As a 39-year old in a DINK household in the low six figures, everything in this feels true to me. We have no shot of owning a similar apartment in our neighborhood to what we currently rent.
I’m also skeptical of the “carrots, not sticks” approach. It reminds me of the early years of Obamacare when red states flat-out refused to take the federal dollars for Medicaid expansion. Their citizens suffered, and their leaders paid no political price for it. Never underestimate what a Long Islander is willing to pay in opportunity cost to keep their town/village/hamlet single-family and ethnically homogeneous.
My house now (that no one would call a McMansion) is bigger than the house I grew up in, which is bigger than my grandparents’ house etc. (my grandmother lived there until she died in 2023 at age 94). Similarly, I saw a TikTok about a guy saying people complain about housing prices - but for example, he grew up without air conditioning in his house. Serious question - do these stats take those kinds of things into account? I never know that when I read these articles. Thanks! P.S. Ramit Sethi suggests renting and investing the difference as the mathematically better investment over buying a house if anyone wants to check him out.
This all sounds great but a functional government, including the legislative branch and ideally less fragmentation at the local level, is a precondition to change. I work in infrastructure planning and in my experience even attempts to spur investment, like the IRA, end up imposing even *more* rules and funding dubious and wasteful pet projects.
My hope is that we use this dumpster fire as a bunch of natural experiments to point toward a better, much leaner framework for planning and development. But what we’re actually seeing so far seems to be a will to destroy on one side and a clinging to a sclerotic status quo ante on the other. I hope it doesn’t stay this way.
As a 39-year old in a DINK household in the low six figures, everything in this feels true to me. We have no shot of owning a similar apartment in our neighborhood to what we currently rent.
I’m also skeptical of the “carrots, not sticks” approach. It reminds me of the early years of Obamacare when red states flat-out refused to take the federal dollars for Medicaid expansion. Their citizens suffered, and their leaders paid no political price for it. Never underestimate what a Long Islander is willing to pay in opportunity cost to keep their town/village/hamlet single-family and ethnically homogeneous.
(Edited for typos)
My house now (that no one would call a McMansion) is bigger than the house I grew up in, which is bigger than my grandparents’ house etc. (my grandmother lived there until she died in 2023 at age 94). Similarly, I saw a TikTok about a guy saying people complain about housing prices - but for example, he grew up without air conditioning in his house. Serious question - do these stats take those kinds of things into account? I never know that when I read these articles. Thanks! P.S. Ramit Sethi suggests renting and investing the difference as the mathematically better investment over buying a house if anyone wants to check him out.
This all sounds great but a functional government, including the legislative branch and ideally less fragmentation at the local level, is a precondition to change. I work in infrastructure planning and in my experience even attempts to spur investment, like the IRA, end up imposing even *more* rules and funding dubious and wasteful pet projects.
My hope is that we use this dumpster fire as a bunch of natural experiments to point toward a better, much leaner framework for planning and development. But what we’re actually seeing so far seems to be a will to destroy on one side and a clinging to a sclerotic status quo ante on the other. I hope it doesn’t stay this way.