6 ms·

Isn't the vast majority of the true problems caused by not enough supply of all KINDS of NEW housing being built to accompany both massive population growth (in

Isn't the vast majority of the true problems caused by not enough supply of all KINDS of NEW housing being built to accompany both massive population growth (including immigrants in some areas), massive wealth increase among the global rich (who can now own multiple empty properties in marquee cities), landlords eating up more of your income AND in the US case government rules and regulations creating a predatory medical system that consumes over 18 percent of GDP. In the 70s a blue collar worker could buy a house and look after their family. Now we have massive asset price inflation due to low interest rates and not enough growth in housing assets. This can lead to future social unrest on a massive scale (not just occasional riots/protests).

nradov 5y ago
There are many places in the US where a skilled blue collar worker can buy a house and look after a family. But HN users tend to have a distorted perspective since most of them live in the SF Bay Area and other expensive areas.
- YesThatTom2 5y ago
  Where? Where in the US can someone live on blue collar salary and afford a mortgage?
  - b9a2cab5 5y ago
    Plenty of places in the Midwest/South if you're a tradesman. Obviously a McDonald's worker or Starbucks barista is probably not going to be able to afford a mortgage.
    - stefan_ 5y ago
      This is obvious because? We certainly have the wealth for it.
      - b9a2cab5 5y ago
        You are free to tip until they make whatever you consider a sufficient wage. "We" should start with "you".
        piva00 5y ago
        Tipping is the worst culture possible for work environments... Make someone's salary hostage to the whims of patrons, what a lovely way to live.
    - derbOac 5y ago
      I agree with you, speaking from experience with family. But I also see the spillover from the coasts as threatening this. The "wealthy refugees from the west coast" has become a real thing. Maybe it's all about [over]population and age distributions.
    - butMyside 5y ago
      Then spend all their retirement on medical care for their broken body. We treat each other like animals no matter the job. Moral relativism has never gone anywhere. It was black people, and women, now it’s just poor people. Still flogging Anglo gibberish law when it’s clear it’s all just biological need being held hostage by political corruption empowering cliques like a fucking high school
  - samsolomon 5y ago
    Most small and mid-sized cities? I lived in Mobile, Alabama for a couple years. I rented an awesome 1,400 sq ft place with power, gas and water included for about $600/mo. Looking at that same street on Zillow it looks like there are a few 3br 2ba homes for around $200,000.
  - throwaway803453 5y ago
    One of the properties I own is in Reno which is a 4hr drive from SF. It's a 2br 1ba condo which Zillow estimates $207k. It's nice, fully remodeled. That would be $900 mortgage + $180 hoa + $50 taxes (?) = ~$1200/mo ? Make $20/hour like most folks in this working class neighborhood do and you are all set. Get a roommate or a spouse that works part time if you can't earn $20/hr.
    - jkaptur 5y ago
      Enviably close to Tahoe, too.
  - afpx 5y ago
    Most of the US, I'm guessing. There are 53 million people living out in rural areas. The vast majority aren't college educated. People just live on a lower standard of living and get by with less. For example, my sister just bought a $28,000 3 bedroom house. It's a boring old company home, in a boring and uneducated area of the country. But, she has lived there all her life and enjoys the people and culture.
  - abernard1 5y ago
    > Where? Where in the US can someone live on blue collar salary and afford a mortgage? Most places that aren't deep blue cities. That seems like hyperbole but is true. Picking just a few cities, the median house prices/sq footages are: - Houston, TX: $238K, 2031 sq ft - Indianapolis, Indiana: $196K, 1853 sq ft - Oklahoma City, OK: $152K, 1455 sq ft - Atlanta, GA: $399K, 1586 sq ft Each one of these places has a cost of living (excluding real estate) less than 50% that of CA as a whole. All >1M size metros. The most expensive, Atlanta, has a combined monthly payment inc taxes of $1700 a month on a 30-yr. That's $20,400 a year. Median plumber salary in Atlanta is $63K a year, so this would be 1/3rd their income. Once again, that's median salary and salaries rise sharply at mid-career, and median home price.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    Generally speaking, the US population is quite concentrated. 66% of people live with-in 100mi (160km) of a border: * https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone A sizeable portion live on the coast: > As of 2014, nearly 40% of the population lived in counties on the coast. * https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html So presumably there's a decent amount of space 'in the middle'.
- eru 5y ago
  Yes, there are many places like that. Alas, there's almost no overlap between those places and the most productive parts of the country. GDP would be enormously increased, if eg more people could move to New York City or Silicon Valley. See also https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-out https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-o...
  - biomcgary 5y ago
    Or would GDP be increased more (and more evenly distributed, both geographically and demographically) if the jobs in NYC or SV were all required to be remote? Imagine if every small town in the country had HN types bringing money into the local economy instead of taking it out.
    - eru 5y ago
