- "x% of what? what is the denominator?". Without that number, the claim is meaningless. - surely it cannot be the entire population, so it has to be a survey. - how many people participated in the survey? what was the distribution?
Here is that info for this study. I found this in the PDF version of the study report [0] referred to at the end of the Northwestern page [1].
> Methodology The Harris Poll conducted a total of 4,375 online interviews among the general U.S. adult (18+) population between January 5th and January 21st, 2026. Included in this overall total is a sample of 816 High-Net-Worth individuals (those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property, greater than $1,000,000).
[0] https://filecache.mediaroom.com/mr5mr_nwmutual/179168/2026%2...
[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
How? Mechanical Turk? Ads? This sort of survey is biased toward people who click on lots of stuff.
An easy one that I would expect most HN readers probably do already is: When shopping, always round up to the nearest dollar before even mentally storing it or operating on it. The usual cognitive bias is that many people end up storing the listed price of $4.96 in a lossy manner, as $4.xx, and end up thinking of it as $4 when in reality they could be skipping straight to keeping it as $5 in their head.
figured it out since i learned to read so it seems so childish to hear adults make it
turns out ppl like me are the weird ones and most people just truncate at the period
Would that everyone employed this level of skepticism before commenting on figures.
Am I reading this wrong, is this about trust fund kids?
> Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income.
They oversampled in major markets where they work and in high-net-worth populations (who they service), but their claims are for the overall US adult population.
Oversampling like this is pretty routine in survey research. It improves the precision of any subgroup analyses you might want to do, and, to a first approximation, it doesn’t tend to bias the weighted overall-population claims in one direction or another.
I think about it like Google Earth or something. I happen to have much-higher-res imagery of London than of the Cotswolds. That doesn’t mean my view, when zoomed out to “the whole United Kingdom,” is necessarily misleading. It does mean I can additionally make more detailed claims about Piccadilly Circus than about the sheep fields or whatever.
I’ve certainly seen trust fund kids who’s success is anchored on “daddy gave me a sweet job at his company” and others who’d be dead or in prison if it wasn’t for the constant money poured into the legal system by their parents.
Q2630. Do you currently consider yourself financially independent?
Yes: 72% No: 28%
Q2634. How financially independent do you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)?
Fully independent: 44% Mostly independent: 17% Somewhat dependent: 17% Fully dependent: 8% Not applicable: 14%
Then they report 17+17+8=42 = "42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support"
[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/download/2026+P%26P+Mark...
The impulse to ask "what population was sampled?" is good but its not always a straight line from there to "these results directly reflect that sampling bias."
In fact, from the page you posted: "Data for the general U.S. population (including the High Net Worth oversample) were weighted to Census targets for education, age, gender, race/ethnicity, region and household income. A full methodology is available."
I would presume that the headline number attempts to account for sampling bias.
My concern is that headlines like “x% of adults do y” get repeated without anyone (sometimes even journalists writing the article) seeing the methodology or nuance behind them. Context matters.
https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2018/01/26/how-different...
However, I never _asked_ my parents for money. I had a good education and a well-paying job, and was able to turn IPO money into a house down payment. In the end, we struggled to close the deal, and my wife and I both asked to borrow money from our parents. Of course they were happy to do so, but I still remember it as feeling so hard to do -- just something that I "shouldn't" have to do. And, of course, it also made me reflect on those who didn't have family support to fall back on, let alone jobs that paid well.
I understand that YC is questioning the results of the survey. The YC community is very privileged; and i bet, if we do the same survey in this community, 20% or less of adults rely on their parents.
In many cultures multigenerational households are the norm. You may never move out; you raise your kids in the same house your parents raised you.
If you're from a poor family and break out of poverty, you're still in a worse financial state than someone from a rich family, even holding income and assets constant. You've got to effectively self insure (by taking fewer risks; being more conservative in investments; cutting down on rich people expenses that help with networking) to plan for the worst case scenario. And rich kids don't even realize how much their families' financial status enables and drives their behavior.
