alt Hacker News>If I move to a cheap house somewhere
Again, I'm not trying to be difficult here, but "where" is "somewhere." There are jobs in Austin, San Antonio, Kerrville, Marfa, and El Paso. They might not all be for me, but they exist in all these places. Where you live and what your commute is, again, is not exactly something that's particularly trivial to define. At what point should I start looking in San Antonio rather than Austin?
These are hard questions. This is what I mean when I ask whether I have a right to housing in Malibu? At what point should I be expected to just move to East LA?
At the end of the day, housing in Austin is relatively inexpensive. There are real options below $300K. Living in SF, it's pretty astounding that that's even possible within the city limits, much less at reasonable commuting distances.
I certainly think incentivizing subsidized low income housing is worthwhile, and I think even incentivizing builders to just target the low income price points is also worthwhile. I just think that focusing on subsidizing the lowest income folks, rather than letting markets actually work for most people has been shown to trivially fail in CA where I live at actually accomplishing anything. A lot of "ugly" 5-over-1's have been built in Austin, and it's working to keep the place affordable for working class people. I'm absolutely fine with that.
> At the end of the day, housing in Austin is relatively inexpensive. There are real options below $300K.
This is so insanely out of touch. Most people will never be able to afford a house over $200k, even in Austin. I live here, you apparently live in California. As a resident, let me tell you that Austin is not affordable, and definitely not "inexpensive". Housing here is relatively inexpensive compared to the most expensive metros in the world, it's not relatively inexpensive compared to the US housing market, or more relevantly, the Texas housing market. This isn't the Bay Area, it's the middle of Texas.
> A lot of "ugly" 5-over-1's have been built in Austin, and it's working to keep the place affordable for working class people.
Austin isn't affordable for working class people and it hasn't been for a long time, so no, those new constructions aren't keeping it affordable, they've just stopped the insane rent increases that were coming every year for more than a decade. A living wage in Austin for a single person is $100,000, for a family it's $200,000, and that is well above the median household income of ~$90,000. Working class people are well below the median and aren't making $90,000 per year. These numbers are from an article in our local newspaper from this week. [0]
[0] https://www.statesman.com/news/local/article/austin-cost-of-...