red county is mirrored by some of the bay area counties I moved from.
science4sail 5y ago
I wonder if there could be an evaporative cooling like effect in play here? That is, everyone who is willing to move has already moved; as a result, the remaining population biases towards those unwilling to move.
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  Switch unwilling for unable and you've got it.
KaiserPro 5y ago
Because there are no jobs there. Yes remote might fix that, eventually. But I strongly doubt that, especially as humans are social animals.[1] However The UK is a more extreme version of this. People move to london because it has the most concentration of high paying jobs, and as a side effect culture (what that is I leave up to you. I don't just mean music, cinema and posh people shit.) Now, I could move back to bumblefuck rural england, but I would have to exchange an underserved IT job market, with a median wage of >£60k to a once/two company town with a median wage of £38k. Combine that with houses only being 30% cheaper, and higher transport costs, no nurseries or comprehensive child care, the countryside can be a real pain in the tits. Costs are higher in the countryside, as there are less public amenities. So no, people can't just move, otherwise they would have done already. [1] there are two classes of remote "influencers" the first ones seem to be happy working alone, permanently. The second appears to be the ones that are "jet setting" where they work in a new country every other month. Both of these groups represent a tiny minority. I strongly doubt that we should be optimising for these two noisy classes of people. I suspect, and me, my team and wider company data backs this us (even though its shallow evidence) that they more popular route is hybrid.
- mbesto 5y ago
  > Because there are no jobs there. This is simply not true. There are a record number of job openings. I would go on to say that there has never been a time in history where finding a job was this easy. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/jolts.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/jolts.pdf https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL "The number of job openings was little changed at 10.4 million on the last business day of September, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today"
  - throwawaygh 5y ago
    Presumably OP means a job in their profession, not employment generically.
    - lostmsu 5y ago
nabilhat 5y ago
Roughly 1 in 10 people in the USA already live more than an hour away from their job, a number that's been increasing over the last ~15 years as people move to cheaper places. This sustained migration of workers has not yet fixed the whole issue of housing.
WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
A local move (cheap market) is 4k out of pocket after factoring in 1st/last/sec, utility deposits & endless move/cleaning expenses. The local move (cheap market until this year) we just did was ~5x that. Moving to another city where savings have to be firehosed until enough jobs are secured (us:3-4) can easily burn thru ten/tens of thousands of dollars. A pretty big chunk of America doesn't have that much cash sitting around.

ioseph 5y ago

* Not everybody can work remotey (nor want to) * Health and Education services tend to be much poorer

hprotagonist 5y ago

My community is here. How is it just that I be forced into exile because “the market” says so? I’ve done no wrong.

