“Did some nefarious fat cat in a smoky back room decide that now real estate companies would only make gigantic houses”
This exact thing happened in Auckland until a few years ago, but the culprit is not nefarious fat cats, it is zoning. If you have large areas with single housing zone, and with a minimum lot size that makes land cost at least the equivalent of half a million USD then of course you get large houses.
I agree completely. Clearly, people do want larger houses than we had in 1950, but I think this preference has been greatly exaggerated by the illegality of building smaller dwellings in many places. You can't build 1000 sq ft houses in vast swaths of the United States.
it's kind of feature creep, and that happens with cars and consumer electronics. Manufacturers are constantly making things better... but that is basically very good, comparing the baseline of 1963 with that of 2025. The auto industry is one of the best examples in a positive way, think of what was available back then and now. We have an insane amount of choice buying a car in 2025: electric, hybrid, gas , diesel... as opposed to gas only in 1963. And I am much happier driving a 2025 VW than a 1963 VW!
I’m so glad you pointed this out, I came to make this exact point. Some bozo on Twitter was making a similar case the other day that the proliferation of HOAs in the US was proof that Americans like them. “After all, they still buy houses!” As though not basically all newly built American houses come with an HOA because it’s a way of obscuring the cost of what should be government provided services so that property taxes don’t go up. Americans don’t get a fully free choice in what size house they buy, or if there’s an HOA. They get to buy what builders make, or they don’t get to buy anything.
I don’t have an HOA but the people I know that have one are genuinely happy about it. They like having services like a community pool, consistent painting and yard work so that all the houses look nice, and so on. So to each their own.
This just doesn't make sense. As much as I hate HOAs and despise the type of people involved in them, I can't see any reason why builders would include them if buyers would rather not have them.
Builders are required by cities to do upgrades before they’re given permission to build, at builder expense. These capital expenses are then passed on to homeowners in their home price, and the operational expenses are the responsibility of the HOA. For example, in my mom’s neighborhood the builder had to create the streets, build the water retention basin for the draining of the streets, build common area space because the city wouldn’t build a park, etc etc. Then the community owns these and has to pay to maintain them. In addition to property taxes. There does exist in CA a way for localities to create special tax assessment districts to pay for infrastructure like this. I wish this was used more often because you get the benefits of the HOA in managing shared assets, without the downsides of Brad and Karen yelling at you about the height of your potted plants or the color of your front door.
That's kind of nuts. If the city requires the builders to build the supporting infrastructure, they should at least take over the maintenance of it once built. The homeowners are paying property taxes to the city after all.
That doesn't work as well as it might sound. Most US cities have historically agreed to maintain whatever infrastructure developers built (given conformity with their standards), and that ends up being a massive financial drain on the city. The city doesn't design these roads and so they aren't able to have a day in whether the ones that get built pass a long-term cost/benefit test. Your property taxes are almost certainly not high enough to actually cover those maintenance and replacement costs, and most US cities are slowly falling behind on this.
Don’t most cities still require roads built to standards, permit approval to build and inspections to consider it done? There aren’t many places I’m aware of where builders can just build roads however they want.
It's a fundamental misalignment of incentives. If the people paying to build the roads are not also on the hook for the maintenance, their incentive is to build the cheapest roads possible.
I had no idea that could be done by the city. Seems like it should be an unconstitutional breach of freedom of association for the government to force you into a private organization.
It’s better than the alternative in most places—which is the city eventually being forced to cut basic maintenance and services and/or going bankrupt.
Low-density development on the outer fringe is not economically sustainable in most areas. The roads and pipes service a small number of property-tax payers, and are an indefinite fiscal liability to the city.
Low density development on the outer fringes is typically on private well and septic, not public water and sewer. And at least where I live, a lot of them are on existing roads.
there are many laws mandating americans buy higher quality products. it is illegal to buy a car without seatbelts and airbags, or to go to a restaurant that fails a health inspection, or to get treated by a medical school drop out, etc.
Am I supposed to read this to mean you think buying a 1400sqft house is equivalent to eating in a vermin infested restaurant? That it’s something the government does and should *protect* us from?
Those regulations target features of a product that are t always obvious when a customer is checking it out, and that customers don’t always think about in ordinary circumstances. That sort of feature often does make sense to regulate, because it is something that people care about when it comes up, but it’s hard for them to check and they forget to check.
