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Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
- gonzalohm 4mo agoIs it the wages or that shitty one bedroom apartments go for $2000+
- foolfoolz 4mo agoone bedroom (and living alone) is a luxury and always has been
- MSFT_Edging 4mo agoMany localities will have co-living restrictions for single-family homes.
- cpburns2009 4mo agoApartments exist everywhere with a population over 100. Does no one rent an apartment with roommates anymore?
- llbbdd 4mo agoThey avoid it because it sucks
- nullorempty 4mo agoNot true. Rent for one bedroom apartment was 500$ in 1998, cold / hot water included other utilities are extra. I was making 35K back then and it was enough to afford relatively good living - car, groceries, gas, occasional meal for 2 at a restaurant. And gas was 35cents on the Wet Coast of Canada.
- rafram 4mo ago$35,000 in 1998 is $72,500 in 2026, which is still a totally fine income. I know people living pretty well on that in New York City.
- nullorempty 4mo agowell, if one bedroom now goes for 2000$ that's x4 increase where as the 72K vs 35K is only x2 increase So, no, your math doesn't work.
- rafram 4mo agoWho said a one-bedroom is $2,000?
- nullorempty 4mo agoI'd say at least 2K. But the poster above says it's over 3K.
- rafram 4mo agoThe poster above was quoting the median for all apartments in New York City, the (second-?)most expensive market in the country. Nationally it’s about $1,600 for a 1br: https://www.apartments.com/rent-market-trends/us/ https://www.apartments.com/rent-market-trends/us/
- nullorempty 4mo agoYou mentioned NY - logical to look at NY then no?
- john_strinlai 4mo ago>I know people living pretty well on that in New York City. median asking rent in 2026 for NYC is $3616/mo ($43,392/yr) meaning rent alone would be 60% of that income, assuming that the $72.5k figure is after taxes (which it probably isnt). if you take taxes off, you're probably at like 55-60k. that means rent alone is 70%-77% of income! "living pretty well"?
- api 4mo agoStop this race to the bottom stuff. You know what else is a luxury and always has been? HVAC, transportation, anything beyond maybe emergency medicine, Internet access, education, drinkable tap water, … The fact that the bulk of the US population has these things is what makes us a first world country.
- pocksuppet 4mo agoActually the US is a first-world country because it's allied with the US. Russia is a second-world country because it's allied with Russia, and Switzerland is a third-world country because it's allied with neither.
- gravypod 4mo agoIs this true? I think SROs were very common in the US in metropolitan areas. It was common plot point in media to: 1) kick your kids out at 18, 2) if two men lived together they were assumed to be dating.
- bglusman 4mo agoI think SRO's are very different from "One bedrooms" and even from studios? a studio or a one bedroom has a kitchen, a bathroom, and some living space... I think SRO's typically have a bed, a chair, and sometimes a desk. Bathrooms were shared, I'm not sure how kitchen/cooking space worked?
- littlexsparkee 4mo agoyep, a ton of SROs have been lost in cities like SF https://ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/ https://ccsroc.net/s-r-o-hotels-in-san-francisco/ also - gentrification of apartment housing stock over time raising the price floor and phasing out of public housing
- sethjgore 4mo agoI would think greed is a luxury and always has been, more than a simple adobe and living alone.
- antonvs 4mo agoWhy not both? Wages are too low and rents are too high. The common factor: the capital class screwing over the working class.
- ajmurmann 4mo agoLook at real, median household income. It's been going up and up. The things that have gone up in relative cost are housing (because we heavily regulate building it) and premium services like healthcare and education because of Baumol.
- mrweasel 4mo agoProbably also doesn't help that to many people want/need to live in the same few areas. If you could take your office job (which in most cases would work perfectly fine) and move to a less popular area, 30% might be rather high.
- ghaff 4mo agoThat's the thing or at least one thing. These discussions aren't about most small towns and cities in the Midwest. They're about prime areas on the coasts for the most part. Heck where I live about an hour west of Boston/Cambridge is a lot cheaper than the metro itself for the most part.
