| HN Mirror

For a lot of people on HN, "making a living" means owning property in a VHCOL area.

_DeadFred_ 83 days ago

For a lot of people on HN, they grew up in VHCOL places that used to be affordable and are trying to keep the lives they've had since birth.

I was forced to move, lost connection to my friends and half my family, all the places I knew and had memories/attachment to, habits/hobbies. I understand why they are fighting to keep their lives and not give up and in a way die and start a new, lonelier, much different life.

I don't understand how that is nepo/spoiled/rich behavior, it's just basic normal human behavior. Thinking it's totally cool to displace people is also normal human behavior, just to me the shittier less justifiable of the two.

[1]: https://law.justia.com/constitution/california/article-xiii-...

I agree with all of that, but it's not representative of everybody that grew up in the VHCOL area. A slight majority of residents in the Bay Area (used as an example) own their own home. If you grew up there, and your parents owned their own home, your family has benefited enormously from the meteoric rise in house prices. Those people (long-time residents) are thrilled by the influx of tech cash and actively pursue NIMBY policies to restrict the housing supply to keep prices as high as possible. Most of the tech workers actually moving to the Bay Area and renting would much prefer a massive increase in the housing supply to bring prices down.

California is an especially egregious example because none of the inherited familial homes are taxed appropriately, which lowers liquidity and drives up market rates further. If you wanted to create a landed gentry, California Article XIII A is the gold standard for a policy to do that [1]

Of course, a lot of families never end up owning a home in an area that will experience that kind of appreciation. But the idea that it's "newcomers vs. life-long-residents" is wrong. It's actually more about the tension between the life-long-residents who own property and pursue NIMBYism vs. everyone else.

_DeadFred_ 83 days ago

My example is representative of EVERY person I grew up with that didn't come from generational wealth. I guess if their parents died when they were young of a fluke you would consider them lucky, but what's the average lifespan for someone in the area? Everyone I knew would rather have had the option to live/raise a family in their home town than inherit a million dollar home in their 50s after they had to start a new life they didn't pick.

You can write paragraphs about how displacing people is fair, how kicking grannies out of their homes and auctioning them off because of tax debt (something that was happening) is the moral way. But you are still just talking around displacement of people to reach your desired end goal.

A functioning economy is full of these tensions between people with divergent "desired end goals". Everybody wants high home prices when they want to sell but low home prices when their kids want to buy. Everybody wants low prices for things but high wages for people, even though those things are inversely correlated. I'd bet many of the parents you're talking about voted for NIMBY policies and cheered the tech industry's rise. Of course they would. If I'd owned a house in the bay, I'd have been pretty jazzed about it too.

I'm not pro-displacement. I'm pro-housing, which we need much more of in SF.

anigbrowl 83 days ago

Those used to be quite reasonable cost of living areas. We're not talking about owning a mansion in the Hamptons, but a decent-sized apartment in a downtown area or a nice single family home in a pleasant neighborhood.

WarcrimeActual 83 days ago

Correct. This is a space occupied disproportionately by spoiled rich nepo or otherwise kept silver spooned babies.

I had to drop off my health insurance when the bill hit $4,850.24/month.

Millions did the same. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/aca-enrollees-uninsured.html

slavoingilizov 83 days ago

This is a problem specific to the US. The price of your health insurance is very far from the actual cost of it to providers.

8note 83 days ago

FAANG wages are also fairly specific to the US - the two go hand in hand

That sucks and I hope congress gets their shit together soon, but there are a lot of non-FAANG companies that offer insurance.

That money black hole hits companies too. A $50k/year job typically can't throw in $60k in healthcare benefits.

https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/cost-of-employer-sponsored-h...

It’s not that much.

A small company can use a PEO like Rippling (a YC company) where employees are “co employed” with the actual company and for taxes/HR/benefits with for Rippling. It’s not like contracting. Everyone from the CEO down is “co employed”

It really is.

The US saw an average of $14,885 per-capita healthcare costs in 2024. Higher now.

