Housing is flexible. Lots of poor people in some places live in RVs or trailers. It can't be that nice but they have to save a lot of money (or not, because RVs are expensive too). You have tent cities in non-totalitarian cities but their biggest downside is being illegal and therefore everyone who lives there gets periodically ransacked by police and sent to prison. People used to live 10 to an apartment, which also sucks, and were extorted by landlords but if we remove that part it's better than being homeless, but that's illegal too. It's starting to sound like the root of the problem isn't even a shortage of housing, but the fact that cheap housing is illegal.

I may or may not meet your definition as a nimby 28 year old. I am all for housing, just not the type being built in my area. Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom. They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k - and those low income units go away as soon as the building gets sold to another corporation.

I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods. I want real public housing. Housing should be a human right. As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.

> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.

If actual number of houses was the problem, house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline. It's existing houses being repriced upward by speculation that makes them unaffordable.

In Germany we even import people by the millions to keep rents high, among other things, and more than half of them get their housing paid for by taxpayers money.

Agreed, this feels so obviously a housing cost problem to me.

I highly challenge this. For a region, industry booms drive upward movement. And regions that are only held by one industry when it busts build rust belts.

Ideally, you have industry for a region treated like a well balanced investment portfolio. But you have to internalize that balancing investment portfolios is is a protection against downside risks. And it specifically loses against the lucky portfolio that was heavy on something during a boom.

So, the question heavily looms on if the regions we are looking at are diverse enough that they can sustain some downturns.

> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.

Or maybe we do, but just couldn't keep up with the enormous influx of immigrants for a few years a that ended a couple of years ago. The housing costs have risen due to unforeseen demand, not supply.

A big political problem with YIMBYism is that almost by definition it will take years to see the effects.

If you champion it as a politician, there's a very large chance you get all the flack for new developments, but the next guy gets all the credit for affordable housing.

Texas seems to be the only place that actually does it, and I honestly have no explanation for why.

Are they actually NIMBYs or just annoyed? I live in a major metro downtown full of construction and fully support it 100%, but that doesn't mean it doesn't irritate me. Roads and sidewalks are constantly randomly closing. Every bridge across the local highway is currently closed for the next five years. My wife had every tire on a brand new go flat within three months because of nails on the roads. Our houses are all covered in yellow dust because the gas company dug up bedrock 9 years ago, left an enormous pile on a street corner, which then washed away in rain and still covers half the sidewalks nearly a decade later. Most of the housing ends up becoming short-term rentals, which in turn mostly become party houses, so the streets are strewn with broken liquor bottles all the time, cops are getting called in the middle of the night to break up fights with strippers. My car's hatch got destroyed by a city dump truck a few years back and I've been hit while parked two other times by work trucks. All of my power tools were stolen out of my garage by a work crew because the original builders put me on the same radio channel as the guy two doors down, so my garage randomly opened without me knowing about it.

I still support it. We need all the housing we can get. But I do get endlessly irritated by the attitude on Hacker News that no person could ever oppose rebuilding a neighborhood while people still live in it for a good reason and they must all by miserly hoarders trying to pull the ladder up from beneath them.

It's not just about building more in existing areas. It's about making the construction of affordable housing PROFITABLE for developers; which in this world is nearly impossible. Every tax break you give for building anything just results in luxury developments and the builders keeping the breaks as profit.

Also, you can't just build more in these already built up areas. Many of these areas already have strains on public services and just building up without adjusting for electricity consumption, water, schools, roads, transportation, parking, etc is just creating an even larger more expensive headache.

You have to make building towns / hoas in undeveloped areas easier; and the includes high speed transportation to get to the nearest city hub.

We also have to be alot more flexible on what's allowed to be called housing. We should have more places for people to be able to live in their RV's, cars, etc safely.

