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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn’t housing and zoning. The problem is people absolutely refuse to go live in places where housing is cheap because they’d rather live in the popular hotspots.

You want a cheap house? Sub 300k? Come to the Midwest, you’ll get one easy. Oh what’s that? You’d rather live right in downtown San Francisco or Manhattan? Well…

Sometimes I think about just selling my expensive city apartment and moving out to a small rural mountain town and finding a wife there.

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Cheap houses in cheap areas are cheap precisely because the areas themselves are low value with a low expected-value of living there.

Put another way, those houses are cheap because employment opportunities are limited.

What a disgustingly materialistic and capitalist way to write off entire communities of people as worthless simply because you can’t find a six figure job there. No wonder the coastal elites get hated so much.

I think it can be more simply explained with supply and demand when it comes to labour. Or, if you’re a cook, for example, you’re going to find a more robust market for your skills in Vancouver rather than Castlegar. Because of that, cities can often be more attractive for the working class.

I do have a lot of respect for the people who are able to make a sustainable living in a less dense area, but it’s not a reliable path for everybody.

I think you may be interpreting my comment the way you did because you viewed it through a lens of already-existing hatred of coastal elites.

Certainly nothing in the comment itself even hints at me considering entire communities of people as worthless.

Keep in mind the word "value" has several definitions [1]. Describing low-cost areas as "low-value" could be seen as insulting via definitions 1-3.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/value#Noun

"capitalist way"

Uhhh... Maybe consider giving away your laptop, and go live innawoods in a loincloth.

If you use "capitalist" dispargingly, while benefitting from it, I'd describe you as a hypocrite, naive, and immature.

If you're not a capitalist, stop accepting benefits created by capitalism.

Go find a deer, harvest its skin to clothe yourself, and drink from the local creek. ...or, continue being a comfy capitalist.

From what I discern, you've chosen the latter.

This is pretty much it, at least in the US. Lots of places in the Midwest where the median house is less than 2.5x the median income. But if you want to live in San Jose, that ratio is 10x. Even in Portland it's over 5x.

A remote tech worker can buy quite a lot of house in the midwest if they keep all or most of the salary they were getting while living in a coastal city.

Or perhaps they merely want to live near their jobs and their spouse’s jobs?

Perhaps remote work will reduce this disparity. I'd expect it to happen in "waves" as high-paid remote workers move from cities with "tier N" CoL+culture to "tier N+1."

There's already been a significant migration from NY+CA to FL+TX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

I'd just add that, while it's hard to drive out of expensive real estate in the Bay Area, that's actually not true of a lot of major cities. While there are expensive towns, there are also some pretty reasonable towns within 60-90 minutes of Boston for example. Not living downtown can buy you a lot of weekends on the town in a hotel.

But then you'd have to live in the midwest. There's a reason the costal cities are popular -- culture, weather, people with similar political views, exposure to other races and cultures.

Especially if you didn't grow up there, the weather is killer.

And there is still plenty of space in the popular places, if people were allowed to build there.

But the people who are already there do everything in their power to prevent it.

For many people living in coastal cities, moving to the areas of the midwest where housing is affordable will definitely involve exposure to other cultures.

There is also an abundant supply of weather.

> There is also an abundant supply of weather.

That's the problem though. Unless you grew up with it, most people do not like the extreme weather in the midwest. Both too hot and too cold.

In the case of California climate specifically though, you have to ask yourself how much you're willing and able to pay to live in the only Mediterranean climate in the US versus e.g. somewhere that gets snow in the winter. (Lots of California can get pretty hot too.)

People value things differently, including the things you mentioned, and cost is a large driver of that.

The only thing cities dislike more than an increasing population is a decreasing one. Given homeostasis is essentially traffic, suburban sprawl, etc we should let areas organically grow and shrink as people make choices. And areas that are appealing now will become unappealing either by cost or changing economies.

Surprisingly, people don't think that living under a racist theocracy in Tulsa is a substitute good for living in a liberal democracy.

Wow, spoken like a truly superior progressive where the only morally good place to live in the world is SF. And, apparently every other city will get you killed due to racism. Please consider never leaving your ‘liberal democracy’ because folks like you destroy cities.

Really? Painting all of the Midwest as a "racist theocracy?" Those $300k homes are also Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas, even blue states like Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan.

You aren’t wrong, but I also want to throw out a challenge to anyone with similar thinking: help us. You might be surprised by the number of people living in deep red areas who crave political change. We can’t do it without political and financial support from the more liberal parts of each state / the country. There’s even the option of moving here and being part of boots-on-the-ground change. Some of these communities can and will change in my lifetime, even if it is a slow process. And the housing is cheaper too.

I am not going to sacrifice my children's happiness so that I can move back to Oklahoma and somehow stick my finger in the dike against theocracy. It's all well and good to propose that an influx of reasonable people would help reform a state's politics, but when it comes down to your own family you are talking about specific people, not averages.

Your children don’t give a damn. They’re children. They will live wherever you live and be completely oblivious to whatever adults argue about on forums and the news. Don’t prop your children up as an excuse.

You live a life of sheltered ignorance if you aren't aware of what young people go through in such places when they are of minority races, minority religions, not heterosexual, or not conforming to gender binaries.

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