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Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
161–170 of 359 posts
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting married is expensive? How so?
The legal fees themselves aren't very expensive. If you can resist the societal pressures to have a large and extravagant wedding with many guests, then even the wedding itself isn't particularly expensive. The main cost of getting married is getting divorced. Legal fees add up a lot here, and the division of assets is costly. Now, you could argue your marriage won't end in divorce, but 60% of marriages in the US do.
That division of assets is cheaper if you married someone who earns as much as you.
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
This stage of the demographic transition is a huge problem, IMO. The more I think about it, the more it seems like a ratchet (as in, it only moves in one direction): Basically, two incomes are useful, so both people in a relationship pursue careers. Now they have more money to compete on the housing market. This seems like a good move, so others follow suit. At first this is largely a win for people who pursue this r…
Sane zoning laws would be much easier and do a lot more to ease the burden on people (I currently live in an “OMG no high rises! Won’t someone think of the neighborhood character!?” city and the rent is ridiculous). We just have to have the political will to change them, which unfortunately means angering very powerful monied interests, including Betty and Edgar who really love their now-valued-at-$500,000 house next…
I'm living in California and I have this idea for a zoning law: if a residential plot of land sells for more than $X million per acre, it is automatically up zoned to higher density. That way if the market says a location is really valuable more people get to live there.
I've theory-crafted other potential policies like "require any increase in office build density to be matched by increased residential density". That seems more potentially game-able than simply increasing density of properties the market had determined are valuable.
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#164From previous: " In nations in the West, an important limiting factor is the ability to get one’s own apartment. That is, the ratio of average male wage to average rent. In the USA, the happiest year for this ratio was 1958, when people were spending 22% of their income on rent, on average. Not by coincidence, this was the peak year of the Baby Boom. In some sense, it was the best year in history to be a young white…
In pretty much every analysis involving housing costs, I try to mention that percentage of income spent on housing is not a great metric. A better metric is absolute income minus housing costs. All else being equal, I would gladly earn $1 million per year and spend 75% of it on rent, because that remaining 25% would be a heck of a lot of money. I doubt this metric would significantly change the conclusions of this ar…
And that remaining 25% would help you pay for rent in retirement... How?
Not everyone wants to move to Ohio to retire.
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
You won’t, because you were smart and rented instead. :)
If you were smarter you'd have commuted in from the suburbs and banked the money for retirement.
Spending your day commuting and living in a car dependent hell hole is smarter, just because you can retire a bit sooner? What alternative universe has HN transformed into?
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
In some alternate reality where everyone's goals and chosen locale are identically that of their parents, yes.
In theory, if your goals and chosen locale are not identical to your parents, you can sell their house for cash and use the cash to buy a house in your chosen locale. In practice, a large percentage of the population are getting screwed because a.) their parents lost their home in the foreclosure crisis, the bank repossessed it, and it got sold to a private investor b.) their parents had inadequate savings and needed…
Don’t forget people who:
- don’t have parents
- are estranged from their parents
- would never accept anything from their parents, even after death
- whose parents never escaped poverty for long enough to buy property
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#167There's correlation here, but likely not causation. The real underlying cause in the drop in birth rates is an increase in working hours, an increase in commuting times, an increase in college tuition and health care costs, and also an increase in divorce rates. These days, even getting married is an expensive financial arrangement. Having kids is just another layer on that. Housing prices have increased because of c…
Odd that you can see a correlation but claim no causation and then list nearly half a dozen reasons why birth rates a falling. Is it possible that you could add rising house costs to your list and that, as with list things, a number of factors fees into falling birth rates?
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you were smarter you'd have commuted in from the suburbs and banked the money for retirement.
Spending your day commuting and living in a car dependent hell hole is smarter, just because you can retire a bit sooner? What alternative universe has HN transformed into?
For NYC it can be an easy 30-45 minute train ride where you are free to occupy your time with something productive.
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
> All else being equal, I would gladly earn $1 million per year and spend 75% of it on rent Ah, so you want to live in San Francisco
There IS a reason why rent in high cost areas are so, well, costly. If you go to NYC or SF and make 400k/year after tax, who cares if housing costs you 300k out of that. Especially if you're buying, in which case you can get part of your money back once you sell.
Yea and the majority of people don’t make anywhere near 400k. You still need a huge low paid workforce to get things running. Firemen, police, teacher, retail and grocery workers, cleaners, bus drivers, plumbers and the like.
Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you square that with somewhere like Denmark with it's equally abysmal yet they have way less working hours and a large social safety net?
I've visited Denmark before as an American :) It's a pretty nice place-- sure there are pretty generous payments to most members of society, but there is still some petty crime and different social classes and lack of major mobility. I am not precisely sure if they have less working hours. I mean, anecdotally, I don't know any Danes who have 10 minute commutes working 4 days a week, 6 hours a day or something like th…
The average distance from home to work for a Dane i ~21km (13 miles). Most Danes have a regulated average work week of 37 hours (unless otherwise is specified in the contract), and we have strong unions.