- TimorousBestie 4mo agoHousing prices in the Midwest have also inflated greatly.
- NDlurker 4mo agoI'm paying 28% of my net income for rent and utilities on a one bedroom apartment. I could find a cheaper place too and it would be just as nice, just not in as desirable part of town. Not sure I'll ever be able to afford a house though.
- ajmurmann 4mo ago
- bruce343434 4mo ago“I have seen people technically meet the 30% rule and still feel financially strained,” shares Linda Grizely, a certified financial planner and financial wellness speaker. “The pressure isn’t the rent alone; it’s the combination of rent plus everything else in their financial life."
- gravypod 4mo agoIn 1970 a $300/month apartment would be ~$2000/month in today dollars. I do think rents are too high as productivity and supply chains are much more efficient. I think in the 70s we were still using black pipe for gas, iron septic lines, and copper pipes for water. But, I don't think new builds or renovations are cheaper inflation adjusted (harder to estimate). Cost of money (inflation), building, and maintenance is the floor for rents.
- selfmodruntime 4mo agoThe 1970's median salary was $800 (so rent was 37%), the 2026 equivalent is $5220 or 49%.
- forshaper 4mo agoIncidentally, the 1970s are when productivity kept rising, but typical worker pay stopped rising with it.
- bantunes 4mo agoHow many apartments were $300/m in 1970?
- datadrivenangel 4mo agoProbably not many. The median rent reported in the census was 108. Per state breakouts: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/time-series/coh-grossrents/grossrents-unadj.txt https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/ti...
- jmclnx 4mo agoVery few, 300 USD was considered rather high in my area back then, maybe a house would be 300. That area is now in the top 5 expensive areas to rent. In the late 80s early 90s I was paying 350 USD for a 2 bedroom.
- Spooky23 4mo agoMy parents bought the home we grew up in, which is located middle of Queens/NYC for ~$30k around 1977/8. It sold most recently for $3M. Rents were typically well under $300mo. $150 in not so great areas. That was a high inflation time though. Today, I live in a small city in a house I bought for about $200k 20 years ago. IIRC, it sold for $80k around 1992. Worth about $450k today. A decent 2BR apartment rents for like $2k here, a nice one >$2700.
- api 4mo agoIt’s that wages have not risen with inflation.
- vorpalhex 4mo agoAside from less than a quarter point (0.24) from Covid, wages have in fact risen with inflation and that small difference is also likely to disppear soon. https://usafacts.org/answers/are-wages-keeping-up-with-inflation/country/united-states/ https://usafacts.org/answers/are-wages-keeping-up-with-infla... It is in fact rents, especially with mandatory add-ons. The actual cost of renting a place is a lot more than the direct rent payment.
- sethjgore 4mo agoFrankly the statistics do not feel right - I remember jobs that were easily found at $15 per hour in 2012 and cost of everything was insanely low. One bedroom / 750, McDonald burger, $1, McDonald soda $1, a pack of beer $7. Now eveything is easily double or triple and the basic jobs are still at $15.
- bee_rider 4mo agoThat’s a sort of interesting question. On one hand, landlords are easy to resent, they extract a lot of income primarily by owning something rather than doing anything productive. On the other hand, wages haven’t kept up with inflation and the super-wealthy are constantly capturing more of the value. At least in the case of small-scale landlords, maybe they are just the only lower-to-middle class people who’ve managed to defend the deal they had in the 90’s, proportionally speaking…
- shlant 4mo agoAre you saying that you blame apartment prices on landlords? If you build more apartments then market rent goes down and landlords can't charge more if people can just find cheaper apartments. It's not like landlords just choose whatever price they want - it's significantly bound by the demand.
- hgoel 4mo agoIt's largely landlords causing trouble building housing where it's needed because it would limit how much they can make.