All of this comes down to the economic reality of what it takes to actually build and maintain a home and piece of property in America. It's not a right to own a home because of that economic reality. The main ingredients are cheap land in an area that has access to electricity, water, streets, infrastructure and access to income. If you can maintain a job for long enough you can pay off the land and cost to build. That is the only viable way to own. Expecting those kind of prices in LA or NY near the beach or downtown is delusional.

We have to also, philosophically, be honest about the way time passes and an intelligent species propagates itself. An frankly we can just look in the wild and see the same dynamics. If a species is successful, then there will be lots of individuals. Those individuals will be drawn to the BEST places to live. There are only so many BEST places to live. Do we really want to turn every place we live into giant high rises? This is an honest question and I think people aren't being entirely honest about their motives / vision for the planet.

I really hate this “we don’t build enough housing” narrative these days, because it implies this is a simple supply and demand problem, which it is not. I see so many progressives repeating this line, apparently not understanding that they are suggesting unfettered capitalism (up zoning…) is the solution.

The fundamental problem is we simultaneously want our housing to be affordable and good investment. It can’t be both.

"…get annoyed whenever there's new construction…"

People "getting annoyed" doesn't prevent construction of affordable housing. I often see NIMBY comments but never see anything to back up the notion.

Greedy developers that want the largest profit on a given plot of land is probably where you should be looking instead. Why build two inexpensive starter homes when you can build one luxury home and make a larger profit? (Never mind that the county gets larger property tax returns on the more expensive homes.)

And yet. They build high end homes and they sell them anyway. So there seem in fact to be buyers out there?

For anecdata, what decade did you borrow in?

I have never asked my parents for money. They have had to resort to trickery (asking for bank details for some passport stuff) to send me money. I hope to be able to do the same for my kid.

> Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.

Rental approvals are ridiculous. We're renting an apartment while we remodel our house.

We've taken out mortgages, refi'd mortgages, and (by now) taken out 3 HELOCs in a row (2 of them subsequently closed as we needed to re-file for more $). While there's a lot of paperwork involved, it feels pretty easy. "Promise to pay us back? Cool!"

Filling out apartment rentals was awful. The rejections, the tiny paper forms asking you about creditors and bank accounts, how much money you owe each of them every month, personal references, "supervisor's phone number", have you ever been to jail, ever failed to pay rent for any reason, previous landlords' contact info. Look, I get that rent is an unsecured obligation (vs a mortgage), but every step of it was gross and accusatory.

Well, that's where the money is.

The 55 and older demographic holds 70% of the wealth in America[1].

The 70 and older demographic holds 31% (almost 1/3) of the wealth in America[2].

1: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/older-americans-control-70-we...

2: https://www.apolloacademy.com/31-percent-of-wealth-owned-by-...

Source: https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...

OK, now I'm questioning the whole thing... it also claims 17% of Boomers reliant on their parents. So, we have some substantial number of 62-80 years olds relying on their 90-100 year old parents? Seems unlikely.

yeah that's ridiculous. I'm 50 and fully support my MIL (she lives in my garage apartment) and my sister fully supports our mom (she lives with my sister). The boomers i know are completely financially dependent on their children.

I think that's an ad that appears at the bottom of most of the articles on "cnbc make it" so I'm not the specific article is shilling it per se.

How so? If you don’t touch the principal you can live off the investment returns forever and so can your descendants.

In reality, almost nobody ever has built "Generational wealth" because it's not a normal thing that happens.

Most people are just trying to survive for tomorrow.

it blows my mind when anyone ever reads $x.99 as $x out loud. i often cant keep myself from muttering "$x+1" and its taken decades of practice to keep myself from looking at them like they have 2 heads

figured it out since i learned to read so it seems so childish to hear adults make it

turns out ppl like me are the weird ones and most people just truncate at the period

You are reading gp’s comment correctly as it was written, but it omits the next line in the source study:

> Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income.

They oversampled in major markets where they work and in high-net-worth populations (who they service), but their claims are for the overall US adult population.

Oversampling like this is pretty routine in survey research. It improves the precision of any subgroup analyses you might want to do, and, to a first approximation, it doesn’t tend to bias the weighted overall-population claims in one direction or another.

