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Comment by dreamdu5t | Hacker News Reader

Cry me a river.

San Francisco is expensive. It's not the tech workers fault.

Nobody owes you a home in San Francisco. The American dream is not home ownership. Where'd you hear that? A countrywide home loan commercial?

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Putting aside the condescending, finger wagging tone I was struck by the incorrectness of this comment. Home ownership is actually part of the "American Dream" You could debate whether it should be but you can't define it as not being. A quick Wikipedia check on the American Dream:

The meaning of the "American Dream" has changed over the course of history, and includes both personal components (such as home ownership and upward mobility) and a global vision.

As an Ohio home owner who is thinking about moving to California and renting I agree. The dream of home ownership often overlooks the costs and insane amount of work involved in owning home and keeping it nice. I love having a 4 acre yard, but it takes me 7 hours to cut grass.

Well CA will certainly take care of that 4 acre yard problem for you :-) And the climate is sooo mild you'll be shocked by how little house work you need to do vs the rest of the country. No hard freezes or high humidity, no real bugs of infestations. A good exterior paint job will get you 10 - 15 years not 5 - 10.

I'm cool with just a few days of sunshine :). Even in the summer that's a rare occurrence here.

Why do you feel that it is okay to dismiss someone's opinion outright? He's not suggesting that home ownership is a right, but merely that it would be nice to be able to have the possibility to own a home. Those are two very different things.

The dream of home ownership is largely a manufactured one, like the desire for diamond rings, from William Levitt [0] and his Levittowns during the post-WW2 suburban boom. Before that, most Americans were quite content renting for their entire lives. Even today, countries with standards of living otherwise close to that of the US (western Europe, Australia) have much lower rates of home ownership with no reduction in quality of life (many would say it's an increase). Those countries never experienced the push for private living driven by homebuilders and carmakers in the US in the 1950s.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Levitt

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