Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

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If you seriously think 40-49%, whatever ridiculous mis-read stat you're choosing to use this time, of 30-34 year olds are home owners I have a bridge to Hawaii to sell you. I'm 40, make around 300k and know a LOT of people my age and the vast, VAST majority don't own houses. I owned a house in 2016 and sold it, I don't want to own a house because I'm single and they're $800k minimum here, none of my friends want houses because for 99% of us it means moving 45 minutes away to some suburb. Would they take a house a block over here downtown? Absolutely, but that's $2mil+.

I can count how many times I walk into an ACTUAL house, like a free standing house not a condo, apartment, or townhouse - on one hand over ONE year. I think I have 2 friends with houses out of 20+ here in Denver, and I'm of course including condos/ths, anything purchasable. Almost everyone I know over 30 lives in a 1-2 bd apartment. And this is hackernews where I can pretty much assume someone like you is so far from the average American reality you have no idea what's going on.

There's already a post right above this from some compsci engineer talking about how, oh no, there really are a lot more americans making over $100k than you'd imagine!!

You don't have any real humans in your life to use THAT anecdata from? You sound like you're vastly out of that age range, your "you're too confrontational uwu" style of writing and you're obvious lack of knowledge related to the topic at hand.

I have anecdata on the contrary. I'm 25 and with my wife have a household income of ~150k. We own a house in a Midwestern major city, and so does 80% of our friend group. I realize it's an outlier, as should you, because most of the country doesn't have 800k minimum starter houses.

I could not care less about what the lives of 25yos in some midwestern city are like. The vast majority of millennials had to move to major cities for work around the 2008 recession.

What's your cities population? Is it even 100k? How much of your anecdata is actually related to this convo, in the sense of what percentage of your midwest people are even relevant to it? I've lived in at least 8 MAJOR (Houston, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Portland, San Josa) since 2008, those population centers absolutely dwarf whatever you can come up with in the mw to affect this stat.

This is like when someone on here chimes in with their amazing $120k house in Oklahoma. Owning a house at 25, whether you're in BFE Alabama or not is also not common.

Nor is being married at 25, anymore.

Just about 2 million people in the metro area. Not the biggest, but not 100k.

Since I can't reply to your later comment yet, I might just do it here. I live in the city proper. It's Columbus OH just to make it easier for you. I'm sure you'll find a way to reason that's not a major city but it is (multiple Fortune 500 companies HQ'd, major league sport team etc). I live ~10 minutes from downtown and the house was 290k.

"Metro" is what suburbanites use to make it sound like they live somewhere more interesting, know anything about that city and its lifestyle, to people who don't know where, and not some suburb outside of it. So, no that doesn't matter. It's not your city.

People who live in BFE an hour or two north of Dallas, that isn't Dallas, love to say they live in Dallas, then you go further, "dallas metro." Nah. Then they find out you actually live downtown because you're asking for neighborhoods IN the city and call you a downtown pretty boy who probably has to fight off muggers daily. Christ, Fort WORTH is in the "Dallas metro" and it's literally it's own city that NOBODY in Dallas ever visits and has NOTHING in common with Dallas. "The Dallas metro has 10 billion people!" Yeah who never interact with one another and live an hour away.

So they love it till it's actually, you know, big scary city stuff. And that's a huge reason why WE don't claim them back. Hearing someone from Plano (rich af suburb) say they live in Dallas to someone from Texas themselves is so cringe. Because I absolutely know they actually hate Dallas, the city. It's different if the person has no idea where and you're just giving a general area.

It’s more useful for many purposes. You have oddball cities like St Louis where the city is really made up of a ton of small cities and towns—but treating them as separate would be misleading in many contexts.

In our midwestern city, we do live in the city limits proper. But if you drive straight from here to the city center, you’ll pass through at least two other towns before reaching it! There are probably seven or eight tiny to large towns in the same general direction as us, but which are closer to downtown than we are (some are just 5 minutes to downtown by car). And our school district is separate from the rest of the city (and shared by parts of some of those other towns)

Like 30% of the population of our metro area and probably 40% of the money is in another state! And many of them closer to downtown than us.

That's a good point, I never saw the point of "metros" how they used them in Texas. I'm assuming it's basically a common economy sort of thing.

But I know nothing about Townships and all the MW/Michigan style of .. cities? I guess. Tend to forget those even exist.

> Tend to forget those even exist.

Ha ha—that’s fair.

> That's a good point, I never saw the point of "metros" how they used them in Texas.

One role of that way of categorizing, even in less-atomized cities, is to capture the area that’s basically economically dependent on the city. Nobody (more or less) would live in those suburbs and exurbs if not for the presence of the city. It’s like looking at a lake’s drainage basin.

I live in the city proper. It's Columbus OH just to make it easier for you. I live ~10 minutes from downtown. I'm sure you'll find a way to reason that's not a major city but it is (multiple Fortune 500 companies HQ'd, major league sport team etc). It's also bigger than Portland and Denver (but not their metro areas, see why people use that term?). The metro itself is similar to Portland or Austin in size.

You're 25 in Columbus and most/all of your friends own homes? That's .. really impressive. I was one of the first people I know friend-wise, like out of everyone I know in ever city to buy a house, in Austin, and I was .. around 33 I think. $365k 1970s 3/2 in 2016.

Starting salaries post 2019 have skyrocketed though. It took me about 10 years experience to get over 120k, my ex, her second job at 25 was 150k. My first engineering job was $40k in 2006 or so. 2008 wrecked salaries for a decade. Hopping job to job to make an extra $10k because nobody was giving raises and everyone was treated like trash.

Cool good work man, maybe I'll check it out. My rent in Denver is $3100 for a 2br. Denver is SUPER dense for a mid sized city though, it feels way bigger than Austin/Dallas people+shop+bar+etc wise to me because of that. I never drive.

I mean yeah, I'm definitely an outlier. Neither me and my spouse have student debt which helps massively. And while we've done it without the help of parents, I'm pretty sure some of my friends got some kind of assistance that way.

Columbus is nice because it still feels kinda small and driving is still super comfortable because you can get anywhere in about 15 minutes. I still prefer to bike to work because it feels nice but I'm definitely in the minority here doing that.

You can't disagree with statistics. You are living a very unique lifestyle, that is highly paid in HCOL areas with high standards for housing. That is not the norm whatsoever.

All statistics have absolutely correct data and fundamentally sound designs, right? That's literally the entire argument going on in this conversation you've hopped on. How these statistics are being misconstrued or not.

I moved into programming from bartending after dropping out of school. I am absolutely not ignorant to the lifestyles of all of my friends who aren't engineers.

In fact it's the polar opposite. I am vastly aware of how ignorant my engineer friends are to real people. Like all of my $300k+ friends who have massive houses and 4 kids and 2 suburbans and wonder why a huge portion of their friends, like me, aren't giving them playdates or "cousins" to their kids so they have to go find dad-friends at the kids soccer games who their only real commonality is .. kids.

It's certainly possible that there are errors in the data, but if you suspect that to be the case, the proper argument would be to identify those errors so they can be mitigated, not to dismiss the data in favor of anecdotes, especially anecdotes that may represent outliers.

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