And that's not even starting to count financial expenses to take care of aging parents who can't afford to take care of themselves.
Like: I built a $50 billion business with my own hands. Okay, I got the first $2 billion from my parents. Okay, I got the first $2 billion for every business from my parents until I was successful.
I half expect to have to apologize for this, like when I was growing up people would think you are a loser if you were in this situation. Today people think we are really smart and the people who are paying more rent than they can afford to live alone that are losing.
The only situation in which I would consider charging my kids 'rent' is, if as adults, they were being irresponsible with their life, e.g. being a NEET and not helping out around the house. Even then I would hold the money in a separate account to gift back to them later.
I think it's parents' role to always be a source of almost unconditional comfort and security for their kids. Though I also think that this is unsustainable unless kids also do their best to maintain and respect that relationship.
He's eating food out of the communal pool and it's a running gag at local restaurants that he eats two entrees. I think it's fair that he contributes something, like he is working, except for this summer when he said "take this job and shove it" because he was working for a crew where the foreman was twice his age but didn't have any sense for construction. Instead, he's doing a lot of work around the farm to fix things up, some of which is stuff we need and some of which is stuff he wants.
He expects to inherit the farm, will probably move to our other house if and when he is ready to co-habitate as opposed to getting on the housing ladder in the conventional way.
I live in the US now, and here, where it is (used to be?) easy to land a well-paying job fresh out of school, it is considered quite common to charge your children rent if they decide to stay at home. My feeling is that staying at home in the USA carries quite some stigma for both the kid and their parents. American culture puts a lot of value in self-reliance and financial independence, and the general idea is that you failed as a parent if your kids aren't able to afford their own place.
(I also have a feeling all of the above is changing dramatically, given the current cost of living crisis in America.)
I know other fathers that charge their adult children rent, keep the money, and then gift it to them at the wedding or to help them buy a house.
> I know other fathers that charge their adult children rent, keep the money, and then gift it to them at the wedding or to help them buy a house.
This looks like a game which should have ended by the time a child is an adult.
I am raising a very young child so I am very concerned about the future and constantly thinking what's the right way to raise him.
The right way to raise your child is so that they can thrive without you while wanting their children (your grandchildren) to spend time with you. This is a tall order because it requires decades of sacrifice, pain, and difficult yet positive decisions.
If they aren't frugal, and are otherwise suffering from lifestyle creep, then not charging them might be an injustice and setting them up for false expectations/never leaving home.
FYI, I was in the first group because my first job had pay cuts within 2 weeks, and then I discovered I basically spent minimal time at home anyway, so why pay more for it. Let me buy when I wanted to move out.
When I grew up, that was seen as pampering kids. They'd never "learn" how to be financially responsible, etc. if they always received help.
But, let's be honest, in many places the housing market is now so expensive that people could be saving for 5-10 years just to afford the down payment. And by the time they have enough, the market will have appreciated even more, so they have to save for even longer. I have peers that got into the housing market 20 years ago with help from parents, and their properties are now worth 5x - 8x of what they paid.
Either way, the idea that the natural and normal state of affairs is that every person can go out into the world and be a perfectly self sufficient but comfortable atomized economic unit without support from their family or society is deeply flawed.
This wasn't the norm for most of human history, and it isn't the norm globally today.
We have a group that promotes a "living wage" construct in Tompkins County that pushes the unquestioned assumption that people who are working in the lowest paying jobs can live 100% alone. It's not something I want to challenge directly, but... It reminds me of discussions about the minimum wage in the late 1980s when it was common for teenagers to work at supermarkets and fast food markets. I think the public never really understood how the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit
was specifically intended to help out people who were raising a family with low incomes that was economically efficient and how there is some logic to people who are working in low income jobs qualifying for food stamps, it is not just a way "Wal-Mart is stealing for us."
e.g. part of "affordability" is keeping costs low and as much leftie folks want to sweep it under the rug there is a lot of internal class conflict in groups such as women: like the Sheryl Sandberg type definitely benefits from exploiting less wealthy women to do child care work for them and child care is basically problematic because the child care worker is not productive enough to put their own children in child care without subsidy and you don't get the Fordist scenario where the auto line worker can easily afford to own one of the cars they make.