Square footage of a house and size of the lot aren’t things that people forget to care about when looking at a house, and they aren’t hard to evaluate when you visit. Don’t makes much less sense to regulate those. The competitive market will provide whatever discipline is valuable there (which may not be as much as some people naively think is relevant).
They aren’t about the buyer. They are about protecting the character, style and density of the area. Now, on libertarian grounds I don’t think there should be strong regulation of these factors, and on YIMBY grounds we discovered that applied everywhere at scale these regulations have the side effect of reducing housing supply and thus costs for everyone. But, in fairness, the rules generally aren’t about the micromanaging individual’s housing choices - they are about managing aesthetics for the existing residents. There is real value there - that is why fighting the NIMBYs is so hard.
This is also true for houses and apartments. You may have requirements for double glazed windows, insulation, fire safety, etc. And this is a good thing.
Accidentally enforcing a minimum size far larger than what people need or want however leads to a ton of waste, and in case of housing, a shortage.
If the only way to have a neighborhood where families normatively have 2 parents is to have huge houses, there will be huge houses. That - not housing per se, but housing in a 2-parent neighborhood - is what's gotten spectacularly more expensive.
However, I think you did not present an accurate picture of food insecurity in the United States. The USDA report you linked to shows higher levels of food insecurity than you cite. Most readers will come away with the false impression that food insecurity is relatively rare.
I'm very involved in this issue on a grass roots basis and while practically no one in America is starved of food, the disruption to lives and loss of dignity of food uncertainty and having to rely on food banks and pantries is pervasive among the poor.
I don’t know what “severe food insecurity” means in the chart you put up. But I think if you and I didn’t know where we might find food for ourselves/our family tomorrow or a week from now, we would say that was “severe.”
>>while practically no one in America is starved of food, the disruption to lives and loss of dignity of food uncertainty and having to rely on food banks and pantries is pervasive among the poor.
You seem to be saying "food insecurity is still a large problem because a lot of people rely on govt programs and charity that help prevent it" - which is an odd argument to me.
Ideally no one should have to rely on assistance for food security, but programs to address existing food insecurity seem like the next best thing to me.
Not really. The unstated thesis behind the question is that people who are food insecure have only themselves to blame and so we shouldn’t care about or for them. If you think that’s ok… best of luck.
Of course it's a valid question. The answer is hardly obvious and does make a difference in formulating good policy.
Neither truth nor good policy are likely to result from attempting to shame people who ask "inappropriate" questions. To change the world well, we need an accurate grasp of it.
Mike Green is not a friend of mine, so I will be less kind and simply call his article rubbish. Rubbish that is especially pernicious and fraught with danger right now.
One will never go broke telling Americans what they want to hear—and what we want to hear right now is that we are deprived victims, oppressed by “the system” and unable to afford “necessities”. By the fat cats, naturally.
Like all woe-is-me rubbish narratives, this has a grain of truth. Our health care, day care, and housing economies in big elite cities are not ideal. We really are currently run by lawless, violent fat cats (whom we elected!). Things need to change, not least our ongoing slide into gangsterish dictatorship.
But the notion that “no one can afford anything” and that you need to be rich to survive in America in 2025 is garbage. Garbage that it is simply not popular or socially acceptable to push back on, especially if you are a liberal. But push back on it we must.
I fear with articles like Green’s, we risk pumping up policy demands and expectations so high, and our general public existential unhappiness with it, that no left-of-center or small-d democratic (but I repeat myself) administration has any realistic capacity to satisfy them.
No future president is going to succeed in adequately delivering to a public that genuinely imagines $140,000 a year—or anything like it—to be the universal “bare minimum” to survive, lived experience and actual real life be damned.
The likely result of a mass delusion like that is yet another cycle of malaise, status-quo-burning-down, and revived right-wing corrupt dictatorship, followed by whomever succeeds it picking up the pieces. Over, and over, and over again.
We’ve already gone through two cycles of that nonsense, to increasingly destructive effect across America. I hope to god we don’t go through a third.
P.S.: For all their mutual emnity on a host of unrelated issues, I think Noah Smith and Will Stancil see eye to eye on this issue in particular.
Will’s been shouting into a gale-force wind on the perils of Democrats trying to ride an “affordability crisis” narrative back to power for much of November. I wish him luck; he’ll need it.