      No. Increase in GDP means that someone is making more money. And you seldom have to _require_ anything to get people to make more money. Companies and workers already have the option to negotiate remote working arrangements. And had for a long time. > Imagine if every small town in the country had HN types bringing money into the local economy instead of taking it out. They'd just take it out to another 'local' economy. What makes some random spot more deserving than some other random spot? And in any case, on a macro scale there's basically as much money in the national economy as the Fed wants there to be. If there's some process that makes money magically vanish (eg perhaps those wacky foreigners selling you goods but then just burying the cash you pay them, instead of spending it), then the Fed will just issue more money to make up for the shortfall. Similarly, if those foreigners dig the money back up, the Fed will just sell a few items off their balance sheet to soak up the extra money.
      - Nevermark 5y ago
        You are responding to arguments about GDP with arguments about money supply. Inflation adjusted GDP is a completely independent measure/concept/entity/quantity from money supply.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
If housing were the problem you wouldn't see parallels in other countries that have vastly different housing landscapes. Big societal problems don't have one simple solution because if they did they'd be solved and they wouldn't be big societal problems.
- eru 5y ago
  > If housing were the problem you wouldn't see parallels in other countries that have vastly different housing landscapes. Well, have you looked at those other countries? Housing become more expensive has been a fairly broad trend in many countries. Looking at specific examples (and looking at their other problems) is instructive, indeed.
  - wahern 5y ago
    Housing price inflation is definitely a trend across many developed countries. But it's not universal, or at least uneven. I haven't researched data for this specifically, but a broader trend might be the bifurcation of labor into creatives and non-creatives (or some similar rough dichotomy), with the former seeing faster income growth than the latter. Such a phenomenon would readily explain housing price inflation while also being an obvious consequence of globalized labor markets depressing most strongly income growth for non-creatives.
    - eru 5y ago
      But labour markets aren't globalised. We have strong restrictions on migration all around the globe. Some goods and services are tradeable, but also with some legal restrictions.
      - wahern 5y ago
        > Some goods and services are tradeable Most goods are tradable, and for decades now manufacture of consumer goods relocates relatively quickly in search of low cost labor. This leaves a surplus of workers behind, suppressing wages in industries with low costs of entry--remaining manufacturing but especially non-professional services. IOW, labor markets are strongly globalized from the perspective of capital. A little less so from the perspective of laborers, though their wages remain stagnant all the same, so in many ways it's a distinction without a difference.
abecedarius 5y ago
> massive population growth The U.S. population growth rate right now is easily the lowest it's ever been, except for the 1930s. Agreed that housing and medical constriction are a big part of what's going on.
- varenc 5y ago
  Major cities are still experiencing a rate of population growth much higher than the national average.
  - eru 5y ago
    Yes, though in a national context you'd probably call that migration, not population growth. And it's a shame that it ain't larger: people migrating to more productive areas of the country is one way to increase the standard of living.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - pydry 5y ago
    Same thing that happened to Japan - population shrinkage combined with migration to the cities.
    - abecedarius 5y ago
      I get the impression housing prices aren't a big deal there?
inter_netuser 5y ago
in the 70s, blue collar workers were not competing with 2 billion workers that were happy to 2 bucks an hour.
- eru 5y ago
  Back then those hungry masses would have been ecstatic about 2 bucks a day. China and India (to take just the two biggest countries) have become massively more productive and massively richer since those bad old days. Thanks to their integration into the world economy, today blue collar workers can afford riches undreamt-of in the 1970s.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    >today blue collar workers can afford riches undreamt-of in the 1970s. All the luxury you could dream of, as long as you don't dream of a home or medical care.
    - eru 5y ago
      Yes, but we know why these are screwed up. And it's not because of foreign workers. For medical care: 1970s style medical care is basically outlawed today, and there's lots of regulation. Eg if you want to open a new hospital, the existing hospital in your area that you would compete with have veto rights, and use them. See eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... or look for 'Certificate of Need' in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/04/highlights-from-the-comment-thread-on-school-choice/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/04/highlights-from-the-co... For housing: see eg https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-out https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-o... Basically, building houses used to be legal in the 1970s. Now it's illegal in many parts of the US.
      - pydry 5y ago
        They're screwed up because of wealth inequality and rent seeking. Essentially they're screwed up because American union power was destroyed by oligarchs and blue collar workers subsequently lost political representation. "Everything bad is caused by government regulations!" was a story told repeatedly in many different forms by lavishly funded Koch think tanks (mercatus, which you cited, being just one example) and filtered through other oligarch run mainstream media outlets. It was inspiredly largely by their battles with their nemesis - the EPA in the 70s/80s and was largely successful at promoting the "overregulation = bad" meme amongst the American proletariat. This was subsequently leveraged by Koch-funded politicians to democratically strip EPA regulations on their behalf.

nradov 5y ago

There are many places in the US where a skilled blue collar worker can buy a house and look after a family. But HN users tend to have a distorted perspective since most of them live in the SF Bay Area and other expensive areas.