- shlant 4mo agoare you referring to NIMBY homeowners? because yes, people who own houses are the most likely to prevent more housing from being built (although not the only reason more housing isn't being built)
- hgoel 4mo agoYep, referring to NIMBYs.
- cucumber3732842 4mo agoLandlords don't care. You put a 5/1 beside their slum and they're ecstatic because that means the land under their slum is now worth "build a 5/1 here" money.
- MiscCompFacts 4mo agoListening to NPR yesterday, they mentioned it’s a renters’ market in the Sunbelt [1]. Lots of new supply here in Texas and I just signed a lease recently with 2 months free in DFW. Bringing me down to ~$1550/month. Lots of places are offering 2-3 months for free. [1] https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/tx/ https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/tx/
- alphawhisky 4mo ago$1,550 a month for what? A three bedroom, 1.5 bath duplex with a garage maybe. For a flat though? Shoot me.
- littlexsparkee 4mo agoH1-B crackdown is cooling the housing market in cities like Dallas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48399957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48399957
- HumblyTossed 4mo agoCan both be true?
- littlexsparkee 4mo agodual income expectations raising costs for everyone, plus work culture necessitating clustering in metros - everything conspires against affordability
- selfmodruntime 4mo agoNot really. Rent is too high. It's not a problem unique to America. Rents in Munich, for example, have also doubled since 2012. A three-room apartment often costs between €2,200 and €2,700 per month in this city. For reference, that's close to an entire net salary for many, even for someone in the top 20% of earners in Germany, where salaries are relatively low and taxes are high. The median net income here is around €2,200 per month. This has been a key factor in my fiancée's and my decision to move away, as it's simply unsustainable for families with children.
- _heimdall 4mo agoBoth numbers matter though. Something is unaffordable only when you can compare the price and income.
- Gigachad 4mo agoThat doesn’t really make sense with the point of the article being that someone could be spending less than 30% of their income on rent and still not have enough for their other expenses. If it was just rent being too high they would be over 30%. The suggestion here seems to be every expense is too high that even if you find the most dirt cheap sharehouse to reduce rent, you still might struggle.
- lifestyleguru 4mo agoIt's quite cruel how Germans still keep up appearances with applying for the apartment with elaborate portfolio, full personal and financial data, letters and so on. While the only portfolio that matters is envelope with EUR 1500 in cash, or at least was 2-3 years ago and now is probably higher. 5-8 years ago it was maybe funny but now is simply cruel.
- selfmodruntime 4mo agoI have never heard of someone paying cash to get an apartment tbh
- lifestyleguru 4mo ago
- mc32 4mo ago[flagged]
- bonsai_spool 4mo ago> You know even on 2008 Krugman, who is known for making predictions that end up being wrong, was saying immigration depressed wages of Americans. Do you have evidence of this claim?
- mc32 4mo agoSee Krugman vs Krugman: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/paul-krugman-immigration-economy https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/paul-krugma... My bad, it was 2006.
- bonsai_spool 4mo ago"Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans." That doesn't sound like the claim you made. It is also a prima facie reasonable claim to make.
- whoknowsidont 4mo agoThat source isn't even able to directly lay out the claim, it spends 5 paragraphs IMPLYING Krugman changed his position for hand-wavy political reasons. But lacks any direct evidence that he actually did so. It misquotes things and really grasps at straws to make a point, holy moly. It's so disingenuous lmao.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo agoThe common criticism is his prediction about the internet: https://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue55/economics.html https://web.archive.org/web/19980610100009/http://www.redher... > By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
- estearum 4mo agoHenry George was right about everything
- formerly_proven 4mo agoAlways has been. You have to suck the money out of inefficient real estate to compress their margins and make it a commodity (=Georgism) or you let real estate bleed your economy dry (=what every Western country is doing today).
- whoknowsidont 4mo agoLandlords are the least productive class in society, and it's not even close in terms of ranking.
