10 ms·

HN has a blindness for the vast land area of America that isn't The Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, Boston, and a handful of other insanely expensive locations. Home ow

HN has a blindness for the vast land area of America that isn't The Bay Area, NYC, Seattle, Boston, and a handful of other insanely expensive locations. Home ownership has probably plummeted in those markets (I don't have the data) but it leads to certain types of comments being passed around as fact. The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting.

echelon 3y ago
> The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting. The algorithm has turned (some) people into whiners and doomers. It really sucks to watch them take defeatist attitudes on everything in life. I see lots of these young 20-somethings on Reddit thinking their lives are over. It's absurd. They have their entire lives ahead of them, and all it takes is one break into a career. They even think climate change is going to "kill all of us" before they're elderly. That's not even what the science says. On the topic of having children, though - people aren't having kids because they're choosing to focus on themselves. There are ten times as many forms of entertainment today as there were in the 1980s, and people can endlessly consume content in their hands. You can go glamping at a music festival, post it on Instagram, and hook up with new friends and romantic partners you meet. All incredibly easily. Our culture has become built around experience and consumption. I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.
- atoav 3y ago
  As someone who is doing well financially I don't think you found the reason. The gist of it is: There are worlds and circumstances into which people want to bring kids. We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark. The rest is probably due to individualism. Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives. And the best live does not involve herding 6 kids, even if they are your own. We created this world willingly, and the low birth rate is a consequence — and so is the need for migration if we wanna stay wealthy. The thing is: now that the genie is out of the bottle we are not gonna be able to force people to have kids. We can just create circumstances in which they are willing to. I am in my 30s and I am unsure if I will ever be able to retire. I am sure however that I will have to change my job and career multiple times throughout my life. Despite me being financially well off, I am not sure if I would be able to support kids in the future. This is not about being whiny. I just think if I had kids it is my responsibility to throw them into a world that can sustain them. This one can't.
  - sangnoir 3y ago
    > Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives. Thought experiment for all the unrestrained free-market folk: how can the free hand of the market can solve for low birthrates? Bonus points if the solution doesn't involve government-issued visas.
    - namdnay 3y ago
      > Thought experiment for all the unrestrained free-market folk: how can the free hand of the market can solve for low birthrates tax cuts for families, subisidies for child birth and care - none of these are contrary to the idea of a free competitive market
      - echelon 3y ago
        > tax cuts for families, subisidies for child birth and care - none of these are contrary to the idea of a free competitive market Moreover, a free market can benefit from regulation and certain socialist policies (eg. transportation and education).
    - techdragon 3y ago
      Oh it’s got a few solutions… but you’re probably not going to like them… there’s the whole 13th amendment issue for starters…
    - The_Colonel 3y ago
      Free market is a kind of natural selection. People with inner desire to procreate will spread themselves, people without it won't. Pro-natalist cultures (e. g. orthodox jews) will procreate as well. This inner desire wasn't selected for strongly in the past because there were other mechanisms to nudge people to procreate (social norms, lack of birth control), but I expect it will play a much bigger role in the following generations.
      - troupo 3y ago
        > Free market is a kind of natural selection. People with inner desire to procreate will spread themselves, What does free market have to with it?
- Defletter 3y ago
  It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman. That is unthinkable today. We understand there are ways to be successful, but it's like that saying: anyone can be successful, but everyone can't. I know a lot of people who spend their money on experiences because they genuinely believe they won't get a retirement, so they might as well enjoy their life while they can. I'm part of this group. I don't think the world will literally be over by then, but the future looks bleak. We've also been drilled from birth that you should never have a child if you can't afford it, and people are taking that advice to heart. And because you can't afford your home on a single income anymore, more and more parents are having to rely on childcare, which is itself expensive. The issues are just compounding. If you just want to believe that everyone is too enamored by their phones to procreate... that's your prerogative, but yikes.
  - Duanemclemore 3y ago
    >mailman Is a bad counterexample, as that's still a good, high-paying (union!!!) job. But aside from that tiny gripe you're not wrong about the rest.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      Ddg reckons average mailman salary is about 50k. That’s 1/8th the average house price. In 1990 it was about 25k with prices about 150k House prices are about 100k too high, they should be 300k not 400k One reason for this is more people rely on two incomes to pay for housing, so more money is available for housing, so money transfers from future debt of millenials to existing assets of boomers and gen x. But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care.
      - echelon 3y ago
        > But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care. Maybe we're also stuck in something of a vicious cycle. More people not having kids leads to more double incomes. More double incomes means more money to pay higher prices. The market seems to be bearing the higher prices just fine, so they continue to climb...
- willis936 3y ago
  Claiming a legitimate argument is from "the algorithm" is flimsy, unprovable, unfalsifiable, and does nothing except discredit the person rather than the idea. I could claim your argument is from living a life of privilege, but then I'd be addressing the person rather than the argument.
- rpcope1 3y ago
  > I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children. That kind of thing, at least to me, seemed to get old pretty quickly. Probably more importantly though, is that we all get old at some point. When fewer and fewer people have children of their own, what happens when the bulk of people get past retirement age? I think it's a huge problem from both an economic standpoint (if there's no productive workers to keep things going, is the state really going to be able to support you in better than awful conditions as you age?) and from an individual and cultural standpoint.
