alt Hacker NewsAs an occasional visitor to the US from England I was surprised by how expensive it's become. The US always used to seem cheaper than England I think largely because the government got out of the way so houses were cheap because you could build them, cars were cheap because you could import them, food was cheap because you could just grow stuff in huge fields whereas in England much of that was restricted.
On my trip to Austin a couple of years ago it'd got really expensive. Even food where normally you could walk in a shop and get something for not much, a basic sandwich started from $8 and when I came out some lady followed me and said could she have some she was hungry so I gave her half and really was hungry. I've never really had that in the other fifty countries I've visited including in Africa. In London you get Roma sitting around with 'hungry' signs but they are all fat and well fed and want cash. It's odd.
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In constant dollars cars are actually pretty much the same as they were 40+ years ago when you compare similar types and trim levels. A new Honda Civic for example costs about the same when you take into account inflation as the Civic I bought in 1989.
The average price people are paying for a new car now is (in constant dollars) about twice what it was back when I got that '89 Civic, but that is because a larger percentage of buyers nowadays are buying bigger and/or more luxurious cars.
It's quite remarkable when you take into account how much more technology and safety features are in new cars. My '89 Civic didn't even have cruise control.
Same experience as a Canadian visiting NY and SF in recent years. Yes I know I went to the most expensive cities in the country but still it was hard to eat a basic meal that wasn't US$30, and in tourist contexts (like the hotel restaurant) it was even more still.
Even shopping for a few basic groceries felt like I was paying dollar amounts more than I would expect to see at home but in a currency that's worth 1.3x+.
Austin prices absolutely exploded from about 2010 to 2022. A huge part of that was housing, and then just before the pandemic Austin became sort of a weird "meme stock" ("Elon Musk is moving there!", "Joe Rogan is moving there") where its popular vision far outstripped its actual reality. I remember travelling around 2018 or so and telling people I was from Austin, and nearly every time I got a "Oh cool, I've heard that's such an awesome city" in response, which was far different a response I'd get in like 2005 or so. I mean, I like Austin, but we also had 2 months straight of 105+ degree weather a few years ago...
Like the article states, when housing goes up everywhere, it means that even the lowest wage workers need to be paid a lot more to survive, so the reason basic sandwiches are so expensive there is that entry level pay is now about $25/hr.
The other issue you saw, homelessness, is especially concentrated in Austin. Austin is perhaps the most liberal city in deep red Texas, so homeless people flock to Austin because it has good services and a generally sympathetic populace, and some rural conservative locales have even been giving homeless people one way bus tickets to Austin.
I guess the good news is that Austin built a shit ton of housing since 2021-2022, so housing prices (including rentals) are falling faster in Austin than anywhere else in the US.
>On my trip to Austin a couple of years ago it'd got really expensive.
That's Austin & life in the 21st Century, friend.
I grew up ATX-style in the 90s, and cannot afford to live there anymore. But also chose not to years before then.
There're still a few regions where living hasn't gotten life-prohibitive, yet (my answer: anywhere there is a Cookout and/or Pal's fastfood restaurant).
But nothing is cheap, anymore.
A big part of it is that literally almost every major US city has a self-inflicted housing shortage (https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives...), which then has cascading effects on every other part of cost of living.
Texas has gone nuts. I visited Dallas, Houston, Galveston from Oregon last year, looking to try out the cheap food that I hear about online because they dOn’T hAvE cOmMuNiSt tAxEs aNd rEgUlAtIoNs, and oh boy did I my hopes get crushed. Everything seemed as expensive, or more, than in my area with regulations, more reasonable worker protections and minimum wage…
Partially this is because of the strength of the dollar. I lived briefly in England in 2013ish and everything was expensive. I went back last year and it seemed cheaper, but only because the dollar has increased in value. Thus, if you've been visiting from England, you're probably seeing a huge increase in price due to the pound weakening.
They're opening Action stores in the US because their CEO has noticed that it's a huge potential market.
Cheap Chinese shit is like mana from heaven for the poor and couple that with Dutch frugality and America is saved.
Just speculation:
The houses got expensive because homeowners wanted housing to be an investment, so they voted for laws that make it harder to build or densify housing.
Cars are expensive because the government puts tariffs on perfectly good imports to protect the American car companies. The American car companies produce garbage, and even the electric car companies like Tesla and Rivian are producing super-high-tech luxury land yachts. The government incentives are also captured to produce huge trucks, and many states don't have regular inspections, so lifted trucks are common. The companies don't want to build and sell small cars because the perception is that a small car is going to get pancaked in a crash with a bigger, heavier car. Gas prices don't matter because the government artificially suppresses them, sometimes with war.
Corn and dairy are cheap because the government subsidizes them at the behest of the corn and dairy lobbies, which use small good ol' boy farmers who don't even exist as their marketing. A lot of the corn goes to ethanol for fuel, even though it's a crappy fuel and an acre of solar panels results in many more miles of EV driving than the same acre of corn ethanol. So you can also get a cheap soda and a cheap cheese pizza, but a lot of the food pipeline is captured by seed monopolies and middle-men. Somehow milk became a bit of a right-wing meme, and it's basically a naturally-occurring dessert, so people love milk even though it's not good for you and not a good way to get nutrients.
> Even food where normally you could walk in a shop
You aren't supposed to walk in America. You're supposed to drive. Don't get me started lol
The UK's the same. The lockdown was a major driver of this.
I don't think you've seen starving people if this is your opinion.
I have never seen someone in america starving.
The US has an enormous land area and the cost of living varies dramatically across it. Intense pockets develop where the high paying jobs are, and everyone wants to cram in there to compete for those jobs, and then they're competing for the housing there, so the prices skyrocket, so the jobs have to pay higher still. Wealthy as the average person may be, the poverty slope is very steep in such places. The SF / Bay Area is the paradigmatic example of this. But when COVID hit, the main attractor of the Bay Area vanished overnight: you didn't have to live there to work those jobs. There was a mass exodus to cheaper places. Texas was at the top of the list of destinations. Austin, though decidedly not the rest of Texas, has a similar culture to SF and so was a natural and comfortable landing spot. So the pressure relief valve on SF is a source of pressure on Austin. But Austin was already suffering growing pains before COVID.
But, all that said, its probably not wise to generalize an experience about Austin to an idea about the US as a whole. At best, you might generalize it to ideas about large US cities.