[vineyardmike]

Because people aren’t literally worse off. Just different-off. Housing is more expensive, but as others have said, there’s a growth in 2 income households so if you account for “percent household spend” instead of per capita spend it’s a more reasonable number. At the same time, a lot of that productivity has gone into leisure activités that weren’t available before. Growth in games and movies and travel etc.

[diffeomorphism]

> it’s a more reasonable number.

No, absolutely not. House prices have grown much faster than inflation even if you introduce a fudge factor 2.

> Growth in games and movies and travel etc.

Is that like "eat cake"? Housing is incredibly more expensive, education is incredibly expensive, but don't worry movies are cheap and that more than makes up for it, right?

[vineyardmike]

> House prices have grown much faster than inflation even if you introduce a fudge factor 2.

No prices have grown a lot in major metros where Software people work. I’m sure SF is insane. But also NYC according to the article has “only” grown by 200% - so it’s literally cheaper on a household level if you include wage growth (assuming you go from single income to double income), and I’m sure Cleveland has a lot less growth. According to (1) housing has only grown 150% nationwide.

It’s not “eat cake”. Houses have grown bigger over time. They gained electricity and running water and 2 car garages and high efficiency water heaters. But people also replace their now 2 car often and buy new iPhones and stream high qualitymovies from their large high def TVs. At some point houses don’t need to get bigger and theirs no more room in Silicon Valley for single family homes but there’s always room for more consumerism delivered faster priced cheaper and plenty of businesses who will deliver. Proof is that housing is becoming a smaller part of the GDP (0) despite becoming “unaffordable expensive”.

As a bonus, according to this article (2), houses are 150% larger and rentals are 200% larger since 1970s. So I guess you get what you pay for?

(0) https://eyeonhousing.org/2018/04/housing-share-of-gdp/

(1) https://listwithclever.com/research/home-price-v-income-hist...

(2) https://www.propertyshark.com/Real-Estate-Reports/2016/09/08...

[imtringued]

Maybe you should stop with the hypocrisy. The people that complain about expensive housing are the most annoying because they are the ones who least care about making housing affordable, they just pretend that they care to strike up some virtue points. The moment you mention land value taxes people are going to argue how evil it is to give everyone enough housing and how the rights of a single family owner are more important than the rights of renters and how multi family homes are ghettos and how nobody should suffer the disgrace of living in one.