Downward mobility is almost entirely caused by housing costs, which are a self-inflicted problem. We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.
I live in an expensive area and I'm always shocked by how many of my friends who cannot afford to buy a home (or even a condo) are NIMBYs. These are people in their 20s through 40s who have been earning since college, can't afford to buy, yet get annoyed whenever there's new construction that "alters the character of the neighborhood". Talk about false consciousness. I can at least understand people who own a home feeling this way.
I may or may not meet your definition as a nimby 28 year old. I am all for housing, just not the type being built in my area. Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom. They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k - and those low income units go away as soon as the building gets sold to another corporation.
I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods. I want real public housing. Housing should be a human right. As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.
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.
It's all talking points on both sides. "Build more housing" being the one true solution has become a religious tenant in a lot of wonkish circles. I see it repeated uncritically every single time this topic comes up on HN and similar spaces.
The reality is that demand is always going to far outstrip supply in certain areas. You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso, even if you raze the city to the ground and replace it with some yimby paradise that houses 25% more people. The extra supply might lower costs to some degree in the short term but the induced demand will ensure they stay above what someone on an average salary can afford. Everyone seems to understand this when the topic is freeway expansion, but not with housing.
The actual solution for housing costs is a lot more complicated and multi-pronged, but that doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker. There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at, so it gets dismissed; and suggesting someone move there is practically treated as a human rights abuse.
Dramatically increasing housing density does have adverse affects for existing residents. It's fine to say the tradeoffs are worth it, I'm not saying it's never the answer, but even acknowledging that it's a tradeoff usually gets met with dismissive insults from the yimby crowd.
Isn't SF infamously a SFH zone that makes no sense? If you razed the whole city and rebuilt it like Manhattan, you wouldn't have 25% more inhabitants, you'd have 25000% more. And if you improve public transit (I heard BART is some that's pretty good by American standards but not by European standards?) you can drastically widen the area that feels like the core city (just take a look at Berlin which I'm familiar with) giving maybe another 1000% multiplicative increase.
Every time I'm in Berlin I love the public transit system there. I think that's because they have a relatively dense network of lines through the city center, and the trains run every 4-5 minutes which means you don't have to check the timetable before going to the station, you can just show up. I haven't visited London or NYC though. I know some cities with more modern train signaling have trains every 1-2 minutes so there is basically always a train at every metro station.
It might be unsatisfyingly simplistic, but if prices are high in an area because a lot of people want to live there, building more housing seems like a fundamentally better approach than demanding everyone who wants to live in San Francisco instead accept living in Mississippi. Even if prices stabilize back to where they were before, it would still be a net win that more people than before get to live in a desirable place for the same cost. I'm genuinely not "sneering" at Mississippi here. But if you want to live in San Francisco, Mississippi is probably not going to be a reasonable substitute and maybe making it easier for you to live in San Francisco is a reasonable policy goal.
But history and lots of examples suggests prices are unlikely to remain the same if you build more supply, which makes sense from an economics perspective. There aren't an unlimited number of people wanting to live in a particular area at a given price point, otherwise they would likely have driven the price higher in the first place. Induced demand is a problem for highways because the cost of driving that particular route at a particular time is essentially zero, which his not really true of moving to a different area.
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.
They did this in New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern's government and house prices have started to fall, but only slightly so far. IIRC the rules were something like, lots in a certain radius of a train station or town center are mandatory mixed-use zoning, overriding any city rules to the contrary. It was very controversial for the national government to override city governments like that.
> In several opinion polls, Ardern's domestic popularity had reached all-time lows by 19 January 2023...[when] Ardern announced she would resign as Labour leader and prime minister by 7 February. -Wikipedia
Other political leaders might hesitate to follow such footsteps.
It was during the coronavirus pandemic. New Zealand successfully avoided the virus completely for a few years, but conspiracy theorists thought she was just being a Nazi.
If rich people can't buy luxury housing, they buy non-luxury housing, driving up its price. If you don't want rich people driving up the price of affordable housing, make sure there is lots of luxury housing available so they don't drive up the price of the cheap stuff.
> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.
If actual number of houses was the problem, house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline. It's existing houses being repriced upward by speculation that makes them unaffordable.
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
This seems to be, or have been, a very common scenario in Canada, which is why I completely discount when most politicians start going on about a "housing crisis" when in another breath they'll say they don't want houses to get cheaper. If it was a "crisis", one might think houses would be treated with special care instead of basically just another commodity. If a person with wealth can just buy up as many of a finite resource within, especially within the same city as they can tolerate the possession of, then nobody should have a surprised Pikachu face when they do that. If all of the food could and was bought up by a few rich people and figuratively removed from access by anyone who can't bid arbitrary amounts for it, there would and should be riots. That's how houses and condos are priced, and more supply without finite policy restrictions just mints more money for people who already have it. If it's a crisis, why is anyone allowed to own more than 1? Level it out.
As far as I know, they're taxed higher in the sense that they're not exempt from capital gains, like primary residences are, but in my view it seems like that would at-most be a marginal disincentive if renters don't have much in the way of other options or protections (which vary across the country). Likewise, I'm fairly sure a mom+pop residential landlord can save on tax for any expenses related to secondary suites or secondary properties if it's considered business income. If there is very little suitable supply, it still makes sense to acquire the asset and profit off of rent, although this dynamic may be changing with increased cost of borrowing and less demand depending on market, AirBnB short-term rental restrictions, etc..
When money was free and restrictions were few, non-institutional investors seem to have capitalized aggressively on this, because the price of the property increased dramatically and also it was a near-certainty that there would be a constant stream of inflated rent a landlord could charge.
I'm happy about those tax disincentives, but they do strike me as playing around the margins; in normal economic circumstances, they should play around the margins, but that particular aspect of the economy is so embarrassingly tilted that it's really not funny anymore.
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)".
Nobody advocates for fixing the price. People want more supply which will bring the cost of housing as a whole down or at least provide more price diversity.
Is it even beneficial to have a house worth a lot of money? Think about places where property is expensive, it is also expensive to live there in general because housing costs so much. The cost of housing means employers have to pay their employees a lot to keep them there. This in turn means you are paying more for goods and services. If you're a homeowner, but NOT a high income person, this is very bad. It means you can't make payments towards maintenance of your house, going out becomes harder, etc. Your quality of life decreases.
People who inherit homes that are worth a lot, but aren't flush with cash end up having to sell frequently because there is no way for them to maintain it. It's also the plot of white lotus season 2 with the villas lol.
Expensive housing means expensive commercial rent too, which means high prices and less quirky niche shops. In Berlin I've watched them disappear and get replaced by a McDonalds or a cryptocurrency startup firm.
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.
Edit: DuckDuckGo seems to have served me a terrible example, further digging shows some examples which don't even need looking up, its clear that pricing has plummeted.
And anyone with a braincell would've remembered that wages didn't keep up with inflation, hence the point you're making isn't actually being made.
You're just being rude for no reason, which is also why I'm now rude to you. You could almost call it rudeflation, tomorrow we'll probably cause a rudeness singularity
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.
That only covers a portion of the population. Don't forget the middle of nowhere towns that refuse to tax their citizens (but eat grant money like pigs) and refuse to allow new housing. All of this is essentially being done to maximize property value and keep new people out. This is why people are moving to cities in the US. Not a desire, but a need in order to make ends meet and get on the property ladder.
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
Civil Engineer/City Planner here. The bottleneck is legislative. NIMBY's are all over in US politics right now, local and larger. These folks put together legislation that makes it extremely hard to build without City/County/Township permission, unless the project benefits them in some way. So, most places will disincentivize new construction unless they get a grant for it, because they feel obligated to help their citizens by keeping taxes low and house values high. New construction does the opposite of these things.
This is exactly it. I built a house for 60k a few years ago in a HCOL area by finding a legal loophole to permitting/planning that bypassed civil engineers, code inspections, and almost all planning. The house next to me, quite similar and 50 years old, is selling for 5x that.
In the old days it was common to build your own house. And it usually allows a house for half or less the market price. But this is effectively illegal/impractical in most the US. Some simple changes to legislation would halve the average cost of a house overnight!
Do everything yourself and it never touches commercial regulations on licensing, inspection, and and building plans. I recorded a sworn affidavit with the county I was building it myself on my own property for purely personal residential use and then they issued me a permit explicitly stating I did not need to submit building plans or inspections.
Since the house was built without any compensation and not used for any commercial purpose, it bypasses "commerce" which was the auspice under which housing was regulated. When I was done I literally just sent the county a picture of a house and they closed the permit and that was that.
I'm thinking that very few folks, these days, have the mindset & skill set & finances & timeframe to build their own houses.
And it wouldn't be just the currently-active NIMBY's who fought tooth and nail against any "simple changes" that might halve the average cost of a house overnight.
Last I checked 5 or so years ago a lot big enough to drop a yurt on in San Francisco was only like 100k. Legally unbuildable, but perfectly usable and sanitary with an incinerator toilet, solar, and hauled water. Maybe 200k all in, in roughly the most expensive place in the US.
edit: as a comment, there are a lot of people in places like big island hawaii for instance, that do something like this under burner LLCs with shipping containers, then just move them when caught and do the same thing over again.
I suppose as long as it's 100% temporary, it might be legal (I am not your lawyer). So maybe a caravan trailer, a tent, or a covered up cargo bicycle will be allowed. But I'm not paying $100k to sleep in a converted bicycle bin, I can do that just as well under a bridge!
I was working 60 hours a week, plus raising small children, plus had zero construction experience, plus buying literal pieces of lumber and block paycheck to paycheck as money allowed. If you start at 18 and finish in 20 years, you are still ahead of age of median new home buyer by 2 years.
California problem. There's no constrained supply in Houston or Austin or a few other cities in the US that are now crashing from over supply.
Another one is Manhattan. There's no space to build so things get retrofitted (office conversions) and new zoning (Hudson Yards) but it's expensive - high hourly rates to pay people on buildings with more 99 units, many many permits required, land is expensive, etc
So it's luxury only in NYC
None of this is NIMBYism.
Part of it is return to office. Why move there if it's too expensive - the answer is you're unemployed otherwise
Part of it is demand. NYC is the closest thing to Europe, where you don't drive around in an SUV to do simple things. The GDP is enormous, so you find jobs. Young people. Etc
Housing costs are a lot more complicated than NIMBYism. There's a strong California bias for obvious reasons, here on HN.
Housing is flexible. Lots of poor people in some places live in RVs or trailers. It can't be that nice but they have to save a lot of money (or not, because RVs are expensive too). You have tent cities in non-totalitarian cities but their biggest downside is being illegal and therefore everyone who lives there gets periodically ransacked by police and sent to prison. People used to live 10 to an apartment, which also sucks, and were extorted by landlords but if we remove that part it's better than being homeless, but that's illegal too. It's starting to sound like the root of the problem isn't even a shortage of housing, but the fact that cheap housing is illegal.
In Germany we even import people by the millions to keep rents high, among other things, and more than half of them get their housing paid for by taxpayers money.
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.
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.
If people are practically poorer and less well off than before, does it matter to them that the country is on paper NOT economically stagnating?