Runways 3y ago
Texan here. Your ad hominem attack is BS. Our house prices, North of Dallas and deep in the suburbs - far from the bay areas and Seattles, have doubled. That includes my home. People in our profession usually have to live by big cities, like Dallas. But the homes are ridiculously priced and it's insane. My juniors have no hope of owning a home that is big enough to raise a family without years of saving. And they're college educated engineers, some of them married with dual incomes.
- wombatpm 3y ago
  Dual income has its own set of problems when it comes time for kids. Lose an income or pay for child care.
  - pc86 3y ago
    My wife and I are expecting. Daycare is expensive, but it's only an outrageous expense if you have two people making up to about 3x minimum wage. Below that, it makes sense (at least in our area) to have one person stay home. But the cheapest state-regulated, licensed daycares are around $1500/mo for full-day infant care. $18k/yr is a lot to spend on anything when you're making $20/hr for sure, but if you've got two professional people making $75-100k/yr each it becomes a very manageable expense and nobody considers staying home to save that.
    - cableshaft 3y ago
      $75k is about $56k after taxes. And many people that have children tend to have at least two children, so you can double that $18k to $36k/year for those people. Once you get to that point, it gets harder to justify having someone work just to take home an extra $20k a year. It starts making more sense for one person to stay home (or work a part-time gig that lets them still raise their children) and the other person to try to make a bit more money on their end instead. My parents got around the daycare cost problem by my mother running a daycare out of the home, so she was making money while still able to raise us. But I imagine that's become so much more risky nowadays (like legal issues, parental trust, etc) that it probably wouldn't be worth doing that anymore. And as soon as we both graduated high school she stopped doing it and went back into the workforce elsewhere.
vlovich123 3y ago
There are also people who pretend like problems highlighted in the Bay Area and other metropolitan cities are unique to them. Yet every time it looks like those are just the first wave of the changes that are heading to other regions first. Like the wave of homelessness. People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality and how it impacts housing are rippling through the US. While it may be too doomer, it’s worthwhile to listen and understand the struggles of people who aren’t you to understand what’s coming. Certainly home ownership is rarer even for millennials and Genz is likely going to have even lower rates (its a little too early to compare since they’re too young for it)
- AlchemistCamp 3y ago
  > ”Certainly home ownership is rarer even for millennials and Genz is likely going to have even lower rates” Looking at the data, certainly not: https://x.com/noahpinion/status/1649492485968891904?s=46&t=CRBDO2D7VnJVQhLZQofo4w https://x.com/noahpinion/status/1649492485968891904?s=46&t=C...
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    25 is too young to start making those predictions I think. We won’t for a while
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  > People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality and how it impacts housing are rippling through the US. These aren't automatic, though. Who's to say they aren't produced by policy that's often done first in SF first?
  - nostrademons 3y ago
    The policy is usually in response to the problems, not vice versa. California is actually dysfunctionally democratic (with a small "d", not "Democratic"). The state constitution gives ballot initiatives powers that they don't have in many other states, and the state has a tradition of individual rights and political activism that means the citizenry isn't shy about using that. A lot of people in the rest of the country tend to think "Oh, that's just dysfunctional California politics, we'll vote in different policies and things will go differently for us." Yes, you will vote in different policies. No, things will not go differently for you. California voted in different policies too - remember that it's the source of the Reagan Revolution, the hippie generation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, all sorts of policies that took hold nationally but are now the antithesis of what California stands for. At the root of this is a misperception of the power of politics. Most ordinary people think that laws are laws and the people who make the laws have ultimate power. California (and U.S. history in general) proves that laws are reactions to specific social and demographic forces, and the laws reflect the shape of those forces. Economics drives politics and technology drives economics.
refurb 3y ago
Pretty much. I used to live in a mid-sized mid-West city in the US and still keep in touch. Most everyone I know bought a house, even with the modest wages they had. Why? Because there are plenty of homes in the $100-$200k range, even now.
- vundercind 3y ago
  Hell, you can buy beautiful, updated small mansions in the heart of many small midwestern towns for under $200k. The trouble is: 1) no local jobs to speak of (unless you want to clerk at the farm & feed or assistant-manage the McDonald’s out by the highway) 2) nearest hospital that can do more than stabilize you before shipping you somewhere better, is over an hour away. 3) the schools are really, really bad 4) no local services or amenities. Hope the nearest state park (if any) is really good. But if it’s a midwestern one it’s probably not. Remote work, being young and healthy and willing to take a little extra risk, having no kids and planning to have none, and being kinda a home-body (or being really into readily available rural midwestern outdoor activities like hunting and fishing), can make it a viable way to go, but that’s a lot of qualifiers. In our medium-ish sized midwestern city there are smaller slightly-run-down houses in the low $200Ks, but universally in bottom-half school districts for the city. Solid choice if no kids, though. But also local tech jobs pay at most 50% of big-city equivalents.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    "the schools are really, really bad" Depends on the state and locality. Some rural schools have good opportunities. But pretty much agree on the other parts.
    - vundercind 3y ago
      They exist, but they’re needles in a haystack. Especially if you exclude rural districts that aren’t cheap because they’re basically captured by the same folks who attend the country club the community’s centered around (there are a few of these, particularly in the Northeast)