YesThatTom2 5y ago
Where? Where in the US can someone live on blue collar salary and afford a mortgage?
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  Plenty of places in the Midwest/South if you're a tradesman. Obviously a McDonald's worker or Starbucks barista is probably not going to be able to afford a mortgage.
  - stefan_ 5y ago
    This is obvious because? We certainly have the wealth for it.
    - b9a2cab5 5y ago
      You are free to tip until they make whatever you consider a sufficient wage. "We" should start with "you".
      - piva00 5y ago
        Tipping is the worst culture possible for work environments... Make someone's salary hostage to the whims of patrons, what a lovely way to live.
  - derbOac 5y ago
    I agree with you, speaking from experience with family. But I also see the spillover from the coasts as threatening this. The "wealthy refugees from the west coast" has become a real thing. Maybe it's all about [over]population and age distributions.
  - butMyside 5y ago
    Then spend all their retirement on medical care for their broken body. We treat each other like animals no matter the job. Moral relativism has never gone anywhere. It was black people, and women, now it’s just poor people. Still flogging Anglo gibberish law when it’s clear it’s all just biological need being held hostage by political corruption empowering cliques like a fucking high school
- samsolomon 5y ago
  Most small and mid-sized cities? I lived in Mobile, Alabama for a couple years. I rented an awesome 1,400 sq ft place with power, gas and water included for about $600/mo. Looking at that same street on Zillow it looks like there are a few 3br 2ba homes for around $200,000.
- throwaway803453 5y ago
  One of the properties I own is in Reno which is a 4hr drive from SF. It's a 2br 1ba condo which Zillow estimates $207k. It's nice, fully remodeled. That would be $900 mortgage + $180 hoa + $50 taxes (?) = ~$1200/mo ? Make $20/hour like most folks in this working class neighborhood do and you are all set. Get a roommate or a spouse that works part time if you can't earn $20/hr.
  - jkaptur 5y ago
    Enviably close to Tahoe, too.
- afpx 5y ago
  Most of the US, I'm guessing. There are 53 million people living out in rural areas. The vast majority aren't college educated. People just live on a lower standard of living and get by with less. For example, my sister just bought a $28,000 3 bedroom house. It's a boring old company home, in a boring and uneducated area of the country. But, she has lived there all her life and enjoys the people and culture.
- abernard1 5y ago
  > Where? Where in the US can someone live on blue collar salary and afford a mortgage? Most places that aren't deep blue cities. That seems like hyperbole but is true. Picking just a few cities, the median house prices/sq footages are: - Houston, TX: $238K, 2031 sq ft - Indianapolis, Indiana: $196K, 1853 sq ft - Oklahoma City, OK: $152K, 1455 sq ft - Atlanta, GA: $399K, 1586 sq ft Each one of these places has a cost of living (excluding real estate) less than 50% that of CA as a whole. All >1M size metros. The most expensive, Atlanta, has a combined monthly payment inc taxes of $1700 a month on a 30-yr. That's $20,400 a year. Median plumber salary in Atlanta is $63K a year, so this would be 1/3rd their income. Once again, that's median salary and salaries rise sharply at mid-career, and median home price.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  Generally speaking, the US population is quite concentrated. 66% of people live with-in 100mi (160km) of a border: * https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone A sizeable portion live on the coast: > As of 2014, nearly 40% of the population lived in counties on the coast. * https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html So presumably there's a decent amount of space 'in the middle'.
eru 5y ago
Yes, there are many places like that. Alas, there's almost no overlap between those places and the most productive parts of the country. GDP would be enormously increased, if eg more people could move to New York City or Silicon Valley. See also https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-out https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-o...
- biomcgary 5y ago
  Or would GDP be increased more (and more evenly distributed, both geographically and demographically) if the jobs in NYC or SV were all required to be remote? Imagine if every small town in the country had HN types bringing money into the local economy instead of taking it out.
  - eru 5y ago
    No. Increase in GDP means that someone is making more money. And you seldom have to _require_ anything to get people to make more money. Companies and workers already have the option to negotiate remote working arrangements. And had for a long time. > Imagine if every small town in the country had HN types bringing money into the local economy instead of taking it out. They'd just take it out to another 'local' economy. What makes some random spot more deserving than some other random spot? And in any case, on a macro scale there's basically as much money in the national economy as the Fed wants there to be. If there's some process that makes money magically vanish (eg perhaps those wacky foreigners selling you goods but then just burying the cash you pay them, instead of spending it), then the Fed will just issue more money to make up for the shortfall. Similarly, if those foreigners dig the money back up, the Fed will just sell a few items off their balance sheet to soak up the extra money.
    - Nevermark 5y ago
      You are responding to arguments about GDP with arguments about money supply. Inflation adjusted GDP is a completely independent measure/concept/entity/quantity from money supply.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