Shoving a graph in their face with a made up number won't change their economic situation.
Sure, let's say GDP went up 5%, but then everything that matters like housing and healthcare went up 10-20%. Average workers aren't the winners of this mythical economic growth we're told we need to keep prioritizing.
What use is GDP growth if most of it just gets concentrated in the top 10% of asset holders and everyone else in the trenches keeping society going, ends up worse off in a decaying society.
That's how we are now massively outputting homeless junkies who gave up on society and Luigis who want to shoot the elites responsible for this, because the system does not work for them.
Now, the elites can avoid the homeless junkies their economic policies create, by living in gated communities in the suburbs and chauffeuring their kids to private schools, but the Luigis are more tricky to dodge because they're smart and motivated, that's why the like of the EU, UK, AU, etc are expediting privacy invasive laws under the guise of "protecting kids" to make sure any future Luigis will be preemptively dealt with the moment they speak ill of the king and the nobility.
I highly challenge this. For a region, industry booms drive upward movement. And regions that are only held by one industry when it busts build rust belts.
Ideally, you have industry for a region treated like a well balanced investment portfolio. But you have to internalize that balancing investment portfolios is is a protection against downside risks. And it specifically loses against the lucky portfolio that was heavy on something during a boom.
So, the question heavily looms on if the regions we are looking at are diverse enough that they can sustain some downturns.
> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.
Or maybe we do, but just couldn't keep up with the enormous influx of immigrants for a few years a that ended a couple of years ago. The housing costs have risen due to unforeseen demand, not supply.
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.
A big political problem with YIMBYism is that almost by definition it will take years to see the effects.
If you champion it as a politician, there's a very large chance you get all the flack for new developments, but the next guy gets all the credit for affordable housing.
Texas seems to be the only place that actually does it, and I honestly have no explanation for why.
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.
Are they actually NIMBYs or just annoyed? I live in a major metro downtown full of construction and fully support it 100%, but that doesn't mean it doesn't irritate me. Roads and sidewalks are constantly randomly closing. Every bridge across the local highway is currently closed for the next five years. My wife had every tire on a brand new go flat within three months because of nails on the roads. Our houses are all covered in yellow dust because the gas company dug up bedrock 9 years ago, left an enormous pile on a street corner, which then washed away in rain and still covers half the sidewalks nearly a decade later. Most of the housing ends up becoming short-term rentals, which in turn mostly become party houses, so the streets are strewn with broken liquor bottles all the time, cops are getting called in the middle of the night to break up fights with strippers. My car's hatch got destroyed by a city dump truck a few years back and I've been hit while parked two other times by work trucks. All of my power tools were stolen out of my garage by a work crew because the original builders put me on the same radio channel as the guy two doors down, so my garage randomly opened without me knowing about it.
I still support it. We need all the housing we can get. But I do get endlessly irritated by the attitude on Hacker News that no person could ever oppose rebuilding a neighborhood while people still live in it for a good reason and they must all by miserly hoarders trying to pull the ladder up from beneath them.
It's not just about building more in existing areas. It's about making the construction of affordable housing PROFITABLE for developers; which in this world is nearly impossible. Every tax break you give for building anything just results in luxury developments and the builders keeping the breaks as profit.
Also, you can't just build more in these already built up areas. Many of these areas already have strains on public services and just building up without adjusting for electricity consumption, water, schools, roads, transportation, parking, etc is just creating an even larger more expensive headache.
You have to make building towns / hoas in undeveloped areas easier; and the includes high speed transportation to get to the nearest city hub.
We also have to be alot more flexible on what's allowed to be called housing. We should have more places for people to be able to live in their RV's, cars,
etc safely.
All of this comes down to the economic reality of what it takes to actually build and maintain a home and piece of property in America. It's not a right to own a home because of that economic reality. The main ingredients are cheap land in an area that has access to electricity, water, streets, infrastructure and access to income. If you can maintain a job for long enough you can pay off the land and cost to build. That is the only viable way to own. Expecting those kind of prices in LA or NY near the beach or downtown is delusional.
We have to also, philosophically, be honest about the way time passes and an intelligent species propagates itself. An frankly we can just look in the wild and see the same dynamics. If a species is successful, then there will be lots of individuals. Those individuals will be drawn to the BEST places to live. There are only so many BEST places to live. Do we really want to turn every place we live into giant high rises? This is an honest question and I think people aren't being entirely honest about their motives / vision for the planet.
I really hate this “we don’t build enough housing” narrative these days, because it implies this is a simple supply and demand problem, which it is not. I see so many progressives repeating this line, apparently not understanding that they are suggesting unfettered capitalism (up zoning…) is the solution.
The fundamental problem is we simultaneously want our housing to be affordable and good investment. It can’t be both.
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.
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.
People "getting annoyed" doesn't prevent construction of affordable housing. I often see NIMBY comments but never see anything to back up the notion.
Greedy developers that want the largest profit on a given plot of land is probably where you should be looking instead. Why build two inexpensive starter homes when you can build one luxury home and make a larger profit? (Never mind that the county gets larger property tax returns on the more expensive homes.)
And yet. They build high end homes and they sell them anyway. So there seem in fact to be buyers out there?
Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes:
- "x% of what? what is the denominator?". Without that number, the claim is meaningless.
- surely it cannot be the entire population, so it has to be a survey.
- how many people participated in the survey? what was the distribution?
Here is that info for this study. I found this in the PDF version of the study report [0] referred to at the end of the Northwestern page [1].
> Methodology
The Harris Poll conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews among the general U.S. adult (18+) population between January 5th and January 21st, 2026. Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth individuals (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).
I love mental rule of thumbs / heuristics that we can install into our brain to avoid getting caught up in cognitive biases or other mistakes.
An easy one that I would expect most HN readers probably do already is: When shopping, always round up to the nearest dollar before even mentally storing it or operating on it. The usual cognitive bias is that many people end up storing the listed price of $4.96 in a lossy manner, as $4.xx, and end up thinking of it as $4 when in reality they could be skipping straight to keeping it as $5 in their head.
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.
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.
There’s a huge spectrum. I’m mid 40s and my wife grew up much wealthier than I did. We have done quite well, but I I’m a bit frugal, like to save, despise waste and excess, and therefore don’t like traveling like they do. I like traveling but all the fancy upgraded experiences at every turn is what I refuse to spend money on. But we don’t go without, we “rely” on my in laws to upgrade our travel (or that’s how my wife has structured the relationship with them, they pay for everything and we cover the drinks is basically how it works out). I’m not a huge fan of it but they don’t care and it keeps my wife off my back lol, so whatever. We travel with them a lot but even when we don’t I think my wife uses their card to pay for it. It’s between them is what I say, I don’t want to be a part of it as it feels like we’re taking advantage of them but apparently they’re fine with it. Is this fitting the definition of “rely” because it’s nonessential
Another reason the denominator is important is that "parents" are (hopefully) completely a subset of "adults". And not all adults have living parents. So who is counted:
- All adults
- Adults with living parents
- Adults within an age range
- Adults without children
or what? This really belongs in the title. Without it, as you say, the statistic is meaningless.
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.
Typically surveys are adjusted for sampling biases before reporting. That appears to be the case here. So there is usually some attempt to account for the biases in the sampled population.
The impulse to ask "what population was sampled?" is good but its not always a straight line from there to "these results directly reflect that sampling bias."
In fact, from the page you posted: "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. A full methodology is available."
I would presume that the headline number attempts to account for sampling bias.
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.
Related - any time a study is based on gathering the opinions of a random subset of the population, I also instantly dismiss it. The average person is a moron. I don't care about random people's subjective opinions, I only care about objective data. People polled in the 16th century would have said the sun orbits the earth; that doesn't make it true.
When I was a kid, we never had a ton of extra money, but my parents were very supportive-- they paid for most of my college expenses, for example. Their outlook was that us kids shouldn't have to work-- "school is your job". (However, both my sister and I _did_ have jobs while in school).
However, I never _asked_ my parents for money. I had a good education and a well-paying job, and was able to turn IPO money into a house down payment. In the end, we struggled to close the deal, and my wife and I both asked to borrow money from our parents. Of course they were happy to do so, but I still remember it as feeling so hard to do -- just something that I "shouldn't" have to do. And, of course, it also made me reflect on those who didn't have family support to fall back on, let alone jobs that paid well.
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.
I have never asked my parents for money. They have had to resort to trickery (asking for bank details for some passport stuff) to send me money. I hope to be able to do the same for my kid.
The question that was ask in the survey was: How financially independent you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)
I understand that YC is questioning the results of the survey. The YC community is very privileged; and i bet, if we do the same survey in this community, 20% or less of adults rely on their parents.
The hacker news crowd is also more than just Americans. Some of us live in welfare states and/or societies with strong trade unions, which we know we can rely on instead, if we ever come to a situation where we need it.
I think you have it backwards. Poor people cannot rely on their parents because their parents are poor too. Every person I know who grew up rich relied on their parents until… well, forever. Privilege is being able to rely on your family.
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.
It is more nuanced than that. I know of a family where one of the children are fully dependent on their parents, and three are fully independent. The one dependent has a law degree.
Also, the first thought I had was "what %age of adults are 18-30". Not that a 30yo should be dependent on their parents but I'd assume that people answering yes skew younger. And to your point about YC, that's also a young skewed demographic.
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.
Haha. I had the opposite thought. If they are very privileged, wouldn’t they rely more? I guess there is privileged you make yourself and privileged you are born into and then more easily make for yourself. But if you are the latter and can support yourself, would you really then do it entirely on your own and not still benefit/rely from/on your parents? I’m not sure (and yes I am including family vacations, connections, and other kinds of arrangements).
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.
Either way, the idea that the natural and normal state of affairs is that every person can go out into the world and be a perfectly self sufficient but comfortable atomized economic unit without support from their family or society is deeply flawed.
This wasn't the norm for most of human history, and it isn't the norm globally today.
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
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.
Well high wage implies a cost that has to be pushed on somewhere. It's not crazy to fear that raising wages, sometimes, can cause costs to go up, which can lead to more demand for higher wages. It may really depend on how much slack there is in the system.
What does improve material standard of living is increases in productivity, but the scope for those is limited, see
Like the basic story of the past 150 or so years is that agriculture has gotten dramatically more productive so people can do other things and move into cities with all sorts of implications.
High wages raise purchasing power as much as they raise costs, so aren't exactly raising costs overall. In fact prices should be measured relative to wages. Non-wage costs (i.e. profit and rent) seem to be the killer. Note that Adam Smith hated rent.
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.
I don't agree with your characterization of "human nature". I mostly disagree that there is any such thing, and to the extent that there is, it seems to me that it is more like: cooperative, altruistic, empathic within the in-group, aggressive, selfish and uncooperative with the out-group.
The great work of human civilization is to expand the size of the in-group.
Look at any popular religion and you will find a heavy emphasis on sacrifice, selflessness and delayed gratifications (that helps strengthen our control over our base desires). This is because early civilisations (that used a religio-political construct to form societies and nations) recognised that a healthy society only flourishes when humans are taught to fight their innate desire to be selfish. You can observe this when kids demand attention as they become jealous of their siblings or play with toys with anyone - they have to be taught to share, and appreciate it as a value.
