YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Hmmm how does the rate of new home/apartment builds look?

Americans are experiencing much of the same despite being the richest country in... history. Immigration is a not insignificant part of it but real estate being the only thing most people can finance with leverage has serious footprint as well.

It seems like you haven't read the article at all.

Statistics do not always match our personal experience. But it can still be "too expensive" while way better than it is happening in Portugal, Spain and France.

Thanks for doing it. I love your approach. I'd love to see something similar that looks more deeply at areas that have a much larger housing market available to a particular job due to a really integrated mass transportation network.

I think this is a key detail people often miss. In other words a particular job in a particular neighborhood is great but if it can only be accessed by a small number of people in that neighborhood then it's quite a different dynamic than if a whole metropolis can essentially work and live anywhere within commutable distance.

And there are secondary components of this.. for example access to people who provide child care is easier in a well integrated metropolis than a federated byzantine instead of neighborhoods.. and childcare, school access, secondary care options are all critical components similar to housing hosts for families

> The other €1,100, the part that actually hurts, is invisible.

It's still money out of pocket each month, even if equity increases. I assume it "actually hurts" because it's the majority of the payment.

> This guy lost me here, with the assertion that increased equity "hurts" / vanishes.

I don’t know that the phrasing is great and it’s good to build equity as we both understand, but in terms of your monthly paycheck or ability to afford to do or buy things it seems crazy to me to only measure the interest and not the entire payment.

> Presumably its AI slop? It's certainly a lot of charts / "effort"

Even if is AI slop (and as a policy please stop insinuating something is AI slop) it’s not much worse than the torrent of dumb human only bloggers who are making asinine posts about how the AI bubble is 0vER.

Not sure what is confusing you.

The story is talking about the portion of your monthly budget occupied by housing. If you only "count" the interest on a mortgage payment, then you're ignoring a material amount of money out the door every month, and that would render the whole dataset questionable.

The only honest way to discuss "is housing too expensive?" is to ask "how much do you pay someone on the first of the month to live in your home or apartment?"

This can take several forms, but the majority are either:

* "My rent is $X;" or * "My total mortgage payment, including interest and principal, is $X;" or, in some cases, * "My total mortgage payment, including interest and principal, is $X, and I also have to pay $Y in condo fees / HOA fees / building fees."

That last category might just be an American thing; I have no idea. I just know that many if not most condo developments/buildings have an additional fee you have to pay even if you own your unit outright, and it can be significant.

"there is no obligation to move to major cities" but counterargument is "there is no obligation to create jobs only in major cities". Everyone monetizes this phenomenon, no one is stopping it.

This sort of distribution effect is true in the US too. We have many rust belt cities that are shrinking. You would think that if people and the government cared about affordability then they would take measures to decentralize the jobs and spread them to shrinking cities through a density tax or job creation credit in specific zones, etc.

Unfortunately there isn't a single cause. Some people say we should create more jobs outside of cities. Some say we should build more flats inside cities. Some say we don't actually need to build more at all, but to distribute housing in a better way (some people own two houses, other own none).

I think it's a bit of everything, but if we decentralize too much, it becomes less energy efficient, and energy costs more in Europe compared to a lot of countries. If you decentralize, you need more fuel to get groceries, to go to work, to heat your home etc.

There is a good middle ground. Probably by creating more jobs and flats in cities with 50-200k inhabitants.

In Italy indeed we have a big problem, especially in touristic regions, where houses are almost always priced for non-italian citizens, there are even specialized agencies who try to sell only to non italians (I have two near my house that just focus on Germans, another close by that focus on USA citizens). This is creating a bizzarre effect where most houses in towns are effectively empty for 9-11 months per year while the people actually working and living here cannot buy anything and are forced to live with their parents even longer than the usual

The way to make housing more affordable is to make it more expensive?

Care to explain how?