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Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

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Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#241

Post by iainmerrick »

Swizec wrote: post #212
iainmerrick wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you commute by train it’s not all necessarily wasted time. You can read, play games, listen to podcasts, etc. I always read many more books when I commuted than when I didn’t commute. I find myself making new year’s resolutions to read more. But it was easy when I had the commute as a forcing function. (Not having internet on the subway probably helped...)

If you don’t think reading books is valuable enough to do when you aren’t commuting, is it really valuable to you? Or are you just doing the best you can to salvage a shitty situation? (I audiobook when running so I’m no better)

I think it is valuable, I’m just bad at organising and prioritising my spare time!

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#242

Post by mkane848 »

nostrademons wrote: post #135
defterGoose wrote: post #115

Earlier 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…

You know some families have more than one kid, right?

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#243

Post by usrusr »

usrusr wrote: post #191
baddox wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Because the ratio is what makes people aim low or high. If it takes 75% to have a house, is very attractive to live in something smaller and pocket the delta for fun and games (and/or stash it away for a downpayment later in life). High wage/rent areas will only exaggerate this, since many of the luxuries in question are not coupled to local markets (gadgets, vacations, stressing away for living in a cheaper place) I…

Exaggerated example: in a high wage/rent area, I'd rather have a boat than an extra bedroom. In a low wage/rent area, I'd rather have an extra bedroom than a slightly bigger TV.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#244

Post by dexen »

baddox wrote: post #37
lkrubner wrote: post #20

From 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…

You are missing one important factor: prices of locally rendered services will factor in the high housing costs of the service provider workers, and of service establishments. I.e., all the services will be significantly more expensive just as well.

And even goods' prices will reflect the high rent costs, given that stocking & sale of good requires[1] employment of local workers, and purchase/rental of local commercial space.

-- [1] even the automated, self-service stores require certain amount of human work as of now.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#245

Post by zip1234 »

kanox wrote: post #13

Correlation is not causation. Low birth rates and high home values are both also highly correlated to education and women in the workforce and high income and economic growth and trendy hipster bars and many other nice things. Picking just two items and claiming that "people don't have children because homes are expensive" is not very enlightening at all.

In my area, the place where the highest home prices are is where the empty nesters buy because they have the cash to do so. Obviously, they won't be having more children. An effect as simple as that could explain this effect.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#247

Post by CalRobert »

sien wrote: post #72
nomocrypto wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is bang on. Looking at the graph look where Harris County (Houston) and Dallas are. If the graphs were plotted with increase in population against the change in fertility then those places would be outliers. Texas zoning and tax on houses work. The funny thing about housing prices is that a state in the US has handled house prices so well with an economy that is doing well but Texas is often ignored in these dis…

Texas has pretty restrictive laws about parking minimums. It would be illegal to build a pleasant neighborhood (for my definition of pleasant) in Texas.

Also, negative externalities of Texas' built environment (lung disease, cancer, potentially more autism near motorways(still early stages of research) dead people on roads, inability to travel or perform basic tasks for those who can't or prefer not to drive, being impoverished by your automobile, and the potential collapse of global civilization due to climate change) are not priced in, so often the neighbors or the rest of the world are paying for those houses.

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#248

Post by murph-almighty »

throwawaymath wrote: post #237
AstralStorm wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something productive that can be done in a car or train you mean. Not, say: - Being with your kids, spouse or helping them out to school or work - Housekeeping - Working out - Doing anything that requires undisturbed attention

To your last point: in NYC it's pretty easy to do things requiring "undisturbed attention" on a 45 minute express Metro North train into the city from the suburbs. It's a very different experience from the subway. As for the other three, I guess I could say that I'm not sure it's realistic to try and budget your time so efficiently that a 30-45 minute commute is intolerable. Many people have commutes for which that's…

I'm one of those 30-45 minute margin-of-error folks- I'd move into Hoboken or Brookyln for a 45 minute commute in two seconds!

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#249

Post by murph-almighty »

Swizec wrote: post #212
iainmerrick wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you commute by train it’s not all necessarily wasted time. You can read, play games, listen to podcasts, etc. I always read many more books when I commuted than when I didn’t commute. I find myself making new year’s resolutions to read more. But it was easy when I had the commute as a forcing function. (Not having internet on the subway probably helped...)

If you don’t think reading books is valuable enough to do when you aren’t commuting, is it really valuable to you? Or are you just doing the best you can to salvage a shitty situation? (I audiobook when running so I’m no better)

I always find other more pertinent/alarming things I need to do at home and the forced lack of internet makes me focus more than I normally would.

Admittedly this doesn't say great things about my attention span...

Re: Birth Rates Dropped Most in U.S. Counties Where Home Prices Grew Most

#250

Post by Clubber »

gnarbarian wrote: post #183
vkou wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can then move to a flyover state in the mid-west, and buy a palace for the $100,000/year you were stashing away.

This is the future. Silicon valley rent problems are a network optimization problem best solved by pushing resources to the edge of the graph.

Ya it has to be. We have so many square miles of underutilized cheap land between the costs it's crazy. The federal government owns around 60-90% of the land in the western states too. If only there was a way to communicate without being face to face.
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