echelon 3y ago

> The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting. The algorithm has turned (some) people into whiners and doomers. It really sucks to watch them take defeatist attitudes on everything in life. I see lots of these young 20-somethings on Reddit thinking their lives are over. It's absurd. They have their entire lives ahead of them, and all it takes is one break into a career. They even think climate change is going to "kill all of us" before they're elderly. That's not even what the science says. On the topic of having children, though - people aren't having kids because they're choosing to focus on themselves. There are ten times as many forms of entertainment today as there were in the 1980s, and people can endlessly consume content in their hands. You can go glamping at a music festival, post it on Instagram, and hook up with new friends and romantic partners you meet. All incredibly easily. Our culture has become built around experience and consumption. I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.

atoav 3y ago
As someone who is doing well financially I don't think you found the reason. The gist of it is: There are worlds and circumstances into which people want to bring kids. We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark. The rest is probably due to individualism. Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives. And the best live does not involve herding 6 kids, even if they are your own. We created this world willingly, and the low birth rate is a consequence — and so is the need for migration if we wanna stay wealthy. The thing is: now that the genie is out of the bottle we are not gonna be able to force people to have kids. We can just create circumstances in which they are willing to. I am in my 30s and I am unsure if I will ever be able to retire. I am sure however that I will have to change my job and career multiple times throughout my life. Despite me being financially well off, I am not sure if I would be able to support kids in the future. This is not about being whiny. I just think if I had kids it is my responsibility to throw them into a world that can sustain them. This one can't.
- sangnoir 3y ago
  > Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives. Thought experiment for all the unrestrained free-market folk: how can the free hand of the market can solve for low birthrates? Bonus points if the solution doesn't involve government-issued visas.
  - namdnay 3y ago
    > Thought experiment for all the unrestrained free-market folk: how can the free hand of the market can solve for low birthrates tax cuts for families, subisidies for child birth and care - none of these are contrary to the idea of a free competitive market
    - echelon 3y ago
      > tax cuts for families, subisidies for child birth and care - none of these are contrary to the idea of a free competitive market Moreover, a free market can benefit from regulation and certain socialist policies (eg. transportation and education).
  - techdragon 3y ago
    Oh it’s got a few solutions… but you’re probably not going to like them… there’s the whole 13th amendment issue for starters…
  - The_Colonel 3y ago
    Free market is a kind of natural selection. People with inner desire to procreate will spread themselves, people without it won't. Pro-natalist cultures (e. g. orthodox jews) will procreate as well. This inner desire wasn't selected for strongly in the past because there were other mechanisms to nudge people to procreate (social norms, lack of birth control), but I expect it will play a much bigger role in the following generations.
    - troupo 3y ago
      > Free market is a kind of natural selection. People with inner desire to procreate will spread themselves, What does free market have to with it?
Defletter 3y ago
It's wild that, not too long ago, you could afford a house and a car on a single income as a mailman. That is unthinkable today. We understand there are ways to be successful, but it's like that saying: anyone can be successful, but everyone can't. I know a lot of people who spend their money on experiences because they genuinely believe they won't get a retirement, so they might as well enjoy their life while they can. I'm part of this group. I don't think the world will literally be over by then, but the future looks bleak. We've also been drilled from birth that you should never have a child if you can't afford it, and people are taking that advice to heart. And because you can't afford your home on a single income anymore, more and more parents are having to rely on childcare, which is itself expensive. The issues are just compounding. If you just want to believe that everyone is too enamored by their phones to procreate... that's your prerogative, but yikes.