wankerrific 5y ago
Sorry. You’re going to have to move. Owning is for investors, banks, and other financial entities. /s The best part is that if things go upside down in a few years we get to bail them out.
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  Aren’t most houses owned by their inhabitants, rather than evil corporate entities?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    The threshold for a crisis isn't 50%. For example, our current shortage of housing is 4M-7M homes. That small percentage belays the story of millions of families who are not finding a home. That said, we've past our historical high of owner-occupied homes. That trend is downward. As ever, ~0 rentals are owned by the inhabitant. What changed there is that individual-owned rental properties are no longer the norm.
itake 5y ago
I think ppl in your position should either follow the community, and obtain higher pay or relocate in area with people that align with your values. If working 60 hour weeks or reskilling isn’t your cup of tea, that’s fine but we can’t keep everything the same forever.
- another_story 5y ago
  I don't think it's fair to put the onus on individual people to move everytime they're priced out of a market, especially a market that has been heavily manipulated to benefit the few via lower interest rates and poor zoning laws. You could see this housing crisis coming from years out and the government did nothing but maintain low rates, block multi-unit zoning changes, and allow the wealthy and foreign investors to buy up housing. The real issue is poor and inept leadership.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    > The real issue is poor and inept leadership. I'd guess something like 90% of governors are property investors.
  - flyinglizard 5y ago
    Low interest rates benefits everyone who takes mortgage and in fact makes (leveraged) investment into building more properties a no brainer. There is no bad guy here, just individuals displacing other individuals.
    - another_story 5y ago
      And it doesn't benefit the working poor and younger people who can't afford a down payment. It's not individuals who are keeping rates low.
tedunangst 5y ago
How is it you've fallen so far behind the rest of your community's median income?
- WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
  That can happen all kinds of ways. In my case, the economic crisis, then Obamacare's impact on small medical biz, then embezzlement by a biz partner, then my wife developed psychosis & left me w/o a vehicle for a year, eventually agism and most recently housing has increased 70% from last year while transportation costs have tripled.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
BenjiWiebe 5y ago
I see your point. However, isn't it still preferable to have a home and leave your community, then to have the community but be on the street? I personally would prefer moving to homelessness, many times over, even though I wouldn't say it was fair/desirable/justice that I needed to.
- bravura 5y ago
  The choice of location is rarely as clear cut or stark as the choice between simply community vs homelessness. For many people, the choice of location involves weighing many competing and hard-to-quantify intangibles and opportunity costs.
  - spiderice 5y ago
    Right, but I personally don’t see a scenario where living on the street doesn’t trump every single one of those other factors. In other words, anything that involves me living on the street is a complete non-starter, regardless of how compelling the other factors are. I get that some people really don’t have the option to just move somewhere cheaper. But if that’s at all a possibility, it seems like that should be a no brainier
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      There has to be a place to live on the other end. That place has to be affordable and safe. There have to have enough funds for the entire family to move. The funds have to last until all of the jobs that pay enough are secured (in our case 3-4). The funds may also need to last long enough for the wage earners' business to be reestablished or can find an employer who's hiring portal doesn't auto-discard 20 year job gaps (that portal may not exist). All this assumes earning family members don't have even the most minor of criminal records. It also assumes family members don't have zero credit (which bar most rentals and many employers) after years of frugal living to save up those funds. God help anyone with medical debt. Just one of these factors can lead to family homelessness, in some city far away from their support systems.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
The curse of mobility I guess: people can move in if they want, bid up prices, which can force out those who were there before. The only solutions are to either eliminate/reduce mobility or move housing out from market influences.
timwaagh 5y ago
I think there's definite limits to that. Like you can't expect to forever stay in Amsterdam center because you happen to live there now. Loads of others want your place and can contribute more. But it's not always the case. For example the outskirts of said city are deliberately underdeveloped because the zoning designation says so which is entirely a political choice to expel the poor.
Der_Einzige 5y ago
What you did wrong was not keep up economically with the average earnings of those in your community. The market believes that you are not productive enough to live where you currently do. Capitalists believe that you must turn the other cheek for the invisible hand of the free market...
marcinzm 5y ago
My view is one shaped by a family of immigrants. In the end life isn't about right or wrong or morals or ethics. It just is. Much of it is out of an individuals control and never was or will be. All you can do is control how YOU react to those factors. You can complain about them and get ground into powder, or you can adjust to make your own life better.
toss1 5y ago
Yes, it is sucky to not be able to live where you like, but the attitude seems odd. Why do you feel entitled to live at any particular location (that was not actually inherited)? I've never felt it was my "right" to be able to afford any particular location and/or living standard at that location, and always noticed that it was a trade-off between costs, location, commute/travel times. Same whether it is in a resort town vs out in the styx, or in a major city downtown vs the suburbs/exurbs. As long as I can remember, it's been that way - the workers in the fancy town couldn't afford to live there, unless a big crew got together to rent a house in town. Or, you were looking for a rent-controlled apt or sublet. Just because you or I have done no wrong, does not mean that we are entitled to do what we want, where we want, when we want. "... You can't always get what you want / But if you try sometime you just might find / You just might find / That you get what you need " Welcome to the real world.
- lostdog 5y ago
  > Why do you feel entitled to live at any particular location (that was not actually inherited)? For me, it's less about my own life, and more about how terrible the world is when people get pushed out of their homes. Most people need stability to have a good life. They do better when they understand their neighborhood. Their kids do better when they can go to the same school system until they are 18. Plus, the employment market is really uneven, so being booted out of a location with good jobs can be a disaster for a family. On top of this, moving is costly by itself, so the cost of moving every year is another tax on those who are struggling. The argument of "you shouldn't feel entitled to this" just sucks. A better lens is "Do our housing policies help or hurt leading a good life." We're not talking about who deserves the latest fancy SUV, but about whether our housing situation screws up many people's lives.
  - mikem170 5y ago
    I agree. I believe zoning is a big impediment. People wouldn't be priced out of their communities if there was more supply of housing at varying prices. Instead current regulations restrict the supply of housing and seem to prioritizing uniformity and property values.
beervirus 5y ago
Things change all the time, even if you don’t do anything wrong. Welcome to earth.
archsurface 5y ago
Commuting enables this. If people couldn't commute, they couldn't invade your area. I've long claimed one of the biggest problems with the UK is the tube; it enables people to pile into London every day. Get rid of the tube, and people and business would be more spread out, which would in turn get rid of the elephant in the room being the UK is a one trick pony - "What do you have, UK?" - "London.", "What else?" - "London", "What else?" - "London". Oh, and then there's the medieval monarchy nonsense...
diogenescynic 5y ago
>How is it just that I be forced into exile because “the market” says so? I’ve done no wrong. Capitalism. The market giveth and the market taketh away. What is the alternative? Nativism? And at what point does a claim to a particular place start? Because I have bad news for most Americans...

