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this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2024
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The problem is that for many folks the amount they are making isn't enough for them to live a very reasonable life AND they have nothing to invest in the first place. Suppose a household in a given area needs $100,000 to afford a VERY modest house in that area, health insurance, savings, healthy food etc. Now suppose the house has one disabled breadwinner and one fellow working for $40,000.
Because of this they live in shit town in a tiny apartment a building full of drug addicts in a not so great part of the state wherein the average life expectancy is about 10 years less than one of the good parts of the country.
The first 40k of "excess" would be spent on having a decent life, working a sane number of hours, moving into an actual home. For fully half the country the idea of having excess is laughable. It's a crass joke.
My SO has a medical condition that limits her income. I'm in academia, so I don't make much and work crazy hours. We get to have happy day to day, and save money to invest by renting a shity apartment. As in, my investment account is worth more than that of some friends in software development, cus they wanted to live in good apartments.
It doesn't matter that average life expectancy is 10 years shorter. It matters why. Are people randomly getting murdered or constantly exposed to high air pollution? Don't live there. Is it shorter cus they are mostly stupid fucks that eat shity food and their only hobby is smoking on the bench below the building? You can live there fine, those are my neighboors. Doesn't stop me from eating healthy home made food, staying in shape and saving money.
Am I happy about it? No, I will never own a house, and it sucks cus I love to tinker, and enjoy growing plants. But I can live a full filling live, better than any king that ever lived up till around the 18-19 century, and save money.
The economic system is dead, it died in 2008. Combine that with climate change, and things are only going to get worse. Unless some politician is going to pull out free, infinite, energy machine out of their arse they can't do much as the system is already collapsing.
You can be smart about it, and have a few more happy years before we all die. Or you can be stupid about it, and suffer till we all die.
Most areas don't need $100,000 a year to afford a "very modest house", you could get a nice mobile home and afford to pay off the loan in just a couple years.
the areas where most people live, however, do.
nobody wants to live in trailer park in Mobile, AL.
Everybody wants everything at no cost. That's not how the world works, though. If you earn $X a month and want to save some of it as a long-term investment, you simply cannot spend $X a month. You can't have both.
There are indeed some people who have no choice but to spend $X a month, their basic expenses just can't go any lower without literally ending up on the street or straight up dying. Those people do have a real problem and I sympathize with them.
People who say "I want to save money but I also want to live in the nicest possible house in the nicest possible neighborhood" I have less sympathy with, because they have a choice. I face that choice myself and instead of griping about how I can't have everything I want with no sacrifice I just go ahead and make the choice. I don't spend all my money each month, and as a result I don't take vacations as nice as I could take and I don't have as nice a car as I could have. But in exchange for that I've got plenty of savings built up.
Why not?
Lets define "most". Herein I define most as the area immediately surrounding the majority of people. 70% of people live in urban areas not out in bum fuck.
I live in a small city of 50,000 in Washington. A house around here starts at about 400k. I would have to pay about 3100 per month including taxes and insurance. I would take home about 6500 per month after taxes if I made 100k. At current interest rates I would need to spend 3100 per month to service such a loan.or about 47% of my take home pay. It is difficult to see how I could afford a home with a household not individual of less than 100,000.
Adjacent to me is a much bigger city with about 20x the jobs and opportunities. I would need more like 900k to buy into there. Realistically to afford a home there we are talking about my household making more than 200k. Why so much? Because housing has got very expensive and interest is very high.
A ton of urban areas have much options cheaper than the west coast though, mobile homes, townhouses, duplexes, etc. $400,000 is much more than a very modest house. For example I would consider a shotgun house very modest, and short of very high income areas they're usually much less than $400,000
Cheaper places are cheaper for a reason. Worse health care. Worse education for your kids. Worse life expectancy. Worse Opportunity. For instance St Louis has a median home price of 207k but they also have 10x the murder rate of Seattle a worse jobs outlook. You'll make less money etc.
Who in their right mind would want to live in a red state?
Yes, and I agree I prefer higher density, but ultimately some people living in less desirable areas is more reasonable than trying to build ever taller skyscrapers in city centers- in a country with massive amounts of empty land.
It depends, there are plenty of cheaper cities with very good healthcare, I grew up in Louisville, KY, spent a lot of time in LA, CA, and now live in Prague, CZ. Louisville has had the cheapest rent/purchase price and had by far the best quality healthcare(at least that I and my family received) out of anywhere I've lived.
This is valid in some cases, and there are plenty of valid reasons to desire living somewhere else more, that doesn't mean there aren't costs to that. Furthermore, there are plenty of expensive places with terrible school systems, plenty of cheap places with passable school systems, but more importantly traditional schools systems in general suck. Kids now days have access to the internet, that combined with parents who encourage curiosity and creativity will be much more important to them learning than the school system they go to.
That is cherrypicking, compare Chicago to Fargo, ND. Or a less distant example, Seattle to Spokane.
Assuming you don't work remotely, but you'll also spend less.
Not about being red or blue, its about not being a HCOL megalopolis. You can also move to Maine.
Manhattan doesn't have much room to expand up or out but but Seattle still has 70% single family homes it and surrounding cities have plenty of room to build up.
Spokane is largely populated by bigots and Trumpers. In particular the state congressman they elected wrote a paper the "biblical basis for war" wherein he advocated that after the fall of the united states they would make war on the rest of us nonbelievers taking the women prisoners and killing men who wouldn't submit in his new Christofascist white ISIS like kingdom. He was then caught trying to "rescue" a bunch of Ukrainian kids on behalf of an organization that existed on paper only without doing boring stuff like making sure they didn't have parents fighting in the war or other relations who wanted to take them.
On an economic front the Seattle Metro area has substantial commerce, an international airport, a port and 4M people. Spokane has about 230k. Adding another 230k would be a 5% increase in population for the Seattle Metro it would double spokane. The resources for expanding housing and resources in the Seattle metro actually exist. If it ever makes it there that is about half a century of growth for Spokane.