Almost everything you said is a typical NIMBY talking point:

> Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom

A nebulous definition of "luxury", and totally ignores the fact that people with money can get what they want anyway, pushing those with less out. So yes, more "luxury" builds help.

> They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k

Many purportedly want more low income housing, often at absurd rates like "100% affordable" knowing that projects like that will never pencil out. It's a way of saying "No" without actually saying it.

> I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods.

Okay, so build some? If you can't build what you want then why stop others from building what they can with the budget they have?

>As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.

It's literally illegal in most places to build more densely due to height, parking requirements, discretionary reviews, etc. impacting everyone interested in building more units (Like for a multigenerational household as seen in elsewhere in the world). This is not just impacting corporations seeking to extract profit.

That is all that is allowed due to local and state zoning codes. Loosening restrictions on what can be built will bring down costs and all for more types of buildings. The bland housing is all that pencils out for builders at the moment.

Please consider running for local office to be an advocate for non market social housing in a position of leverage.

It's not number of houses, it's number of houses where people want to live.

"house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline" -> the causation could be running backwards: a family of 2 (maybe 2 retired people with accumulated wealth) can outcompete with a young family of 4 for the same unit, that drives prices up and population down. I'm not saying this is the case, but decreasing population not being associated with decreasing housing prices does not mean that increasing housing prices is not caused by housing scarcity

After thirty years of house prices rising astronomically, you can't appeal to "speculation" any more. People are speculating because the underlying scarcity makes prices sure to rise.

I think if you look closely at "population down, house prices up" you will find normal supply-and-demand stories like "population down, houses down even more" or "population down (downtown), prices up (suburbs)".

You can't look at the cost of a house out of context. If you look at Flint, Michigan it's actually one of the most expensive places in the country if you account for average income in that area. Absolute cost needs to be normalized by income in the area. The housing is actually very expensive if you do this type of calculation. We saw an example of under supply during COVID. Housing prices in "underpriced" areas increased during COVID because regions with no real economy saw people moving there with the high out of state salaries. Those areas didn't have enough supply. Now that remote work is less prevalent, those places are having their costs go down but the Bay Area is seeing skyrocketing costs. We are able to measure the effects of supply and demand pretty clearly due to COVID.

Speculation is known to have an effect, but not nearly as much as an effect as under supply. Blackrock THEMSELVES published a paper that the reason their investments are working is due to the low development of housing. Their whole strategy is reliant on NIMBYism and people's lack of understanding of the housing market.

Anyone with 60 seconds of free time can trivially see that your claims hold no water.

Simply Google for cities/areas with declining population, choose one, look up average housing prices there over the last 10 years or so, see how they've changed, correct the figures for inflation, and you'll see that in almost all cases inflation-adjusted prices are lower today in those places than they were 10 years ago.

Not necessarily.

House occupancy laws also have a role here - some of the living arrangements that ended up in higher density in the past are illegal today, forcing population decline in a given area (which is not necessarily equivalent to _demand_ decline)

There's no question that underbuilding is the largest factor here. You can look at construction vs. population over time (it's well below historical standards). Or available home vacancy rates. Or notice that the number of households is increasing faster than the number of homes. Or look at the various models, which show a 2 million-4 million shortfall in homes.

That aside, housing prices are reasonable in much of the country. Where population is stagnant or declining, they are generally reasonable.

are these areas with declining populations and rising housing prices increasing the number of houses? it could be that the population declines because no one can afford to live there however it's still a desirable area so prices remain high. cities like Austin are seeing reduction in housing prices despite population increase due to construction of new housing.

If they were unaffordable they would not be selling. Don't underestimate just how much money people can conjure up. Most parents don't want to be buried with their money Egyptian pharaoh style.

How do you separate speculation from legitimate price increases? If the houses are overpriced due to speculation, why isn't someone building Alternatives and undercutting them? This implies that there is either a real increase in value, a manufactur bottleneck, or both

About half of social housing in London is headed by people born outside of the country. Social housing is quite rare in the UK now after 1980s mass privatization started. It is provided at a steep rental discount and if you qualify for it you can keep it for life. Or purchase it at a steep discount.

