Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

strongtowns.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 564 posts

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#161

Post by RivieraKid »

nivenkos wrote: post #14
fsloth wrote: post #8

Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can c…

The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though. Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD). The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. And housing has become a "store of value" against inflation for investors, driving up prices and becoming a retirement fund for landlords and home…

Similar prices here in Prague...

I think that the reason is similar to why stocks have appreciated so much - long-term interest rates have dropped as a result of QE.

What central banks usually do is that they buy short-term bonds to affect short-term rates. QE means that they buy long-term bonds to affect long-term rates.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#162

Post by quantumofalpha »

nivenkos wrote: post #14
fsloth wrote: post #8

Fantastic cultural divide. This is one of the reasons why I read HN. Most of Europe is more or less walkable - one reason is that the largest urban centers predate cars, but intentional design AF (anno ford) is also a factor. I can bike or walk everywhere, and the only reason I have a car is that it makes grocery shopping much, much easier. I am not very green or anything, I just like to keep things simple. You can c…

The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though. Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD). The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. And housing has become a "store of value" against inflation for investors, driving up prices and becoming a retirement fund for landlords and home…

> The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world.

With falling fertility rates, natural population growth in the west is about zero today. If not even (going to be) negative.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#163

Post by herbst »

nivenkos wrote: post #81
dr_dshiv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you use price per square meter to compare European housing to American housing, Europe seems super expensive. But, if you compare by the functional space (# bedrooms), Europe is cheap. I moved from San Diego to Amsterdam and was very happy to find 3-4 bedroom apartments to buy (the bank accepted my self employment income and gave a 1.6% interest rate). Apartments are well designed so you don’t need as much space.…

I guess you're on a US salary as a contractor? There's no way I could afford more than 2 bedrooms in the city as a senior engineer, and even that's a push.

To be fair for me (Swiss and self employed) the renting prices in beautiful places like Haarlem or Rotterdam appeared really tempting. Nice big apartments nearby the city for less than $1000/m are basically unheard of in Switzerland, or Austria for that matter.

No idea what locals earn there, but from a outside perspective it appeared really affordable if you ignore the high taxes :3

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#164

Post by nivenkos »

CalRobert wrote: post #153
nivenkos wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you're on a US salary as a contractor? There's no way I could afford more than 2 bedrooms in the city as a senior engineer, and even that's a push.

This might be useful to you - trimodal nature of comp in NL. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

In my experience, it's bullshit. The author must be conflating staff positions with "senior".

I was paid 75k as an L5 engineer at Amazon, that's like intermediate senior (two levels down from Staff). So maybe one level up you'd get 100-110k?

I've never seen salaries anywhere close to that article. Even contractors might pay $150k (and then you have to pay your own taxes, insurance, etc. out of that).

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#167

Post by pornel »

matkoniecz wrote: post #99
nivenkos wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though. Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD). The main issue is that there is just nowhere near enough housing to keep up with population increases, seemingly anywhere in the Western world. And housing has become a "store of value" against inflation for investors, driving up prices and becoming a retirement fund for landlords and home…

> The walkability comes at the cost of tiny housing though. Is it really obligatory? I know that it is often correlated, but it is possible to build apartment tower with decently sized apartments, in a walkable neighbourhood. Maybe it tends to be more profitable to split apartments into smaller one? While splitting house plots into smaller being less profitable and resulting in this effect?

Walkability is highly correlated with population density. Dense walkable neighborhoods are more attractive. These two together make housing small and expensive.

Walkable neighborhoods need destinations you can walk to. Businesses need a minimum number of customers to be viable, so the denser the neighborhood the more variety of destinations it will have.

To avoid cars taking up the space, it's necessary to have high-frequency public transport, and that also requires high population density to be viable.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#168

Post by ptr »

nivenkos wrote: post #92
ascar wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Like here in Stockholm even 60m2 is getting very pricy (~350-450k USD). Isn't that still really cheap compared to NY or Silicon Valley? Rising housing prices has more to do with pressure to move to a select few cities rather than walkability or rising population. E.g. in Germany housing in Munich, Hamburg or Frankfurt costs multiples of housing in smaller eastern German cities.

Yeah, but the salaries are much, much lower. SF: ~$167k USD p.a. - https://www.builtinsf.com/salaries/dev-engineer/software-eng... Stockholm: 45k SEK per month = ~$63k USD p.a. - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/stockholm-software-engine... Taxes are also much higher (especially if your employer has good health insurance coverage in the US, so the added benefits are less). Like I pay an average 40% rate on income p…

For software engineers, there are employers in Stockholm that pay much more than 63k USD p.a. A good income combined with the low mortgage interest rate (~1.4%) and the basically tax-free investment accounts (ISK/KF) make Stockholm a pretty good place to make money in over time.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#169

Post by maxerickson »

Gwypaas wrote: post #124
nivenkos wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but the salaries are much, much lower. SF: ~$167k USD p.a. - https://www.builtinsf.com/salaries/dev-engineer/software-eng... Stockholm: 45k SEK per month = ~$63k USD p.a. - https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/stockholm-software-engine... Taxes are also much higher (especially if your employer has good health insurance coverage in the US, so the added benefits are less). Like I pay an average 40% rate on income p…

Don't forget the 31.42% payroll tax that's hidden from your salary but a tax right on it. A salary of 50k SEK costs the employer 65.7k SEK on their books, which is what actually matters. The actual marginal taxrate flowing from your employers books at that level is somewhere up at 75%-80%, not even counting sales tax when you use the money.

The US has a 7.5% employer side payroll tax up to some limit.

Effective marginal tax rates in the US are higher than they look at a glance.

Re: Our self imposed scarcity of nice places

#170

Post by FeepingCreature »

stavros wrote: post #52
crooked-v wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 kg seems like a lot for walkable grocery shopping unless you're intentionally getting a bunch of bulk staples all at once.

It's not every time, but when we need water I get two sixpacks (for balance) and those are 18kg alone. Not that there's anything wrong with tap water, but eeeh.

Tap water plus SodaStream is the life for me.
Post reply on HN