Your perspective on the in-group and out-group is relevant of course - it isn't healthy if one is self-sacrificing without addressing their own needs. (However the degree of that varies between eastern and western culture. Eastern cultures, which have more civilisational history, perhaps don't necessarily see as it in such rigid terms?). Moreover, my point was that having wealth tends to affects your perceptions to "expand the size of the in-group" - money does provide more avenues to be independent, and thus a financially independent youth can (ignorantly) miss opportunities to learn how to have healthy co-dependent relations as most erroneously assume that such relations are not important to them because they have achieved "independence". Learning to be independent is important. But then learning to understand the importance of co-dependency is another step to become a mature adult.
That's also incorrect, it's not net worth > $1mm, it's "those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property" over $1mm, which is a much smaller number. The sources I saw said about 4% of US households meet this criteria, but 18% of survey respondents did.
Slavery and massive wealth disparity was also the norm for most of human history, but just like generational wealth transfer, that doesn't mean it's equitable (or sustainable). Personally, I'm concerned that this will lead to greater wealth transfer from poor to rich and the subsequent dissolution of social norms that hold countries and cultures together. But I don't really care, I have nothing to lose here.
It is something to aim for though. The kid feels good about themselves and the parents can enjoy their hard earned money to have a banging retirement. My parents won’t stop traveling. They’ve been to something like 50 countries over the last 5-7 years.
My 20-something son is living with us but he does pay (some) rent.
I half expect to have to apologize for this, like when I was growing up people would think you are a loser if you were in this situation. Today people think we are really smart and the people who are paying more rent than they can afford to live alone that are losing.
I can’t understand morally or financially how can parents charge anything of their children. Not judging it, just honestly can’t understand it. Isn’t it the parents’ responsibility to build the foundation for their children and keep building it until it’s there? I am viewing it from a moral angle where it’s the parents’ selfish choice to have a child so they must take full responsibility until a child is or feels that they can be independent.
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.
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.
I know my neighbors very well due to my personality. There are 20-40 year old adults who live with their parents for various reasons. The foolish "children" are those who order door dash at 3am with no income or education. They are unable to 'launch' from their parent's orbit. i feel terrible for these people. As mentioned, I know them well and they do not have an excuse other than laziness and permission. The rule 'those who do not work do not eat' is something all people can agree with but few enforce.
The right way to raise your child is so that they can thrive without you while wanting their children (your grandchildren) to spend time with you. This is a tall order because it requires decades of sacrifice, pain, and difficult yet positive decisions.
> The rule 'those who do not work do not eat' is something all people can agree
Um, no?
Thanks for suggesting a possible left/right political litmus test though.
We shouldn't have to waste too many resources on "useless people" but I think starving them to death is a bit excessive. We don't have a shortage of food. They're more likely to need mental health services or spiritual guidance to help them not be useless - which they can pay back in taxes if the transformation succeeds.
I suspect it depends on the kid. If they are naturally frugal and saving for things (and the household doesn't need the money), then why bother.
If they aren't frugal, and are otherwise suffering from lifestyle creep, then not charging them might be an injustice and setting them up for false expectations/never leaving home.
FYI, I was in the first group because my first job had pay cuts within 2 weeks, and then I discovered I basically spent minimal time at home anyway, so why pay more for it. Let me buy when I wanted to move out.
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.)
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.
That's the way it is where I live, too. It might not be "fair game", but if people really want to help their kids, they should do everything in their power to get them into the housing market ASAP.
When I grew up, that was seen as pampering kids. They'd never "learn" how to be financially responsible, etc. if they always received help.
But, let's be honest, in many places the housing market is now so expensive that people could be saving for 5-10 years just to afford the down payment. And by the time they have enough, the market will have appreciated even more, so they have to save for even longer. I have peers that got into the housing market 20 years ago with help from parents, and their properties are now worth 5x - 8x of what they paid.
I am early 30s. I realised this about the time I finished university and thought I might be expected to move out. The housing market was already pretty insane.
I got a job that required me to move when I was 25, though, and what I realized after that was that living with your parents constrains you. I don't know how your relationship with your son is, but while I lived with my parents, they expected to know where I was going and be home for dinner, and even if I refused to tell them, I'd feel that I was judged for it, so I usually avoided it. Living by myself means if I want to go to a party or buy a pile of network switches for experimentation or get into soldering, I can just do it without worrying what my parents will think. I think delaying that stage has been really bad for my development.
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.
I may have ended up that way if I hadn’t gotten into software as a teenager. Luckily a did and the timing was right for me to make some sort of decent career out of it.
I did live independently prior to going into software, but it sucked and was fragile and likely would have fallen apart long term. I also doubt I could find a similar living situation as a young man with no credit or much money to his name. Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.
> Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.
Rental approvals are ridiculous. We're renting an apartment while we remodel our house.
We've taken out mortgages, refi'd mortgages, and (by now) taken out 3 HELOCs in a row (2 of them subsequently closed as we needed to re-file for more $). While there's a lot of paperwork involved, it feels pretty easy. "Promise to pay us back? Cool!"
Filling out apartment rentals was awful. The rejections, the tiny paper forms asking you about creditors and bank accounts, how much money you owe each of them every month, personal references, "supervisor's phone number", have you ever been to jail, ever failed to pay rent for any reason, previous landlords' contact info. Look, I get that rent is an unsecured obligation (vs a mortgage), but every step of it was gross and accusatory.
33% of GenX is still depending on their parents? That's shocking... I'm at the young end of GenX at 49yo. So, a slice of the population that is fast approaching retirement age is still reliant on their septuagenarian or octogenarian parents for money? Wow.
OK, now I'm questioning the whole thing... it also claims 17% of Boomers reliant on their parents. So, we have some substantial number of 62-80 years olds relying on their 90-100 year old parents? Seems unlikely.
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.
I'm the last of the Boomers, and my parents are in their 80s and I was a prom baby (meaning "young parents"). There's no way 17% of Boomers are sponging off Mom and Dad, because the overwhelming odds are: Mom and Dad are dead, and have been for a while now.
OTOH, I guess that doesn't mean someone isn't still cashing that retirement check.
Looks to me like the older generation amounts to roughly 30% of the boomer generation. A couple has 4 parents and half of people are bellow average.
Sure maybe its wrong and people are counting inheritance similarly to living parents, etc, but I'm not surprised at all if the lowest quartile is reaching retirement age broke getting money from any relatives that can help and that are inclined to help.
Sure, totally get that, but we're talking about a cohort that is mostly retirement age themselves... How many of those 70-80 year old Boomers have parents left alive from whom to receive those retirement funds? That's why I'm hesitant to believe the number.
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.
yeah that's ridiculous. I'm 50 and fully support my MIL (she lives in my garage apartment) and my sister fully supports our mom (she lives with my sister). The boomers i know are completely financially dependent on their children.
I think the word "rely" is doing some heavy lifting here. Still being on your parent's family phone plan doesnt mean youd be destitute if they werent helping you out.
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?
Not only that, if you're a single boomer with a living parent and neither of you have much other incomes its probably better to cohabitate in that old family house that was paid off in the 90s and share what little benefits you both receive.
>> Still being on your parent's family phone plan doesnt mean youd be destitute if they werent helping you out.
I think there's some important things like this that should be considered. In the late 90's early aughts, I didn't need a laptop, smartphone and 24/7 internet access with 1GB download speeds or half the technological stuff kids need these days to be a contributing member of society.
Now those are all standard items for kids growing up. When I was in college in 2000, life was pretty easy. I paid $350/month for rent, cable, heat and landline phone. That was literally my entire financial costs for the month. Beer, going out to the bars, random things here and there? Easy to cover when you're making $10/hour working 35 hours a week.
Now? Your basic needs will consistently run $1,500 for all of the stuff you need to function into today's society. Having your parents covering some of that in order for you to live on your own I think is not abnormal any more.
As a Gen Xer, we had it really good. I've started to realize kids these days are put at a massive disadvantage because we require everything to be accessible via the internet and smartphones.
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.
> CPI inflation would suggest that the current cost ought to be about $692.
Rent alone will probably blow that. I live in a burnt out rust belt shithole city and I’m struggling to understand how rent is this high. I pay a good bit more than $692 to live in a slum just outside the ghetto right now and I have to feel gracious for that. It’s closer to what I paid in a decent middle class neighborhood in Florida. That was only 5-6 years ago.
This is in a city where the best people can say about it is: “well it’s cheaper”.
Hell when I lived in South Carolina from 2017-2019. My apartment there was closer to the stated inflation figure, but this was for a place that regularly flooded the downstairs neighbors and left me for weeks without AC in the peak of summer because of careless management.
Still not as bad as business rents. I’ve seen downtown business close because they’re being made to be $7000 for a shitty 100 year old property surrounded by condemned properties.
Let me suggest the problem: CPI inflation suggests a rough doubling of basic living costs. How many jobs can you point to that are paying 2x in 2026 what they were paying in 2000?
There are some. But the data seems to suggest that the majority do not.
This posted while I was still in the middle of my other rant, but when I was doing the four guys in one apartment thing putting myself through community college, my job was overnight janitor at Knott's Berry Farm and paid $6.50 an hour. Minimum wage in California is now $16.90, so that at least is more than double.
Prices have been increasing much faster than CPI for years and decades. I'd say this suggests there's something wrong with CPI, but HN would violently disagree.
The last time I can remember a reasonably low rent payment, I was paying $300 a month in the year 2000 in Fullerton, CA. That was sharing a two-bedroom apartment between four guys, two of whom lived in the kitchen and living room and paid slightly less, one of whom was a speed addict and eventually got us kicked out and our lease terminated, which left me homeless briefly living in my car. No car payment because I'd bought it in high school for $260 at a sheriff's auction, but roughly $200 or in insurance plus gas money, mostly because commuting anywhere near LA/Orange county uses a lot of fuel. I was still on my parent's health insurance because you could do that until 25 as long as you were in school, and I wasn't paying back student loans because again, still in school. I was also 6'2" and regularly didn't crack 140 lbs because I was eating bulk oatmeal dry. I don't remember the cost of the shared phone bill, but I do remember it was under my name and that speed freak never paid his share, the bill eventually went to collections, and wrecked my credit for several years, which didn't really matter ultimately because I wasn't borrowing any money back then anyway other than the student loans.
I don't know a whole lot of 20 year-olds but certainly hear on the Internet all the time how hard it is for them. I'm extremely skeptical anyone living quite as shittily as I was 26 years ago is really paying 4.5 times as much for the privilege. My 24 year-old niece pays a lot more in rent than I did, but she also lives alone a mile from the beach in San Diego. In a shack, but it's still a hell of a lot nicer than anything I had.
In any case, I got a few bucks here and there from my parents, but they didn't have much when I was young and ultimately helped out my younger sisters a lot more. Cost of teenage parents, I guess. I was the test run. I still turned out fine and they've mostly relied on me in the past 15 years, which seems oddly missing from this survey. If we're concerned about adults not being self-sufficient, surely relying on your kids or siblings or anyone else at all is just as bad as relying on your parents.