This type of thing is the reason why a sensible tax policy in the US is politically impossible. Even the Democrats promise there will be no tax increases on people earning under $400,000 due to the myth that the middle class is struggling more than ever, and the other myth that the middle class extends to people making $400K.
I grew up in a high-income family but with a somewhat austere, frugal upbringing by today’s standards.
As I’ve grown older and find myself and my friends is a similar income bracket as my own parents, I can anecdotally attest that expectations have grown dramatically.
It is now normal for “middle class” families to live in gargantuan spaces, have 3 cars, take multiple expensive vacations every year, and have their kids involved in several expensive sports and activities.
This is partly why the definition of “poor” has so greatly shifted.
As a European that has been to the US very recently, including LA, that is considered one of the most expensive cities in the US, this is very funny. LA's rents of normal homes (for example) are on par with those of the largest and most desired cities in Europe, like Berlin, London, etc.
But household incomes are nowhere near 140k, they're 1/3 or at best 1/2 of that figure.
By this flawed logic it should mean that basically 99.999% of Europe is made of poor families/people.
If you ever visited Europe, do you think that Berlin or Paris or Milan are places where people live with 1/3 of the poor's income? Do they look like slums filled with the poorest?
Of course 140k $ per year is a ton of money everywhere, including the US, and it makes no sense to call it the poverty line.
No, central Paris is not a slum. But actually yes, I do think the data on consumption and GDP show that western/northern Europeans are materially poorer than Americans (yes obviously painting with broad strokes). Part of that is low incomes and punitively high taxes. Part of it is low economic growth caused by regulation strangling the markets. Part of it is a sort of hair shirt holier-than-thou refusal of modern technology.
We have lower or much lower net incomes (that often are even more unfavourable due to higher costs in a ever increasing number of goods like gasoline, electricity, and now even homes in some cases), but saying that the vast majority of citizens of Berlin, Paris, London or Barcelona are poor because households make less than 140k is pure madness.
Since I'm lazy I asked chatgpt to tell me the median household income for cities like London or Paris (but he gave me sources and checked), and the net income (after tax) is 40k for households (not personal). If the after tax income reported here of 118k is correct, then in these cities the income is about 1/3 of that.
If you tell me that having a net income under 118k means you're poor, then having 40k means you're really poor.
I think we can all agree that by no means we would define the median household in Paris or Berlin as poor, unless we empty the word poor of every sensible meaning.
Noah, you make a lot of good points, but you imply that childcare is either full-time or nonexistent. You make it sound like families temporarily pay for full-time care for children 5 and under, and then, poof! Childcare expenses just go away.
Obviously that is not the case for dual-earner families. A seven-year-old whose classes end at 1:30 pm and whose parents get home from work at 5:30 pm can’t be left home alone during those hours. He or she needs after-school care, which is a recurring expense, to say nothing of the many days when school is closed but parents have to work, like 2.5 months in the summer! Sure, this kind of care is much less expensive than full-time daycare for an infant or toddler, but it is by no means a trivial expense.
Sure, of course. But by the same token, if you have two kids spaced 3 years apart, then you only pay the full $32k for ONE year, ever. And if they're 4 years apart, you *never* pay $32k ever. So it's kind of wild to list $32k as an ongoing annual expense.
Agreed, but omitting it from the list (because you can't find good numbers?) is also kind of wild. It's a real expense that is significant for most parents' budgets. In fact, in California it's much more significant than healthcare costs for at least a decade of a young family's life. In my opinion ignoring it does a disservice to your analysis.
I was coming here to say the same thing. Also, summer camp is grossly expensive, but still essential for families where both parents work. And don't get me started on all the days the kids have off school.
Noah mentions a tax credit for child care in New Jersey, but when I looked it up, it's only $1k, which doesn't help much if you're paying $18k a year per kid.
As someone who finds these “actually $xxx,xxx is poor” articles infuriating I’m glad for this debunking. You forgot another political reason these articles proliferate in places like WSJ, CNBC and The Free Press; these outlets of an ideological predisposition towards Reaganism including economics and especially tax cuts so these articles serve as a way to help these publications mostly top 10% readership feel less guilty or even think they “need” upper class tax cuts.