- sethjgore 4mo agoAbsolutely. Rackteering party and bureaucracy always finds themselves returning in all society until killed or thrown over.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo agoMaybe. I think when times are good it seem like that (right now) but when times are tough they can be stuck owning things that lose money. There is some risk in ownership.
- estearum 4mo agoYou lose close to zero money owning land even in down markets. That's why there are vacant lots that cost millions of dollars in every major city. Near-zero carrying cost. There's risk in owning housing and so we should make sure people get rewarded for that instead of rewarded for owning land.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago>You lose close to zero money owning land even in down markets. You still lose relatively though because the next person with their money in the market made some % Land and real estate assets are generally a poor investment relative to the market without a ton of active management. There are god knows how many millions of people who own land that would be incredibly valuable if not for the civil engineering lobby getting environmental rules and laws written to their favor.
- estearum 4mo agoIt's worth being precise about this because it's a really important point. Most people who we call "landlords" are simultaneously a landlord and a property manager. Property management is an important and productive job. But the vast majority of such people's financial outcome is actually from being a landlord, that is doing literally nothing except holding a piece of paper granting them monopoly on a plot of land. That plot of land's value (separated from the buildings on top of it) is generated, by definition, by the community surrounding the plot. So when you say landlords are the least productive class in society, it is that they are totally unproductive by their nature. There is literally nothing to be produced! The land is there regardless! Then the fact that they collect a tax on consumption of a good they did not create makes them a negative-productivity component. If you remove landlords (but keep property managers, developers, etc, which are all different jobs sometimes played by the same people), it would be a strict improvement to everything about our economy.
- Arodex 4mo agoAgain seeing some blaming poor immigrants for this in the very first answers. Meanwhile, where do the money for OpenAI and the SpaceX IPO comes from? Who got hold of so much money? How did they got hold of it? And here's the killer question: would they, and the rules and system supporting them, change in any way if there were less immigrants?
- cyanydeez 4mo agoit can't be those 8 guys with >50% of the wealth! no sir, it must be all those poor people taking up the poor people's space they were alotted in 1995.
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoWhat do you mean? Trillions move through the stock market every day from pensions, mutual funds, foreign governments, 401ks. And professional trading. I’m sure many immigrants had money on the IPO as well?
- Supermancho 4mo agoThe law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoEqual treatment sounds good to me. Which point are you responding to?
- Supermancho 4mo ago> I’m sure many immigrants had money on the IPO as well? Either it's bad faith or you don't understand the implications. Either way, GL with whatever.
- groundzeros2015 4mo ago
- amazingamazing 4mo ago[flagged]
- groundzeros2015 4mo ago> minorities were in chains Actually just one particular group. Minorities aren’t homogenous. And the war that ended that was almost 200 years ago. So that was far before any “good old day” talk,
- amazingamazing 4mo ago[flagged]
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoNo, obviously everyone was affected. You want to try clarifying what you want to argue?
- amazingamazing 4mo agoI am saying more than one group of people in usa were in chains. Hope that is clear.
- cm2012 4mo agoWages in america are extremely high, its just property prices are even higher.
- miltonlost 4mo agoGo tell that to Oklahomans and others still making a minimum wage of $7.25 an hour
- WarmWash 4mo agoIf you can find a single person still getting paid that, please give me their info and I will have them making twice that by tomorrow.
- anothereng 4mo agoI'm making that much as a software engineer in a 3rd world country. Hire me :)
- limflick 4mo agoHell, Google pays Junior Engineers less than that in Bangalore.
- VoodooJuJu 4mo ago[dead]
- _DeadFred_ 4mo agoI'm making zero. I have been in IT, a developer (but out of date mostly VB and SQL), managed dev teams, managed IT departments. Unfortunately I have a record and it's hard to get someone to give me a second chance plus now I'm over 50 and too old/overqualified for the minimum wage jobs. Would love to hear your ideas.
