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Comment by throwaway934898 | Hacker News Reader

> New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco or Washington, D. C.

Maybe they need to accept that they can't all live in the cities that they want to.

Or at least not consider buying a house as some kind of a necessity. The rent to buy ratios in these places tend to heavily favor renting. Plus they often have tenant protections and rent control which remove many benefits of ownership. And renters have significant political power in some of these cities.

No matter how much money one has, renting typically makes a lot more financial sense. The life-script expectation of buying a house may or may not be outdated in the country as a whole, but home ownership in the major cities is definitely a pure luxury good.

I'm not sure exactly what you're getting at. Should those cities be reserved for the wealthy and their children?

No more "reserved" than any other luxury good. They list the most expensive cities in the world and lament not being able to own a home in them. Of course the average person can't buy a house in SF. There's very limited availability and millions more people who want to live in the city than it can support.

No one has a right to live in a super trendy, naturally expensive city.

You forget that to many, the point is not to live in trendiness, but to live where the jobs are.

Or even to live where they were born and were raised themselves.

As someone born and raised in one of those cities, I now no longer live in it because the economic reality is such that it doesn't make sense to do so. I do not feel entitled to live in a city that's become a luxury destination, even if my family came from there.

I'm not saying the feeling is one of "entitlement", but simply a desire for the familiar, and a wish to be around one's family and friends. Hardly unreasonable.

There are jobs everywhere though. Billions of people do not live in the cities listed and do just fine. I think the trendy jobs are in these places.

I have to live in one of these places to do my career that I trained for (not trendy or super high status). If you could go back in time and say to a student "you can't actually be whatever you want, learn something that is regionally employable" then maybe they could change. Even then with the concentration of jobs in major US cities and contraction in 2nd tier ones you might get it wrong.

Depends on how we define "wealthy" but land is a finite, fixed asset. If you artificially restrain rent-seeking on it, a black market will emerge to accommodate.

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