But you mentioned houses being bigger today but I do think you’re underselling the fact that houses being much bigger today is not really as big a net win as it’s made out to be. As other people have noted, zoning rules mean that the supposed preference for large houses is not necessarily the true preference of all people. Add in the warping effects of the mortgage interest tax deduction and it’s not at all clear that big houses in the exurbs is truly the real desire of all Americans.
Furthermore, I think you need to consider that the marginal return to happiness diminishes very rapidly once the square footage of a house gets above a certain number. I’d love to have a dedicated guest bedroom in my house. But honestly, how often do I really have guests over to stay overnight. Basically once everyone has their own room I think we really overrate how much extra space is really going to improve your life.
It’s sort of like social media. Yes we have all this extra money for stuff like Tik tok but based on the numerous articles we’ve read about young people and depression is it actually improving our lives? Similar with very large houses. Once you factor in the extra cost of upkeep, utility bills etc. how much extra happiness is that nice big den really giving you.
It’s “reverse Wobegone-ism.” People want to redefine being in poverty as feeling that you can’t have what the median American has. Voila, half of America is poor. So stupid.
I have nothing to add to the poverty line discussion, but I think the overall thread mixes very different households. What I will say, however, despite my economic training + respect for Noah, that 140k for a young couple with children in New Jersey point very much hits home. The expense levels that original article has cited are if anything, too low.
What may be going on is massive distributional effects in the aggregates. The last 50 years seems to have been a story of the childless and old benefiting of the expense of younger families – through housing price appreciation, stock market appreciation, Medicare expansion, etc - squared against rises in childcare and until recently, educational expenses. Unfortunately, the original article collapses that important thread into a poverty line discussion aggregate, losing credibility in the process. Yet this development may be at the root of much of the societal angst we’re living through, and may present a serious threat for our social stability.
Yes, “you don’t have to live in New Jersey” is somewhat true – we moved. But many people cannot for family and other reasons. But the comment about childcare NOT being a necessity is shockingly cavalier. I can only hope other commenters that are less upset by it can provide a more logical explanation of why that will land so poorly with so many.
I think the observation that there's been a distribution via policy to the old is a good one; but I also think it has always generally been the case that young families move based on cost of living and jobs, responding to economic signals. I'm super for making it easier to build more housing, but I don't know that you're ever going to create a situation where any family can afford a 2500 sq ft House in whatever city they happen to want to be in.
Children are also not a necessity. I also want a lot of things that this "current timeline" is not supportive of. Life is full of hard and cruel choices, but that doesn't mean there are no good (or at least better) choices.
Having a child already is a very complex affair, with many prerequisites (well, at least if we assume this middle-class situation), if someone wants that they need to navigate this socially, economically, (and obviously politically) unfriendly decision space.
I agree that there's a very server poverty of the mind, but not of economic surplus.
On an individual level, they are not; on a society-wide level, they very much are, unless you’re cool with your society going extinct in less than a hundred years.
Noah wrote a nice post about it, I think that sums up how a modern society with some sustainability in mind ought to operate.
(If "current" society values its own continuation at the level that provides a sufficiently large active population - workers, future caretakers - then it ought to fucking act like it. And if not, it's not my problem, really. I support a lot of collectivist efforts, I want the deep future to be a good one for humanity, but there are billions of people who don't even know what this means, don't have the attention span, and in general, who are too busy having kids - for example - or voting against that future, even if sometimes "just" with their wallet.)
It’s a worrying trend that Americans from all groups like to participate in victimhood Olympics instead of being satisfied with what they have. Immigrants are more likely to appreciate their good fortune because they’re more likely to have experienced real poverty by American standards.
As I live in NJ and I believe Noah lives in SF, I’m going to guess that the cost of living is similar.
I can tell you that $140,000 less the high taxes people pay in CA and NJ, and it sure feels like a struggle.
When I work my side gig as a paramedic, I had calls to homes that one would consider poor. Having traveled overseas to poorer countries than the US, I have always told people that the poverty in America is far different than the poverty you can see overseas.
More often than not, everyone had a cell phone and a big-screen TV, and they all looked well fed; in fact, except for the elderly, I would say, overfed, possibly not by choice. Fast Food and high-carb meals are a staple of the less well off.