The great work of human civilization is to expand the size of the in-group.
Your perspective on the in-group and out-group is relevant of course - it isn't healthy if one is self-sacrificing without addressing their own needs. (However the degree of that varies between eastern and western culture. Eastern cultures, which have more civilisational history, perhaps don't necessarily see as it in such rigid terms?). Moreover, my point was that having wealth tends to affects your perceptions to "expand the size of the in-group" - money does provide more avenues to be independent, and thus a financially independent youth can (ignorantly) miss opportunities to learn how to have healthy co-dependent relations as most erroneously assume that such relations are not important to them because they have achieved "independence". Learning to be independent is important. But then learning to understand the importance of co-dependency is another step to become a mature adult.
That's quite different to your claim.
Right you are.
I did live independently prior to going into software, but it sucked and was fragile and likely would have fallen apart long term. I also doubt I could find a similar living situation as a young man with no credit or much money to his name. Even the mom and pop landlords use management companies that run you through a black box for approval/rejection with little room for negotiation.
Rental approvals are ridiculous. We're renting an apartment while we remodel our house.
We've taken out mortgages, refi'd mortgages, and (by now) taken out 3 HELOCs in a row (2 of them subsequently closed as we needed to re-file for more $). While there's a lot of paperwork involved, it feels pretty easy. "Promise to pay us back? Cool!"
Filling out apartment rentals was awful. The rejections, the tiny paper forms asking you about creditors and bank accounts, how much money you owe each of them every month, personal references, "supervisor's phone number", have you ever been to jail, ever failed to pay rent for any reason, previous landlords' contact info. Look, I get that rent is an unsecured obligation (vs a mortgage), but every step of it was gross and accusatory.
OK, now I'm questioning the whole thing... it also claims 17% of Boomers reliant on their parents. So, we have some substantial number of 62-80 years olds relying on their 90-100 year old parents? Seems unlikely.
OTOH, I guess that doesn't mean someone isn't still cashing that retirement check.
Sure maybe its wrong and people are counting inheritance similarly to living parents, etc, but I'm not surprised at all if the lowest quartile is reaching retirement age broke getting money from any relatives that can help and that are inclined to help.
"How financially independent you currently feel from your parents (meaning you could support yourself without them if needed)"
1: https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
I think there's some important things like this that should be considered. In the late 90's early aughts, I didn't need a laptop, smartphone and 24/7 internet access with 1GB download speeds or half the technological stuff kids need these days to be a contributing member of society.
Now those are all standard items for kids growing up. When I was in college in 2000, life was pretty easy. I paid $350/month for rent, cable, heat and landline phone. That was literally my entire financial costs for the month. Beer, going out to the bars, random things here and there? Easy to cover when you're making $10/hour working 35 hours a week.
Now? Your basic needs will consistently run $1,500 for all of the stuff you need to function into today's society. Having your parents covering some of that in order for you to live on your own I think is not abnormal any more.
As a Gen Xer, we had it really good. I've started to realize kids these days are put at a massive disadvantage because we require everything to be accessible via the internet and smartphones.
> $1500/month [ 2026 ]
CPI inflation would suggest that the current cost ought to be about $692. So if it really costs $1500 to cover the things you've mentioned (noticeabley absent: student loans, health insurance, car payments) then either our society is deeply fucked or your list has changed or your estimates are wrong or your memory is wrong or all of the above.
Rent alone will probably blow that. I live in a burnt out rust belt shithole city and I’m struggling to understand how rent is this high. I pay a good bit more than $692 to live in a slum just outside the ghetto right now and I have to feel gracious for that. It’s closer to what I paid in a decent middle class neighborhood in Florida. That was only 5-6 years ago.