- thejazzman 4mo agoI could probably pack a bus or several buses just with the town I live in. How many openings do you have? :P
- pelagicAustral 4mo agoI think right now, the only place I can afford a house (in a place I would actually like to live in), is in some derelict, abandoned Italian town in Sicily, or something like that.
- armchairhacker 4mo ago> derelict, abandoned Italian town in Sicily That sounds like a great place to live. Good weather, quiet, Italian food & culture, safe & stable, public transit to the city…and you can work remotely.
- amanaplanacanal 4mo agoif you can work remotely. And if Italy will let you immigrate. I would bet those two ifs fit a small percentage of the populace, unfortunately.
- pelagicAustral 4mo agoYeah, I was going to comment on the remote side of things... Can't manage that at the moment, so it's a no-go for me on that ground.
- dfxm12 4mo agoThe famous cheap (€1?) houses in Sicily (and other places with similar schemes) likely do not meet most of these criteria. It's not like real estate is cheap in Giardini Naxos...
- glass1122 4mo ago[dead]
- WarmWash 4mo agoThe problem is absolutley that housing is too expensive, which of course a bunch of realtors are not going to point out. Increasing wages will not fix the housing crisis, and will just drive prices higher. How convenient for a bunch of realtors...
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoRealtors don’t own the houses.
- phantom784 4mo agoRealtors earn commissions as a % of the price a house sells for.
- nathan_compton 4mo agoMerch has to move for them to earn a percentage. If prices are systematically too high I would guess liquidity goes down.
- WarmWash 4mo agoNothing a 50 year mortgage can't fix, I'm sure that article will be coming out soon to from our realtor friends.
- adityamwagh 4mo agoIt’s also a diabolical amount. My friend bought a house in San Jose, and both, the buyers and sellers agent got $50,000 each on a $2M house. They didn’t even help with the house search much.
- groundzeros2015 4mo agoWho agreed to those terms?
- iLoveOncall 4mo agoIn most European countries this 30% rule has never worked. It's always been a completely out of touch rule, and, especially for single people, rent has always easily been 50% of their net income in major European cities.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- nextstep 4mo agotoo bad houses AREN’T for living in, but for speculating
- hereme888 4mo ago[flagged]
- mekdoonggi 4mo agoDo you believe that is a credible source?
- hereme888 4mo agoMore than random theory by those without access to the info and dedicate their time, as a team, to produce the resource, in a manner accountable to others. So, yes.
- santoshalper 4mo agoThat link doesn't seem very credible. It looks like they were targeting an outcome, and bent the statistics to fit.
- lelandfe 4mo agoIllegal or foreign-born? (Not that I trust the current HUD at all)
- hereme888 4mo agoYou're correct. Foreign-born/non-citizens.
- post-it 4mo agoSomething tells me this data may not be accurate.
- Supermancho 4mo agoThank for the link. It has a Fox News snapshot and links to CIS data. Considering that data unreliable, is prudent.
- quink 4mo agoI count 23 instances of invective language or politicisation in that HUD statement, and that’s to say nothing of the supposed data behind this. How about blame wealth extraction by the 0.01% before going after the out group that’s clearly working more than the average and paying taxes?
- FrustratedMonky 4mo agoVery Recently, wasn't there a lawsuit against apartment owners for a vast price fixing scheme based on them all using the same software package that was telling them all to raise prices at the same time.
- littlexsparkee 4mo agoyes, RealPage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealPage
- TrackerFF 4mo agoDon't live in the US, but we're facing similar problems here in Norway. One main driver is that there's not being built enough new housing. It's a combination of building being too expensive, higher interest rates, etc. So the second-hand/used market is red hot. Renting has become so expensive, that many landlords have exited - so we're likely heading into a really bad crunch in the near future for the renters. I've read about people spending 50%-60% of their net pay on rent alone.
- win311fwg 4mo ago> One main driver is that there's not being built enough new housing. I recently entertained the idea of building a new house. Not terribly surprising, but worth mentioning that the time and materials to put up the structure was going cost even more than buying a used house. If nobody can afford to buy a less expensive used house then naturally nobody is going to build the much more expensive new house either. Therein lies the bottleneck.