I think about it like Google Earth or something. I happen to have much-higher-res imagery of London than of the Cotswolds. That doesn’t mean my view, when zoomed out to “the whole United Kingdom,” is necessarily misleading. It does mean I can additionally make more detailed claims about Piccadilly Circus than about the sheep fields or whatever.

How you define “rely”.

I’ve certainly seen trust fund kids who’s success is anchored on “daddy gave me a sweet job at his company” and others who’d be dead or in prison if it wasn’t for the constant money poured into the legal system by their parents.

> total of 4,375 online interviews

> Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth

Looks like about 1/5 are in the trust fund kid category.

Sure seems like it if you are excluding property.

Europe in general maybe outside of some CEE, DACH, Nordics/Benelux is pretty fucked for the youth. Without help from parents or inherited housing you're fucked. You get American CoL with African wages. Joking of course, but you get the point.

I agree with you - there’s usually some adjustment for sampling bias, and this study says it is matching Census targets. But I had to go three levels down to see that info before I derive any meaning from the number.

My concern is that headlines like “x% of adults do y” get repeated without anyone (sometimes even journalists writing the article) seeing the methodology or nuance behind them. Context matters.

Still, it lowers the resolution of the results if you have to throw out a significant portion of the interviews.

I think you will find that worldwide, family support is more common, not less.

In many cultures multigenerational households are the norm. You may never move out; you raise your kids in the same house your parents raised you.

It's a kind of free insurance: if a bad financial event happens, you're protected against the worst downsides.

If you're from a poor family and break out of poverty, you're still in a worse financial state than someone from a rich family, even holding income and assets constant. You've got to effectively self insure (by taking fewer risks; being more conservative in investments; cutting down on rich people expenses that help with networking) to plan for the worst case scenario. And rich kids don't even realize how much their families' financial status enables and drives their behavior.

And that's not even starting to count financial expenses to take care of aging parents who can't afford to take care of themselves.

I also think that educated and wealthy parents are better able to support their children; from education and financial literacy to real estate and plain money. However, I do think that this support makes the children more independent when they're adults.

I also thought that YC might be younger, but then i remembered that most (successful) founders are 40+. Do we know something about YC demographics? Aside from the fact that it's obvious that a great many of them come from STEM fields. I did not find anything about it.

I've asked myself the same question. And I've come to the conclusion that there's a difference between feeling independent and being independent.

Like: I built a $50 billion business with my own hands. Okay, I got the first $2 billion from my parents. Okay, I got the first $2 billion for every business from my parents until I was successful.

Yeah right? I used to live in nicer/upper area and like everybody got help from their parents for house, if not outright given to them.

It's an interesting question.

We have a group that promotes a "living wage" construct in Tompkins County that pushes the unquestioned assumption that people who are working in the lowest paying jobs can live 100% alone. It's not something I want to challenge directly, but... It reminds me of discussions about the minimum wage in the late 1980s when it was common for teenagers to work at supermarkets and fast food markets. I think the public never really understood how the

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit

was specifically intended to help out people who were raising a family with low incomes that was economically efficient and how there is some logic to people who are working in low income jobs qualifying for food stamps, it is not just a way "Wal-Mart is stealing for us."

e.g. part of "affordability" is keeping costs low and as much leftie folks want to sweep it under the rug there is a lot of internal class conflict in groups such as women: like the Sheryl Sandberg type definitely benefits from exploiting less wealthy women to do child care work for them and child care is basically problematic because the child care worker is not productive enough to put their own children in child care without subsidy and you don't get the Fordist scenario where the auto line worker can easily afford to own one of the cars they make.

I am not sure - in my experience, I've observed that the more money you have the less people care about relations (their social circle becomes smaller) and healthy co-dependency reduces. This is more true of the young. Human nature tends to be selfish, which is not conducive for a healthy society. Young people becoming financially-independent at an early age may negate opportunities for self-introspection on that - without the struggle to earn a good living, many fail to understand the value of money and good relationships, which often lead to costly and immature decisions.

