Stuck In Your Parents’ Basement? Don’t Blame The Economy

[garbon]

I don't even understand the utility of such arguments. You can't afford to live in NYC? Or DC? Or SF? Or San Diego?

Tough shit. Live somewhere else. There are plenty of places with much more reasonable real estate than the prime locations in the USA. That is why they are prime, because lots of people want to live there. Go live somewhere else, and if living in NYC is your life's dream, then work your ass off to make it happen, or deal with living in a hovel with your 6 best friends.

In either case, it isn't evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with young professionals ability to afford a place to live that they cannot live in the most desirable and expensive real estate in the world.

If you're a professional, you kinda have to go where the jobs are.  You can't just move to some rural town in Mississippi, and then check out the local jobs market for software engineers.

But then you can always choose to live somewhere in the metro area and not the city proper. Rents still might be higher than other parts of the country, but those will be affordable for young professionals. So get a roomate and split 2 bedroom in Jersey City rather than a 1 bedroom in the Village.

[DGuller]

I don't even understand the utility of such arguments. You can't afford to live in NYC? Or DC? Or SF? Or San Diego?

Tough shit. Live somewhere else. There are plenty of places with much more reasonable real estate than the prime locations in the USA. That is why they are prime, because lots of people want to live there. Go live somewhere else, and if living in NYC is your life's dream, then work your ass off to make it happen, or deal with living in a hovel with your 6 best friends.

In either case, it isn't evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with young professionals ability to afford a place to live that they cannot live in the most desirable and expensive real estate in the world.

If you're a professional, you kinda have to go where the jobs are.  You can't just move to some rural town in Mississippi, and then check out the local jobs market for software engineers.

But then you can always choose to live somewhere in the metro area and not the city proper. Rents still might be higher than other parts of the country, but those will be affordable for young professionals. So get a roomate and split 2 bedroom in Jersey City rather than a 1 bedroom in the Village.

Yes, and people are doing that, if they can't or won't live with their parents.  But rents tend to catch up a lot faster than you'd think.  Good luck finding anything affordable anywhere near a PATH station.  My boss is looking for a place in Jersey City right now, and he still can't find one because they're all too expensive for his budget.  I myself am about to hand in my lease renewal, for about $2700/month rate for a one-bedroom apartment.

Yes, of course you can make it work.  Young people aren't starving out in the streets, are they?  We're discussing quality of life here, not survival.  In my book, neither living with your parents nor with roommates qualifies as a solution with high quality of life.

[garbon]

Oh I wouldn't want to live with roommates either but many people I know seem to get a long fine with it. Sort of extends the whole college lifestyle into ones 20s.

[Berkut]

I don't even understand the utility of such arguments. You can't afford to live in NYC? Or DC? Or SF? Or San Diego?

Tough shit. Live somewhere else. There are plenty of places with much more reasonable real estate than the prime locations in the USA. That is why they are prime, because lots of people want to live there. Go live somewhere else, and if living in NYC is your life's dream, then work your ass off to make it happen, or deal with living in a hovel with your 6 best friends.

In either case, it isn't evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with young professionals ability to afford a place to live that they cannot live in the most desirable and expensive real estate in the world.

If you're a professional, you kinda have to go where the jobs are.  You can't just move to some rural town in Mississippi, and then check out the local jobs market for software engineers.

I am rather aware of that, having been in exactly that position myself. I had offers from places in DC and SF, and declined them because I had 23 other offers from places where the cost of living was much more reasonable, and hence my overall standard of living would be better.

You are pitching this like the options for young professionals is NYC, SF, and rural Mississippi. That is obviously just not true, and even you know that. So why are you persisting in this train of thought?

There are 300+ million people living in this country. Most of them don't live in NYC or SF. Indeed, very few of them do compared to not living in those places. The problems of NYC and SF are not the problems of the entire country.

[Berkut]

I don't even understand the utility of such arguments. You can't afford to live in NYC? Or DC? Or SF? Or San Diego?

Tough shit. Live somewhere else. There are plenty of places with much more reasonable real estate than the prime locations in the USA. That is why they are prime, because lots of people want to live there. Go live somewhere else, and if living in NYC is your life's dream, then work your ass off to make it happen, or deal with living in a hovel with your 6 best friends.

In either case, it isn't evidence that there is something fundamentally wrong with young professionals ability to afford a place to live that they cannot live in the most desirable and expensive real estate in the world.

