alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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I'm not sure this is really true anymore and it ignores the reality on the ground of "cheap areas". Often times cheap areas are underserved in a way that once you require or depend on a service that is baked into other higher cost of living areas your life becomes much more expensive than if you'd simply lived in a high cost of living area. There are many examples of this but hospitals in rural areas are one of my favorite examples. There used to be many of these but many people didn't realize they were all (or mostly) subsidized capital ventures. Many of them are closing now that the subsidy has ended. So, is that county land cheap? Yes, but when you have an incident where time matters your likelihood of being cooked goes up precipitously.
In general it’s bad to generalize, but the article says that housing prices across the US increased 50% over the past 5 years.
> 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.
I'm sceptical that not generalizing will be the smart move. The world is more and more connected these days. A person in Rural Town A and a person in Urban Area B and a person in Whole Other Side of Planet C all have access to many of the same goods and services, and almost all the same information as each other. Price and supply information and news from areas are all available instantly in contexts far removed from where they originated, and are having ripple-effects in areas beyond where they'd be logically applicable because communication is so cheap and low-friction. I think we need to generalize more, because those who set prices are definitely going to be generalizing and trying to pull prices towards the highest possible profit margin. Only commodities get supply-and-demand price cuts. Everything else gets inflation for any valid reason and deflation for no valid reasons.
Yup, you are correct to not generalize, because Austin is one of the cheapest "cities" in America.
You still don't expect people to go hungry in a first world developed country. Nor did people go hungry or homeless at this scale before in recent American, British or even broadly Western history. Yet here we are, and the UK is no exception either.
At least you can be guaranteed for certain you won't be going hungry in Istanbul, Warsaw or Amman.
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Then why did houses used to be affordable even in those dense regions with high paying jobs? People act as though housing has always been prohibitively expensive in city centers but it hasn't. My dad bought a house in Boulder, CO of all places easily in the 90s. And of course he made a killing off of it because the housing market went completely insane over the next two decades. I now make more money than he ever did and can't even dream of buying the same house.