[cvoss]

The US has an enormous land area and the cost of living varies dramatically across it. Intense pockets develop where the high paying jobs are, and everyone wants to cram in there to compete for those jobs, and then they're competing for the housing there, so the prices skyrocket, so the jobs have to pay higher still. Wealthy as the average person may be, the poverty slope is very steep in such places. The SF / Bay Area is the paradigmatic example of this. But when COVID hit, the main attractor of the Bay Area vanished overnight: you didn't have to live there to work those jobs. There was a mass exodus to cheaper places. Texas was at the top of the list of destinations. Austin, though decidedly not the rest of Texas, has a similar culture to SF and so was a natural and comfortable landing spot. So the pressure relief valve on SF is a source of pressure on Austin. But Austin was already suffering growing pains before COVID.

But, all that said, its probably not wise to generalize an experience about Austin to an idea about the US as a whole. At best, you might generalize it to ideas about large US cities.

[davesque]

Then why did houses used to be affordable even in those dense regions with high paying jobs? People act as though housing has always been prohibitively expensive in city centers but it hasn't. My dad bought a house in Boulder, CO of all places easily in the 90s. And of course he made a killing off of it because the housing market went completely insane over the next two decades. I now make more money than he ever did and can't even dream of buying the same house.

[Aurornis]

> Then why did houses used to be affordable even in those dense regions with high paying jobs?

Because those city centers have remained the same size while demand for living there continues to increase

More demand for a fixed set of land drives prices up.

Those city centers today are not equivalent to the same city centers 35 year ago.

[xethos]

> More demand for a fixed set of land drives prices up.

This works because both you and GP specified "[free-standing] house". This is not true of homes, where multiple homes can occupy the same land - just 15 feet higher or lower

Perhaps someday more American cities will discover the third dimension, allowing for cheaper housing

[_carbyau_]

Don't get me wrong, there is a place for units/apartments, especially in the face of homelessness. But no one dreams of owning an apartment as opposed to a free-standing house.

The dream/desire is the thing.

[ButlerianJihad]

https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Weird-Al-Yankovic-2/Buy-Me...

  Gonna buy me a condo
  Gonna buy me a Cuisinart
  Get a wall-to-wall carpeting
  Get a wallet full o' credit cards
  I'm gonna buy me a condo, never have to mow the lawn
  I'm gonna get me da T-shirt wit' the alligator on

[wan23]

Why would you want to live in a free-standing house instead of a nice apartment given the choice? There are pros and cons sure, but unless you can hire someone to do all the house things I don't see it being a clear win.

[kelnos]

> But no one dreams of owning an apartment as opposed to a free-standing house.

I think you might be a little out of touch. Plenty of people dream of owning any kind of real property.

[_carbyau_]

Mate, I am well aware of the struggle, I am living it too.

But we're talking dreams here. Imagination. Do people really feel the need to be frugal with their imagination of what they desire?

Do people really think "Gosh, what I could do with a billion dollars.... no wait, I need to conserve my brain energy, my imagination is getting too expensive, better make that tree fiddy." ?

[diogenescynic]

I think you're focusing on the wrong thing and missing the point. Housing supplies have not significantly increased with population growth (demand) in decades--thus the price equilibrium has moved up. I don't care if you build up or out and neither does the law of supply and demand. The left gets all hung up on 'the right kind of housing' and doesn't realize they're part of the problem--making it harder to build housing (of any kind) is pushing housing costs up.

[WarmWash]

Just to take it one step further, there are usually geographical reasons why cities are located where they are.

So you also can't just build a new city in central Nebraska and have everyone move there for cheap.

This is besides the entrenchment that happens when industry is in one place for a long time.

[thereisnospork]

Because the regulations, set by those with vested interest in real estate, make it difficult to build more housing. Otherwise anyone with any sense would undercut the existing housing stock and turn a 100k investment in concrete and timber into a million dollar home in Boulder, CO.

Not exactly rocket science - if there's money to be made and people aren't making it then something is stopping them.

[yason]

It's a generational narrative here as well: while it gets applied to X, Y, or Z generations in turn and depending on the context - I think it started with X's - but the gist of it is that young generations couldn't afford the house they themselves grow up in. Even if their parents were basic blue collar families and the new generation are well educated. There's too much truth in that as people look back in the preceding decades.

[davesque]

This wasn't some kind of mansion. It was a 1300 square foot house. I guess I'm aiming too high then while making 4x his salary? And people have been whining about this same problem for decades so nothing to be done about it?

[9x39]

Depends if you think you’re going to ride a rising tide of appreciation when you buy a house, or if you have to accept its already long passed.

