
Stuck: Why the rent and mortgage-burdened don’t always move to cheaper pastures - jseliger
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/24/stuck-why-rent-and-mortgage-burdened-americans-dont-always-move-to-cheaper-pastures
======
DoreenMichele
_Jose didn’t have a job lined up in Missouri. They certainly didn’t have the
money for the moving costs; those would have to go on credit. Not to mention
the fact that he’d also be leaving his home, his friends, and almost
everything he knew behind in Colorado._

I moved someplace cheaper to get off the street. I did that in part by
developing an online income under very challenging circumstances. I was able
to make the move shortly after paying off my student loan.

On the one hand, we need more affordable housing. On the other, I see a lot of
potential for reducing our current problems by providing more support for
developing portable, flexible income via the internet.

What I did is not easy to arrange. It took me several years and I am certainly
not in the lap of luxury yet.

I do get frustrated when people act like there is no housing crisis, there is
plenty of cheap housing. Yeah, sure but it mostly isn't near employment
centers. If you don't have an income, you can't afford housing, no matter how
cheap it is.

The way to promote that idea without being a butt about it is to provide
support for people to develop an online income instead of acting like they are
just stupid or lazy that their life isn't working.

~~~
joe_the_user
_On the other, I see a lot of potential for reducing our current problems by
providing more support for developing portable, flexible income via the
internet._

The problem is any online business involves competing with everyone on the
Internet. Maybe the skills of fluent-in-American-English or leadership or
persuasion or math or programming allow a few to make a decent income selling
that unique thing. But any skill that can be mastered is going to have a flood
of people learning it from all around world, reducing it's price online.

~~~
notyourday
In 10-20 years, sure. So for those 10-20 years we should encourage it.

~~~
gtirloni
I think that's already the reality today. Many comments here on HN talk about
how hard it's to find any decent paying gigs on sites like Upwork due to
global competition.

~~~
notyourday
Because they are looking at the wrong places. Business that knows about UpWork
already knows how to handle race to the bottom. 99% of businesses in the US do
not.

Being a contract programmer is dating. Are you a super star with great skills
and great personality? Fantastic, you can do equivalent of $550/h and still
work 30-40 hour weeks ( translation: you are super hot, super fit and rich -
you get to play with anyone you want ). Are you just OK? Well, start taking
$30/h jobs that give you same 30-40 hours but live in a place where you can
buy a house for $40k.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
That requires you to have two valuable and difficult to learn skillset instead
of just one. You have to be a good programmer and a good salesperson too. That
is a tough bar to clear.

------
pascalxus
It's quite simple, really. The main reason they don't move to cheaper pastuers
is: Jobs. The cheapest place in the US won't help much if you don't have any
source of income.

We really need to start encouraging companies to put jobs in places where
people can live. Or build places people can live near jobs. One or the other,
or Both.

~~~
metalliqaz
Companies won't put jobs in places where they can't find good candidates. It's
a circular problem.

There are many factors and therefore many aspects to a solution, but I think
one certainty is that education is required. Investments in public education
and job re-training could go a long way to making those low-cost places more
attractive to employers.

Another thing to keep in mind is that people who have choice will often pay
more to live in places that have benefits other than available jobs. People
want a safe place with a good social scene and stuff to do. Just ask
Connecticut. Employers there are struggling to find candidates because
everyone wants to leave the boring state. Conservatives love to blame the
state's high taxes, but the high-value employees are so often moving to places
like NYC and Boston where the taxes and living costs make CT look downright
cheap.

------
scarface74
One problem is easy to solve - not wanting to move because your house is under
water.

It's called "strategic default" walk away from the house, stop throwing good
money after bad and three years after your foreclosure you can buy another
house.

I did it when my house was $60K under water and I was "prequalified with a
contingency" to start the process of getting a house built a month before I
was officially qualified to get an FHA loan. The day I was qualified, the
lender submitted my loan application.

I had no moral qualms about it. It was strictly a financial decision.