throwaway0a5e 5y ago

If housing were the problem you wouldn't see parallels in other countries that have vastly different housing landscapes. Big societal problems don't have one simple solution because if they did they'd be solved and they wouldn't be big societal problems.

eru 5y ago
> If housing were the problem you wouldn't see parallels in other countries that have vastly different housing landscapes. Well, have you looked at those other countries? Housing become more expensive has been a fairly broad trend in many countries. Looking at specific examples (and looking at their other problems) is instructive, indeed.
- wahern 5y ago
  Housing price inflation is definitely a trend across many developed countries. But it's not universal, or at least uneven. I haven't researched data for this specifically, but a broader trend might be the bifurcation of labor into creatives and non-creatives (or some similar rough dichotomy), with the former seeing faster income growth than the latter. Such a phenomenon would readily explain housing price inflation while also being an obvious consequence of globalized labor markets depressing most strongly income growth for non-creatives.
  - eru 5y ago
    But labour markets aren't globalised. We have strong restrictions on migration all around the globe. Some goods and services are tradeable, but also with some legal restrictions.
    - wahern 5y ago
      > Some goods and services are tradeable Most goods are tradable, and for decades now manufacture of consumer goods relocates relatively quickly in search of low cost labor. This leaves a surplus of workers behind, suppressing wages in industries with low costs of entry--remaining manufacturing but especially non-professional services. IOW, labor markets are strongly globalized from the perspective of capital. A little less so from the perspective of laborers, though their wages remain stagnant all the same, so in many ways it's a distinction without a difference.

abecedarius 5y ago

> massive population growth The U.S. population growth rate right now is easily the lowest it's ever been, except for the 1930s. Agreed that housing and medical constriction are a big part of what's going on.

varenc 5y ago
Major cities are still experiencing a rate of population growth much higher than the national average.
- eru 5y ago
  Yes, though in a national context you'd probably call that migration, not population growth. And it's a shame that it ain't larger: people migrating to more productive areas of the country is one way to increase the standard of living.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pydry 5y ago
  Same thing that happened to Japan - population shrinkage combined with migration to the cities.
  - abecedarius 5y ago
    I get the impression housing prices aren't a big deal there?

inter_netuser 5y ago

in the 70s, blue collar workers were not competing with 2 billion workers that were happy to 2 bucks an hour.

eru 5y ago
Back then those hungry masses would have been ecstatic about 2 bucks a day. China and India (to take just the two biggest countries) have become massively more productive and massively richer since those bad old days. Thanks to their integration into the world economy, today blue collar workers can afford riches undreamt-of in the 1970s.
- Talanes 5y ago
  >today blue collar workers can afford riches undreamt-of in the 1970s. All the luxury you could dream of, as long as you don't dream of a home or medical care.
  - eru 5y ago
    Yes, but we know why these are screwed up. And it's not because of foreign workers. For medical care: 1970s style medical care is basically outlawed today, and there's lots of regulation. Eg if you want to open a new hospital, the existing hospital in your area that you would compete with have veto rights, and use them. See eg https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost... or look for 'Certificate of Need' in https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/04/highlights-from-the-comment-thread-on-school-choice/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/12/04/highlights-from-the-co... For housing: see eg https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-out https://www.mercatus.org/publications/monetary-policy/shut-o... Basically, building houses used to be legal in the 1970s. Now it's illegal in many parts of the US.
    - pydry 5y ago
      They're screwed up because of wealth inequality and rent seeking. Essentially they're screwed up because American union power was destroyed by oligarchs and blue collar workers subsequently lost political representation. "Everything bad is caused by government regulations!" was a story told repeatedly in many different forms by lavishly funded Koch think tanks (mercatus, which you cited, being just one example) and filtered through other oligarch run mainstream media outlets. It was inspiredly largely by their battles with their nemesis - the EPA in the 70s/80s and was largely successful at promoting the "overregulation = bad" meme amongst the American proletariat. This was subsequently leveraged by Koch-funded politicians to democratically strip EPA regulations on their behalf.