This is in a city where the best people can say about it is: “well it’s cheaper”.
Hell when I lived in South Carolina from 2017-2019. My apartment there was closer to the stated inflation figure, but this was for a place that regularly flooded the downstairs neighbors and left me for weeks without AC in the peak of summer because of careless management.
Still not as bad as business rents. I’ve seen downtown business close because they’re being made to be $7000 for a shitty 100 year old property surrounded by condemned properties.
There are some. But the data seems to suggest that the majority do not.
I don't know a whole lot of 20 year-olds but certainly hear on the Internet all the time how hard it is for them. I'm extremely skeptical anyone living quite as shittily as I was 26 years ago is really paying 4.5 times as much for the privilege. My 24 year-old niece pays a lot more in rent than I did, but she also lives alone a mile from the beach in San Diego. In a shack, but it's still a hell of a lot nicer than anything I had.
In any case, I got a few bucks here and there from my parents, but they didn't have much when I was young and ultimately helped out my younger sisters a lot more. Cost of teenage parents, I guess. I was the test run. I still turned out fine and they've mostly relied on me in the past 15 years, which seems oddly missing from this survey. If we're concerned about adults not being self-sufficient, surely relying on your kids or siblings or anyone else at all is just as bad as relying on your parents.
It is acknowledged as not covering some costs that affect many people severely. But that does not by itself make it a bullshit number.
https://www.investopedia.com/here-s-how-many-americans-can-t...
37% of survey respondants say they would need to use a credit card to cover a $400 expense. They wouldn't be destitute, they just don't immediately have the cash.
It also cites another study that put the number much lower, at 8%.
- Is it better/worse than other countries? ... better/worse than "comparable" countries?
- What's the historical trend?
- And in both directions (geographical, historical): How does it relate to the respective diffences in wealth inequality?
[1] https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-st...
I don't believe the US will exit the 4-income economy in my lifetime.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com has been linked on HN many times before.
Is it related to that?
Searching the internet, one can read more, such as:
> In August 1971, alongside the "Nixon Shock" that severed the dollar's convertibility to gold, the Nixon administration imposed a 90-day economy-wide freeze on all wages and prices. This was the first time the U.S. enacted wage and price controls outside of wartime. Following the initial 90-day freeze, the Nixon administration implemented a complex, multi-tiered price control system on the petroleum industry that lasted for years.
> In August 1971, Nixon was "floating" the dollar, abandoning the gold standard and "freezing" prices and wages.
This video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EBEapf3OFw asks the below:
> Why did America deliberately destroy its own manufacturing industry?
And starts off,
> It did not happen all at once. Americans watched their own country lose it, brand by brand, factory by factory. Every time, the country was handed the same three reasons...(It looked inevitable. And every one of them was true enough to believe.) Plenty of those factories were still making money the day they were ordered shut. They closed anyway, on the say-so of men who had never worked a shift in their lives and grew richer each time another one went dark....
My kids are in their 20s and I still support them.
But, I want the government to STOP
- spending my taxes on wars and military - spending my taxes on supporting immigration programs - immigration programs altogether
May be then financial and work situation can finally improve for kids of the people who built out the western civilization.
The common misconception that the US Government is wasting money on immigration is pushed by Trump and FOX News, who both lie regularly. For example, see [1] about how Trump rejected a report produced by Federal researchers. The report is available [2].
Overall, the refugee resettlement program gives the country back many times what the government spends. And even if you just focus on the expenditure, the bulk of it is on border enforcement and imprisonment, which goes to domestic private companies.
As to your love for "the people who built western civilization", I'll just leave it up there. Your connotation is clear, and it doesn't reflect well on you.
[1] Trump administration rejects report showing positive impact of refugees
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/18/us/politics/refugees-reve...
[2] Rejected Report Shows Revenue Brought In by Refugees. SEPT. 19, 2017: A draft of a study rejected by Trump administration officials that found that refugees brought in $63 billion more in government revenues over the past decade than they cost.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/09/19/us/politics/d...