Quite bizarre, but difficult to talk about, because it plays in to the wrong side of ongoing culture wars for some people.

https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/fact-check-foreign-born-p...

Same in Austria and other old wealthy EU countries that have since economically stagnated or even declined.

All that seems to matters today, is that the GDP number keeps going up at any and all cost, regardless of long term externalities and second order effect to society. Kina like Saturn devouring his children.

Like sure, now you need to wait 4 months to see a public healthcare specialist compared to only 2 weeks 8 years ago, but the GDP number is higher now than back then, so obviously we must be better off today than in the past, right? RIGHT?!

That's why EU politicians are rushing to implement free speech crackdowns, invasive privacy laws using dictatorial techniques, like last week's Chat Control 1.0. They know they're on borrowed time before the majority of the population wises up and turns against them for the effects of the unpopular policies they pushed that lead to their decline in quality of life and purchasing power.

Yes, this is a real problem. Also, in high-demand areas, building more will lower prices compared to the counterfactual but that doesn't mean prices will actually go down. This makes it a harder sell.

This was a problem long before that, the trajectory has been clear. Is immigration a factor? Sure. The suggestion that it’s the key issue is complete nonsense. This is happening all over the world, even places with low immigration. There’s really no economists claiming that immigration is the main driver. This is reactionary right wing rhetoric and not much more.

if developers cant build housing for people to live in profitably, the government should build it instead

afordable housing is a bedrock to ecobomic prosperity, the same as education and healthcare

I can't think of a good reason as to why people would want housing to be a good investment except if their own wealth depends on it or they want to preserve the wealthy character of their own neighborhood. It takes away investment from local enterprise, local government, which would spur innovation, salary growth, better infrastructure, municipal services, etc.

Those aren't really two different arguments. Wanting housing to be a good investment is one of the reasons we have a supply problem because it incentivizes people to vote against allowing more housing to be built. But at the end of the day the high cost of housing really is a simple supply problem, it's the reason for that lack of supply that's more complex.

Public housing is the answer to this.

it blows my mind when anyone ever reads $x.99 as $x out loud. i often cant keep myself from muttering "$x+1" and its taken decades of practice to keep myself from looking at them like they have 2 heads

figured it out since i learned to read so it seems so childish to hear adults make it

turns out ppl like me are the weird ones and most people just truncate at the period

You are reading gp’s comment correctly as it was written, but it omits the next line in the source study:

> Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income.

They oversampled in major markets where they work and in high-net-worth populations (who they service), but their claims are for the overall US adult population.

Oversampling like this is pretty routine in survey research. It improves the precision of any subgroup analyses you might want to do, and, to a first approximation, it doesn’t tend to bias the weighted overall-population claims in one direction or another.

I think about it like Google Earth or something. I happen to have much-higher-res imagery of London than of the Cotswolds. That doesn’t mean my view, when zoomed out to “the whole United Kingdom,” is necessarily misleading. It does mean I can additionally make more detailed claims about Piccadilly Circus than about the sheep fields or whatever.

How you define “rely”.

I’ve certainly seen trust fund kids who’s success is anchored on “daddy gave me a sweet job at his company” and others who’d be dead or in prison if it wasn’t for the constant money poured into the legal system by their parents.

> total of 4,375 online interviews

> Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth

Looks like about 1/5 are in the trust fund kid category.

Sure seems like it if you are excluding property.

Europe in general maybe outside of some CEE, DACH, Nordics/Benelux is pretty fucked for the youth. Without help from parents or inherited housing you're fucked. You get American CoL with African wages. Joking of course, but you get the point.

Came here looking for this response.

My follow-up question is "What percentage of the 'totally independent' group, are parents with adult children?"

i.e. there's almost an interesting statistic here about what percentage of adults have "no option" in relying on their parents for financial help, and what percentage of the remainder still do rely on their parents.

But once I had this question, I realized that I needed to be suspicious of the % itself.

I agree with you - there’s usually some adjustment for sampling bias, and this study says it is matching Census targets. But I had to go three levels down to see that info before I derive any meaning from the number.

My concern is that headlines like “x% of adults do y” get repeated without anyone (sometimes even journalists writing the article) seeing the methodology or nuance behind them. Context matters.