~~~
girvo
I’m curious about the moral qualms bit. I suppose I was raised differently
(and in NZ/Australia, too) by my parents, but I read an article recently that
was on HN about a man who lost maybe $110,000 servicing an underwater mortgage
that was due to the GFC. Where do those “morals” stem from?

~~~
scarface74
Some people think it's a moral responsibility to pay back a debt to the bank.
The banks had no qualms about taking taxpayers money and paying people
millions in bonuses.

The mortgage was a simple contract. If I didn't pay the mortgage they had the
right to take the house. They exercised their right.

~~~
girvo
Exactly. The banks can and will screw you over, and they caused the damned
issues in the first place! Morals have no place here, I think.

------
Overtonwindow
For me it’s jobs. I move to a cheaper place for a while, and it was great,
until I couldn’t find a job in my industry. Then it was really bad.

------
test6554
I'm surprised nobody is considering a family unit consisting of three equal
(adult) partners rather than the standard two-adult nuclear family. Two
workers and one homemaker could cover all the bills and allow for the care of
the home and children.

Given the financial circumstances many Americans are living in, I can't
imagine nobody's thought of it.

~~~
tobyhinloopen
Are you suggesting 3-person “marriage”? Polygamy? That is evil! Only the devil
marries multiple people! /s

Ill ask my GF if I can look for a 2nd (working) lady to cover some financial
issues

~~~
test6554
Yes, but obviously not legally married as that is not currently possible.

~~~
logfromblammo
In which case the obvious solution is to incorporate the family and write the
articles and by-laws like a pre-nup.

Some use of the civil marriage system might also be required to realize a
subset of the benefits enjoyed by traditional marriage partners.

------
s73v3r_
Because moving takes money, and moving doesn't mean you'll be able to find a
job when you get there.

~~~
overcast
What happened to finding a job prior to moving? How many people in this
country just pack up all their personal belongings into a horse drawn
carriage, and trek across the Oregon trail for a better life?

~~~
s73v3r_
Not every career path allows for doing that. If you're not working a white
collar job already, odds are you're not going to have the time to go out to
the new area to interview, let alone be able to afford to get yourself out
there.

~~~
overcast
I would guess most people aren't working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There
are plenty of online resources for finding jobs. My father worked in a steel
mill for 20+ years, managed to go back to school as a much older adult, and
get a job in an entirely new field(medical tech).

~~~
s73v3r_
No, but if you're working two jobs, your time for doing that is extremely
limited. Double so if you have a family. Your dad probably was not working
more than 8 hours a day. A lot of people that the article is talking about are
those that have to work much more than that.

~~~
overcast
My father worked double shifts most of my childhood, on rotation shifts no
less. Dude worked his ass off, and still had time to build our house, advance
his career, and was always around for baseball practice. No excuses.

------
komali2
>But talk to just one individual who’s gotten stuck (or even chosen to stay)
in an expensive home they couldn’t afford, and all that Econ 101 vocabulary
starts to fall short. Or at least, you’ll find fairly quickly that no one’s
housing decisions are governed neatly by the laws of supply and demand in the
housing market alone. And that's because all of us — as consumers and as human
beings — are part of infinite markets with infinite feedback loops, not all of
which are easily predictable.

I struggle to understand why people who argue for rationality, i.e., people
who I know are very very smart and extremely rational, turn around and
_expect_ rationality from populations.

I've talked to highly intelligent bankers who are surprised when a market
turns volatile/irrational, doctors who can't comprehend why their patients
make irrational/poor health decisions, teachers who have difficulty accepting
the disconnected nature of students whose very future depends on them doing
well in a given class. Politicians who have this expectation that people will
not break the law, or pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or whatever
other things that require rigid rationality.

Maybe it's a problem with empathy? Of "putting yourself in someone else's
shoes?" Maybe it's not even _possible_ for extremely intelligent, relatively
rational people, to adopt the mindset of people who (by choice, culture, or
means well outside their control) live more emotional, instinctual lives. Even
more insidious is when these exact people fail to recognize the irrationality
present in themselves, inherent to the fact that they're human.

