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A millennial couple who make $250,000 say they can't find a home in their budget: 'We refuse to become house-poor'
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Packed is a reaaaaal stretch here. Portland's population density is about 1/10th that of notably the lovely and liveable city Paris.
The USA has "cities" that have so much land dedicated to preventing anyone else from owning a home - all that matters is the landowners and their precious fucking "real estate value". And where it's not houses it's car parks.
Everyone in the US who wants to live in a city could live in a city if we just built the requisite housing. We have too many self preserving leeches who refuse to live next to an apartment complex.
Yeah people in the US don't know what housing density actually looks like.
We got a country with a massive amount of land and just decided that the rich should be able to own all of it and if you don't feel like making money rentinf it out to people you rent it out to cars and demolish the house that was there.
We keep pushing further and further into the suburbs though for massive costs of infrastructure for 3 hour commutes to jobs that pay minimum wage though. It feels so unsustainable when I see our farm land being sold to real estate developers to put a massive parking lot and 12 houses on it.
what gets me is the cost. you would think it would be the cheapest given the efficiency but I know plenty of people like myself who would dearly like to live in a high rise towards the city center but they are insanely expensive.
No one is in a rush to build more housing and lower the cost of all the other buildings they own and rent out.
It should be packed - economics of housing aside. Spread out everywhere is incredibly inefficient in terms of transportation and infrastructure. Look at the San Joaquin valley in California. 1/6th of the land since 1990 after the initial gold rush has been urbanized and they lose 40k acres a year more to urbanization. CA has some of the best farmland in the country and it’s being paved over with housing and the associated businesses.
The American stereotype of the ‘burbs with a standalone house on a piece of land is destructive and inefficient, especially with the shitty way we build homes for max profit and minimum energy efficiency. The unfortunate downside of everyone living in one area is that housing developers and landlords drive rent and sale prices to the extreme.
It should be packed but it isn't was my point - not sure if it came through there.
You also get such a degradation of the fabric of society when every family lives in their little isolated burb, away from all the consequences of their callous indifference, socially isolated and slowly losing all empathy for their fellow man.
Not to mention the torturous effect on kids and parents - being forced to be an Uber for your child or let them rot in boredom in your basement away from all in person socialization.
And I say that as one who grew up rotting. Suburban Atlanta is hell on earth and you can't convince me otherwise.
As someone who prefers living in actual rural areas, the suburbs are the worst of both worlds. You've got a tiny plot of land you can't do anything with except grow grass, you're as surrounded by people as you are in a city, you have no public amenities and no space for good private ones, and you still have to drive everywhere.
Absolutely - I have farmers in my family. They also hate suburbs. It's neither rural nor urban.