Many had pets. Few could afford the $900 vet bill I just paid, but the trappings of a better life than abject poverty were evident. Subsidized housing, subsidized utilities, SNAP, child tax credits, these are the things of the American poor.
Still, car and home insurance rates have increased. Repair costs and parts for repairs have increased. Noah may be able to disprove my theory, but I suspect we have been in a wage-price spiral. Costs rise, workers demand higher pay, which raises prices, which in turn prompts workers to demand higher pay.
The UAW and Boeing workers demanded large pay increases, and we see unionization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon. I can say that in NJ, a teacher and a paramedic, between them, could have made $140,000, and they would be struggling to do more than just pay bills.
Now, as to Child Care, whoever came up with this ill-informed statement, "ultimately, it’s not something you need in and of itself to live a good life,” is just ignorant.
Everyone who works in a hospital works 12 hours. If a flight attendant has a child and a firefighter husband, who is watching the kids? My paramedic partners, working their 12-hour shifts, had to constantly juggle child care for their 7- and 8-year-old kids.
My wife, a teacher, would, of course, hear from a mother of a sick child who cannot be left alone at home, forcing a working parent to call out sick or frantically find someone to come to the house at 6:30am so those who work in the city could start their two-hour commute.
I’ll just say that who ever said child care ends after five years is a dope.
When I was 7-8 I ran around the neighborhood with all the other kids after school. If people want to perpetuate this myth that kids are helpless and need constant adult supervision, and if they want to spend $32K a year on it, then fine, but I have no sympathy if they are struggling financially for their stupid choices.
Unfortunately, the government won’t let parents leave children under some age (around 14 I guess, depending on the state) alone in a house, in a car or playing in a park and any nosy neighbor can call CPS or the cops and you are then in a world of pain. This wasn’t the case in the 1970s, as far as I know. I did have my nosy neighbor (Uncle Bill) call my mom on me when us kids crawled out of our bedroom dormer window and were playing on the second story sloped roof, but no authorities got involved.
I think your struggles are very real, but they may not be representative. Nor do they reflect poverty.
For example, most people do not work 12 hour shifts, and it is certainly a small minority of two-income households that have young children and both adults working long and/or evening hours.
A two hour commute from NJ to NYC is also unusual. The median American lives in a mid-sized city, much closer to their place of work.
NYC and SF are some of the most expensive places in this country. $140,000 doesn't go nearly as far there as it does everywhere else.
The median family doesn’t live in SF/NYC. In those markets probably $140k is quite hard to live on for a family of four. But the post was discussing the median.
We also aren’t very good at spreading income and expenses throughout our lives. A family with two young children has very high expenses and less ability to make income. Whereas 20 years later their income is much higher and yet their expenses are lower. So a lot would rely on intergenerational wealth transfer or other support (free child care).
KIplingers list of the top 15 cities for housing might surprise you. NYC Manhattan is the outlier at $3 million. They start at just over a million and go up to $1.9 million in San Jose CA. Brooklyn and Queens are there and so is Orange County CA. So are Seattle, Bethesda MD and Boston. Cities are expensive, period.
This alone had me thinking how ridiculous the ideas of US middle class 'poverty' is: "How about shelter? About 14% of American children have living situations with more than one person per room, which is how we define “overcrowded”." errr.... the horror of two kids sharing a room????
Although the reocurring prevalance of this does highlight the self-harming (in political as well as economic terms) of degrowth thinking.
I wish there were a deeper investigation of the why at the end.
I think it is too easy to cynically blame it on politicians trying to get voters on their side. You see the same exact dynamic in Vietnam...but there is no voting there!
And there are tons of examples of people NOT pretending they are struggling. You've got people pretending everything is fine when their lifestyle is supported by a house of cards of debt. You've got nouveau riche who infamously blow money on all kinds of things. And there are many cultures -- Asia is a prominent one but not the only one -- where showing off wealth to prove you aren't struggling is a big thing.
So there's something very curious and intriguing going on with all these various currents and countercurrents.
It is hard not to feel that the "housing theory of everything" plays a role, even if just a supporting one.
I also wonder how much is people having unrealistic expectations about the relationship between wealth and happiness and then overcorrecting and being unduly pessimistic.