jmspring 5y ago

A lot of times, one's proximity to work, friends, family has a non-trivial cost associated with it. Not everyone can be mobile. That said, the other side of the coin with regard to homelessness - some fall in the above; some follow to where the services/ease of access to one's vice/tolerance (also known as compassion) is. With regard to moving to a smaller town. The median income in the county in CA I live in is ~40k/year. The average house price has essentially doubled in the last 5ish years. Income, hasn't changed so much. I bought my place ~5.5 years ago and it's basically doubled and is a condo. Same issues around a lack of affordable housing in this rural mountain red county is mirrored by some of the bay area counties I moved from.

science4sail 5y ago

I wonder if there could be an evaporative cooling like effect in play here? That is, everyone who is willing to move has already moved; as a result, the remaining population biases towards those unwilling to move.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
Switch unwilling for unable and you've got it.

KaiserPro 5y ago

Because there are no jobs there. Yes remote might fix that, eventually. But I strongly doubt that, especially as humans are social animals.[1] However The UK is a more extreme version of this. People move to london because it has the most concentration of high paying jobs, and as a side effect culture (what that is I leave up to you. I don't just mean music, cinema and posh people shit.) Now, I could move back to bumblefuck rural england, but I would have to exchange an underserved IT job market, with a median wage of >£60k to a once/two company town with a median wage of £38k. Combine that with houses only being 30% cheaper, and higher transport costs, no nurseries or comprehensive child care, the countryside can be a real pain in the tits. Costs are higher in the countryside, as there are less public amenities. So no, people can't just move, otherwise they would have done already. [1] there are two classes of remote "influencers" the first ones seem to be happy working alone, permanently. The second appears to be the ones that are "jet setting" where they work in a new country every other month. Both of these groups represent a tiny minority. I strongly doubt that we should be optimising for these two noisy classes of people. I suspect, and me, my team and wider company data backs this us (even though its shallow evidence) that they more popular route is hybrid.

mbesto 5y ago
> Because there are no jobs there. This is simply not true. There are a record number of job openings. I would go on to say that there has never been a time in history where finding a job was this easy. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/jolts.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/jolts.pdf https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL "The number of job openings was little changed at 10.4 million on the last business day of September, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today"
- throwawaygh 5y ago
  Presumably OP means a job in their profession, not employment generically.
  - lostmsu 5y ago

nabilhat 5y ago

Roughly 1 in 10 people in the USA already live more than an hour away from their job, a number that's been increasing over the last ~15 years as people move to cheaper places. This sustained migration of workers has not yet fixed the whole issue of housing.

WarOnPrivacy 5y ago

A local move (cheap market) is 4k out of pocket after factoring in 1st/last/sec, utility deposits & endless move/cleaning expenses. The local move (cheap market until this year) we just did was ~5x that. Moving to another city where savings have to be firehosed until enough jobs are secured (us:3-4) can easily burn thru ten/tens of thousands of dollars. A pretty big chunk of America doesn't have that much cash sitting around.