News lie regularly and I happen to hold the opinion for a while.
Studies also lie, another entity that lies regularly is government! All of them!
When you live long enough you learn to trust your eyes not your ears.
As far as the western civilization goes - it's being killed off. Pay attention.
I've heard enough "this country doesn't have enough talent!!! We need millions more immigrants to cover the gap!" While almost every recent cybersecurity graduate I know is quite literally UNABLE to find a relevant job, with most resigning to hitting up the employers of jobs they had in HS with low-skill work like wiping down decommissioned K-12 Chromebooks for resale on ebay.
What an absolute waste of their talents.
We obviously have the talent in this country, we're literally the forefront of the field. Employers just prefer a 'subclass' of laborers with less rights (e.g. H1Bs/illegal immigrants that the employer can hold over their head) and lower minimum livable salary compared to regular citizens.
We had an article a few days ago on the Zuckerbergs of the world trying to find their way into the Chinese party. We’ll see how that goes for them.
Most people are just trying to survive for tomorrow.
Most of these people that are getting help aren't saving for retirement either so its just a long game of desperation. Easy to say get a better job but not everyone has the skills or mental acuity to do that. With that said there are aboslutely a lot of people that have no concept of budgeting and are their own worst enemy
Serve their kids. The money is only incidental to the power structure (nepotism, classism, xenophobia) that they intend to pass down to their chosen successors. They've been working to limit economic mobility, opportunity, and fairness for a while now.
Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of negative things to say about boomers, but I'm not sure how your complaint here really fits the article.
Whatever is happening to 42% of Americans is happening to 97% (figures drawn from my ass) of black Americans. $5000 is pretty good. I'm from Chicago, where the median black wealth is $0.
I live in an expensive area and I'm always shocked by how many of my friends who cannot afford to buy a home (or even a condo) are NIMBYs. These are people in their 20s through 40s who have been earning since college, can't afford to buy, yet get annoyed whenever there's new construction that "alters the character of the neighborhood". Talk about false consciousness. I can at least understand people who own a home feeling this way.
I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods. I want real public housing. Housing should be a human right. As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.
> Dozens of “luxury” units built cheaply, selling for 4,000$ for a 1 bedroom
A nebulous definition of "luxury", and totally ignores the fact that people with money can get what they want anyway, pushing those with less out. So yes, more "luxury" builds help.
> They get subsidized by the local government for including maybe 5 units that are “low income” and probably still cost 2k
Many purportedly want more low income housing, often at absurd rates like "100% affordable" knowing that projects like that will never pencil out. It's a way of saying "No" without actually saying it.
> I want lots of high quality, dignified housing for myself and my community, not wealth extraction pods.
Okay, so build some? If you can't build what you want then why stop others from building what they can with the budget they have?
>As it stands now the land is being squatted by mega corporations seeking to extract as much profit from the community as possible.
It's literally illegal in most places to build more densely due to height, parking requirements, discretionary reviews, etc. impacting everyone interested in building more units (Like for a multigenerational household as seen in elsewhere in the world). This is not just impacting corporations seeking to extract profit.
The reality is that demand is always going to far outstrip supply in certain areas. You can only cram so many houses into a place like San Franciso, even if you raze the city to the ground and replace it with some yimby paradise that houses 25% more people. The extra supply might lower costs to some degree in the short term but the induced demand will ensure they stay above what someone on an average salary can afford. Everyone seems to understand this when the topic is freeway expansion, but not with housing.
The actual solution for housing costs is a lot more complicated and multi-pronged, but that doesn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker. There actually is a ton of affordable housing in the US, but it's mostly in areas that people in influential industries like tech and media tend to sneer at, so it gets dismissed; and suggesting someone move there is practically treated as a human rights abuse.
Dramatically increasing housing density does have adverse affects for existing residents. It's fine to say the tradeoffs are worth it, I'm not saying it's never the answer, but even acknowledging that it's a tradeoff usually gets met with dismissive insults from the yimby crowd.
