Family/friends. Real-life social network/support often outweighs the gains of moving somewhere cheaper.

I wonder about this often, but not about in California

Based off this article about hookworm being alive and well in Southern Alabama. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/sep/05/hookworm-low...

In the article, there is a woman without a sewage hookup paying $611 for her mortgage, and $300 for electricity.

In the city of Atlanta, and much less, some of the suburbs, paying $900 for a single wide's square footage for a house or apartment is entirely possible. This woman doesn't have much family that's not staying with her, etc.

The other logical frustration from this is that density solves a lot of problems. From cheaper insurance, heating/cooling up to 5 fewer walls, to shared sewer connections - an apartment solves a lot of problems compared to a trailer home.

As a divorced parent, moving to another city would mean losing access to my kids. That definitely weighs into my consideration. With the number of marriages ending in divorce, I wonder how common this situation is and if it also plays into the equation for them.

I live near the beach in San Diego, where house prices are pretty damn high, so my wife and I still rent. On the weekends, we ride bikes or walk to the beach and hang out. It's how we like to live our lives.

I've been to a lot of areas in the country, and I simply don't want to live in them, regardless of price. I can walk outside in a t-shirt 365 days a year where I live and not die from exposure in a few minutes. I have no need to shovel snow. I am surrounded by mountains, the ocean, forests and desert are a few minute drives away.

Plus friends. And family. It's also nice living in a place that people want to visit, old friends pop in all the time simply because we live where people want to vacation.

Cheaper does not always mean a desirable place to live. This question somewhat assumes that all places to live are created equal.

Strange how it’s only people who already own a house who suggest this.

Being able to remote 100% of the time is not as common as people want to think here.

A lot of managers aren't comfortable with that notion, and basically ignore you when you make the case that a position is essentially impossible to fill when just letting it up to local market for labor.

Why would you want them to? A city consisting only of people who can afford $1.5m mortgages is missing most of the amenties and services you rely on and value. They only function in San Francisco today out of inertia; their ability to hire and retain staff is plummeting.

Everyone I know hase gone through a "power-saving" phase at least once in their life, typically on the path towards buying a home. This is inherently a period of austerity for the individual, or, as the article describes, "great discomfort".

If you're going to be depriving yourself, you may as well do it where people are getting paid the most, and just live like an itinerant/vagabond while there. It's the high salaries and abundant opportunity that attracts all the well-paid housing seekers. Join them, just don't bother with the housing, and watch your savings blow up.

You'll probably learn a bunch about yourself and how to live simply in the process as well.

Affordable housing is a symptom, not an issue. The basic issue is that living in a nice city falls prey to basic supply and demand curves.

The unit of supply is not the house itself, but everything that's included within a city - opportunity, lifestyle, family, friends, food, etc. These things are subjective to each individual, but have some universal similarities (ie: people generally prefer more opportunity to less).

The population of demand is theoretically the entire world, and more practically, the body of people that wants to live in that city due to opportunities and lifestyle. Just speculating, I'd estimate demand to live in a nice city is much greater than the population by 10 or 100x.

When supply is short and demand is not, you reach equilibrium at the point where only the people who can afford to live there do. "Afford" is subjective too, as some people are willing to pay much more in terms of rent and lifestyle sacrifices. In the case of SV, since wages are still extremely high, I think the cost of housing will still increase. It will squeeze the middle class lifestyle heavily (if its not doing so already).

If you want to look at a mature housing market in the dystopian sense of the word, visit Hong Kong. An abundance of high paying finance jobs, low income taxes, and a crazy amount of powerful real estate investors made HK some of the most expensive housing in the world. But finance is no longer growing, real estate is squeezed of its profits, and the affordability of housing in HK is in serious crisis. Haven't lived here for too long, but it seems that lifestyle has been constantly compromised (small houses, live with your parents forever) by the expensiveness of housing. Or that affording your own house is actually a luxury, not a basic human right (depends on your perspective).

Is there a long term solution? Quite simply, not unless we dramatically think of cities differently than we do currently. Fixed housing costs doesn't solve the basic situation that a city is a very attractive place to live, and that many people would like to move there if they could.

Housing cost is currently the way of deciding who gets to live there, and what they're willing to give up for it.

