Downward mobility is almost entirely caused by housing costs, which are a self-inflicted problem. We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.

I live in an expensive area and I'm always shocked by how many of my friends who cannot afford to buy a home (or even a condo) are NIMBYs. These are people in their 20s through 40s who have been earning since college, can't afford to buy, yet get annoyed whenever there's new construction that "alters the character of the neighborhood". Talk about false consciousness. I can at least understand people who own a home feeling this way.

I may or may not meet your definition as a nimby 28 year old. I am all for housing, just not the type being built in my area. Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom. They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k - and those low income units go away as soon as the building gets sold to another corporation.

I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods. I want real public housing. Housing should be a human right. As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.

> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.

If actual number of houses was the problem, house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline. It's existing houses being repriced upward by speculation that makes them unaffordable.

California problem. There's no constrained supply in Houston or Austin or a few other cities in the US that are now crashing from over supply.

Another one is Manhattan. There's no space to build so things get retrofitted (office conversions) and new zoning (Hudson Yards) but it's expensive - high hourly rates to pay people on buildings with more 99 units, many many permits required, land is expensive, etc

So it's luxury only in NYC

None of this is NIMBYism.

Part of it is return to office. Why move there if it's too expensive - the answer is you're unemployed otherwise

Part of it is demand. NYC is the closest thing to Europe, where you don't drive around in an SUV to do simple things. The GDP is enormous, so you find jobs. Young people. Etc

Housing costs are a lot more complicated than NIMBYism. There's a strong California bias for obvious reasons, here on HN.

Housing is flexible. Lots of poor people in some places live in RVs or trailers. It can't be that nice but they have to save a lot of money (or not, because RVs are expensive too). You have tent cities in non-totalitarian cities but their biggest downside is being illegal and therefore everyone who lives there gets periodically ransacked by police and sent to prison. People used to live 10 to an apartment, which also sucks, and were extorted by landlords but if we remove that part it's better than being homeless, but that's illegal too. It's starting to sound like the root of the problem isn't even a shortage of housing, but the fact that cheap housing is illegal.

> self-inflicted problem

Self-inflicted would mean the person (or people) suffering from the problem is the same person causing the problem.

But the gazillionaire corrupt politicians aren't really suffering from any affordability problem personally.

In Germany we even import people by the millions to keep rents high, among other things, and more than half of them get their housing paid for by taxpayers money.

Agreed, this feels so obviously a housing cost problem to me.

I highly challenge this. For a region, industry booms drive upward movement. And regions that are only held by one industry when it busts build rust belts.

Ideally, you have industry for a region treated like a well balanced investment portfolio. But you have to internalize that balancing investment portfolios is is a protection against downside risks. And it specifically loses against the lucky portfolio that was heavy on something during a boom.

So, the question heavily looms on if the regions we are looking at are diverse enough that they can sustain some downturns.

> We don't, as a matter of intentional policy, build enough housing.

Or maybe we do, but just couldn't keep up with the enormous influx of immigrants for a few years a that ended a couple of years ago. The housing costs have risen due to unforeseen demand, not supply.

A big political problem with YIMBYism is that almost by definition it will take years to see the effects.

If you champion it as a politician, there's a very large chance you get all the flack for new developments, but the next guy gets all the credit for affordable housing.

Texas seems to be the only place that actually does it, and I honestly have no explanation for why.

Are they actually NIMBYs or just annoyed? I live in a major metro downtown full of construction and fully support it 100%, but that doesn't mean it doesn't irritate me. Roads and sidewalks are constantly randomly closing. Every bridge across the local highway is currently closed for the next five years. My wife had every tire on a brand new go flat within three months because of nails on the roads. Our houses are all covered in yellow dust because the gas company dug up bedrock 9 years ago, left an enormous pile on a street corner, which then washed away in rain and still covers half the sidewalks nearly a decade later. Most of the housing ends up becoming short-term rentals, which in turn mostly become party houses, so the streets are strewn with broken liquor bottles all the time, cops are getting called in the middle of the night to break up fights with strippers. My car's hatch got destroyed by a city dump truck a few years back and I've been hit while parked two other times by work trucks. All of my power tools were stolen out of my garage by a work crew because the original builders put me on the same radio channel as the guy two doors down, so my garage randomly opened without me knowing about it.

I still support it. We need all the housing we can get. But I do get endlessly irritated by the attitude on Hacker News that no person could ever oppose rebuilding a neighborhood while people still live in it for a good reason and they must all by miserly hoarders trying to pull the ladder up from beneath them.

It's not just about building more in existing areas. It's about making the construction of affordable housing PROFITABLE for developers; which in this world is nearly impossible. Every tax break you give for building anything just results in luxury developments and the builders keeping the breaks as profit.

Also, you can't just build more in these already built up areas. Many of these areas already have strains on public services and just building up without adjusting for electricity consumption, water, schools, roads, transportation, parking, etc is just creating an even larger more expensive headache.

You have to make building towns / hoas in undeveloped areas easier; and the includes high speed transportation to get to the nearest city hub.

We also have to be alot more flexible on what's allowed to be called housing. We should have more places for people to be able to live in their RV's, cars, etc safely.

All of this comes down to the economic reality of what it takes to actually build and maintain a home and piece of property in America. It's not a right to own a home because of that economic reality. The main ingredients are cheap land in an area that has access to electricity, water, streets, infrastructure and access to income. If you can maintain a job for long enough you can pay off the land and cost to build. That is the only viable way to own. Expecting those kind of prices in LA or NY near the beach or downtown is delusional.

We have to also, philosophically, be honest about the way time passes and an intelligent species propagates itself. An frankly we can just look in the wild and see the same dynamics. If a species is successful, then there will be lots of individuals. Those individuals will be drawn to the BEST places to live. There are only so many BEST places to live. Do we really want to turn every place we live into giant high rises? This is an honest question and I think people aren't being entirely honest about their motives / vision for the planet.

I really hate this “we don’t build enough housing” narrative these days, because it implies this is a simple supply and demand problem, which it is not. I see so many progressives repeating this line, apparently not understanding that they are suggesting unfettered capitalism (up zoning…) is the solution.

The fundamental problem is we simultaneously want our housing to be affordable and good investment. It can’t be both.

"…get annoyed whenever there's new construction…"

People "getting annoyed" doesn't prevent construction of affordable housing. I often see NIMBY comments but never see anything to back up the notion.

Greedy developers that want the largest profit on a given plot of land is probably where you should be looking instead. Why build two inexpensive starter homes when you can build one luxury home and make a larger profit? (Never mind that the county gets larger property tax returns on the more expensive homes.)

And yet. They build high end homes and they sell them anyway. So there seem in fact to be buyers out there?