Again, I suspect that the problem isn't the size of your rent payment, it's the size of your paycheck (which is not your fault, but that of your employer, our government(s) and The System (TM)).
CPI is a bullshit number. CPI indexes Social Security COLAs, TIPS payouts, tax brackets, and federal pensions. Every 0.1% shaved off CPI saves the Treasury real money on its indexed obligations.
I don't know, that one doesn't seem as benign as your making it out to be. I would say if you're having your parents subsidize your phone bill you're still not technically living on your own.
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
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%.
I think that the vast majority of people who are "relying" on their parents for finances actually belong to the upper class. Family Feudalism has bred two consecutive generations of entitled shitheads, and these people are gonna have the wheel soon (if not already) in the US politically. This has concerning potential consequences.
These numbers are a nice snapshot, but I see no comparison to historical numbers in the article. I know many families who have had intergenerational support happening from older to younger and vice versa.
The premise of TFA along with the entirety of the comments are eloquently embodied by the misfit troubadour and grunge philosopher Todd Snider in Statistician's Blues [0]
have a large extended family almost entirely living in the Seattle area while i grew up in rural Oregon
i moved out after high school and did my best to stay out (of course occasionally life has other plans). nearly all of my 30ish Seattle cousins stayed with their parents until getting married, some never moved out. i was so confused because i was close with my cousins and we seemed pretty like-minded, but it really just came down to housing costs
I lived with my parents until I was 20 and they helped me out until I was 22. My girlfriend's kids are on the same path. Though even with people in their 30s and 40s I think it's common to get help for unexpected big expenses because a lot of people don't have adequate emergency funds.
Searching the internet, one can read more, such as:
> In August 1971, alongside the "Nixon Shock" that severed the dollar's convertibility to gold, the Nixon administration imposed a 90-day economy-wide freeze on all wages and prices. This was the first time the U.S. enacted wage and price controls outside of wartime. Following the initial 90-day freeze, the Nixon administration implemented a complex, multi-tiered price control system on the petroleum industry that lasted for years.
> In August 1971, Nixon was "floating" the dollar, abandoning the gold standard and "freezing" prices and wages.
> Why did America deliberately destroy its own manufacturing industry?
And starts off,
> It did not happen all at once. Americans watched their own country lose it, brand by brand, factory by factory. Every time, the country was handed the same three reasons...(It looked inevitable. And every one of them was true enough to believe.) Plenty of those factories were still making money the day they were ordered shut. They closed anyway, on the say-so of men who had never worked a shift in their lives and grew richer each time another one went dark....
So if said kids are relying on their parents for support... how are their kids going to rely on them? The idea behind generational wealth is that there is something left to pass down. If you have nothing to pass down, because both you and your parents spent it all, then you're fully on your own to support yourself. Somewhere along the line the bill always comes due.
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.
I'd be curious if the folks that are advocating for people to provide support to their adults kids also expect those adult kids to keep their parents living with them when elderly. I know assisted living facilities charge exorbitant amounts of money, to the point it's often advised to setup a trust, so the parent's assets are no longer viewed as their assets. These facilities apparently charge based on assets, where if you have none then suddenly the monthly cost to live there equates only to the value of your Social Security Income payments.
Unfortunately that is the sad reality of the state of fiscal literacy in the country. We have work to do to prepare people for their own futures. Pensions were nice but this transition to private plans has been rough, with far too many believing their Social Security Income alone will be enough to sustain them in their golden years.
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.
This seems to be some self-help for the well-off (and their kids) to not feel bad about such dependence, but totally ignores the large population whose parents aren't affluent enough to support their children. Or may even need support from their children. I don't think the feefees of the well off is the gravest issue here.
In my experience, poorer families tend to live in multigenerational housing at a much higher rate. So this doesnt seem to be true. Less affuluent usually means more sharing of resources, not less.
The biggest problem here is finding secure and
reliable income in the long term. People here
in the 1960s, for instance, could save up quite
a lot of money. This is of course possible today
too, but what if you can only find low income
jobs? You'll remain working poor for the rest of
your life. That's not exactly fair from an
inter-generational point of view. Meanwhile the
number of superrich is growing. That's also unfair.
And money buys legislation, so (many, but not all)
democracies are broken.
Its expensive out there. I used to judge people for not being able to stand on their own but now my mindset is if someone is working 40+ hours a week and sticking to a reasonable budget and not driving a new car then not sure what else we can ask them to do.
Most of these people that are getting help aren't saving for retirement either so its just a long game of desperation. Easy to say get a better job but not everyone has the skills or mental acuity to do that. With that said there are aboslutely a lot of people that have no concept of budgeting and are their own worst enemy
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
Reminder that black US slave descendants have a median wealth of about $5000 (i.e the equity they have in their cars.) When you consider black crime, consider the OP statistic in light of that. Most black people I know have parents who rely on their support (and siblings, and cousins, etc.)
Whatever is happening to 42% of Americans is happening to 97% (figures drawn from my ass) of black Americans. $5000 is pretty good. I'm from Chicago, where the median black wealth is $0.
Because boomers are selfish and holding onto most of the wealth, ruining and destroying the generations to follow. It’s a weird phenomenon actually, their parents gave them everything possible, even independence, yet, the boomers do all sort of shenanigans to keep holding on the wealth, and when they can’t, they go on manipulation tactics, as if their lives are the center of universe and all generations after are the minions to serve them.
>all generations after are the minions to serve them
Serve their kids. The money is only incidental to the power structure (nepotism, classism, xenophobia) that they intend to pass down to their chosen successors. They've been working to limit economic mobility, opportunity, and fairness for a while now.
Wait, so you're annoyed that the boomers are using their wealth to help support their kids (the respondents to this survey) instead of just giving it to them and making them trust fund kids?
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of negative things to say about boomers, but I'm not sure how your complaint here really fits the article.
What do you call the situation where your parents depend on your support? I helped my dad with a 6000 Euro out of pocket surgery so he can regain the use of his shoulder. And I'm an average working class Europoor, not a stock broker. And my mom is paying some of the bills for my grandma because she can't afford the bills on her ~300 Euro pension.
Not a reply I expected to see on HN, but frankly I agree.
I've heard enough "this country doesn't have enough talent!!! We need millions more immigrants to cover the gap!" While almost every recent cybersecurity graduate I know is quite literally UNABLE to find a relevant job, with most resigning to hitting up the employers of jobs they had in HS with low-skill work like wiping down decommissioned K-12 Chromebooks for resale on ebay.
What an absolute waste of their talents.
We obviously have the talent in this country, we're literally the forefront of the field. Employers just prefer a 'subclass' of laborers with less rights (e.g. H1Bs/illegal immigrants that the employer can hold over their head) and lower minimum livable salary compared to regular citizens.
> STOP spending on immigration programs... to improve situation for kids of the people who built out the western civilization
The common misconception that the US Government is wasting money on immigration is pushed by Trump and FOX News, who both lie regularly. For example, see [1] about how Trump rejected a report produced by Federal researchers. The report is available [2].
Overall, the refugee resettlement program gives the country back many times what the government spends. And even if you just focus on the expenditure, the bulk of it is on border enforcement and imprisonment, which goes to domestic private companies.
As to your love for "the people who built western civilization", I'll just leave it up there. Your connotation is clear, and it doesn't reflect well on you.
[1] Trump administration rejects report showing positive impact of refugees
[2] Rejected Report Shows Revenue Brought In by Refugees. SEPT. 19, 2017: A draft of a study rejected by Trump administration officials that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.
Downward mobility is almost entirely caused by housing costs, which are a self-inflicted problem. We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.
I live in an expensive area and I'm always shocked by how many of my friends who cannot afford to buy a home (or even a condo) are NIMBYs. These are people in their 20s through 40s who have been earning since college, can't afford to buy, yet get annoyed whenever there's new construction that "alters the character of the neighborhood". Talk about false consciousness. I can at least understand people who own a home feeling this way.
I may or may not meet your definition as a nimby 28 year old. I am all for housing, just not the type being built in my area. Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom. They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k - and those low income units go away as soon as the building gets sold to another corporation.
I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods. I want real public housing. Housing should be a human right. As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.
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.
It's all talking points on both sides. "Build more housing" being the one true solution has become a religious tenant in a lot of wonkish circles. I see it repeated uncritically every single time this topic comes up on HN and similar spaces.
The reality is that demand is always going to far outstrip supply in certain areas. You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso, even if you raze the city to the ground and replace it with some yimby paradise that houses 25% more people. The extra supply might lower costs to some degree in the short term but the induced demand will ensure they stay above what someone on an average salary can afford. Everyone seems to understand this when the topic is freeway expansion, but not with housing.
The actual solution for housing costs is a lot more complicated and multi-pronged, but that doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker. There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at, so it gets dismissed; and suggesting someone move there is practically treated as a human rights abuse.
Dramatically increasing housing density does have adverse affects for existing residents. It's fine to say the tradeoffs are worth it, I'm not saying it's never the answer, but even acknowledging that it's a tradeoff usually gets met with dismissive insults from the yimby crowd.
Isn't SF infamously a SFH zone that makes no sense? If you razed the whole city and rebuilt it like Manhattan, you wouldn't have 25% more inhabitants, you'd have 25000% more. And if you improve public transit (I heard BART is some that's pretty good by American standards but not by European standards?) you can drastically widen the area that feels like the core city (just take a look at Berlin which I'm familiar with) giving maybe another 1000% multiplicative increase.
Every time I'm in Berlin I love the public transit system there. I think that's because they have a relatively dense network of lines through the city center, and the trains run every 4-5 minutes which means you don't have to check the timetable before going to the station, you can just show up. I haven't visited London or NYC though. I know some cities with more modern train signaling have trains every 1-2 minutes so there is basically always a train at every metro station.
It might be unsatisfyingly simplistic, but if prices are high in an area because a lot of people want to live there, building more housing seems like a fundamentally better approach than demanding everyone who wants to live in San Francisco instead accept living in Mississippi. Even if prices stabilize back to where they were before, it would still be a net win that more people than before get to live in a desirable place for the same cost. I'm genuinely not "sneering" at Mississippi here. But if you want to live in San Francisco, Mississippi is probably not going to be a reasonable substitute and maybe making it easier for you to live in San Francisco is a reasonable policy goal.
But history and lots of examples suggests prices are unlikely to remain the same if you build more supply, which makes sense from an economics perspective. There aren't an unlimited number of people wanting to live in a particular area at a given price point, otherwise they would likely have driven the price higher in the first place. Induced demand is a problem for highways because the cost of driving that particular route at a particular time is essentially zero, which his not really true of moving to a different area.
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.
They did this in New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern's government and house prices have started to fall, but only slightly so far. IIRC the rules were something like, lots in a certain radius of a train station or town center are mandatory mixed-use zoning, overriding any city rules to the contrary. It was very controversial for the national government to override city governments like that.
> In several opinion polls, Ardern's domestic popularity had reached all-time lows by 19 January 2023...[when] Ardern announced she would resign as Labour leader and prime minister by 7 February. -Wikipedia
Other political leaders might hesitate to follow such footsteps.