Cost of moving: Lost income while looking for a new job at the new location, security deposit, first and last month's rent up front, moving truck, loss of income while moving, lack of security at new job, emotional toll if also moving children, loss of pay due to a different cost of living...

Sure, why not move all the time?

The cost of moving is never trivial, and it requires you to be prepared with sufficient money in your savings account. If you don't have that savings and you don't have a support net to catch you, you're not going to be able to move and remain off the street.

Family ties are indeed extremely strong. However, here in Idaho we have lots of former Californians and it seems that it only takes one family member to make the "leap" to move up here, and before long (usually within 5 years) the other members start to see the benefit and move themselves.

My grandmother just moved here after living 80 years in CA. The family next door is 4 generations, each gradually moving up from CA.

The reason is the same: Family. But once someone made the leap, the others followed.

That was easy: "The same reason they can't just go to an ATM and pull out more money. Don't well-off folks ask the darnedest questions?"

As a side note, over the weekend I a report that said housing sales have gone soft on the coasts. The reason given was the recent changes in the tax laws. Perhaps, if prices drop so might the cost of rentals?

It continues to amaze me how the (policy) talk is pro-affordable housing, but the walk is more wealth - of which property ownership is a great conduit - in few hands.

One of the most striking things I learned about the Rwandan genocide[1] was how many Tutsi simply refused to flee, even temporarily, even in the depths of the slaughter. Not because they wanted to make a stand or affirmatively resist, but seemingly out of some ineffable resistance to change. AFAICT, the same phenomenon has happened in every other genocide, not to mention other large scale disasters.

Economists can and should debate and quantitatively measure varying aspects of and reasons for the phenomenon. But from a high-level public policy perspective the reasons are largely irrelevant; there's simply no denying that on the whole most people by their nature are extremely averse to moving, even in the face of impending death. Any public policy predicated on intragenerational migration in response to run-of-the-mill structural economic dislocation is doomed to fail. Many people will follow straight-forward economic incentives. But a very large number won't, even to their extreme and readily foreseeable detriment. That makes failure inevitable.

[1] See "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Wish_to_Inform_You_That_Tom...)

Ironically, the source they cite on California domestic migration indicates that, in lots of cases, they do, and that's pretty much exactly what is driving migration out of CA (and, conversely, that people who can afford it are moving in, but there are fewer of those.)

Not much to add, except that this article makes me sad. My family struggled with housing costs when I was a child, but as a newly arrived immigrant family to a city with a tiny minority population, the lack of social support was felt more keenly than the cost of rent.

I don't think they've address some other factors. It's really scary to move especially when you are struggling. Taking a risk like that when you're only just making ends meet isn't the kind of things we humans do well.

Moving itself is a cost, reduced but not eliminated if you are willing and able to abandon literally all your possessions and then live precariously at your destination while the move is sorted out.

Because those places that are cheaper are usually cheaper for a reason. And generally they don't have the same job opportunities that the more expensive places do.

No jobs.

I could buy a ton of homes in Flint michigan. I wouldn't have a job though.

for me,

no job, no connection

[dead]

It's frankly pretty silly when people complain about prices (housing prices, prescription drug prices, gas prices, etc.)

The issue with housing prices is that there are a lot of government policies that have the (intentional or unintentional) effect of increasing housing prices. Some of them are as follows:

- Making mortgage interest tax deductible

- Special tax treatment for the sale of a primary residence

- Laws limiting how many people can cohabitate in one building, or similar laws that enforce this more softly through limits on street parking.

- Rent control laws which suppress the price of rental units, limiting the incentive for landlords to build new units.

- Laws that limit the construction (or add extra costs/requirements) to projects that would add more residential units.

- The utter failure of highway infrastructure during rush hour, which adds hours of commute time for short distance travel, drastically increasing the price of residences that do not require a highway commute.

- The failure of municipalities to provide adequate and affordable parking and public transit, adding inconvenience to many neighborhoods which drives up prices in others.

- The failure of law enforcement to create a safe environment in many neighborhoods that offer more affordable housing, leading to increased crime and under-investment in improving and expanding areas that would otherwise be highly desirable for residences.

- Laws that create building code requirements that are not based on sound engineering or safety principles but which create lucrative contracts for certain professions in the building trade... These increase the cost of new construction and make many retrofitting/repurposing projects impossible.

There are many, many more.