- Duanemclemore 3y ago
  >mailman Is a bad counterexample, as that's still a good, high-paying (union!!!) job. But aside from that tiny gripe you're not wrong about the rest.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    Ddg reckons average mailman salary is about 50k. That’s 1/8th the average house price. In 1990 it was about 25k with prices about 150k House prices are about 100k too high, they should be 300k not 400k One reason for this is more people rely on two incomes to pay for housing, so more money is available for housing, so money transfers from future debt of millenials to existing assets of boomers and gen x. But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care.
    - echelon 3y ago
      > But on top of that it means two incomes means harder to have kids due to child care. Maybe we're also stuck in something of a vicious cycle. More people not having kids leads to more double incomes. More double incomes means more money to pay higher prices. The market seems to be bearing the higher prices just fine, so they continue to climb...
willis936 3y ago
Claiming a legitimate argument is from "the algorithm" is flimsy, unprovable, unfalsifiable, and does nothing except discredit the person rather than the idea. I could claim your argument is from living a life of privilege, but then I'd be addressing the person rather than the argument.
rpcope1 3y ago
> I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children. That kind of thing, at least to me, seemed to get old pretty quickly. Probably more importantly though, is that we all get old at some point. When fewer and fewer people have children of their own, what happens when the bulk of people get past retirement age? I think it's a huge problem from both an economic standpoint (if there's no productive workers to keep things going, is the state really going to be able to support you in better than awful conditions as you age?) and from an individual and cultural standpoint.

Runways 3y ago

Texan here. Your ad hominem attack is BS. Our house prices, North of Dallas and deep in the suburbs - far from the bay areas and Seattles, have doubled. That includes my home. People in our profession usually have to live by big cities, like Dallas. But the homes are ridiculously priced and it's insane. My juniors have no hope of owning a home that is big enough to raise a family without years of saving. And they're college educated engineers, some of them married with dual incomes.

wombatpm 3y ago
Dual income has its own set of problems when it comes time for kids. Lose an income or pay for child care.
- pc86 3y ago
  My wife and I are expecting. Daycare is expensive, but it's only an outrageous expense if you have two people making up to about 3x minimum wage. Below that, it makes sense (at least in our area) to have one person stay home. But the cheapest state-regulated, licensed daycares are around $1500/mo for full-day infant care. $18k/yr is a lot to spend on anything when you're making $20/hr for sure, but if you've got two professional people making $75-100k/yr each it becomes a very manageable expense and nobody considers staying home to save that.
  - cableshaft 3y ago
    $75k is about $56k after taxes. And many people that have children tend to have at least two children, so you can double that $18k to $36k/year for those people. Once you get to that point, it gets harder to justify having someone work just to take home an extra $20k a year. It starts making more sense for one person to stay home (or work a part-time gig that lets them still raise their children) and the other person to try to make a bit more money on their end instead. My parents got around the daycare cost problem by my mother running a daycare out of the home, so she was making money while still able to raise us. But I imagine that's become so much more risky nowadays (like legal issues, parental trust, etc) that it probably wouldn't be worth doing that anymore. And as soon as we both graduated high school she stopped doing it and went back into the workforce elsewhere.

