
Social Mobility May Suffer as Income Fails to Keep Pace with Housing Costs - uptown
http://www.zillow.com/research/social-mobility-housing-costs-12138/
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djb_hackernews
Housing, Education and Health Care are all insanely unaffordable for the
middle class. Eventually the home equity of their parents that has been
floating the millennial generation will run out and what happens then?

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ktRolster
Housing costs are easy to fix.....it's just a matter of building more housing.
Current residents don't want to do that though, so it's just a typical case of
entrenched interests against newcomers: story as old as time.

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graeme
This seems naive. There's only so much land in urban areas, and everyone wants
to live there.

As population expands, isn't there some kind of mathematical constraint on
total possible hoising within a circular area? City centres radiate outwards
roughly circularly.

More NYC like areas would help, but we can't seem to build those anymore. When
existing cities grow they just sort of spread outwards.

 __Edit: __Per my comment below, my argument is that as long as we build the
way we do, we can 't really build our way out of this. Even our "dense"
construction isn't really dense once you consider total land use including
businesses, offices, etc

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landryraccoon
> More NYC like areas would help, but we can't seem to build those anymore.

That seems like a policy problem. I don't think we're nearly at the point
where physics or math is a constraint on how densely we can build.

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graeme
I agree, actually. But it's a deep policy problem. Since cars, we've built no
cities that are both dense and desirable. And very few areas dense, period,
especially when you consider that stores + offices are usually separate from
dense residential towers. So those separate areas need to be accounted for in
the total footprint.

The pre car areas tend to be dense and also have shops in the areas. I live in
such an area in Montreal. Low rise but very dense.

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ghaff
In part (but only in part), I'd argue this is because--sort of by definition--
post-car cities have tended to be built in areas where there is room to spread
out. And, for better or worse, the natural evolutionary path seems to be to
spread out. (And, where there has been a conscious effort to build density in
an area, it's tended to be housing project style.)

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davidw
It's very much a policy problem. 'Dense' is not allowed in huge swaths of the
US. Some people don't want dense, and that's fine, but for those who do favor
it, it's simply not an option in many places, and that needs fixing.

San Francisco is not as dense as Paris, France - and Paris is not constrained
by water, so that probably includes some fairly large tracts of low-density
suburbs.

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ghaff
Central Paris was built quite a while ago :-) Paris is actually almost
uniquely dense among large cities in developed countries.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_d...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_population_density)

Which I knew but wouldn't have guessed. Looking at a population density map
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Paris)
I think the reason may be that the City of Paris is a very small chunk of the
total area.

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davidw
The density list seems to be missing a number of places - New York, for
instance. Most European cities are denser than SF, but it can be kind of hard
to gauge as the line where the city ends can be somewhat arbitrary.

Density doesn't need to be skyscrapers, it often works well if it's just a few
extra stories.

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wheaties
I would say that basic economics should have predicted this. I mean, if
there's an area where your children can escape poverty with a higher chance,
isn't that area more desireable to live? And if so, wouldn't you pay a premium
to allow your children the opportunity?

I would. My parents did. I'm a child of the lowest 25% who now am a developer
living in the highest 25%.

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TulliusCicero
A certain amount of price increase for a desirable area is expected, of
course. It's just gotten out of control in certain areas due to highly
restrictive regulations around building more.

Like, the bay area should be more expensive than normal because of the booming
economy. But should housing in otherwise-normal suburbs like Sunnyvale or
Santa Clara cost 3-4x as much as normal? No; that's the result of onerous
regulations.

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AdmiralAsshat
I've been trying to buy a place for awhile now. On Zillow, as a matter of
fact. I can attest to the fact that it seems bloody impossible to find a
place. I've had people in my neighborhood tell me that they bought their
townhouse for $200k or so ten years ago and putting it up for sale now at
rates of $350k or higher.

The nice thing about Zillow is being able to see the pricing history. The vast
majority of houses I have looked at are approaching their 2005/2006 prices,
before the last bubble popped.

I'd say we're due for another one soon. I will begrudgingly bide my time until
then.

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gdilla
I think it depends on the location. During the last bubble-burst(?) housing in
Santa Monica didn't really fall. Activity just kind of slowed down. Also, the
last bubble was partially fueled by bad loans to unworthy borrowers. They were
leveraged to the hilt, and when their rates reset on their teaser loans,
foreclosures went up. This is happening less now because easy mortgages aren't
as rampant. I bought a house in LA as a 20 year old with 0 downpayment and
'stated income' in 2002! That doesn't happen anymore.

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ghaff
Much of the Boston area didn't really drop much either. Certainly a much
different situation from, say, Las Vegas where there was a huge amount of
speculative building and bad loans going on.

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talmand
I was there, it was an interesting thing to see that's for sure.

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cherry_su
Figure 1's concentration of orange and yellow areas looks moderately
correlated with the Bible Belt
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Belt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_Belt)),
in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism plays a strong role
in society and politics, and Christian church attendance across the
denominations is generally higher than the nation's average. It would be
interesting to explore this relationship further.

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oftenwrong
...in the US

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jacobush
... and in Sweden

