[refurb]

But why would you expect to be able to afford the same house even with higher net worth?

I mean, my folks bought a house I can afford either but when they bought it, it was on the edge of the city, not a desirable area in a 2nd tier city. That’s why it was cheap. Now it’s in a historic neighborhood, highly desirable in a city where everyone wants live.

I could afford a house similar to the one they bought in terms of those qualities. In fact it would likely be cheaper compared to salary.

[threwawasy1228]

Show me an affordable house in on the edge of NYC in the "undesirable" neighborhoods. Even if you pick neighborhoods past where subway lines end (a very undesirable quality for city property to have) that also happen to be high crime areas it is still too expensive for anyone to purchase. Like two examples look at New Lots/East New York and South Ozone Park/Jamaica. Both fit my description above, they are at the very edge of subway access, and are high crime areas, and both are too expensive for normal middle class people to buy property in.

Contrast this with great people I've met who are ~60 now, who just stumbled into the east village/alphabet city in the 1980s in their mid-20s and bought up cheap houses while bumming around paycheck to paycheck. What area of NYC or the valley can I do that in now? If the answer is none, and you can't point me to a city in the midwest or south where buying up cheap affordable property IS going to turn me into a multimillionaire when I'm ~50 what does that mean for our growth/stagnation culturally and as a country? This is the difference, there is no place that even has the faintest whiff of a city that is about to take off where such gains would even be possible.

In other countries that have similar issues in Europe, where a lot of cities are unbelievably expensive there are two solutions that you see a lot. One is that it is culturally common to live with your entire extended family and not be able to afford a house, and the second is welfare or new home ownership incentives that make it more viable. "Rugged Individualism" in American mindsets and cultures makes both options seem untenable but clearly we have to adapt.

[bradleyjg]

1980s NYC did not have “the faintest whiff of a city about to take off”. That couple bought property in a crime ridden part of a crime ridden city. Tompkins Square Park was an open air drug market.

The equivalent today is a bad area of Detroit. I’m certain you can find something affordable there today. I doubt it will turn you into a multimillionaire, but if we were having this conversation in 1984 everyone would doubt buying in the East Village would get you anything other than mugged or shot.

[rayiner]

Having grown up in the 1990s in the D.C. suburbs, and visiting family in Queens (recent immigrants) I still reflexively do a double take when new associates at my law firm say they're living in Brooklyn, or in D.C., in Capitol Hill. Like--I know you can afford to live somewhere decent!

[bradleyjg]

There’s a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Bed-Stuy. In Billy Joel’s song about being manic there’s a verse:

“I walked through Bedford Stuy alone / even rode my motorcycle in the rain”

because it was something only a crazy person would do. I can never quite get over the fact that a young coworker of mine was living there with his girlfriend. It is mind blowing.