vlovich123 3y ago

There are also people who pretend like problems highlighted in the Bay Area and other metropolitan cities are unique to them. Yet every time it looks like those are just the first wave of the changes that are heading to other regions first. Like the wave of homelessness. People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality and how it impacts housing are rippling through the US. While it may be too doomer, it’s worthwhile to listen and understand the struggles of people who aren’t you to understand what’s coming. Certainly home ownership is rarer even for millennials and Genz is likely going to have even lower rates (its a little too early to compare since they’re too young for it)

AlchemistCamp 3y ago
> ”Certainly home ownership is rarer even for millennials and Genz is likely going to have even lower rates” Looking at the data, certainly not: https://x.com/noahpinion/status/1649492485968891904?s=46&t=CRBDO2D7VnJVQhLZQofo4w https://x.com/noahpinion/status/1649492485968891904?s=46&t=C...
- vlovich123 3y ago
  25 is too young to start making those predictions I think. We won’t for a while
robertlagrant 3y ago
> People made fun of SF, then it spread to the broader Bay Area, then LA, then other parts of the country. Turns out the effects of income inequality and how it impacts housing are rippling through the US. These aren't automatic, though. Who's to say they aren't produced by policy that's often done first in SF first?
- nostrademons 3y ago
  The policy is usually in response to the problems, not vice versa. California is actually dysfunctionally democratic (with a small "d", not "Democratic"). The state constitution gives ballot initiatives powers that they don't have in many other states, and the state has a tradition of individual rights and political activism that means the citizenry isn't shy about using that. A lot of people in the rest of the country tend to think "Oh, that's just dysfunctional California politics, we'll vote in different policies and things will go differently for us." Yes, you will vote in different policies. No, things will not go differently for you. California voted in different policies too - remember that it's the source of the Reagan Revolution, the hippie generation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, all sorts of policies that took hold nationally but are now the antithesis of what California stands for. At the root of this is a misperception of the power of politics. Most ordinary people think that laws are laws and the people who make the laws have ultimate power. California (and U.S. history in general) proves that laws are reactions to specific social and demographic forces, and the laws reflect the shape of those forces. Economics drives politics and technology drives economics.

refurb 3y ago

Pretty much. I used to live in a mid-sized mid-West city in the US and still keep in touch. Most everyone I know bought a house, even with the modest wages they had. Why? Because there are plenty of homes in the $100-$200k range, even now.

vundercind 3y ago
Hell, you can buy beautiful, updated small mansions in the heart of many small midwestern towns for under $200k. The trouble is: 1) no local jobs to speak of (unless you want to clerk at the farm & feed or assistant-manage the McDonald’s out by the highway) 2) nearest hospital that can do more than stabilize you before shipping you somewhere better, is over an hour away. 3) the schools are really, really bad 4) no local services or amenities. Hope the nearest state park (if any) is really good. But if it’s a midwestern one it’s probably not. Remote work, being young and healthy and willing to take a little extra risk, having no kids and planning to have none, and being kinda a home-body (or being really into readily available rural midwestern outdoor activities like hunting and fishing), can make it a viable way to go, but that’s a lot of qualifiers. In our medium-ish sized midwestern city there are smaller slightly-run-down houses in the low $200Ks, but universally in bottom-half school districts for the city. Solid choice if no kids, though. But also local tech jobs pay at most 50% of big-city equivalents.
- giantg2 3y ago
  "the schools are really, really bad" Depends on the state and locality. Some rural schools have good opportunities. But pretty much agree on the other parts.
  - vundercind 3y ago
    They exist, but they’re needles in a haystack. Especially if you exclude rural districts that aren’t cheap because they’re basically captured by the same folks who attend the country club the community’s centered around (there are a few of these, particularly in the Northeast)