Aunts and uncles picked up homes in SoCal for 150-200k in the 90s, now worth 1-2m in some cases, but in any case, it seems unreplicable today.

If there’s a new frontier to capitalize on, a lot of us seem to be missing it…

[scottyah]

well shoot, his grandpappy just had to roll up and Stake his claim on the land and it was his.

[listenallyall]

Supply and demand. Among many other changes, the demographics of the typical Boulder resident changed significantly - originally nature lovers and hippies for whom earning money was not a primary motivation - post-2000 shifted to educated, highly-compensated desk workers who can bid up prices. And lots more people in total seeking to live in a small area, which also lifts prices significantly.

[satvikpendem]

Zoning laws is why. No one wants new development because it could devalue their own house.

[HDThoreaun]

America is new. Even in the 90s boulder was largely empty, competition for land was low, so land was cheap. As people spread to newer cities and gained wealth they bid up the price on land.

[davesque]

> Even in the 90s boulder was largely empty

Uh, no it wasn't? I was living there and continued living there for the next 30 years. It always felt about as dense to me as it did back then.

[decimalenough]

Even today Boulder is "largely empty". It's an overgrown village and not a city, and planning rules ensure it will stay that way.

[HDThoreaun]

>It always felt about as dense to me as it did back then.

This is why its so expensive. Demand for housing has increased but supply has not. The government refusing to allow densification in the face of increased demand means prices skyrocket

[mothballed]

Still plenty of cheap land in CO, but they made drilling a well a nightmare in many cases. So people wanting to use cheap land either have to haul water or do some kind of low-key wildcat drilling.

[oooyay]

I'm not sure this is really true anymore and it ignores the reality on the ground of "cheap areas". Often times cheap areas are underserved in a way that once you require or depend on a service that is baked into other higher cost of living areas your life becomes much more expensive than if you'd simply lived in a high cost of living area. There are many examples of this but hospitals in rural areas are one of my favorite examples. There used to be many of these but many people didn't realize they were all (or mostly) subsidized capital ventures. Many of them are closing now that the subsidy has ended. So, is that county land cheap? Yes, but when you have an incident where time matters your likelihood of being cooked goes up precipitously.

[littlexsparkee]

Ditto water infrastructure - failures and lack of ability to maintain/upgrade.

[jofla_net]

Food deserts too, i was surprised to learn.

[t-3]

> But, all that said, its probably not wise to generalize an experience about Austin to an idea about the US as a whole. At best, you might generalize it to ideas about large US cities.

I'm sceptical that not generalizing will be the smart move. The world is more and more connected these days. A person in Rural Town A and a person in Urban Area B and a person in Whole Other Side of Planet C all have access to many of the same goods and services, and almost all the same information as each other. Price and supply information and news from areas are all available instantly in contexts far removed from where they originated, and are having ripple-effects in areas beyond where they'd be logically applicable because communication is so cheap and low-friction. I think we need to generalize more, because those who set prices are definitely going to be generalizing and trying to pull prices towards the highest possible profit margin. Only commodities get supply-and-demand price cuts. Everything else gets inflation for any valid reason and deflation for no valid reasons.

[jimbokun]

In general it’s bad to generalize, but the article says that housing prices across the US increased 50% over the past 5 years.

[fakedang]

You still don't expect people to go hungry in a first world developed country. Nor did people go hungry or homeless at this scale before in recent American, British or even broadly Western history. Yet here we are, and the UK is no exception either.

At least you can be guaranteed for certain you won't be going hungry in Istanbul, Warsaw or Amman.

[pgalvin]

I disagree with the claim that a greater proportion of people go hungry, and more are homeless, today than at any point in recent western history. These have broadly been on a downwards trend over the last century.

Of course many do struggle, and that should not be dismissed by pointing to the past. But it nonetheless strikes me as naive to believe that people today are hungrier than at any point in recent history - the obesity crisis, and its lack of discrimination between social classes, should at least in part demonstrate this.

In my opinion, such exaggerations mostly serve to discredit and distract from legitimate complaints about the cost of living today.

[fakedang]

Recent Western history, 70s to early 00s. I doubt many people were going hungry in the US and UK back then, as much as they are now.

The obesity crisis is in part because of the unavailability of nutritious food and the proliferation of cheap junk masquerading as food. But even that is getting expensive these days. Actual food prices have been going on an uptick since the 00s.

I will make my stand on the fact that more people lived better during the 90s in the West than now.

[websap]

Yup, you are correct to not generalize, because Austin is one of the cheapest "cities" in America.

[pixl97]

Not for a while, prices have gone way up here.