Still, it lowers the resolution of the results if you have to throw out a significant portion of the interviews.

Loan was originated in 2014. Our particular circumstance was that it was a run-up in home valuations in a short time period that caused appraisals to start coming in short right when we were trying to close. 20% down turned into 10% down plus a small shortfall.

Always check the pockets of jackets before donating!

My mom snuck $100 in a jacket my wife almost donated without realizing.

Excellent work with the reading there, champ.

I think you will find that worldwide, family support is more common, not less.

In many cultures multigenerational households are the norm. You may never move out; you raise your kids in the same house your parents raised you.

It's a kind of free insurance: if a bad financial event happens, you're protected against the worst downsides.

If you're from a poor family and break out of poverty, you're still in a worse financial state than someone from a rich family, even holding income and assets constant. You've got to effectively self insure (by taking fewer risks; being more conservative in investments; cutting down on rich people expenses that help with networking) to plan for the worst case scenario. And rich kids don't even realize how much their families' financial status enables and drives their behavior.

And that's not even starting to count financial expenses to take care of aging parents who can't afford to take care of themselves.

I also think that educated and wealthy parents are better able to support their children; from education and financial literacy to real estate and plain money. However, I do think that this support makes the children more independent when they're adults.

I also thought that YC might be younger, but then i remembered that most (successful) founders are 40+. Do we know something about YC demographics? Aside from the fact that it's obvious that a great many of them come from STEM fields. I did not find anything about it.

I've asked myself the same question. And I've come to the conclusion that there's a difference between feeling independent and being independent.

Like: I built a $50 billion business with my own hands. Okay, I got the first $2 billion from my parents. Okay, I got the first $2 billion for every business from my parents until I was successful.

Yeah right? I used to live in nicer/upper area and like everybody got help from their parents for house, if not outright given to them.

It's an interesting question.

We have a group that promotes a "living wage" construct in Tompkins County that pushes the unquestioned assumption that people who are working in the lowest paying jobs can live 100% alone. It's not something I want to challenge directly, but... It reminds me of discussions about the minimum wage in the late 1980s when it was common for teenagers to work at supermarkets and fast food markets. I think the public never really understood how the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit

was specifically intended to help out people who were raising a family with low incomes that was economically efficient and how there is some logic to people who are working in low income jobs qualifying for food stamps, it is not just a way "Wal-Mart is stealing for us."

e.g. part of "affordability" is keeping costs low and as much leftie folks want to sweep it under the rug there is a lot of internal class conflict in groups such as women: like the Sheryl Sandberg type definitely benefits from exploiting less wealthy women to do child care work for them and child care is basically problematic because the child care worker is not productive enough to put their own children in child care without subsidy and you don't get the Fordist scenario where the auto line worker can easily afford to own one of the cars they make.

I am not sure - in my experience, I've observed that the more money you have the less people care about relations (their social circle becomes smaller) and healthy co-dependency reduces. This is more true of the young. Human nature tends to be selfish, which is not conducive for a healthy society. Young people becoming financially-independent at an early age may negate opportunities for self-introspection on that - without the struggle to earn a good living, many fail to understand the value of money and good relationships, which often lead to costly and immature decisions.

No, it mentioned 816 out of more than 4500 respondents had net worth over $1M.

That's quite different to your claim.

Agreed. I think it's wild that such a position seems relatively common in the US (though at a surface level I understand that it's just a cultural difference).

The only situation in which I would consider charging my kids 'rent' is, if as adults, they were being irresponsible with their life, e.g. being a NEET and not helping out around the house. Even then I would hold the money in a separate account to gift back to them later.

I think it's parents' role to always be a source of almost unconditional comfort and security for their kids. Though I also think that this is unsustainable unless kids also do their best to maintain and respect that relationship.

I think this is driven by both culture and the grade of economic development of the country you live in. In my home country of Italy, it would be considered kinda crazy to charge your kids rent. There are very practical reasons behind it: high youth unemployment, low salaries when you're just starting your career. Rental apartments are also really expensive in big cities and you just can't afford one without getting a roommate (or a partner with a job). So people end up staying at home longer to save money for a down payment, and the parents are totally fine with it.

