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Comment by UncleOxidant | Hacker News Reader

> The Sweden story sounds so much like the SF story.

It sounds like the same story being repeated all over the world. There was someone on comments here on another thread talking about how this is a problem in Ireland now as well. It's not just SF in the US, it's all over the place. A friend recently told me about his search for a place to rent in rural western Washington and they said it was just impossible to find even a one bedroom place under $1800/mo even in this rural area where incomes are much lower than in the urban centers like Seattle and Tacoma.

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I don't know about Ireland, but in the US the home ownership rate is higher than it was at any point in the 20th century. So however bad the situation is it doesn't seem to actually prevent people from buying a house.

In the 90s, I didn't know anyone in their 20s, who didn't have a roommate(or two!), or were married.

No one I knew, could afford an entire apartment to themselves!

I find it weird that people complain about not being able to rent their own entire apartment, but are in their 20s. It wasn't a thing 30 years ago!

As one advances in their career, eg in their 30s, then income tends to rise, due to experience, and better paying jobs.

San Fran is an outlier here. Literally the most expensive area on the planet, with loads of money floating around. Of course rent is crazy expensive.

Anecdote is always dangerous, but 100% same here; I had housemates in the 1990s and this was entirely normal in the city I was in (DC). Come to think of it the only time before I got married I lived alone was when I rented a friend's basement for a couple of years basically as a favor to him.

In the 90s I didn’t have a house, I was in diapers.

In my experience growing up, everyone I knew could afford to buy a house on a single salary when 28-30, so that’s what I expect for myself.

Anything other than that is a regression.

So, you're saying that when interest rates first dropped mega-low, people could afford a house?

But... that's what caused the current problem, some say. Rates too low, for a decade, causing a housing bubble. It sounds to me like what you recall, was an aberration.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong. I think the bar to home ownership should be lower. But at the same time, I think it hasn't been low, for 50+ years.

People forget about the old interest rates. I have a credit card with a lower rate than my parents' mortgage back in the 80s.

In 1995, the average income in the Netherlands was €33000, and an average house (not any house, anecdotally my parents bought it for less) could be bought for €93750 at an interest rate of 7.71%.

3 times annual salary seems reasonsble to me.

> everyone I knew could afford to buy a house on a single salary when 28-30

Did you grow up in 1958? Because that's the last time that was true.

Depends on where they were. For example #15: Clarksville, Tennessee: Median home value: $172,700, Median household income: $58,853 https://www.businessinsider.com/best-places-to-buy-a-home-un...

Meaning median individual income is ~$29K, which is not enough to afford a $172K house on one salary.

When I graduated as a software engineer in 1998 making $45k, I could have easily bought a house in the DFW area.

There are parts of the US where houses are similarly cheap even today, problem is, no one wants to live there. People want to simultaneously live in very popular cities but also not want to pay a high rent. Both can't be true at once.

...Or can it? The solution then is to build more housing; YIMBYism, go to local government meetings and vote for YIMBYist candidates. After all, all of the NIMBY people who bought their house decades ago are there, day after day. There really is no way around this.

Yeah, late 90s/00s I was an exception that I had my own apartment. All my friends had roommates. A couple really industrious ones bought a house and then had 2-3 roommates so they could afford it.

right but I'm guessing a huge percentage is baby boomers or Gen X'ers who bought a house 10 or more years ago. I'm curious to see a graph of home ownership rate history for people between 25 and 39 years old, I'm guessing it is lower now than 30 years ago.

A majority of millennials are homeowners. It's maybe two or three points behind where the boomers were at their age.

The only numbers I could find about this disagree with you:

> Just 47.9% of U.S. millennials owned homes in 2020, according to Apartment List analysis of census data. At age 30, millennial home ownership hit 42%, compared with 48% for Gen Xers and 51% for baby boomers.

https://archive.is/P5EKj#selection-3963.136-3971.67 - Bloomberg: Don’t Blame Avocado Toast. Here’s Why Millennials Don’t Own Homes

Maybe you have access to more recent numbers that show that the majority of millennials are homeowners?

It's like 20 points lower for Irish millennials vs gen X re home ownership rates.

Not in Singapore! Very different things happening here. Then again, 80% of the country lives in public housing.

Plus, availability of land is very limited; I think Singapore is quite a different story.

REITs buy up housing everywhere. That’s your answer - the wealthy elite need ways to keep making money.

REITs aren't the problem; it's a lack of construction.

You can build all you want the corporate and foreign wealth will still buy it before people can.

Well, if they keep buying once there are twice as many housing units as people that want to buy them, they’ll go bankrupt and no one will buy their assets at a reasonable price. So that problem solves itself.

I used to think that, but they influence (read: buy) any politicians and regulators who adjust the policies (the pols benefit by knowing what they're doing also) - either they shift the approach, or exempt themselves.

And do what with it? If they do nothing, they're paying property taxes. If they rent the units, that's housing on the market. If construction continues faster than people move into the city, rents will go down.

> corporate and foreign wealth

These terms are dog whistles. Unless you want to argue for something Marxist, but then "private wealth" would suffice.

I have to think short-term rentals are a big part of it, too. Open up AirBnB in any city and see how many units have been lost.

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