For that theory imagine something like "people naively assume that 2x wealth means 2x happiness". They aren't dumb and they can see they are 2x richer than their grandparents. But they definitely aren't 2x happier -- especially when, as Robert Gordon pointed out, the improvements we do see feel less revolutionary than "now we have electricity" and "now we have cars". (Though smart phones have been pretty transformative and people have completely taken them for granted after less than 2 decades, so I dunno.) People rarely change foundational beliefs when evidence contradicts them so we get society wide cognitive dissonance.
I am not sure there is a contradiction between individuals doing all they can to appear prosperous and successful, while simultaneously applauding an aggregate view of their class as struggling. If for no other reason, this highlights the individual's triumph over adversity.
But I also think that contemporary communications technology has resulted in every subgroup going off into ever narrower bubbles to sulk over the myriad injustices the rest of the population visits upon them. It's not just red and blue by a long shot. Gender resentments multiply, generational divides explode, everywhere you look, the divisive screeds get more strident, more mainstream. With the result that, within your group it is very easy to take as obvious truth some overblown claim of victimhood, especially if it is numberish.
The most important take away from this article is the inflation in expectations that has occurred in the U.S. over this time period as we have gotten richer. The house size is the most telling example but within the house we have been taught that we all need things like 3 bathrooms, swimming pools (even in NJ), granite counter tops (thanks HGTV house porn) and 2-3 car garages which still cannot hold our stuff so we need to rent a storage garage nearby. I spend summers in Czechia (not Prague) and to me it is not a trip to a different place it is a trip to a different time. The time I grew up in NY in the 1960's and 1970's. A few people seem to be rich there but nobody seems to be really poor. Multi-generational households really help with both childcare and eldercare. Almost no two car families and I don't think I ever saw a granite countertop while kids sharing rooms is the norm rather than the exception. That is what I remember.
> Multi-generational households really help with both childcare and eldercare.
Quite true, but in a complex way, because then the labor of care is off the books, so you don't have to formally pay for it, but you personally have to *do* it. And the fact that middle-class Americans don't expect to do that labor needs to be factored in to the poverty level.
This column spends an inordinate amount of space criticizing some guy's statement about pre-tax income for a family of four in New Jersey. Unfortunately, Noah's criticism is itself flawed. And besides, who wants to devote substantial time to reading what Noah thinks about some guy Mike Green? In sum, who cares? ...
Much more interesting would be a brief outline of Noah's own opinions on (i) the conceptual definition of poverty, (ii) what the pretax poverty income is for a family of four, and (iii) how the poverty income differs across states (eg New Jersey vs Mississippi) ...
Perhaps an editor who will tell you to get to the point? ...
Well he created this substack because he doesn’t like having an editor. He seems to be making several $megabucks a year based on his subscriber numbers, so I guess he made the right decision. I think this was a good article, and most of them I are, which is why I pay for it. I hope he spends his income on more rabbits instead of an editor, and if you aren’t a paid subscriber there isn’t really a basis to complain about it.
Yeah seriously I think a lot of writers are over indexed to what is trending on Twitter. I had never heard of Mike Green or the comment that < $140k is poverty. That said I am tired of middle class people throwing around the term poverty because they are stressed financially, or when people act like this is the worst time to be alive in history.
I was with Noah until he started talking about large homes. Once starting homes of 800-1100 sw. ft were relatively common but they are no longer built. Is that a function of consumer demand or caused by zoning and other regs around new home construction that caused fixed costs to rise and made starting homes uneconomical>
I think it's both. It is true that building small homes is, mostly, illegal. But my anecdotal experience is that many first time homebuyers are willing to trade location in the city proper for a newer, larger house out on the edge of town, given equal purchase price. The exurban lifestyle is ultimately more expensive -- mostly because they spend more time commuting, have to own more cars as a family. But this is the unconstrained choice of many people.
Most of the housing stock is older homes. I actually intentionally purchased a smaller (older) home with a nicer location than a larger one further away. But most don’t seem to want to make that choice.
“Did some nefarious fat cat in a smoky back room decide that now real estate companies would only make gigantic houses”
This exact thing happened in Auckland until a few years ago, but the culprit is not nefarious fat cats, it is zoning. If you have large areas with single housing zone, and with a minimum lot size that makes land cost at least the equivalent of half a million USD then of course you get large houses.
Yes!!