No, it mentioned 816 out of more than 4500 respondents had net worth over $1M.

That's quite different to your claim.

Agreed. I think it's wild that such a position seems relatively common in the US (though at a surface level I understand that it's just a cultural difference).

The only situation in which I would consider charging my kids 'rent' is, if as adults, they were being irresponsible with their life, e.g. being a NEET and not helping out around the house. Even then I would hold the money in a separate account to gift back to them later.

I think it's parents' role to always be a source of almost unconditional comfort and security for their kids. Though I also think that this is unsustainable unless kids also do their best to maintain and respect that relationship.

He's paying a fraction of market rate rent and has saved a lot of money.

He's eating food out of the communal pool and it's a running gag at local restaurants that he eats two entrees. I think it's fair that he contributes something, like he is working, except for this summer when he said "take this job and shove it" because he was working for a crew where the foreman was twice his age but didn't have any sense for construction. Instead, he's doing a lot of work around the farm to fix things up, some of which is stuff we need and some of which is stuff he wants.

He expects to inherit the farm, will probably move to our other house if and when he is ready to co-habitate as opposed to getting on the housing ladder in the conventional way.

I think this is driven by both culture and the grade of economic development of the country you live in. In my home country of Italy, it would be considered kinda crazy to charge your kids rent. There are very practical reasons behind it: high youth unemployment, low salaries when you're just starting your career. Rental apartments are also really expensive in big cities and you just can't afford one without getting a roommate (or a partner with a job). So people end up staying at home longer to save money for a down payment, and the parents are totally fine with it.

I live in the US now, and here, where it is (used to be?) easy to land a well-paying job fresh out of school, it is considered quite common to charge your children rent if they decide to stay at home. My feeling is that staying at home in the USA carries quite some stigma for both the kid and their parents. American culture puts a lot of value in self-reliance and financial independence, and the general idea is that you failed as a parent if your kids aren't able to afford their own place.

(I also have a feeling all of the above is changing dramatically, given the current cost of living crisis in America.)

In my house the >8 years old the kids start paying rent. They get paid for normal house work (minimum wage). Rent is ~$300/month. I pay the kid minimum wage for chores because that is work and work should be rewarded. They pay me rent. That rent and other expenses are ~80% of their pay. Some must go to savings and "taxes". They have to keep books as well. The rest is theirs.

I know other fathers that charge their adult children rent, keep the money, and then gift it to them at the wedding or to help them buy a house.

According to that 17% of boomers+ are dependent on their parents. Just looking at boomers, that is around 70 on average. How many people that age even have parents still alive, let alone financially depend on them?

> $350/month [ 2000 ]

> $1500/month [ 2026 ]

CPI inflation would suggest that the current cost ought to be about $692. So if it really costs $1500 to cover the things you've mentioned (noticeabley absent: student loans, health insurance, car payments) then either our society is deeply fucked or your list has changed or your estimates are wrong or your memory is wrong or all of the above.

Cell phone companies incentivize this, though. It's a better deal for both the parents and children (often 50%) with no difference in service

theres plenty of people making 6 figures at 25 that still have their parents pay their phone bill because they get a family discount. i dont get your point

That's not what your linked article says.

37% of survey respondants say they would need to use a credit card to cover a $400 expense. They wouldn't be destitute, they just don't immediately have the cash.

It also cites another study that put the number much lower, at 8%.

So you have no objections to wars. I see.

News lie regularly and I happen to hold the opinion for a while.

Studies also lie, another entity that lies regularly is government! All of them!

When you live long enough you learn to trust your eyes not your ears.

As far as the western civilization goes - it's being killed off. Pay attention.

I really hope nothing like that happens to China and Japan. I am glad that their respective languages are such good natural barriers.

Yup, and don't even get me started about what they're doing to the frogs!!!!11 (hint: it's very s*nful)