from Hacker News

War on the Young

by socalnate1 on 4/19/24, 6:19 PM with 10 comments

• by UniverseHacker on 4/19/24, 6:37 PM

  As a recent transplant to the SF Bay Area, I looked at sale prices and property taxes for the houses in my neighborhood. We are a dual six figure income family and are squeezed tight to live here, while neighbors that have been here a while have about 1/10th the housing cost for essentially identical housing. It takes 4-6x the income to move here and stay now as it did a few decades ago.

  I don’t know what the solution is, because if policies were changed so I wasn’t effectively heavily subsidizing my poorer and older neighbors, they would be kicked out.

  But it seems weird to make 4-6x what my neighbors do, and barely able to afford to live like they do, basically just because I’m younger. For millennials, my partner and I are the “lucky” ones, nobody else I know my age could even consider renting a low end single family home in the bay as we are just barely able to do. It’s weird that the people with kids are barely able to rent small apartments, while the 4 bedroom homes are mostly occupied by 1-2 retirees, with dusty bedrooms that nobody has entered since the grandkids last visited.

• by MattGaiser on 4/19/24, 6:51 PM

  > you’ll be better off than your parents were. For the first time in our nation’s history, this is no longer true.

  This claim is disputed. The Economist argues that this generation is on track to be the best off.

  https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...

• by shrimp_emoji on 4/19/24, 7:07 PM

  The whom?