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this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
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I think that the US as a country needs to abandon the idea that every family should have a detached house with four bedrooms, two cars, and a lush green front garden surrounded by a picket fence. It's just not sustainable. That made sense in 1960, but the country's population has doubled since then.
On the other hand, I would like to see it possible for every family to be able to at least afford a basic 2-bedroom condominium with all the amenities that modern life has to offer, including walkable spaces, accessible green areas, and reliable public transportation.
11,000 hours of minimum wage labour in my city would be $185,000. Maybe a bit too low to be entirely realistic, but $200,000 is probably within reach with a bit of elbow grease on the government side.
I live in one of Italy's richest cities, gross wages for millennials may go from 24k€/y to 60k€/y for the luckiest ones. A normal 80m² apartment goes for about 200-400k€.
It's not just an American problem, and apparently more efficient housing isn't enough of a solution.
I think that is a different situation in your city. I don't know which city it is, and I don't claim to know much about how the Italian economy works, but housing prices seem similar to what I've got in my city (Portland, Oregon, USA), except that wages are drastically lower. So my guess is that it's a problem with people being underpaid as Italy is a developed economy, similar to the US.
€24,000 a year would be about €12 an hour which is below minimum wage in my city. A minimum-wage worker would be paid about $34,000 annually, or €29,500. The mean hourly wage in my city works out to about $76,000 annually (€66,000). I prefer the median as a better estimate of what ordinary people make, but the census bureau only reports the mean as far as I could find.
There are a ton of factors but most problems simply stem from greed. Boomers pulling the ladder up behind oneself and then making fun of millenials for having less assets and saying it's because we're lazy.
I don't agree that the reason single-family detached homes with lawns are necessarily unaffordable primarily because of greed. That might be one factor, but I think the main factor as to why they're unaffordable is simple geometry. Councils don't want to pay for miles of roads, pipes, and electrical cables just to serve less than a hundred families, so these costs get imposed on the developers and homeowners. Some states, including mine, will require new single-family developments to have an HOA, which is responsible for paying for the upkeep of some of these resources. That directly results in higher assessments for ratepayers. Or, where the council absorbs the costs, they still get passed on to owners and renters through higher property taxes.
So while I'm sympathetic to your arguments, I feel that blaming only greed is a shallow understanding of why nobody can afford a house.
"Councils don't want to pay for miles of roads, pipes, and electrical cables just to serve less than a hundred families"
Yes, correct, they don't want to pay for it. We need to allocate more taxpayer money to corporate bailouts.
To make my point clearer because you missed it: Councils should NOT be paying for these regardless of whether anything relating to corporate bailouts happens, because detached single-family houses are a poor use of resources and an inefficient and wasteful form of housing.
Remember to add the 's/' for sarcasm
There may be GOPs reading this and that's their mantra
This is not a popular observation around these parts, but it's true. My city has almost no private equity presence in the market, yet we still have a housing affordability crisis. The geometry problem came first, caused here in the U.S. by zoning and building codes; then houses became the biggest source of investment wealth for individuals because of the artificial scarcity those codes created; then private equity smelled money and moved in.