If you're a professional, you kinda have to go where the jobs are.  You can't just move to some rural town in Mississippi, and then check out the local jobs market for software engineers.

But then you can always choose to live somewhere in the metro area and not the city proper. Rents still might be higher than other parts of the country, but those will be affordable for young professionals. So get a roomate and split 2 bedroom in Jersey City rather than a 1 bedroom in the Village.

Yes, and people are doing that, if they can't or won't live with their parents.  But rents tend to catch up a lot faster than you'd think.  Good luck finding anything affordable anywhere near a PATH station.  My boss is looking for a place in Jersey City right now, and he still can't find one because they're all too expensive for his budget.  I myself am about to hand in my lease renewal, for about $2700/month rate for a one-bedroom apartment.

Yes, of course you can make it work.  Young people aren't starving out in the streets, are they?  We're discussing quality of life here, not survival.  In my book, neither living with your parents nor with roommates qualifies as a solution with high quality of life.

That is a problem with particular geographic areas where the cost of living is very high.

You don't have to live there. There are jobs elsewhere. You *want* to live there, and I have zero sympathy, and certainly do not feel that society or the state has any responsibility to fund you living there because you want to live there, but don't want to have to compete with others who might be better able to afford it.

This is not a real problem, just a fake one invented because of the entitlement attitude of people who think they have some kind of right to live in some particular place they want to live, and it isn't fair that other people with more resources are willing to outspend them for the right to live in those desirable places.

[Berkut]

I don't know. I mean I look at SF, which was already quite expensive, when I moved there in '07 and there's no way that as a recent college grad, I'd be able to afford to live there with anything similar to the standard of living I had then. I think it is a problem to have exciting, vibrant cities that have been (within less than a decade) priced out of the range of young professionals.

Why is that a problem?

I went through the same thing back in 2000, and made a very conscious decision to move away from the Bay area because I felt I could have a better overall standard of living in northern Colorado. I *loved* the Bay area, but that is because it was awesome. Well - lots of other people felt the same way, so they all moved there and competed for finite real estate.

If that results in the prices becoming so high that young, starting out professionals cannot afford to live there, then how is that a "problem"? That is just how markets work. If the result is that people don't live there, then demand will decline, and prices will stabilize.

Again, this is NOT a problem with the prices of housing in the USA, it is a fake problem with this high price of housing in the most desirable places to live within the USA. This is fundamentally no different than me saying there is a problem with the price of new cars in America, because there is no way I can afford a Mercedes S-class, and by golly, I really, really want one!

Not any major boo-hoo, this is a major problem - but distressing nonetheless.

Yeah, not being able to afford everything we would like is sometimes distressing.

[Berkut]

Again, this is NOT a problem with the prices of housing in the USA, it is a fake problem with this high price of housing in the most desirable places to live within the USA. This is fundamentally no different than me saying there is a problem with the price of new cars in America, because there is no way I can afford a Mercedes S-class, and by golly, I really, really want one!

[/quote]

...and the real issue with bringing this up is that it might be obscuring an actual issue.

To extend my analogy, there might be a good argument to be made that new car prices have become too high to be affordable - that the base level cars, say due to environmental and safety regulations, have become so expensive that they are no longer affordable.

You could have a discussion about what is a reasonable price for a new Honda Civic, or Toyota Camry, or Ford or whatever.

But someone coming into the discussion bitching about how much the latest BMW costs, or how the lease on the newest Lexus is out of their price range, creates a sense of a fake "problem" that most people are going to just say "Bah, elitists whining about how much it costs to live in Manhattan or Marin County? Don't care".

Maybe there is a real problem about the cost of real estate and housing in the United States. But it won't be illuminated by a few people wishing they could only afford to live in some of the most expensive places to live in the entire world.

There are plenty of jobs outside of the Bay area and NYC. You don't have to live there. Basic market economics tells us that, and you see it happen. HP had a giant plant in Ft. Collins, CO partially because Palo Alto got so stupidly expensive to live that it made no sense anymore.

[Grey Fox]

But what if you are a teacher in a prime location schools & you can't afford to live where you teach? Like Silicon Valley has trouble with.

[Berkut]

Yes, of course you can make it work.  Young people aren't starving out in the streets, are they?  We're discussing quality of life here, not survival.  In my book, neither living with your parents nor with roommates qualifies as a solution with high quality of life.