When I studied Anthropology, I'd even come across professors that didn't
necessarily believe that human culture is irrational / arbitrary. There may be
traits that continue to exist because natural selection promoted them (a
religion that resisted the eating of pork and promoted evangalising happens to
survive through dark ages because nobody is getting stomach parasites and
because it replicates), but there's nothing _inherently rational_ about that.

TLDR my big word-salad rant -> I strongly believe, and have horded
anthropological evidence to support this belief, that humans at scale are
completely irrational, and to expect otherwise is foolish and irrational. One
should _plan_ for irrationality.

Obviously moving away when rent is too high is the "right" choice, the
"rational" choice, but being human is just too _messy_ for something as simple
as that. Like the article says, there are just so many reasons that get all
tripped up, some rational, some not, all just as powerful an influence on a
human "decision tree" (again, too logical a structure to describe human
choice-making).

I made such a dumb long post because I want to be challenged on this. If you
take the time to reply with why you disagree with me I will be very grateful.

~~~
gr3yh47
This is tangental but, incidentally, the hygienic laws of the Jewish people
encompass far more than just not eating pork, and most of the wisdom in
obeying those laws for health reasons far surpasses any knowledge at the time.

Some modern physicians wrote a book about this called 'None of these diseases'

[https://www.amazon.com/None-These-Diseases-S-
McMillen/dp/080...](https://www.amazon.com/None-These-Diseases-S-
McMillen/dp/0800752333)

To me the rational conclusion given the information above is that those laws
really did come from a source of knowledge higher than the totality of human
knowledge at the time.

~~~
komali2
>To me the rational conclusion given the information above is that those laws
really did come from a source of knowledge higher than the totality of human
knowledge at the time.

Can you clarify what you believe the source is?

~~~
brandnewlow
G-d. Or possibly aliens.

------
notadoc
Much of it is about what is trendy, what is the cultural mecca of the moment.
Unfortunately the overcrowded west coast continues to dominate the
trendseekers mindset, which is why you have ridiculous housing prices all
over, a severe homeless crisis, terrible traffic, and rampant overcrowding.

Make the midwest, south, and NE "cool" and trendy, and all the trendseekers
who endlessly trucked out to the west coast will suddenly discover how
"amazing" and "cool" \- and ridiculously affordable - Columbus Ohio,
Shreveport LA, Rochester NY, or Madison WI are. The price of a downpayment in
any west coast state will buy the entire home - cash - in those locations, and
in many cases you'll have money left over.

~~~
salmonfamine
It's much more complicated than that. Weather is a huge factor. Network
effects are not so trivial or easily displaced. Walkability and public transit
are major factors that contribute to those network effects and establish a
city's culture -- which is a very difficult thing to reproduce. Not to mention
politics. It's easy to say "just move to Shreveport!" But many, many people
would feel very uncomfortable moving to these locations due to their religion,
sexual orientation, gender identity, or whatever. And maybe the city itself is
much more liberal than its surroundings. However, there are still genuine
political concerns that many individuals would have for policy decisions made
at a state-level that would directly affect their well-being.

The major argument people from the midwest or the south give in favor of their
locations is lower house prices. Many of the "trendseekers" have no interest
suburban tract homes. I think the people advancing this argument should
understand that a home is, for many, just one factor amongst many in
determining where to live, and in many cases is not the strongest. Shreveport,
LA is not "uncool" because of some accident of trendiness. It's uncool because
it's uncool. There are no strong networks there, no extensive public
transportation systems, no walkability, no political protections for
marginalized groups -- etc., etc. It's a lot more than just trendiness.

I say this as someone who has never lived on either coast. Just keep in mind
that much of America seems unappealing or unfriendly to people who are not
from here for legitimate reasons.

~~~
emodendroket
Plus, I mean, the elephant in the room is jobs. I'd probably be pretty happy
in Upstate New York, but the options for work are far fewer than they are near
major, booming cities.

~~~
Domenic_S
Just how many jobs do you need? It only takes one good one that pays the
appropriate amount, right?

~~~
Retra
Maybe if it were a union job. As long as it's a right-to-work job, there needs
to be a backup plan.

~~~
emodendroket
Besides that, the lack of available alternatives will almost surely depress
your wages.