I’m never going to defend the American health care system as I sit in a country now for six weeks where I fully plan to become a resident of post retirement mainly because of the healthcare even if I don’t live here full time.

sylos 83 days ago

My guy, congress can't even remove valid bad actors who openly lie to and threaten them. They will never fix any problems except their "light" pocket book

Trump rather likes handing out cash, as long as he can put his name on it. Maybe as long as congress agrees to call it TrumpCare.

pixl97 83 days ago

> I hope congress gets their shit together soon

Narrator: "In fact, they did not"

I know how much the American health care system sucks. But I have looked into a high deductible health care plan on the exchange for myself and my wife - both over 50 to calculate how much we would need to survive a month of unemployment. It was around $1000/mo with no subsidies for a bronze plan.

bix6 83 days ago

You think regular Americans have the money to afford high deductible plans? One ER visit bankrupts people.

High deductible plans max out at around $10K deductible. But it’s the same cost in my experience low deductible vs high deductible + HSA contribution.

The difference being that if you don’t need to use your HSA in a year you keep it - unlike low deductible plans.

bix6 83 days ago

Ah yes because the family making $40k/year can afford $10k in medical expenses.

In my experience the cost of a low deductible health plan is more expensive than a high deductible health plan + equivalent amount of a pre tax HSA.

I have never known a health care provider that you can’t negotiate a payment plan with. Even if your HSA isn’t funded, they could probably have a payment plan = HSA monthly contribution and then take it out of the HSA.

Yes I understand that a lot of people making $40K would be deftly afraid of doing that. But they would still statistically come out ahead

jmye 81 days ago

A family making 40k a year qualifies for significant benefits and subsidies, even today. But don't let not knowing what you're talking about stop you from angrily talking about it.

This is a family plan; the bronze plans are $2400 or so a month. But that means a huge deductible; for a high-needs family, it works out worse financially.

When I compared plans at work over the years, I’ve found that it is rarely cheaper to do low deductible/higher monthly costs than higher deductible /lower monthly cost + pay deductible out of pocket.

That will vary from person to person.

In our case, we tend to hit the max out-of-pocket pretty fast.

Is that still cheaper than high deductible + HSA contribution to cover the deductible?

bdangubic 83 days ago

Both my wife and I have been contractors for decade+ and have been with Kaiser and are paying $1.1k/month for Bronze-ish plan (1 child)

How does that work if you have a pre-existing condition? I am honestly curious

ACA-compliant plans can't deny or change pricing for them.

It was a good change, but it needed the individual mandate to function successfully. That got removed.

bdangubic 83 days ago

ACA put a stop to that

lostlogin 83 days ago

That’s incredible. That must be responsible for population decline (migration more than death).

jmye 81 days ago

You were working at a FAANG and had the enhanced subsidies? That strikes me as complete bullshit and non sequitur to the post.

ACA plans and LG/SG plans are not the same, and pretending they are is, frankly, a large part of why healthcare in this country is such a dumb discussion - those discussing it have no idea what they're talking about.

commandlinefan 83 days ago

When I was 8 or so (early 80's), I read a news article that said something like "in the near future, robots will do all work and humans won't have to work at all". The news article made it sound like it would happen before I reached adulthood and even then I could see the problem there: "who decides who gets to live in the big house at the top of the hill and who decided who has to live where I live?"

Communism/socialism/wealth distribution/planned economies is one potential solution, but it's an awfully ham-fisted one and definitely not one to put into place until it's absolutely necessary. I kind of suspect that a lot of people, like OP, are kind of hoping that now is the time, but it definitely isn't, at least not yet.

underlipton 83 days ago

He's right. It's not just FAANG, but if you're not within about 2 or 3 degrees of separation from FAANG or a subset (not even the whole thing) of SP500, you're hosed. Even then, it's not a panacea. McDonald's employees can confirm.

And it's because only those companies are big enough to cut deals to shield themselves and their subjects from the massive amounts of debt the world economy is being forced to service; everyone else is dumping a double-digit percentage of their labor into covering the bad bets of our banks.

scottyah 83 days ago

Except for all the small business owners that are doing just fine, and many are more than fine. You just don't want to be a corpo who is competing with FAANG, or anywhere where you have to "share" any margins with them.

underlipton 83 days ago

2 or 3 degrees of separation

If money is trickling down to you from FAANG, you're benefiting from their largesse - or, rather, being exploited by the control they have over your source of income, as both an individual and an business owner. FAANG throwing their weight around to force-underpay suppliers becomes the problem of the retail worker whose wages are paid by underpaid consumers. And so on.

estimator7292 83 days ago

Yes. That tends to happen when you don't increase the minimum wage for multiple decades.

senordevnyc 83 days ago

Damn, I hope no one tells the hundreds of millions of global middle class and upper middle class households who don't work for FAANG that they don't exist!