Hacker News Reader

Comment by rubidium | Hacker News Reader

You must be exaggerating or living in New York/San Fran.

Here in the midwest is is very reasonable for a top 20% income for 30 yr old age bracket to have only one parent work. If you're top 1% you can definitely afford a house in the suburbs and have one parent stay home.

View on HN

Living near NYC/SF does include "large swaths of America".

I guess it depends how you define "large swath". Is it a certain amount of landmass or population, a percent of total landmass or population, or some other metric? I think this line is needlessly pedantic. It's reasonable to interpret rubidium's comment as just meaning "the expensive housing in the NY and SF areas are too expensive to be feasible for top 20% earners, as the OP said, but by and large, a middle class existence is possible for most land in America." Population centers with expensive housing may be inaccessible for the regular middle class (when top 20% income earner means only 60k/year or so based on 2010 data[0]). This isn't really the right data to use, because the pay for people in SF is different than say, somewhere in Missouri. With that being said, it seems clear that the American dream of a middle-class existence with only one working adult, isn't realistic everywhere for everyone.

I might be meandering here, but I think this reasoning is actually flawed or biased, because it was never true to begin with. A factory worker could never afford to live in the upscale street, right? The only difference now is that instead of a factory worker not being able to live on the upscale street, there are whole neighborhoods, downtown areas, and maybe even suburbs that are unaffordable to a typical middle-class family.

I haven't looked for data to support these ideas, and am very open to points for and against.

[0]: http://whatsmypercent.com/

In more affordable places are there a lot of jobs that would put you in that 20%?

I'm from Indiana - and that is exactly the problem. Sure, housing is affordable. But wages are a fair amount lower and a fair amount of jobs are low-paying. This is really a major problem with people looking at economic recovery - wages haven't caught up for a fair amount of folks. That all said, it might actually be easier to get to that 'dream' if you plan correctly and are willing to let a few things go: Alternatively, for some it might not be a choice because of the costs of childcare and transportation.

I live about 30-40 miles outside of D.C. The only people I know who have a house earn significantly more, or are dual income top-tier earning households.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com