It was during the coronavirus pandemic. New Zealand successfully avoided the virus completely for a few years, but conspiracy theorists thought she was just being a Nazi.
i think making it more restrictive would be better?
"affordable housing" is the same thing as "luxury housing" asides from the rent
sure, you could allow less restrictive builds so that you only get a room with no bathroom or kitchen for $4k but thats not actually better
If rich people can't buy luxury housing, they buy non-luxury housing, driving up its price. If you don't want rich people driving up the price of affordable housing, make sure there is lots of luxury housing available so they don't drive up the price of the cheap stuff.
That's not how it works. More competition will bring the price of those down.
Please consider running for local office to be an advocate for non market social housing in a position of leverage.
> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.
If actual number of houses was the problem, house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline. It's existing houses being repriced upward by speculation that makes them unaffordable.
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
This seems to be, or have been, a very common scenario in Canada, which is why I completely discount when most politicians start going on about a "housing crisis" when in another breath they'll say they don't want houses to get cheaper. If it was a "crisis", one might think houses would be treated with special care instead of basically just another commodity. If a person with wealth can just buy up as many of a finite resource within, especially within the same city as they can tolerate the possession of, then nobody should have a surprised Pikachu face when they do that. If all of the food could and was bought up by a few rich people and figuratively removed from access by anyone who can't bid arbitrary amounts for it, there would and should be riots. That's how houses and condos are priced, and more supply without finite policy restrictions just mints more money for people who already have it. If it's a crisis, why is anyone allowed to own more than 1? Level it out.
In Canada, second houses and vacant houses are taxed higher than primary residences.
As far as I know, they're taxed higher in the sense that they're not exempt from capital gains, like primary residences are, but in my view it seems like that would at-most be a marginal disincentive if renters don't have much in the way of other options or protections (which vary across the country). Likewise, I'm fairly sure a mom+pop residential landlord can save on tax for any expenses related to secondary suites or secondary properties if it's considered business income. If there is very little suitable supply, it still makes sense to acquire the asset and profit off of rent, although this dynamic may be changing with increased cost of borrowing and less demand depending on market, AirBnB short-term rental restrictions, etc..
When money was free and restrictions were few, non-institutional investors seem to have capitalized aggressively on this, because the price of the property increased dramatically and also it was a near-certainty that there would be a constant stream of inflated rent a landlord could charge.
I'm happy about those tax disincentives, but they do strike me as playing around the margins; in normal economic circumstances, they should play around the margins, but that particular aspect of the economy is so embarrassingly tilted that it's really not funny anymore.
Why not both?
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)".
Agree.
So often I see people complaining "people treat their home as an investment…". Because in fact it turns out it is?
Are we supposed to pass laws that fix the price of a home based on the square footage?
(I wonder if jewelers complain that the reason silver is so expensive is that people treat it as an investment.)
Nobody advocates for fixing the price. People want more supply which will bring the cost of housing as a whole down or at least provide more price diversity.
Is it even beneficial to have a house worth a lot of money? Think about places where property is expensive, it is also expensive to live there in general because housing costs so much. The cost of housing means employers have to pay their employees a lot to keep them there. This in turn means you are paying more for goods and services. If you're a homeowner, but NOT a high income person, this is very bad. It means you can't make payments towards maintenance of your house, going out becomes harder, etc. Your quality of life decreases.
People who inherit homes that are worth a lot, but aren't flush with cash end up having to sell frequently because there is no way for them to maintain it. It's also the plot of white lotus season 2 with the villas lol.
Expensive housing means expensive commercial rent too, which means high prices and less quirky niche shops. In Berlin I've watched them disappear and get replaced by a McDonalds or a cryptocurrency startup firm.
> I wonder if jewelers complain that the reason silver is so expensive is that people treat it as an investment.
Probably not since silver is not a basic need nor even a luxury that affords you independence.
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.
Weren't there a bunch of houses available for $500 in Detroit 20 years ago?
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.
I searched, the first hit was New York (seems odd?). I looked up average price over time, inflation adjusted. They are increasing.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYSTHPI
Edit: DuckDuckGo seems to have served me a terrible example, further digging shows some examples which don't even need looking up, its clear that pricing has plummeted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_city
He’s talking about places with long run population decline.
NYC has grown by about 1.5 million people over the last 30 years.
And anyone with a braincell would've remembered that wages didn't keep up with inflation, hence the point you're making isn't actually being made.
You're just being rude for no reason, which is also why I'm now rude to you. You could almost call it rudeflation, tomorrow we'll probably cause a rudeness singularity
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.
That only covers a portion of the population. Don't forget the middle of nowhere towns that refuse to tax their citizens (but eat grant money like pigs) and refuse to allow new housing. All of this is essentially being done to maximize property value and keep new people out. This is why people are moving to cities in the US. Not a desire, but a need in order to make ends meet and get on the property ladder.
People move to cities because of lifestyle and jobs. Cheap housing has never been an attraction of cities...
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
Civil Engineer/City Planner here. The bottleneck is legislative. NIMBY's are all over in US politics right now, local and larger. These folks put together legislation that makes it extremely hard to build without City/County/Township permission, unless the project benefits them in some way. So, most places will disincentivize new construction unless they get a grant for it, because they feel obligated to help their citizens by keeping taxes low and house values high. New construction does the opposite of these things.
This is exactly it. I built a house for 60k a few years ago in a HCOL area by finding a legal loophole to permitting/planning that bypassed civil engineers, code inspections, and almost all planning. The house next to me, quite similar and 50 years old, is selling for 5x that.
In the old days it was common to build your own house. And it usually allows a house for half or less the market price. But this is effectively illegal/impractical in most the US. Some simple changes to legislation would halve the average cost of a house overnight!
What was the loophole?
Do everything yourself and it never touches commercial regulations on licensing, inspection, and and building plans. I recorded a sworn affidavit with the county I was building it myself on my own property for purely personal residential use and then they issued me a permit explicitly stating I did not need to submit building plans or inspections.
Since the house was built without any compensation and not used for any commercial purpose, it bypasses "commerce" which was the auspice under which housing was regulated. When I was done I literally just sent the county a picture of a house and they closed the permit and that was that.
Ah. One of those weird bureaucratic legal things. Probably wouldn't fly in most countries that have building permits.
I'm thinking that very few folks, these days, have the mindset & skill set & finances & timeframe to build their own houses.
And it wouldn't be just the currently-active NIMBY's who fought tooth and nail against any "simple changes" that might halve the average cost of a house overnight.
A house doesn't have to be fancy. Live in a tent on a grassy lot? Why not?
But you can't, because the lot is unaffordable
Last I checked 5 or so years ago a lot big enough to drop a yurt on in San Francisco was only like 100k. Legally unbuildable, but perfectly usable and sanitary with an incinerator toilet, solar, and hauled water. Maybe 200k all in, in roughly the most expensive place in the US.
If it's legally unbuildable, does that mean you're spending 100k just to get yourself imprisoned for having an illegal structure?
Yes
edit: as a comment, there are a lot of people in places like big island hawaii for instance, that do something like this under burner LLCs with shipping containers, then just move them when caught and do the same thing over again.
I suppose as long as it's 100% temporary, it might be legal (I am not your lawyer). So maybe a caravan trailer, a tent, or a covered up cargo bicycle will be allowed. But I'm not paying $100k to sleep in a converted bicycle bin, I can do that just as well under a bridge!
I was working 60 hours a week, plus raising small children, plus had zero construction experience, plus buying literal pieces of lumber and block paycheck to paycheck as money allowed. If you start at 18 and finish in 20 years, you are still ahead of age of median new home buyer by 2 years.
Some people have valid excuses, but most do not.
California problem. There's no constrained supply in Houston or Austin or a few other cities in the US that are now crashing from over supply.
Another one is Manhattan. There's no space to build so things get retrofitted (office conversions) and new zoning (Hudson Yards) but it's expensive - high hourly rates to pay people on buildings with more 99 units, many many permits required, land is expensive, etc
So it's luxury only in NYC
None of this is NIMBYism.
Part of it is return to office. Why move there if it's too expensive - the answer is you're unemployed otherwise
Part of it is demand. NYC is the closest thing to Europe, where you don't drive around in an SUV to do simple things. The GDP is enormous, so you find jobs. Young people. Etc
Housing costs are a lot more complicated than NIMBYism. There's a strong California bias for obvious reasons, here on HN.
Housing is flexible. Lots of poor people in some places live in RVs or trailers. It can't be that nice but they have to save a lot of money (or not, because RVs are expensive too). You have tent cities in non-totalitarian cities but their biggest downside is being illegal and therefore everyone who lives there gets periodically ransacked by police and sent to prison. People used to live 10 to an apartment, which also sucks, and were extorted by landlords but if we remove that part it's better than being homeless, but that's illegal too. It's starting to sound like the root of the problem isn't even a shortage of housing, but the fact that cheap housing is illegal.
In Germany we even import people by the millions to keep rents high, among other things, and more than half of them get their housing paid for by taxpayers money.
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.
If GDP rises the country is not economically stagnating though.
If people are practically poorer and less well off than before, does it matter to them that the country is on paper NOT economically stagnating?
Shoving a graph in their face with a made up number won't change their economic situation.
Sure, let's say GDP went up 5%, but then everything that matters like housing and healthcare went up 10-20%. Average workers aren't the winners of this mythical economic growth we're told we need to keep prioritizing.
What use is GDP growth if most of it just gets concentrated in the top 10% of asset holders and everyone else in the trenches keeping society going, ends up worse off in a decaying society.
That's how we are now massively outputting homeless junkies who gave up on society and Luigis who want to shoot the elites responsible for this, because the system does not work for them.
Now, the elites can avoid the homeless junkies their economic policies create, by living in gated communities in the suburbs and chauffeuring their kids to private schools, but the Luigis are more tricky to dodge because they're smart and motivated, that's why the like of the EU, UK, AU, etc are expediting privacy invasive laws under the guise of "protecting kids" to make sure any future Luigis will be preemptively dealt with the moment they speak ill of the king and the nobility.
Agreed, this feels so obviously a housing cost problem to me.
> self-inflicted problem
Self-inflicted would mean the person (or people) suffering from the problem is the same person causing the problem.
But the gazillionaire corrupt politicians aren't really suffering from any affordability problem personally.
I highly challenge this. For a region, industry booms drive upward movement. And regions that are only held by one industry when it busts build rust belts.
Ideally, you have industry for a region treated like a well balanced investment portfolio. But you have to internalize that balancing investment portfolios is is a protection against downside risks. And it specifically loses against the lucky portfolio that was heavy on something during a boom.
So, the question heavily looms on if the regions we are looking at are diverse enough that they can sustain some downturns.
> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.
Or maybe we do, but just couldn't keep up with the enormous influx of immigrants for a few years a that ended a couple of years ago. The housing costs have risen due to unforeseen demand, not supply.
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.
as an anecdatum, canadian, especially toronto proces are crashing after an easing of immigration
nothing else has particularly changed
A big political problem with YIMBYism is that almost by definition it will take years to see the effects.
If you champion it as a politician, there's a very large chance you get all the flack for new developments, but the next guy gets all the credit for affordable housing.