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/housing-is-at-the-heart-of-americas
I agree completely. Clearly, people do want larger houses than we had in 1950, but I think this preference has been greatly exaggerated by the illegality of building smaller dwellings in many places. You can't build 1000 sq ft houses in vast swaths of the United States.
it's kind of feature creep, and that happens with cars and consumer electronics. Manufacturers are constantly making things better... but that is basically very good, comparing the baseline of 1963 with that of 2025. The auto industry is one of the best examples in a positive way, think of what was available back then and now. We have an insane amount of choice buying a car in 2025: electric, hybrid, gas , diesel... as opposed to gas only in 1963. And I am much happier driving a 2025 VW than a 1963 VW!
I’m so glad you pointed this out, I came to make this exact point. Some bozo on Twitter was making a similar case the other day that the proliferation of HOAs in the US was proof that Americans like them. “After all, they still buy houses!” As though not basically all newly built American houses come with an HOA because it’s a way of obscuring the cost of what should be government provided services so that property taxes don’t go up. Americans don’t get a fully free choice in what size house they buy, or if there’s an HOA. They get to buy what builders make, or they don’t get to buy anything.
I don’t have an HOA but the people I know that have one are genuinely happy about it. They like having services like a community pool, consistent painting and yard work so that all the houses look nice, and so on. So to each their own.
This just doesn't make sense. As much as I hate HOAs and despise the type of people involved in them, I can't see any reason why builders would include them if buyers would rather not have them.
Builders are required by cities to do upgrades before they’re given permission to build, at builder expense. These capital expenses are then passed on to homeowners in their home price, and the operational expenses are the responsibility of the HOA. For example, in my mom’s neighborhood the builder had to create the streets, build the water retention basin for the draining of the streets, build common area space because the city wouldn’t build a park, etc etc. Then the community owns these and has to pay to maintain them. In addition to property taxes. There does exist in CA a way for localities to create special tax assessment districts to pay for infrastructure like this. I wish this was used more often because you get the benefits of the HOA in managing shared assets, without the downsides of Brad and Karen yelling at you about the height of your potted plants or the color of your front door.
That's kind of nuts. If the city requires the builders to build the supporting infrastructure, they should at least take over the maintenance of it once built. The homeowners are paying property taxes to the city after all.
That doesn't work as well as it might sound. Most US cities have historically agreed to maintain whatever infrastructure developers built (given conformity with their standards), and that ends up being a massive financial drain on the city. The city doesn't design these roads and so they aren't able to have a day in whether the ones that get built pass a long-term cost/benefit test. Your property taxes are almost certainly not high enough to actually cover those maintenance and replacement costs, and most US cities are slowly falling behind on this.
Don’t most cities still require roads built to standards, permit approval to build and inspections to consider it done? There aren’t many places I’m aware of where builders can just build roads however they want.
It's a fundamental misalignment of incentives. If the people paying to build the roads are not also on the hook for the maintenance, their incentive is to build the cheapest roads possible.
The city makes them before they can build the neighborhood in many cases. It’s all bull shit
I had no idea that could be done by the city. Seems like it should be an unconstitutional breach of freedom of association for the government to force you into a private organization.
It’s better than the alternative in most places—which is the city eventually being forced to cut basic maintenance and services and/or going bankrupt.
Low-density development on the outer fringe is not economically sustainable in most areas. The roads and pipes service a small number of property-tax payers, and are an indefinite fiscal liability to the city.
Low density development on the outer fringes is typically on private well and septic, not public water and sewer. And at least where I live, a lot of them are on existing roads.
there are many laws mandating americans buy higher quality products. it is illegal to buy a car without seatbelts and airbags, or to go to a restaurant that fails a health inspection, or to get treated by a medical school drop out, etc.
Am I supposed to read this to mean you think buying a 1400sqft house is equivalent to eating in a vermin infested restaurant? That it’s something the government does and should *protect* us from?
you have drawn the opposite of the intended conclusion
Those regulations target features of a product that are t always obvious when a customer is checking it out, and that customers don’t always think about in ordinary circumstances. That sort of feature often does make sense to regulate, because it is something that people care about when it comes up, but it’s hard for them to check and they forget to check.
