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Comment by akomtu | Hacker News Reader

We were the last generation who could afford housing. I look at kids carelessly running around in a nice neighborhood and think: "by the time you are 30, any of these houses will cost many multiple of your lifetime income, unless you are a successful exec in a big firm, and owning such a house will be like owning a private jet today." In fact, private jets may be cheaper than SFH because jets don't require a chunk of highly desirable land.

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This is happening in Seoul, SK and Toronto, CA right now. I wish it weren't coming to parts of the US, but also, I don't see why it wouldn't. Only with sustained economic decline would home prices drop. Or, maybe if supply increased substantially, but people in the suburbs love their home values and that sort of thing tends to turn people into NIMBY's.

I'm not even sure it's nimbysm. There's simply no room for new SFH neighborhoods in reasonable proximity to city centers where the jobs are. New construction is still happening, but it's big RE firms buy out small businesses and replace them with dense apartment complexes for rent. The thing is, people who are going to live in those hives will have no housing to buy, no matter how much they save.

This is what people don't seem to understand. NIMBYism is vilified as the cause of all evils, when in reality there's a limit to how many people can be housed. Imagine suggesting that the reason people in Beijing or Seoul or Delhi don't have 1 acre lots and 3-bedroom houses is because of NIMBYism. At a certain point, owning a house in certain cities is simply not a reality anymore. Whether it's through sheer population size or sheer population wealth, NYC, LA, etc will never be a small town again. Fighting NIMBYism will just turn them from dense cities into Judge Dredd-like hives, as you said. But hey, I want a nice big property with a nice big house out in the country, so I'm not complaining if everybody insists on renting little shoeboxes in the big cities.

> There's simply no room for new SFH neighborhoods in reasonable proximity to city centers where the jobs are.

The demand isn't only for SFHs though. People are willing to rent/buy condos, and existing homeowners are refusing to allow them to be built. How is that not NIMBYism?

Funny enough, looking to Korea and China is IMHO a crystal ball to the US' future. Overpopulated, hive cities, incomprehensible levels of competition for everything from jobs to (literally) pre-schools. Increasing rates of alcoholism, depression, suicide, other illnesses.

its absolutely abhorrent actually. a younger friend of mine (mid twenties) known no one in his age bracket who is able to afford a home. They all have normal jobs, a high education etc. (teacher, mechanical engineer, nurse etc).

This is an idealistic and unrealistic viewpoint. In feudal ages, basically nobody could afford housing. You basically had to sell yourself to even get housing. Then people in the US got housing. Now the US and other rich countries are becoming dominated by the upper classes. Which means people who want a different life have to leave for somewhere else, like colonists did in coming to the US centuries ago and like countless immigrants do in coming the US today. Land and housing is cheap in places like eastern Europe.

>Which means people who want a different life have to leave for somewhere else, like colonists did in coming to the US centuries ago

I couldn't agree more. I'm surprised by how US-centric the housing view of many of my Americans is ("well housing can go to infinite levels and I'll just have to suck it up and accept a life of debt slavery...")

I know one guy who just bought a (small, old) place in Italy an hour east of Rome for $10k. Not the exact location that I'd choose, but at some point I'll just live elsewhere too. The US doesn't limit the exfil of legitimately acquired and taxed money in your bank account and it's a big world out there.

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