Texas seems to be the only place that actually does it, and I honestly have no explanation for why.
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.
and in the near term, you reduce supply by kicking the people out of their homes and they need to find somewhere else
Are they actually NIMBYs or just annoyed? I live in a major metro downtown full of construction and fully support it 100%, but that doesn't mean it doesn't irritate me. Roads and sidewalks are constantly randomly closing. Every bridge across the local highway is currently closed for the next five years. My wife had every tire on a brand new go flat within three months because of nails on the roads. Our houses are all covered in yellow dust because the gas company dug up bedrock 9 years ago, left an enormous pile on a street corner, which then washed away in rain and still covers half the sidewalks nearly a decade later. Most of the housing ends up becoming short-term rentals, which in turn mostly become party houses, so the streets are strewn with broken liquor bottles all the time, cops are getting called in the middle of the night to break up fights with strippers. My car's hatch got destroyed by a city dump truck a few years back and I've been hit while parked two other times by work trucks. All of my power tools were stolen out of my garage by a work crew because the original builders put me on the same radio channel as the guy two doors down, so my garage randomly opened without me knowing about it.
I still support it. We need all the housing we can get. But I do get endlessly irritated by the attitude on Hacker News that no person could ever oppose rebuilding a neighborhood while people still live in it for a good reason and they must all by miserly hoarders trying to pull the ladder up from beneath them.
It's not just about building more in existing areas. It's about making the construction of affordable housing PROFITABLE for developers; which in this world is nearly impossible. Every tax break you give for building anything just results in luxury developments and the builders keeping the breaks as profit.
Also, you can't just build more in these already built up areas. Many of these areas already have strains on public services and just building up without adjusting for electricity consumption, water, schools, roads, transportation, parking, etc is just creating an even larger more expensive headache.
You have to make building towns / hoas in undeveloped areas easier; and the includes high speed transportation to get to the nearest city hub.
We also have to be alot more flexible on what's allowed to be called housing. We should have more places for people to be able to live in their RV's, cars, etc safely.
All of this comes down to the economic reality of what it takes to actually build and maintain a home and piece of property in America. It's not a right to own a home because of that economic reality. The main ingredients are cheap land in an area that has access to electricity, water, streets, infrastructure and access to income. If you can maintain a job for long enough you can pay off the land and cost to build. That is the only viable way to own. Expecting those kind of prices in LA or NY near the beach or downtown is delusional.
We have to also, philosophically, be honest about the way time passes and an intelligent species propagates itself. An frankly we can just look in the wild and see the same dynamics. If a species is successful, then there will be lots of individuals. Those individuals will be drawn to the BEST places to live. There are only so many BEST places to live. Do we really want to turn every place we live into giant high rises? This is an honest question and I think people aren't being entirely honest about their motives / vision for the planet.
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 really hate this “we don’t build enough housing” narrative these days, because it implies this is a simple supply and demand problem, which it is not. I see so many progressives repeating this line, apparently not understanding that they are suggesting unfettered capitalism (up zoning…) is the solution.
The fundamental problem is we simultaneously want our housing to be affordable and good investment. It can’t be both.
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.
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.
For the average American homeowner 25-50% of their wealth is in their home.
Public housing is the answer to this.
I agree that is a necessary component.
The NYCHA is the largest slumlord in the city. The country has proven over decades that it cannot operate public housing with any measure of success.
"…get annoyed whenever there's new construction…"
People "getting annoyed" doesn't prevent construction of affordable housing. I often see NIMBY comments but never see anything to back up the notion.
Greedy developers that want the largest profit on a given plot of land is probably where you should be looking instead. Why build two inexpensive starter homes when you can build one luxury home and make a larger profit? (Never mind that the county gets larger property tax returns on the more expensive homes.)
And yet. They build high end homes and they sell them anyway. So there seem in fact to be buyers out there?
Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes:
- "x% of what? what is the denominator?". Without that number, the claim is meaningless. - surely it cannot be the entire population, so it has to be a survey. - how many people participated in the survey? what was the distribution?
Here is that info for this study. I found this in the PDF version of the study report [0] referred to at the end of the Northwestern page [1].
> Methodology The Harris Poll conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews among the general U.S. adult (18+) population between January 5th and January 21st, 2026. Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth individuals (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).
[0] https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_nwmutual/179168/2026%2...
[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
> "conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews"
How? Mechanical Turk? Ads? This sort of survey is biased toward people who click on lots of stuff.
I love mental rule of thumbs / heuristics that we can install into our brain to avoid getting caught up in cognitive biases or other mistakes.
An easy one that I would expect most HN readers probably do already is: When shopping, always round up to the nearest dollar before even mentally storing it or operating on it. The usual cognitive bias is that many people end up storing the listed price of $4.96 in a lossy manner, as $4.xx, and end up thinking of it as $4 when in reality they could be skipping straight to keeping it as $5 in their head.
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
> (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).
Am I reading this wrong, is this about trust fund kids?
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.
According to the more detailed report [1] the questions and answers were:
Q2630. Do you currently consider yourself financially independent?
Yes: 72% No: 28%
Q2634. How financially independent do you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)?
Fully independent: 44% Mostly independent: 17% Somewhat dependent: 17% Fully dependent: 8% Not applicable: 14%
Then they report 17+17+8=42 = "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"
[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/download/2026+P%26P+Mark...
There’s a huge spectrum. I’m mid 40s and my wife grew up much wealthier than I did. We have done quite well, but I I’m a bit frugal, like to save, despise waste and excess, and therefore don’t like traveling like they do. I like traveling but all the fancy upgraded experiences at every turn is what I refuse to spend money on. But we don’t go without, we “rely” on my in laws to upgrade our travel (or that’s how my wife has structured the relationship with them, they pay for everything and we cover the drinks is basically how it works out). I’m not a huge fan of it but they don’t care and it keeps my wife off my back lol, so whatever. We travel with them a lot but even when we don’t I think my wife uses their card to pay for it. It’s between them is what I say, I don’t want to be a part of it as it feels like we’re taking advantage of them but apparently they’re fine with it. Is this fitting the definition of “rely” because it’s nonessential
> 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.
> Whenever I see a claim that "x% of adults do y", my brain goes
Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures.
> "x% of what? what is the denominator?"
Another reason the denominator is important is that "parents" are (hopefully) completely a subset of "adults". And not all adults have living parents. So who is counted:
or what? This really belongs in the title. Without it, as you say, the statistic is meaningless.If you look into Italy its like 60% to 70%.
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.
Typically surveys are adjusted for sampling biases before reporting. That appears to be the case here. So there is usually some attempt to account for the biases in the sampled population.
The impulse to ask "what population was sampled?" is good but its not always a straight line from there to "these results directly reflect that sampling bias."
In fact, from the page you posted: "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. A full methodology is available."
I would presume that the headline number attempts to account for sampling bias.
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.
You're not just throwing them out though, those responses do have input. Their input is just weighted.
https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2018/01/26/how-different...
Related - any time a study is based on gathering the opinions of a random subset of the population, I also instantly dismiss it. The average person is a moron. I don't care about random people's subjective opinions, I only care about objective data. People polled in the 16th century would have said the sun orbits the earth; that doesn't make it true.
When I was a kid, we never had a ton of extra money, but my parents were very supportive-- they paid for most of my college expenses, for example. Their outlook was that us kids shouldn't have to work-- "school is your job". (However, both my sister and I _did_ have jobs while in school).
However, I never _asked_ my parents for money. I had a good education and a well-paying job, and was able to turn IPO money into a house down payment. In the end, we struggled to close the deal, and my wife and I both asked to borrow money from our parents. Of course they were happy to do so, but I still remember it as feeling so hard to do -- just something that I "shouldn't" have to do. And, of course, it also made me reflect on those who didn't have family support to fall back on, let alone jobs that paid well.
For anecdata, what decade did you borrow in?
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.
I have never asked my parents for money. They have had to resort to trickery (asking for bank details for some passport stuff) to send me money. I hope to be able to do the same for my kid.
Always check the pockets of jackets before donating!
My mom snuck $100 in a jacket my wife almost donated without realizing.
Never had a ton of extra money but your parents can casually pay for your college expenses and buy a house for you?
Excellent work with the reading there, champ.
The question that was ask in the survey was: How financially independent you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)
I understand that YC is questioning the results of the survey. The YC community is very privileged; and i bet, if we do the same survey in this community, 20% or less of adults rely on their parents.
The hacker news crowd is also more than just Americans. Some of us live in welfare states and/or societies with strong trade unions, which we know we can rely on instead, if we ever come to a situation where we need it.
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.
I think you have it backwards. Poor people cannot rely on their parents because their parents are poor too. Every person I know who grew up rich relied on their parents until… well, forever. Privilege is being able to rely on your family.
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.
It is more nuanced than that. I know of a family where one of the children are fully dependent on their parents, and three are fully independent. The one dependent has a law degree.
Also, the first thought I had was "what %age of adults are 18-30". Not that a 30yo should be dependent on their parents but I'd assume that people answering yes skew younger. And to your point about YC, that's also a young skewed demographic.
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.
Haha. I had the opposite thought. If they are very privileged, wouldn’t they rely more? I guess there is privileged you make yourself and privileged you are born into and then more easily make for yourself. But if you are the latter and can support yourself, would you really then do it entirely on your own and not still benefit/rely from/on your parents? I’m not sure (and yes I am including family vacations, connections, and other kinds of arrangements).
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.
The figure might be misleading. It might not be.
Either way, the idea that the natural and normal state of affairs is that every person can go out into the world and be a perfectly self sufficient but comfortable atomized economic unit without support from their family or society is deeply flawed.
This wasn't the norm for most of human history, and it isn't the norm globally today.
It might, however, be a nice thing to aspire to, no? Economic self-sufficiency doesn't have to imply atomization, I think.
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 can't think of any serious leftist who would advocate for high costs, unless there was some fundamental resource constraint like with fossil fuels.
Well high wage implies a cost that has to be pushed on somewhere. It's not crazy to fear that raising wages, sometimes, can cause costs to go up, which can lead to more demand for higher wages. It may really depend on how much slack there is in the system.
What does improve material standard of living is increases in productivity, but the scope for those is limited, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Like the basic story of the past 150 or so years is that agriculture has gotten dramatically more productive so people can do other things and move into cities with all sorts of implications.
High wages raise purchasing power as much as they raise costs, so aren't exactly raising costs overall. In fact prices should be measured relative to wages. Non-wage costs (i.e. profit and rent) seem to be the killer. Note that Adam Smith hated rent.
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.
I don't agree with your characterization of "human nature". I mostly disagree that there is any such thing, and to the extent that there is, it seems to me that it is more like: cooperative, altruistic, empathic within the in-group, aggressive, selfish and uncooperative with the out-group.
The great work of human civilization is to expand the size of the in-group.
Look at any popular religion and you will find a heavy emphasis on sacrifice, selflessness and delayed gratifications (that helps strengthen our control over our base desires). This is because early civilisations (that used a religio-political construct to form societies and nations) recognised that a healthy society only flourishes when humans are taught to fight their innate desire to be selfish. You can observe this when kids demand attention as they become jealous of their siblings or play with toys with anyone - they have to be taught to share, and appreciate it as a value.