I live in the US now, and here, where it is (used to be?) easy to land a well-paying job fresh out of school, it is considered quite common to charge your children rent if they decide to stay at home. My feeling is that staying at home in the USA carries quite some stigma for both the kid and their parents. American culture puts a lot of value in self-reliance and financial independence, and the general idea is that you failed as a parent if your kids aren't able to afford their own place.

(I also have a feeling all of the above is changing dramatically, given the current cost of living crisis in America.)

In my house the >8 years old the kids start paying rent. They get paid for normal house work (minimum wage). Rent is ~$300/month. I pay the kid minimum wage for chores because that is work and work should be rewarded. They pay me rent. That rent and other expenses are ~80% of their pay. Some must go to savings and "taxes". They have to keep books as well. The rest is theirs.

I know other fathers that charge their adult children rent, keep the money, and then gift it to them at the wedding or to help them buy a house.

He's paying a fraction of market rate rent and has saved a lot of money.

He's eating food out of the communal pool and it's a running gag at local restaurants that he eats two entrees. I think it's fair that he contributes something, like he is working, except for this summer when he said "take this job and shove it" because he was working for a crew where the foreman was twice his age but didn't have any sense for construction. Instead, he's doing a lot of work around the farm to fix things up, some of which is stuff we need and some of which is stuff he wants.

He expects to inherit the farm, will probably move to our other house if and when he is ready to co-habitate as opposed to getting on the housing ladder in the conventional way.

I paid discounted rent to my parents once I had a job and still lived with them. Really not a whole lot. I think of it not as a payment for existing but as a contribution to the household and if I couldn't pay for some reason, they wouldn't have evicted me.

He comes and goes as he pleases but is usually pretty open about it. Also he has plenty of space to do construction projects he wants, he'd probably like to keep playing guitar past 11pm but there are limits!

Now it is not a good situation for sex for anyone involved but we have a lot of land so there's nothing better than a love nest made from glamping gear at least in the summer.

And they wonder why they only get the most desperate people as tenants!

Maybe you're not familiar with the entire economy? There are a lot of households that depend on retirement checks of the oldest members and households that don't have traditional work but may have family homes, businesses and farms still in the name of the oldest relatives. Different groups would have different results as far as whether they will inherit independence or become destitute if parents die.

It's plausible if it's an inheritable nest egg amount. Though I agree, seems unlikely.

Are they counting free housing as 'financial support'? A number of states have perverse incentives to delay the legal transfer of a home as long as possible, like with CA's Prop 13.

Wait until you see the homeownership statistics, or the average age of homebuyers.

According to that 17% of boomers+ are dependent on their parents. Just looking at boomers, that is around 70 on average. How many people that age even have parents still alive, let alone financially depend on them?

Cell phone companies incentivize this, though. It's a better deal for both the parents and children (often 50%) with no difference in service

theres plenty of people making 6 figures at 25 that still have their parents pay their phone bill because they get a family discount. i dont get your point

> $350/month [ 2000 ]

> $1500/month [ 2026 ]

CPI inflation would suggest that the current cost ought to be about $692. So if it really costs $1500 to cover the things you've mentioned (noticeabley absent: student loans, health insurance, car payments) then either our society is deeply fucked or your list has changed or your estimates are wrong or your memory is wrong or all of the above.

That's not what your linked article says.

37% of survey respondants say they would need to use a credit card to cover a $400 expense. They wouldn't be destitute, they just don't immediately have the cash.

It also cites another study that put the number much lower, at 8%.

Health care costs at the end of your life can eat everything you've ever saved and more. Cost of maintenance on housing is increasing and property insurance rates + HOA rates are going up. This idea only works under ideal conditions.

It may feel that way but I do not believe it is indicative of the situation of the masses. Often who we surround ourselves with alters our perception of reality. I do think the US has work to do to restore more faith in people that success is achievable for everyone.

The stock market isn't the economy. Those are different things. If you are new to this area, the Wikipedia article is good for basics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy

So you have no objections to wars. I see.

News lie regularly and I happen to hold the opinion for a while.

Studies also lie, another entity that lies regularly is government! All of them!

When you live long enough you learn to trust your eyes not your ears.

As far as the western civilization goes - it's being killed off. Pay attention.

Refugees are different from immigrants.