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Comment by gutnor | Hacker News Reader

Exactly, come in London. After 12 years and a salary above average I'm still nowhere near being able to live comfortably in the best areas. Hell, with a kid, I can barely afford the shit area where the school do not suck.

There is no magical solution to housing shortage. A waiting list is shit system, but I'm sure the Guinness Book would have no difficulty finding depressing record for rental price in other major cities.

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a salary above average I'm still nowhere near being able to live comfortably in the best areas

This makes sense to me. An "above average" salary should make it possible for you to live in "above average" areas; to live in the "best" areas should require the "best" salaries.

Obviously it's a bit more complicated than this, since different people have different rankings of locations and some people will choose to live in "worse" areas so that they can keep more of their income for other purposes; but in the limiting case where there is public consensus on which areas are "better" and everybody lives in the "best" area they can afford, percentiles of income will exactly match percentiles of housing location.

I find people in Vancouver who are confused by this concept on a regular basis. Vancouver has 900,000 households but only has space for 300,000 detached houses; as long as detached houses are viewed as being superior to other forms of housing, there's no way the median household will ever be able to afford a detached house.

I guess by average they meant median, not mean.

Right, but there's no reason why a 51th percentile salary should make it possible for you to live in a 99th percentile part of town.

> There is no magical solution to housing shortage.

Building more houses works pretty well, and has the benefit that no magic wands are required.

Even then, you can't make more transport. You hit a lot more limits quicker when you have absurd populations and sprawl instead of climb.

'Building housing' doesn't specify whether it's vertical or horizontal. My preference runs towards dense and some height. Depends on the place, though.

You can increase density only so far. It's not like you can just make streets wider or stack them on top of each other. Not to mention all the other infrastructure that you need.

In addition to that dense housings can lead to social problems and therefore crime, which is highly undesireable.

Especially in Europe you also have the problem of having a lot of old buildings that are protected, so you can't change or replace them.

Housing is a very complex problem and supply and demand only gets you so far. If it were really just all about that, places like London, NY and SF would never have become so expensive.

London and SF are not very dense, all things considered, so... yeah, you do hit limits, but the limits there are mostly political.

Some of those political limits are understandable, like not wanting to tear down an ancient building. Others are pure NIMBYism.

You can make more transport capacity (more passenger trips per unit time) without necessarily devoting more land to it. A common problem lies where transit modes and routes are chosen for political, not economic, reasons.

Of course we can make more transport.

Where do you think the existing transport came from?

..and more transportation, and schools, and public utilities, and... the housing is a major but not the only part.

Generally, an influx of working people to an area where costs are kind of high is going to pay for itself, if taxes are done correctly.

We don't know of a magic solution, but we know couple of big reasons why this is happening. The big elephant in the room problem is that Sweden is subsidizing massive immigration from some of the most backwards parts of the world. To make matters worse, Swedish citizens are paying tax to accelerate this process and they are the ones left with massive housing problem.

This is not really true. Immigrants are not being appointed housing in Stockholm City and they do not contribute to the housing problem. Most parts of Sweden actually have problems with housing for the opposite reason, urbanization is pushing big parts of the population into the big cities so there's rather cheap housing in the more "rural" parts.

The issue with housing is Stockholm has existed way before it became popular to blame all problems on the immigrants.

edit: had unclear language

No. This is wrong and xenophobic. If you don't want to wait on the list, you just live in the suburbs. This list is for Stockholm, not the surrounding metropolitan area. Don't believe what you hear coming from Swedish neo-nazis about the immigrants. It's all lies.

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