Your perspective on the in-group and out-group is relevant of course - it isn't healthy if one is self-sacrificing without addressing their own needs. (However the degree of that varies between eastern and western culture. Eastern cultures, which have more civilisational history, perhaps don't necessarily see as it in such rigid terms?). Moreover, my point was that having wealth tends to affects your perceptions to "expand the size of the in-group" - money does provide more avenues to be independent, and thus a financially independent youth can (ignorantly) miss opportunities to learn how to have healthy co-dependent relations as most erroneously assume that such relations are not important to them because they have achieved "independence". Learning to be independent is important. But then learning to understand the importance of co-dependency is another step to become a mature adult.
Look at the comment above, the sample is from really wealthy parents, not the median income in the US, so I'm sure that skews the data.
No, it mentioned 816 out of more than 4500 respondents had net worth over $1M.
That's quite different to your claim.
That's also incorrect, it's not net worth > $1mm, it's "those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property" over $1mm, which is a much smaller number. The sources I saw said about 4% of US households meet this criteria, but 18% of survey respondents did.
Ah, indeed, I read that line backwards ("excluding" got transmuted to "including").
Right you are.
Slavery and massive wealth disparity was also the norm for most of human history, but just like generational wealth transfer, that doesn't mean it's equitable (or sustainable). Personally, I'm concerned that this will lead to greater wealth transfer from poor to rich and the subsequent dissolution of social norms that hold countries and cultures together. But I don't really care, I have nothing to lose here.
It is something to aim for though. The kid feels good about themselves and the parents can enjoy their hard earned money to have a banging retirement. My parents won’t stop traveling. They’ve been to something like 50 countries over the last 5-7 years.
My 20-something son is living with us but he does pay (some) rent.
I half expect to have to apologize for this, like when I was growing up people would think you are a loser if you were in this situation. Today people think we are really smart and the people who are paying more rent than they can afford to live alone that are losing.
I can’t understand morally or financially how can parents charge anything of their children. Not judging it, just honestly can’t understand it. Isn’t it the parents’ responsibility to build the foundation for their children and keep building it until it’s there? I am viewing it from a moral angle where it’s the parents’ selfish choice to have a child so they must take full responsibility until a child is or feels that they can be independent.
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.
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.
I understand that such a game of life might be beneficial for a child. But I would like to understand the reasoning to do that with an adult.
> 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.
This looks like a game which should have ended by the time a child is an adult.
I am raising a very young child so I am very concerned about the future and constantly thinking what's the right way to raise him.
I know my neighbors very well due to my personality. There are 20-40 year old adults who live with their parents for various reasons. The foolish "children" are those who order door dash at 3am with no income or education. They are unable to 'launch' from their parent's orbit. i feel terrible for these people. As mentioned, I know them well and they do not have an excuse other than laziness and permission. The rule 'those who do not work do not eat' is something all people can agree with but few enforce.
The right way to raise your child is so that they can thrive without you while wanting their children (your grandchildren) to spend time with you. This is a tall order because it requires decades of sacrifice, pain, and difficult yet positive decisions.
> The rule 'those who do not work do not eat' is something all people can agree
Um, no?
Thanks for suggesting a possible left/right political litmus test though.
We shouldn't have to waste too many resources on "useless people" but I think starving them to death is a bit excessive. We don't have a shortage of food. They're more likely to need mental health services or spiritual guidance to help them not be useless - which they can pay back in taxes if the transformation succeeds.
I suspect it depends on the kid. If they are naturally frugal and saving for things (and the household doesn't need the money), then why bother.
If they aren't frugal, and are otherwise suffering from lifestyle creep, then not charging them might be an injustice and setting them up for false expectations/never leaving home.
FYI, I was in the first group because my first job had pay cuts within 2 weeks, and then I discovered I basically spent minimal time at home anyway, so why pay more for it. Let me buy when I wanted to move out.
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.)
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.
That's the way it is where I live, too. It might not be "fair game", but if people really want to help their kids, they should do everything in their power to get them into the housing market ASAP.
When I grew up, that was seen as pampering kids. They'd never "learn" how to be financially responsible, etc. if they always received help.
But, let's be honest, in many places the housing market is now so expensive that people could be saving for 5-10 years just to afford the down payment. And by the time they have enough, the market will have appreciated even more, so they have to save for even longer. I have peers that got into the housing market 20 years ago with help from parents, and their properties are now worth 5x - 8x of what they paid.
I am early 30s. I realised this about the time I finished university and thought I might be expected to move out. The housing market was already pretty insane.
I got a job that required me to move when I was 25, though, and what I realized after that was that living with your parents constrains you. I don't know how your relationship with your son is, but while I lived with my parents, they expected to know where I was going and be home for dinner, and even if I refused to tell them, I'd feel that I was judged for it, so I usually avoided it. Living by myself means if I want to go to a party or buy a pile of network switches for experimentation or get into soldering, I can just do it without worrying what my parents will think. I think delaying that stage has been really bad for my development.
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.
I may have ended up that way if I hadn’t gotten into software as a teenager. Luckily a did and the timing was right for me to make some sort of decent career out of it.
I did live independently prior to going into software, but it sucked and was fragile and likely would have fallen apart long term. I also doubt I could find a similar living situation as a young man with no credit or much money to his name. Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.
> Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.
Rental approvals are ridiculous. We're renting an apartment while we remodel our house.
We've taken out mortgages, refi'd mortgages, and (by now) taken out 3 HELOCs in a row (2 of them subsequently closed as we needed to re-file for more $). While there's a lot of paperwork involved, it feels pretty easy. "Promise to pay us back? Cool!"
Filling out apartment rentals was awful. The rejections, the tiny paper forms asking you about creditors and bank accounts, how much money you owe each of them every month, personal references, "supervisor's phone number", have you ever been to jail, ever failed to pay rent for any reason, previous landlords' contact info. Look, I get that rent is an unsecured obligation (vs a mortgage), but every step of it was gross and accusatory.
And they wonder why they only get the most desperate people as tenants!
33% of GenX is still depending on their parents? That's shocking... I'm at the young end of GenX at 49yo. So, a slice of the population that is fast approaching retirement age is still reliant on their septuagenarian or octogenarian parents for money? Wow.
Well, that's where the money is.
The 55 and older demographic holds 70% of the wealth in America[1].
The 70 and older demographic holds 31% (almost 1/3) of the wealth in America[2].
1: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/older-americans-control-70-we...
2: https://www.apolloacademy.com/31-percent-of-wealth-owned-by-...
Source: https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
OK, now I'm questioning the whole thing... it also claims 17% of Boomers reliant on their parents. So, we have some substantial number of 62-80 years olds relying on their 90-100 year old parents? Seems unlikely.
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.
17% of generally retired people are relying on the retirement checks of their parents ? Really ?
I'm the last of the Boomers, and my parents are in their 80s and I was a prom baby (meaning "young parents"). There's no way 17% of Boomers are sponging off Mom and Dad, because the overwhelming odds are: Mom and Dad are dead, and have been for a while now.
OTOH, I guess that doesn't mean someone isn't still cashing that retirement check.
Looks to me like the older generation amounts to roughly 30% of the boomer generation. A couple has 4 parents and half of people are bellow average.
Sure maybe its wrong and people are counting inheritance similarly to living parents, etc, but I'm not surprised at all if the lowest quartile is reaching retirement age broke getting money from any relatives that can help and that are inclined to help.
Sure, totally get that, but we're talking about a cohort that is mostly retirement age themselves... How many of those 70-80 year old Boomers have parents left alive from whom to receive those retirement funds? That's why I'm hesitant to believe the number.
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.
yeah that's ridiculous. I'm 50 and fully support my MIL (she lives in my garage apartment) and my sister fully supports our mom (she lives with my sister). The boomers i know are completely financially dependent on their children.
I think the word "rely" is doing some heavy lifting here. Still being on your parent's family phone plan doesnt mean youd be destitute if they werent helping you out.
I went to the source[1] referenced by the article and found the exact question. It took about 90 seconds.
"How financially independent you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)"
1: https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
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?
The youngest boomers are 62 this year. Not many would have living parents. Are you referring to inheritance they may have gotten?
I'd speculate (based on a study I've recently been made aware of) about 17%.
Boomers can be trust fund babies too.
Not only that, if you're a single boomer with a living parent and neither of you have much other incomes its probably better to cohabitate in that old family house that was paid off in the 90s and share what little benefits you both receive.
>> Still being on your parent's family phone plan doesnt mean youd be destitute if they werent helping you out.
I think there's some important things like this that should be considered. In the late 90's early aughts, I didn't need a laptop, smartphone and 24/7 internet access with 1GB download speeds or half the technological stuff kids need these days to be a contributing member of society.
Now those are all standard items for kids growing up. When I was in college in 2000, life was pretty easy. I paid $350/month for rent, cable, heat and landline phone. That was literally my entire financial costs for the month. Beer, going out to the bars, random things here and there? Easy to cover when you're making $10/hour working 35 hours a week.
Now? Your basic needs will consistently run $1,500 for all of the stuff you need to function into today's society. Having your parents covering some of that in order for you to live on your own I think is not abnormal any more.
As a Gen Xer, we had it really good. I've started to realize kids these days are put at a massive disadvantage because we require everything to be accessible via the internet and smartphones.
> $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.
> CPI inflation would suggest that the current cost ought to be about $692.
Rent alone will probably blow that. I live in a burnt out rust belt shithole city and I’m struggling to understand how rent is this high. I pay a good bit more than $692 to live in a slum just outside the ghetto right now and I have to feel gracious for that. It’s closer to what I paid in a decent middle class neighborhood in Florida. That was only 5-6 years ago.
This is in a city where the best people can say about it is: “well it’s cheaper”.
Hell when I lived in South Carolina from 2017-2019. My apartment there was closer to the stated inflation figure, but this was for a place that regularly flooded the downstairs neighbors and left me for weeks without AC in the peak of summer because of careless management.
Still not as bad as business rents. I’ve seen downtown business close because they’re being made to be $7000 for a shitty 100 year old property surrounded by condemned properties.
Let me suggest the problem: CPI inflation suggests a rough doubling of basic living costs. How many jobs can you point to that are paying 2x in 2026 what they were paying in 2000?
There are some. But the data seems to suggest that the majority do not.
This posted while I was still in the middle of my other rant, but when I was doing the four guys in one apartment thing putting myself through community college, my job was overnight janitor at Knott's Berry Farm and paid $6.50 an hour. Minimum wage in California is now $16.90, so that at least is more than double.
Prices have been increasing much faster than CPI for years and decades. I'd say this suggests there's something wrong with CPI, but HN would violently disagree.
