[jasonwatkinspdx]

You are ignoring the reality many are facing, where essentially all the available options are above their means.

Back in the late 80s Elizabeth Warren and coauthors showed that the most common reason American families went bankrupt was because their high housing costs were an attempt to get their kids into better schools.

The blunt truth is the 20 major metro areas are where nearly all the high income jobs are, so we've seen a decades long pattern of migration towards them. This is a huge underlying force in so much of US economics, politics, and culture. At the same time, these metro areas have not come close to matching demand with increased housing supply.

The result is increasingly people facing the dilemma where the best economic option for their family is for them to spend 3+ hours of their day commuting to an urban core from an outlying area they can just barely afford to rent in. And god help you if your kid gets sick or your car gets totaled. This is the reality for most working class Americans. It's not a matter of them living above what they can afford, it's about our society becoming so broken many people will never reach a threshold of affording anything like middle class prosperity.

And I am entirely out of patience for folks that earn tech industry money while moralizing about how poverty is just people overspending in some purely hedonistic stupid way.

[ac29]

>The result is increasingly people facing the dilemma where the best economic option for their family is for them to spend 3+ hours of their day commuting to an urban core from an outlying area they can just barely afford to rent in. And god help you if your kid gets sick or your car gets totaled. This is the reality for most working class Americans.

The average commute time for Americans in 2019 (pre-pandemic) was 27.6 minutes each way: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-...

Yes, there are supercommuters out there with very long commutes, but saying 3+ hours a day describes "most" Americans simply isnt true.

[yucky]

   > You are ignoring the reality many are facing, where essentially all the available options are above their means.

Again, this just simply isn't true. Go to Zillow, and set your filter to houses under say $150k and check the metro areas of Kansas City, St Louis, Dallas, Little Rock, Memphis, Cleveland, Charlotte, Detroit, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Cincy, etc. etc. and you will get hundreds of hits in every one of those metro areas. These are not rural communities, millions of people live and work in these and other metropolitan areas.

People who say this are convinced they need to move to SF/LA/NYC/Boston/Seattle. Yes, real estate is prohibitively expensive in San Francisco, we get it. So don't move there.

[dchristian]

The bottom end of the housing market is usually junk or otherwise tied up legally. Just because you get hits, doesn't mean that's a viable option.

I just did a housing search recently and found this out the hard way.

Look at the median for an area and then figure that you can go 10-20% below that for a "fixer upper". Even that isn't an option if you don't have DIY skills.

[yucky]

See above, and try it yourself. On a $150k house a first time buyer can use FHA to put 3% down, and if FHA approved the sale then by definition it is not a fixer upper.

That means a first time buyer can get into a $150k house with FHA for $4,500 down and $1,300/month (which includes property tax and home insurance).

This means someone making $25/hour can afford to buy one of these homes, right now, today.