Clearly, however, it is a higher quality of life than the alternative.

It is worth it to people who want to live in NYC to get a roommate because working and living in NYC with a roommate is better for them then working in Kansas City without one. They are maximizing, or trying to maximize, their own quality of life.

You choose to spend 2700/month to live where you want to live. You don't HAVE to live there. You could move somewhere and pay a lot less, and use that extra money to improve other aspects of your life. Or you choose to live where you do at the price you do because you feel that it is worth it.

It is just that simple.

If there is a problem with the prices of housing in NYC and the metro area, it is a specific problem for NYC. Maybe it makes sense for NYC to do something about it, maybe not. But it has nothing to do with the overall problem of the cost of housing in the US, since NYC is a nearly unique situation that has no resemblance to the vast, vast majority of the rest of the country, where housing costs as a percentage of average income is radically different.

[Berkut]

But what if you are a teacher in a prime location schools & you can't afford to live where you teach? Like Silicon Valley has trouble with.

Then that is a problem with Silicon Valley, that they need to figure out how to solve.

It would be foolish to bring that up in a discussion about teacher salaries and the cost of housing for them in general, since it is a very specific example that has no real relevance to the overall issue.

Meaning that a solution to the problem in Silicon Valley would almost certainly be a terrible way to solve it elsewhere, since the forces involved are completely different.

[Grey Fox]

The overall issues is that salaries are too low & that is relevant in any & all discussions.

[Berkut]

The overall issues is that salaries are too low & that is relevant in any & all discussions.

I don't disagree of course, but I think if you enter that discussion by talking about how you can't afford to live in Manhattan on your own on a just graduated from college salary, you make it easy to dismiss the entire topic.

Of course you can't afford to live in Manhattan, and you couldn't regardless of whether or not salaries kept up over the last 20 years.

I couldn't afford to live in a home with my new wife and likely family in Palo Alto, which is why I didn't accept any of the 3 positions I was offered there out of college. Nor could I live in the DC area in the manner I wanted (i.e. not driving an hour each way to work) which I why I didn't accept the positions I was offered at Lockheed Martin, even though they sounded really interesting.

Hell, I didn't even interview with Lucasfilms, because someone I knew who graduated the year before and took a job with them was talking about how much he loved living in an apartment with 4 other Lucasfilm new hires who were all having a blast working there and living that kind of life.

We all make choices about what is important to us, and I don't think it is a problem that the world prices real estate based on how desirable it is to live there, which results in some places being exorbitantly expensive - even too expensive for many people to live there. So go live somewhere else.

If there is a problem (and I think there is a problem) that even in other places the salaries have not kept up with living expenses, then THAT is a much more interesting problem than some individual not being able to live in some of the most expensive real estate in the world because they really like it there.

[Grey Fox]

I, uh, agree.

[garbon]

But what if you are a teacher in a prime location schools & you can't afford to live where you teach? Like Silicon Valley has trouble with.

Then that is a problem with Silicon Valley, that they need to figure out how to solve.

It would be foolish to bring that up in a discussion about teacher salaries and the cost of housing for them in general, since it is a very specific example that has no real relevance to the overall issue.

Meaning that a solution to the problem in Silicon Valley would almost certainly be a terrible way to solve it elsewhere, since the forces involved are completely different.

I'm not sure I agree. I don't know I'd say that the issues of housing and affordability that are facing SF, NYC and London are all that different. Sure they are different from issues facing Kansas but then the population of Kansas is only larger than that of SF. The issues facing those major cities (living expenses not covered by salaries) have a larger impact because there is a larger population of people effected.

And that's not to mention that while you are extolling all these middling places, one doesn't really have the same level of job opportunity there. I guess it is, as you say, about life trade-offs but still seems bad from my point of view to have the negatives piling up for cities. Going to be very painful for all till it gets better (aka people become more willing to slink off into suburbs/middling areas).

[Berkut]

The negatives are not piling up "for cities" they are piling up for highly desirable places to live. Silicon Valley is not urban at all, for example. Certainly not urban in the sense of NYC or London.

There are great places to live, and lots of people want to live there, and hence it is expensive. So what? That is a relative issue, not an absolute one - there will always be places that cost more to live because more people want to live there. That is not a problem.

It is a problem when the *average* places to live are difficult to live in with *average* salaries.