[2devnull]

Do you live in an area with high international demand for housing?

Not all of the US is a hot spot for high paid immigrants, yet. Displacement is a real thing. Not everyone can change states or nations to make the finances work out.

[Belopolye]

Don’t let the reality that this was in response to a statement that implied a universal reality that it’s impossible to raise a family on a single income be lost on you.

I’m the sole breadwinner, my wife and I have six kids, and I don’t make fantastic money for being a developer ($60,000/year- took a haircut for this role for the 100% work from home). We make it work.

[em-bee]

there is a hair in your comment that probably should not be there...

[BigRedDog1669]

no, haircut is now a phrase that doesn't only apply to hair due to the flexibility of human language =)

[bequanna]

Luckily in the US you can choose to live wherever you want. If you’re priced out of a neighborhood, you can choose to live somewhere else.

You can also choose how many and why type of cars to have, what food to eat, how much to spend on vacations, etc.

Hell, you can even choose where and what you do for work! What a country!

Many people will choose higher spending power with two incomes rather than take a step down to live on one.

[2devnull]

You are agreeing in a weird way. Yes, in America if you live somewhere that other people want to live, then you have to move or take on two incomes. That was my point, that because US real estate has become an attractive investment over the past decades and the growth and current size foreign capital outweighs the average American family’s purchasing power which results in: people resort to two incomes, wait to start families, have fewer children when they do have children, etc…

[gls2ro]

I am not sure how it is in US but sharing a bit from my perspective (living in EU):

The (mental) cost of moving is sometimes hard. Here are only two main things:

- you lose your support system (friends, family)

- you lose your time (and maybe cost) saving tricks/knowledge (where to go to buy things, medicine, …)

All these are not impossible to solve but they are way harder for single parent family.

[theGnuMe]

You are free to live any where but most people live near jobs. Great rhat you can get a 10k house in Detroit… bad cause there are no jobs.

[randomdata]

> bad cause there are no jobs.

Yet Detroit's unemployment rate is 3.8%. For comparison, New York's unemployment rate is 4.6% and San Francisco's unemployment rate is 4.0%.

[c-cube]

> You can also choose how many and why type of cars to have

See that's an interesting example. In most places in the US[^1] you have no realistic choice but to have at least 1 car per adult in the household. That's not quite the full extend of choice for "how many cars" one would wish for.

> what food to eat

Have you heard of "food deserts"?

[^1] this is false in a few places that were not bulldozed in the 1960s and still allow for non-car centric life. These places tend to have very high cost of living because they're desirable.

[ndriscoll]

A few years back when I worked in a downtown office in a suburban metro, my wife would often drop me off/pick me up and then she'd have the car all day. Other times I'd bike. When only one person works outside the home, you have more flexibility.

We also lived in what was barely not a food desert at that time, and we walked to the grocery store all the time. "Food desert" can mean it takes 10 minutes to walk to the store. Like for a low income urban census tract it means 0.5 miles. We go on afternoon walks 3-5x that every day.