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Comment by pjonesdotca | Hacker News Reader

So then by your logic, all the single income families are consigned to only living in one bedroom apartments? This seems like a logic fail to me.

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It's not logic fail. It's emotional fail.

Logic fail is claiming there is a logical reason why all single wage earners SHOULD be paid enough to afford a two-bedroom rental in their current location. Emotions might tell you that but logic does not.

For much of the 20th century and perhaps as far back as the 19th a single earner was capable of not only providing a multi bedroom apartment but also a house. You should look into why this has changed and ask yourself why you are OK with that change.

Both of my grandfathers built their own homes in 1951 or 1952. Both original houses were around 800 sqft, and eventually expanded to around 1600 sqft over the course of decades. According to the US census bureau [0] the median new home constructed in the US is around 2100 sqft. If you dig deeper into the data [1] you'll find that the characteristics of housing in the US have changed drastically since the days of mostly single-income households -- homes are much larger, with more amenities. The average dwelling for someone below the poverty line right now is bigger and has better amenities than the average dwelling for Americans as a whole in 1970.

One pair of my grandparents is still living, in the same house. Houses that have sold on their block in the last few months were all around 800 sqft and went for an average of $95,000 -- which is an affordable 3.2 times the median income in the neighborhood (it's a poor neighborhood.) A single earner can provide a house, provided it's a house similar to what single earners could provide decades ago -- but there aren't many of those on the market. We keep building bigger houses and then wonder why the poor can't afford to keep up.

[0] https://www.census.gov/const/C25Ann/sftotalmedavgsqft.pdf

[1] http://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ahs.html

No, that is not what I meant to imply. My point is that increasing living space will obviously require more income, and it seems arbitrary to assume that 2-bedroom is the point of comparison when you're only looking at one-person incomes. I know a lot of single people without families who are perfectly content to live in a one bedroom or studio (myself included). If you simply assume that everyone must live in a 2 bedroom, then of course you can tell dire stories about how unaffordable housing is.

I don't want to diminish the very real struggle some families have with finding adequate housing. But I do think that the linked article has no real clear thesis other than that they wish housing was cheaper. I'd venture that everyone wants that to be true, always, and forever.

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