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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

You’re responding to things the article isn’t saying. It’s a pretty plain and honest article. The facts are genuine and the conclusions have nothing to do with what you wrote here.

It’s a Redfin blog post addressed at people looking to buy a home, not a think tank study of home ownership.

It’s putting numbers, accurate and meaningful ones, to the experience a prospective buyer has when looking for a home right now.

For buyer’s with a median income, only 21% of listings satisfy traditional standards of affordability and it’s worse now than in recent years. No wonder it’s so frustrating when you’re looking for a house lately!

That’s literally all this is saying. And it’s no lie.

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> For buyer’s with a median income, only 21% of listings are satisfy traditional standards of affordability and it’s worse now than in recent years.

I think parent is disagreeing - they point out that 21% of listings in a metro area meet the standards of affordability for everyone in the county. But not everyone in the county has a city job that pays more, and not everyone in the city is willing to live out of town. Thus, more than 21% of city folks can afford a house in the city, and more than 21% of folks living in the country can afford a home in the country. Parent is arguing insufficient granularity, and that's a fair criticism.

I argue of course that everyone should be able to afford a place in town, thats a function of zoning. Federalize zoning, let anyone build whatever they want on their land without asinine parking minimums and setback rules - and years of prostrating yourself in front of council only for them to tell you to get stuffed - and watch the problem sort itself out.

The builder's remedy should just be the status quo and then we could finally stop talking about this.

Nothing in the article is about percentage of people. It’s not saying anything close to 20% of group X can afford anything.

It’s saying only 21% of listings meet the standards of affordability for that county.

That could easily be simply because houses that don’t meet that standard are on the market 5x as long, and you’d see this effect even if the median buyer could afford the median home overall.

I see, I retract my point but since you replied I'll keep it up for posterity.

I wouldn’t be so sure about unregulated market “solving” anything, but I definitely agree that current zoning allowing eg only for single-family houses is absolutely unsustainable. It’s impossible for everyone or even majority to live in a separate house.

Build whatever you want becomes the most profitable houses to build/sell. Monster homes where single family homes were. Seedy businesses beside schools.

You probably want to have some planning.

This is a view on unregulated building that I don't get how you came to it. If you're free to build whatever then the most profitable thing is probably a townhouse. Whatever marginal gain might be had selling one fool a bigger house than anyone needs is less than the gain of selling two or three people a far more modest, somewhat shared living arrangement in the same floor space. Not exactly urban density, just well, town density. I legit don't know what sort of seedy business you reckon is held back merely by regulations right now. Put another way, as a rational profit seeking venture, I certainly can't see any such business wanting to set up by a school in particular. Kids aren't known for their disposable income and there's no real benefit towards picking a controversial position.

But in any case this is all solved by Tokyo minimum nuisance zoning. In short, what that means is you can't build your seedy business in your school zone but you can put your school in your seedy business zone. The zones don't directly prescribe how land can be used, only limits the amount of tolerable disturbance allowed per neighborhood. Things get built where they otherwise wouldn't, but no one has to deal with more annoyance than they bought into.

Of course people living in the city can afford to live in the city... Otherwise they wouldn't be living in the city.

I think it's still interesting if we consider that many people in the county are pushed out of the city because they're priced out, and have to live further away and suffer a long commute.

We can't all be above average.

The implication if 21% of listings satisfy traditional standards of affordability for the median buyer is that the supply of homes is 1.21 * 0.50 = 60.5% of the homebuying population. That's low, but not too far off of historical norms [1].

Apartments are a thing. Historically (post-baby-boom) about 35% of the U.S. population has been renters, unable to afford a house at all. For some reason close to 100% of the population believes they are not going to be in that 35% when they grow up.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rat...

Sorry, you may have some valid point in mind, but your formula doesn’t make any sense and the momentary home ownership rate is simply a floor on what share of people might own homes “when they grow up”. Everyone might die in a home they own someday and the momentary home ownership could still be very low. It doesn’t say what you think it says, here.

Are you basically saying that the article just noticed a bias in the listings ?

Because that is addressed by the comment you're replying to.

> If more expensive homes are sold more often (or, are listed for sale longer - say years - because they're unique) then we will see a skew towards more expensive homes being listed more frequently

I think this is an interesting fact about how we communicate. You can be 100% factually correct and yet most of your readers will reach a conclusion that you may have not written explicitly. Not always the author intentionally misleads; perhaps the author themselves are mislead. Often the title itself primes the interpretation of everything else (and often authors don't chose the title!).

I’m saying that the article is very straightforward in what it’s saying and who it’s saying that to, and that the OP is themselves tilting at a windmill, mistaking it for a giant. The title hasn’t misled anyone but the OP and the people the people they’ve imagined themselves defending.

But what you're saying simply isn't true.

The article clearly explained their faulty methodologies and this is precisely what I've pointed out. In fact, you are tilting at a windmill, reading more into my comments than what I've written. Projection, much?

> You’re responding to things the article isn’t saying. It’s a pretty plain and honest article. The facts are genuine and the conclusions have nothing to do with what you wrote here.

I see him as trying to get out ahead of conclusions the author had too much professional integrity to draw but that the internet peanut gallery will draw after speed reading (if that) TFA in search of numbers and then irresponsibly mix and matching those numbers as if such behavior will yield insights.

> The facts are genuine

Yet there are other facts/statistics that show, the reason home prices are elevated (in some areas) is demand

Therefore, somebody is affording them?

Indeed! Do you think it’s possible that there are other sources of demand for homes besides households?

No, it is not possible.

All demand is derived from households living in homes, regardless of whether the households are purchasing them directly or renting through an intermediary (long or short term).

There are no other uses for a home. No other source of demand across the market.

It depends on zoning. Rarely houses are used as storefronts, museums, or businesses such as psychologists and dentists offices.

Other times houses are used by rich mostly-foreigners as places to stash cash. And not all of these investors care whether the house is occupied by a renter.

These aren't large uses of houses, but they are some.

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