- WarmWash 4mo agoFor builders, they will buy a block of land and build many houses on it. The unit cost of a home drops dramatically when you are building 50 of them at once. The real killer for them is interest rates, as they finance the whole thing and then can pay it off when all the homes are sold. High rates make the finances much more challenging to work.
- win311fwg 4mo agoFor what it is worth, said home entertained was a manufactured home, so it is already pushing economies of scale. I'd hate to see a quote for a custom home. We have not truly figured out how to make housing scale very well, though. Even our most efficient methods are very primitive as compared to virtually all other manufacturing we do. Solve that problem and the price of all homes will plummet.
- stefanfisk 4mo agoI’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately. I live in an apartment in Stockholm but I also own an old forest cabin. It’s perfectly legal for me to live in said cabin permanently, but it would be strictly illegal for me to build a new house to the same simple standard. The building codes are basically making it illegal to be poor. Similar patterns exist for student housing. The old style of student corridors with small rooms are no longer being built. Instead we are basically getting full apartments with individual huge bathrooms because the building codes mandate that everything is wheelchair accessible even when it’s practically temporary housing and they could get by with making 1/10 apartments accessible. And that’s not even getting into how NIMBYism is enabled by laws that basically guarantee stagnation anywhere housing is in demand. Shit’s fucked.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- lp4v4n 4mo agoAt this point I honestly think this is a bit by design. There is a crazy amount of land in the world, but either it's too expensive or you're not allowed to build over it, or a combination of both. Houses have been built for millennia but somehow in the most advanced period of humanity you're supposed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a roof over your head. I think that low key the ruling class + landlords are not interested that housing be an affordable thing, so the whole system works to create artificial scarcity. How's the population going to be forced to work unpleasant and low paid jobs if not by controlling their access to housing? You have to be too naive if you think that a few minds in your country's parliament haven't thought of this. If someday economic activity gets automated enough, and the majority of people are not needed anymore for regular jobs, and this populace gets violent with their ruling class, then I think a lot of housing will be built outside of cities, and the supply of houses will no longer be a problem.
- cucumber3732842 4mo ago> or you're not allowed to build over it, And those laws were passed with the political will of who? Now with the benefit of hindsight what causes that seemed legitimate were used to hoodwink those people? Have those causes and their peddlers lost credibility or legitimacy? Western society is basically slowly recreating old world landless peasantry because we have adopted bad world views or bad morals or bad ideologies (or whatever else you want to call them) that allow us to be manipulated into incrementally creating the system that produces that outcome. Complaints about NIMBYism and "ship it overseas and forget about it environmentalism" are sniffing around the right neighborhood, but there's a more general problem here.
- zer00eyz 4mo ago> There is a crazy amount of land in the world, but either it's too expensive or you're not allowed to build over it, or a combination of both. This is true, to a degree. There is another factor and thats WHAT kind of housing we build. > ruling class + landlords are not interested that housing be an affordable thing Off the mark, the real people pinning housing prices where they are, are home owners. Home ownership is the leading predictor of voting, and issues that maintain or raise current home prices will drive that up. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/if-you-lived-here-you-might-be-voter-now https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/if-you-lived-here-you-... Furthermore home ownership is a functionally unmovable number: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N (that fed data is interesting and says a lot, capturing the 2008 financial crisis, bad lending hardly moved the needle in real terms). > controlling their access to housing? The reality is that this is a social problem. Boomers are living longer (higher quality of life) and alone. They either took their parents in (cohabitation) or put them in homes. I know plenty of elderly people who are living in large houses, by themselves, who had their parents, at that same age living with them. You're not going to see a bunch of retirees moving in together to save on bills - The TV show "Golden Girls" would not make sense today. On that note, cohabitation among younger generations is down. Fewer people have roommates, and lots of them "want to live alone" - sharing a house with 4 friends is much cheaper than living in a studio or one bedroom. And there are whole categories of housing, like boarding houses, that have disappeared. Again this is a cultural problem, look at the TV show "Bosom Buddies" - this is something that would be lost on a modern audience for so many reasons. Part of the cohabitation issue is "renters rights" have gone way too far. There are plenty of people with space, who will not cohabitate because the risk, cost and pain of a renter turning into a squatter is WAY too high. The rules to protect good renters from bad landlords have only served to push out good landlords because of bad tenants. > If someday economic activity gets automated enough... This will never happen. If you dont think were going to find new things to keep busy and if you dont think were going to find new ways to compete for "dominance" I have news for you.