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.
"house prices would not be increasing in areas of population decline" -> the causation could be running backwards: a family of 2 (maybe 2 retired people with accumulated wealth) can outcompete with a young family of 4 for the same unit, that drives prices up and population down. I'm not saying this is the case, but decreasing population not being associated with decreasing housing prices does not mean that increasing housing prices is not caused by housing scarcity
I think if you look closely at "population down, house prices up" you will find normal supply-and-demand stories like "population down, houses down even more" or "population down (downtown), prices up (suburbs)".
So often I see people complaining "people treat their home as an investment…". Because in fact it turns out it is?
Are we supposed to pass laws that fix the price of a home based on the square footage?
(I wonder if jewelers complain that the reason silver is so expensive is that people treat it as an investment.)
Is it even beneficial to have a house worth a lot of money? Think about places where property is expensive, it is also expensive to live there in general because housing costs so much. The cost of housing means employers have to pay their employees a lot to keep them there. This in turn means you are paying more for goods and services. If you're a homeowner, but NOT a high income person, this is very bad. It means you can't make payments towards maintenance of your house, going out becomes harder, etc. Your quality of life decreases.
People who inherit homes that are worth a lot, but aren't flush with cash end up having to sell frequently because there is no way for them to maintain it. It's also the plot of white lotus season 2 with the villas lol.
Probably not since silver is not a basic need nor even a luxury that affords you independence.
Simply Google for cities/areas with declining population, choose one, look up average housing prices there over the last 10 years or so, see how they've changed, correct the figures for inflation, and you'll see that in almost all cases inflation-adjusted prices are lower today in those places than they were 10 years ago.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/NYSTHPI
Edit: DuckDuckGo seems to have served me a terrible example, further digging shows some examples which don't even need looking up, its clear that pricing has plummeted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinking_city
NYC has grown by about 1.5 million people over the last 30 years.
You're just being rude for no reason, which is also why I'm now rude to you. You could almost call it rudeflation, tomorrow we'll probably cause a rudeness singularity
Speculation is known to have an effect, but not nearly as much as an effect as under supply. Blackrock THEMSELVES published a paper that the reason their investments are working is due to the low development of housing. Their whole strategy is reliant on NIMBYism and people's lack of understanding of the housing market.
House occupancy laws also have a role here - some of the living arrangements that ended up in higher density in the past are illegal today, forcing population decline in a given area (which is not necessarily equivalent to _demand_ decline)
That aside, housing prices are reasonable in much of the country. Where population is stagnant or declining, they are generally reasonable.
In the old days it was common to build your own house. And it usually allows a house for half or less the market price. But this is effectively illegal/impractical in most the US. Some simple changes to legislation would halve the average cost of a house overnight!
And it wouldn't be just the currently-active NIMBY's who fought tooth and nail against any "simple changes" that might halve the average cost of a house overnight.
But you can't, because the lot is unaffordable
Some people have valid excuses, but most do not.
Quite bizarre, but difficult to talk about, because it plays in to the wrong side of ongoing culture wars for some people.
https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/fact-check-foreign-born-p...
All that seems to matters today, is that the GDP number keeps going up at any and all cost, regardless of long term externalities and second order effect to society. Kina like Saturn devouring his children.
Like sure, now you need to wait 4 months to see a public healthcare specialist compared to only 2 weeks 8 years ago, but the GDP number is higher now than back then, so obviously we must be better off today than in the past, right? RIGHT?!
That's why EU politicians are rushing to implement free speech crackdowns, invasive privacy laws using dictatorial techniques, like last week's Chat Control 1.0. They know they're on borrowed time before the majority of the population wises up and turns against them for the effects of the unpopular policies they pushed that lead to their decline in quality of life and purchasing power.
Shoving a graph in their face with a made up number won't change their economic situation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fundamental problem is we simultaneously want our housing to be affordable and good investment. It can’t be both.
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?