The last time I can remember a reasonably low rent payment, I was paying $300 a month in the year 2000 in Fullerton, CA. That was sharing a two-bedroom apartment between four guys, two of whom lived in the kitchen and living room and paid slightly less, one of whom was a speed addict and eventually got us kicked out and our lease terminated, which left me homeless briefly living in my car. No car payment because I'd bought it in high school for $260 at a sheriff's auction, but roughly $200 or in insurance plus gas money, mostly because commuting anywhere near LA/Orange county uses a lot of fuel. I was still on my parent's health insurance because you could do that until 25 as long as you were in school, and I wasn't paying back student loans because again, still in school. I was also 6'2" and regularly didn't crack 140 lbs because I was eating bulk oatmeal dry. I don't remember the cost of the shared phone bill, but I do remember it was under my name and that speed freak never paid his share, the bill eventually went to collections, and wrecked my credit for several years, which didn't really matter ultimately because I wasn't borrowing any money back then anyway other than the student loans.
I don't know a whole lot of 20 year-olds but certainly hear on the Internet all the time how hard it is for them. I'm extremely skeptical anyone living quite as shittily as I was 26 years ago is really paying 4.5 times as much for the privilege. My 24 year-old niece pays a lot more in rent than I did, but she also lives alone a mile from the beach in San Diego. In a shack, but it's still a hell of a lot nicer than anything I had.
In any case, I got a few bucks here and there from my parents, but they didn't have much when I was young and ultimately helped out my younger sisters a lot more. Cost of teenage parents, I guess. I was the test run. I still turned out fine and they've mostly relied on me in the past 15 years, which seems oddly missing from this survey. If we're concerned about adults not being self-sufficient, surely relying on your kids or siblings or anyone else at all is just as bad as relying on your parents.
Again, I suspect that the problem isn't the size of your rent payment, it's the size of your paycheck (which is not your fault, but that of your employer, our government(s) and The System (TM)).
CPI is a bullshit number. CPI indexes Social Security COLAs, TIPS payouts, tax brackets, and federal pensions. Every 0.1% shaved off CPI saves the Treasury real money on its indexed obligations.
Please tell me more.
It is acknowledged as not covering some costs that affect many people severely. But that does not by itself make it a bullshit number.
I don't know, that one doesn't seem as benign as your making it out to be. I would say if you're having your parents subsidize your phone bill you're still not technically living on your own.
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
Yet, with 37% of people being only a $400 surprise cost away from financial destitution, you might be completely wrong.
https://www.investopedia.com/here-s-how-many-americans-can-t...
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%.
I think that the vast majority of people who are "relying" on their parents for finances actually belong to the upper class. Family Feudalism has bred two consecutive generations of entitled shitheads, and these people are gonna have the wheel soon (if not already) in the US politically. This has concerning potential consequences.
These numbers are a nice snapshot, but I see no comparison to historical numbers in the article. I know many families who have had intergenerational support happening from older to younger and vice versa.
This article is shilling some courseware for CNBC FYI.
I think that's an ad that appears at the bottom of most of the articles on "cnbc make it" so I'm not the specific article is shilling it per se.
> A large portion of U.S. adults are making ends meet with help from their parents.
The premise of TFA along with the entirety of the comments are eloquently embodied by the misfit troubadour and grunge philosopher Todd Snider in Statistician's Blues [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUK6zjtUj00
The link to their study is much more interesting: https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
It's shocking how once again the number one contributing factor to success is being born to parents who support you for your whole life.
Data table.[1]
[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
have a large extended family almost entirely living in the Seattle area while i grew up in rural Oregon
i moved out after high school and did my best to stay out (of course occasionally life has other plans). nearly all of my 30ish Seattle cousins stayed with their parents until getting married, some never moved out. i was so confused because i was close with my cousins and we seemed pretty like-minded, but it really just came down to housing costs
So: Since this is US centric:
- Is it better/worse than other countries? ... better/worse than "comparable" countries?
- What's the historical trend?
- And in both directions (geographical, historical): How does it relate to the respective diffences in wealth inequality?
I lived with my parents until I was 20 and they helped me out until I was 22. My girlfriend's kids are on the same path. Though even with people in their 30s and 40s I think it's common to get help for unexpected big expenses because a lot of people don't have adequate emergency funds.
I rely on my kids for financial support. It takes four of us (earning typical wages) to afford basic bills + basic emergencies.
I don't believe the US will exit the 4-income economy in my lifetime.
I'd wager that number isn't so different from previous generations, but it's just not as taboo to admit it nowadays.
Ok, but why?
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com has been linked on HN many times before.
Is it related to that?
Searching the internet, one can read more, such as:
> In August 1971, alongside the "Nixon Shock" that severed the dollar's convertibility to gold, the Nixon administration imposed a 90-day economy-wide freeze on all wages and prices. This was the first time the U.S. enacted wage and price controls outside of wartime. Following the initial 90-day freeze, the Nixon administration implemented a complex, multi-tiered price control system on the petroleum industry that lasted for years.
> In August 1971, Nixon was "floating" the dollar, abandoning the gold standard and "freezing" prices and wages.
This video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EBEapf3OFw asks the below:
> Why did America deliberately destroy its own manufacturing industry?
And starts off,
> It did not happen all at once. Americans watched their own country lose it, brand by brand, factory by factory. Every time, the country was handed the same three reasons...(It looked inevitable. And every one of them was true enough to believe.) Plenty of those factories were still making money the day they were ordered shut. They closed anyway, on the say-so of men who had never worked a shift in their lives and grew richer each time another one went dark....
The post WW2 boom in America was an exceptional time. This is the status quo for humanity.
So if said kids are relying on their parents for support... how are their kids going to rely on them? The idea behind generational wealth is that there is something left to pass down. If you have nothing to pass down, because both you and your parents spent it all, then you're fully on your own to support yourself. Somewhere along the line the bill always comes due.
How so? If you don’t touch the principal you can live off the investment returns forever and so can your descendants.
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.
I'd be curious if the folks that are advocating for people to provide support to their adults kids also expect those adult kids to keep their parents living with them when elderly. I know assisted living facilities charge exorbitant amounts of money, to the point it's often advised to setup a trust, so the parent's assets are no longer viewed as their assets. These facilities apparently charge based on assets, where if you have none then suddenly the monthly cost to live there equates only to the value of your Social Security Income payments.
If my parents are indicative of anything, they're just going with the flow and believing it'll all magically work out.
Unfortunately that is the sad reality of the state of fiscal literacy in the country. We have work to do to prepare people for their own futures. Pensions were nice but this transition to private plans has been rough, with far too many believing their Social Security Income alone will be enough to sustain them in their golden years.
In reality, almost nobody ever has built "Generational wealth" because it's not a normal thing that happens.
Most people are just trying to survive for tomorrow.
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.
This seems to be some self-help for the well-off (and their kids) to not feel bad about such dependence, but totally ignores the large population whose parents aren't affluent enough to support their children. Or may even need support from their children. I don't think the feefees of the well off is the gravest issue here.
In my experience, poorer families tend to live in multigenerational housing at a much higher rate. So this doesnt seem to be true. Less affuluent usually means more sharing of resources, not less.
The biggest problem here is finding secure and reliable income in the long term. People here in the 1960s, for instance, could save up quite a lot of money. This is of course possible today too, but what if you can only find low income jobs? You'll remain working poor for the rest of your life. That's not exactly fair from an inter-generational point of view. Meanwhile the number of superrich is growing. That's also unfair. And money buys legislation, so (many, but not all) democracies are broken.
Many people I know brag about how much they rely on their parents.
Its expensive out there. I used to judge people for not being able to stand on their own but now my mindset is if someone is working 40+ hours a week and sticking to a reasonable budget and not driving a new car then not sure what else we can ask them to do.
Most of these people that are getting help aren't saving for retirement either so its just a long game of desperation. Easy to say get a better job but not everyone has the skills or mental acuity to do that. With that said there are aboslutely a lot of people that have no concept of budgeting and are their own worst enemy
The parallels between the Great Depression and the conditions now are worrisome.
I don't know what you mean, the DOW is over 50k. /s
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
I'm thinking you missed the "/s"
Reminder that black US slave descendants have a median wealth of about $5000 (i.e the equity they have in their cars.) When you consider black crime, consider the OP statistic in light of that. Most black people I know have parents who rely on their support (and siblings, and cousins, etc.)
Whatever is happening to 42% of Americans is happening to 97% (figures drawn from my ass) of black Americans. $5000 is pretty good. I'm from Chicago, where the median black wealth is $0.
https://colorofwealth.org/
Because boomers are selfish and holding onto most of the wealth, ruining and destroying the generations to follow. It’s a weird phenomenon actually, their parents gave them everything possible, even independence, yet, the boomers do all sort of shenanigans to keep holding on the wealth, and when they can’t, they go on manipulation tactics, as if their lives are the center of universe and all generations after are the minions to serve them.
>all generations after are the minions to serve them
Serve their kids. The money is only incidental to the power structure (nepotism, classism, xenophobia) that they intend to pass down to their chosen successors. They've been working to limit economic mobility, opportunity, and fairness for a while now.
Wait, so you're annoyed that the boomers are using their wealth to help support their kids (the respondents to this survey) instead of just giving it to them and making them trust fund kids?
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of negative things to say about boomers, but I'm not sure how your complaint here really fits the article.
What do you call the situation where your parents depend on your support? I helped my dad with a 6000 Euro out of pocket surgery so he can regain the use of his shoulder. And I'm an average working class Europoor, not a stock broker. And my mom is paying some of the bills for my grandma because she can't afford the bills on her ~300 Euro pension.
The main thing the article attempts to do is to normalize a situation where parents support their kids into their 20s, 30s and may be 40s.
My kids are in their 20s and I still support them.
But, I want the government to STOP
- spending my taxes on wars and military - spending my taxes on supporting immigration programs - immigration programs altogether
May be then financial and work situation can finally improve for kids of the people who built out the western civilization.
Not a reply I expected to see on HN, but frankly I agree.
I've heard enough "this country doesn't have enough talent!!! We need millions more immigrants to cover the gap!" While almost every recent cybersecurity graduate I know is quite literally UNABLE to find a relevant job, with most resigning to hitting up the employers of jobs they had in HS with low-skill work like wiping down decommissioned K-12 Chromebooks for resale on ebay.
What an absolute waste of their talents.
We obviously have the talent in this country, we're literally the forefront of the field. Employers just prefer a 'subclass' of laborers with less rights (e.g. H1Bs/illegal immigrants that the employer can hold over their head) and lower minimum livable salary compared to regular citizens.
> STOP spending on immigration programs... to improve situation for kids of the people who built out the western civilization
The common misconception that the US Government is wasting money on immigration is pushed by Trump and FOX News, who both lie regularly. For example, see [1] about how Trump rejected a report produced by Federal researchers. The report is available [2].
Overall, the refugee resettlement program gives the country back many times what the government spends. And even if you just focus on the expenditure, the bulk of it is on border enforcement and imprisonment, which goes to domestic private companies.
As to your love for "the people who built western civilization", I'll just leave it up there. Your connotation is clear, and it doesn't reflect well on you.
[1] Trump administration rejects report showing positive impact of refugees
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/politics/refugees-reve...
[2] Rejected Report Shows Revenue Brought In by Refugees. SEPT. 19, 2017: A draft of a study rejected by Trump administration officials that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/19/us/politics/d...
Refugees are different from immigrants.
Yes and my first ask is to stop the wars.
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.