- stego-tech 4mo agoI’ve been on the 50/30/20 budgeting rule for a while now, and I agree it’s a healthier perspective for an individual than a “30% gross on rent/housing” arbitrary metric. Housing is one part of a larger bill of necessities you have to pay every month because society dictates these necessities are not rights, alongside food, energy, transportation, insurance, healthcare, and communications. Laying all this out on paper then multiplying by two and accounting for taxes, helped me remain calmer in salary negotiations because I knew not what I thought I was worth, but what I actually needed to survive. The grim reality is that over-financialization of markets combined with a lack of regulations against predatory practices (like surveillance pricing and algorithmic rent setting) added gasoline to the bonfire that was a fundamental housing shortage brought about chiefly from treating housing itself as an appreciating asset rather than the land housing sits on and taxing accordingly (don’t even get me started on residential property tax schemes popularized by the Baby Boomers and the associated gap between sale price and tax assessed values dictated by law). Growing wages won’t fix this, nor will cutting interest rates. Building more housing is the only way out, but existing homeowners don’t want their assets to decline in value, so that’s generally not happening. Rent control is becoming increasingly popular, and I think it’s a good idea to protect existing renters and force landlords to side with wanna-be homebuyers instead of homeowners by forcing revenue growth through volume creation (new housing) instead of rent hikes.
- holistio 4mo agoYet if I open X, I'm being told constantly that my European mind can't comprehend how poor we are and the richest European country is poorer than the poorest US state.
- dgellow 4mo agoThe US has an insane K-shaped economy[0]. People in the upper part of the K arm live in a completely different country than the rest of the population 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_shapes#K-shaped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_shapes#K-shaped
- holistio 4mo agoI'm aware of the phenomenon, but thanks for letting me know about its name. It looks like people on the upper arm of the K are not only experiencing the economy differently but are also grotesquely unaware of the lower arm.
- consumer451 4mo agoWell, of course. The owner of the site believes: > The EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries, so that governments can better represent their people
- padjo 4mo agoEven though it was those same governments who set the EU up in the first place because it was mutually beneficial.
- consumer451 4mo agoBut it's not beneficial to the handful of dudes programming our SM news feeds, so the EU needs to be destroyed... and we will apparently do nothing to prevent this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance See the projections for many major countries in the EU for the next election cycle. Not looking great.
- marton-laszlo-a 4mo ago[flagged]
- bcjdjsndon 4mo ago[dead]
- Herring 4mo agoAmericans are very confused when it comes to societal/collective issues. We saw this during the pandemic.
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- MemoryHoleHQ 4mo agoFor the ones that didn't read the article, it says there. The problem is that the state takes more and more away from the workers wages: "The biggest flaw: It uses gross income, not take-home pay One of the biggest issues with the 30% rent rule is that it’s based on your gross income—not the amount of money that actually lands in your bank account on payday. To illustrate this flaw, let’s use some real-world numbers. According to the latest FRED data, the median household income in the U.S. is about $84,000 per year, or roughly $7,000 per month before taxes. Under the 30% rule, you could theoretically spend about $2,100 per month on rent if this is your income. But let’s take a look at what your take-home pay could be with this salary. "
- chadgpt3 4mo agoIt may say the problem is taxes take too much money so you can't pay landlords, but how do we know the real problem isn't that landlords take too much money so you can't pay taxes? Or Comcast takes too much money so you can't pay landlords and taxes?
