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I used to believe such things and then I did a median income vs price per square foot worldwide comparison and it turns out the United States is one of the chea
by endisneigh 5y ago
I used to believe such things and then I did a median income vs price per square foot worldwide comparison and it turns out the United States is one of the cheapest, if not the, cheapest place in the world when it comes to the “affordability” (median income vs price per square foot).
I think the issue is that the United States has been too cheap and finally that era of abundance at a low cost is coming to an end.
- torbTurret 5y agoSuch a simple analysis ignores e.g. the higher wages in the US offset by the lack of social nets
- throwaway27727 5y agoIt also ignores the vast differences between densely populated and not very populated cities.
- endisneigh 5y agoEven Manhattan is cheaper than most places according to the same metric.
- brewdad 5y agoMany apartments (condos in the rest of the country) in Manhattan are structured as co-ops with huge monthly obligations. The sales prices are lower because you can easily be committing to $2000 a month in payments to a co-op board. The total monthly outlays bring the numbers back in line.
- hammock 5y agoThe bigger reason is you can buy a house with 20% down (or less) in the US, where that is nearly impossible just about anywhere else in the world Edit: I should say anyone can buy a house for 20% down or less. In much of the world some can do this, but credit is not extended to nearly as many of the population as it is in the US
- tjr225 5y agoThis would make me think houses should be even more expensive than they currently are
- fraa-orolo 5y agoI just bought an apartment with 15% down. It's in the EU; 15% down is about the standard here with no special exceptions. With government assistance programmes it can be even 5% down but you'd have to qualify for some protected category.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoHow long is the rate fixed for?
- fraa-orolo 5y agoThe rate is based on Euribor [1], fixed for 6 months in my case (and commonly most everyone) but anything between 3 to 24 months was possible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euribor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euribor
- lupire 5y agoWow. What's going to happen your payment when rates go back above 0 to stop rampant inflation?
- nemo44x 5y agoI wish you well but the way things look, you’re completely fucked. Your interest rates have been so unsustainably low for so long. And now things are going up fast and will likely continue to due to rapid inflation. Good luck!
- gtirloni 5y agoForever? Here in Brazil we negotiate a yearly rate for the whole extension of the contract. Isn't this standard?
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoHigher average wages, but not do much higher median wages. Unless those rich people who are driving up the average are giving their money away, the ones who are closer to the median are in a sore spot.
- lupire 5y agoAverage wage is always reported as median.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoNo...average is always average, median is always median. Newspapers often mislabel the numbers they are reporting, but the distinction is always made clear in the data. See: > The average annual wage in 2019 in the US was $51,916.27, and the median annual wage was $34,248.45. The median wage is the wage “in the middle,” while average refers to the measure of central tendency for all the data. https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/average-american-income/ https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/average-american...
- scarface74 5y agoI’m not disputing your citation. But I believe this is a lot clearer. https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/ https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-calculator/
- lupire 5y agoBut in exchange taxes are lower.
- knubie 5y agoNot the OP, so I'm not sure what sources they used, but disposable income as measured by the OECD [0], for example, does takes this into account. [0] https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm
- maxerickson 5y agoSquare feet aren't a great affordability measure (they tend to come in rather larger lumps). In any case, why not just continue the era of abundance? We aren't really running short on space, and there is at least some indication that the lack of housing availability is a policy failure (rather than an expected outcome of some physical process or limit).
- endisneigh 5y agoIncomes are not going up with housing costs so eventually it’ll diverge to the point where it’s the same as other countries
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoWe lack space in the few urban areas people want to live in. If people were flexible about where they wanted to live, you’d think that the cheap land/lightly zoned places would prosper, but they don’t.
- betaby 5y agoI don't know. In Canada housing is expensive everywhere.
- xeromal 5y agoFor sure. I grew up in the deep south outside ATL and houses there are still "cheap". They're certainly outpacing the poor folks who were born and raised there, but you can still snag a house with an acre or so of land in the 100,000s. Beautiful land too. Forests, creeks, and wildlife.
- scarface74 5y agoWhat part of metro Atlanta are you referring to?
- xeromal 5y agoAltoona area. Some places in Woodstock. If you're willing to commute from Canton, it's got some great options too.
- majormajor 5y agoOne issue with this is that it just reflects a certain amount of space bloat - if it's impossible to find anything that's not 50% larger than in a certain other country, but it's 50% less per sqft... you get more space, but it's not more within your reach.
- jltsiren 5y agoPrice/area is a flawed metric. People are not only buying square feet but also houses they can live in and houses with a certain number of bedrooms and other features. A better model would assign a part of the price to a 0-room 0 square feet house, a part of it to each room, and only a part to the size of the house. The biggest affordability issue I see is that nobody builds starter homes for sale. In most areas, you can easily find a small 1br or 2br apartment to rent, but you can't buy a similar apartment. If you have to continue renting for years after you have settled down, because you can't buy anything smaller than 1000 square feet, it's harder to afford buying that 1000+ square foot house.
- asdff 5y agoSome parts of the US have pretty high price per square foot and pretty low median incomes within that neighborhood though, so looking at things nationally hides a lot of the nuance that is important to understand the whole. Overcrowding is common among low income people in the U.S. as it is anywhere else in the world. I can take you to parts of CA that will make you think I'm referring to central america and not california with that abbreviation, and these aren't far from cushy white collar jobs and expensive white collar owned homes, sometimes within a couple miles or so. OTOH in areas where housing is considered cheap the poor often aren't faring much better, since social safety nets are either worse or nonexistant and wages (and sometimes even available unskilled labor) amounts to little after the mandatory costs paid in these areas (perhaps car dependency due to a lack of reliable transit to commute to work).