- MemoryHoleHQ 4mo agoWe know it, because during the last 50 years, already adjusted to inflation the USA government budget increased by 2.48× per capita. And unless your argument is that public services are 2.48x better now, then yes, I know that the problem is, as usual, that the government is taking workers money away to do as they please.
- throwawayffffas 4mo ago> Although this rule isn’t necessarily wrong, the reality is that modern budgets are much more complicated than they used to be, so you can’t take the 30% rent rule as a hard-and-fast guideline. Modern budgets are not much more complicated. The rent is too damn high!
- m4ck_ 4mo agoIf companies would allow people to spread out more we could probably improve that situation some, but they want us all concentrated in 10-20 major metro areas. There's cheap housing in this country, its just in places where the job market is extremely limited.
- ecshafer 4mo agoI bang on this drum a lot. We need Land Value Taxes to incentivize productive use of land, and we need to eliminate (or greatly reduce the burden of) Zoning (Japan has zoning but a great model that really allows building housing efficiently). When it costs $50k in permits and takes 2 years just to put a shovel in the ground, to build a single family home, and millions to build an apartment building, of course homes are expensive. Inefficiently taxed land, and artificial scarcity via laws, turned housing into an asset class. This problem will not go away, in any country, as long as those two things are not resolved.
- epistasis 4mo agoLand Value Taxes are the perfect economic solution, however they have the disadvantage of being nigh-on politically impossible to implement and keep, if they are implemented at the local level. The political power base of a city is usually the land-owning class. Everyone from homeowners to commercial landlords that also live in the city. Roughly, every single person gets one vote when it comes to elections, but in the reality of local politics, the homeowners dominate due to their long-established social networks and the low-information environment of most local elections. Large landlords have barely any more influence than the random homeowner, and renters as usual are completely disorganized and are nearly impossible to organize. We need both a much stronger organized tenant movement, and enough class-traitors in the homeowning class in order to get an LVT to stick. Ideally it would legally imposed at the state or federal level, and administered somewhat locally, with a mixture of funds going to the municipality, county, and state levels of government, IMHO. Without a broader base of strong political support, LVTs eventually get voted out by the land owners, like in Vancouver in the 1970s.
- raybb 4mo agoOn a note about addressing housing concerns, it certainly would only help a minority of folks but what do people think about right of first refusal? Like if a landlord wants to sell their building and someone comes along with an offer for $500k then the current tenants have an option to buy it at that price. Certainly would be annoying for investors looking to buy quickly but potentially life changing for long term tenants about to get a new landlord.
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- RandyRanderson 4mo agoCanada here: it can absolutely, definitely get worse.
- insane_dreamer 4mo agothis chart in the article has got to be the most confusing ever: "Map showing the affordability decline by state as costs of living outpaced wages" so a + is an increase in affordability as the title indicates (wages outpacing COL), or + is a decrease in affordability aka an increase in non-affordability (COL outpacing wages) https://na.rdcpix.com/a19175a2a7e40c2a2272c013b8b3458aw-c1749692286srd-w1850_q80.avif https://na.rdcpix.com/a19175a2a7e40c2a2272c013b8b3458aw-c174...
- josefritzishere 4mo agoI am reminded of the phrase "Irrational exuberance" uttered by Alan Greenspan back in the mid 1990s. The housing market is absurdly over valued. It's going to crash. This is unsustainable.
- oxag3n 4mo agoAnd yet listings in nice neighborhoods are gone in under a week in Seattle suburbs now. I started a rental 2 years ago and now again - similar houses are at least 25% more expensive now than two years ago. There was a line of families when I was viewing houses with good schools. I think this is all demand/supply problem. There were way more rental listings May/June 2024 than this year.