Square footage of a house and size of the lot aren’t things that people forget to care about when looking at a house, and they aren’t hard to evaluate when you visit. Don’t makes much less sense to regulate those. The competitive market will provide whatever discipline is valuable there (which may not be as much as some people naively think is relevant).
i agree minimum lot sizes are a regulation with an unusually poor cost-benefit ratio
They aren’t about the buyer. They are about protecting the character, style and density of the area. Now, on libertarian grounds I don’t think there should be strong regulation of these factors, and on YIMBY grounds we discovered that applied everywhere at scale these regulations have the side effect of reducing housing supply and thus costs for everyone. But, in fairness, the rules generally aren’t about the micromanaging individual’s housing choices - they are about managing aesthetics for the existing residents. There is real value there - that is why fighting the NIMBYs is so hard.
This is also true for houses and apartments. You may have requirements for double glazed windows, insulation, fire safety, etc. And this is a good thing.
Accidentally enforcing a minimum size far larger than what people need or want however leads to a ton of waste, and in case of housing, a shortage.
Yes, but not the way you think.
If the only way to have a neighborhood where families normatively have 2 parents is to have huge houses, there will be huge houses. That - not housing per se, but housing in a 2-parent neighborhood - is what's gotten spectacularly more expensive.
It's much more annoying for singles when this happens, they get forced to live in a house with roommates instead of in an apartment.
it's a service to debunk such sloppy analysis.
However, I think you did not present an accurate picture of food insecurity in the United States. The USDA report you linked to shows higher levels of food insecurity than you cite. Most readers will come away with the false impression that food insecurity is relatively rare.
I'm very involved in this issue on a grass roots basis and while practically no one in America is starved of food, the disruption to lives and loss of dignity of food uncertainty and having to rely on food banks and pantries is pervasive among the poor.
For sure. But I did present the expanded food insecurity numbers in addition to the severe food insecurity numbers!
I don’t know what “severe food insecurity” means in the chart you put up. But I think if you and I didn’t know where we might find food for ourselves/our family tomorrow or a week from now, we would say that was “severe.”
>>while practically no one in America is starved of food, the disruption to lives and loss of dignity of food uncertainty and having to rely on food banks and pantries is pervasive among the poor.
You seem to be saying "food insecurity is still a large problem because a lot of people rely on govt programs and charity that help prevent it" - which is an odd argument to me.
Ideally no one should have to rely on assistance for food security, but programs to address existing food insecurity seem like the next best thing to me.
The programs help prevent starvation; they do not take away from the precarity, which makes millions of lives worse, unhealthier, and less productive.
How much food insecurity is down to impulse control issues and poor executive functioning?
Impulse control as in the ability to wait and think before posting a silly comment?
It's a valid question.
Not really. The unstated thesis behind the question is that people who are food insecure have only themselves to blame and so we shouldn’t care about or for them. If you think that’s ok… best of luck.
Of course it's a valid question. The answer is hardly obvious and does make a difference in formulating good policy.
Neither truth nor good policy are likely to result from attempting to shame people who ask "inappropriate" questions. To change the world well, we need an accurate grasp of it.
Great debunking, and I’ll add to it:
Mike Green is not a friend of mine, so I will be less kind and simply call his article rubbish. Rubbish that is especially pernicious and fraught with danger right now.
One will never go broke telling Americans what they want to hear—and what we want to hear right now is that we are deprived victims, oppressed by “the system” and unable to afford “necessities”. By the fat cats, naturally.
Like all woe-is-me rubbish narratives, this has a grain of truth. Our health care, day care, and housing economies in big elite cities are not ideal. We really are currently run by lawless, violent fat cats (whom we elected!). Things need to change, not least our ongoing slide into gangsterish dictatorship.
But the notion that “no one can afford anything” and that you need to be rich to survive in America in 2025 is garbage. Garbage that it is simply not popular or socially acceptable to push back on, especially if you are a liberal. But push back on it we must.
I fear with articles like Green’s, we risk pumping up policy demands and expectations so high, and our general public existential unhappiness with it, that no left-of-center or small-d democratic (but I repeat myself) administration has any realistic capacity to satisfy them.
No future president is going to succeed in adequately delivering to a public that genuinely imagines $140,000 a year—or anything like it—to be the universal “bare minimum” to survive, lived experience and actual real life be damned.
The likely result of a mass delusion like that is yet another cycle of malaise, status-quo-burning-down, and revived right-wing corrupt dictatorship, followed by whomever succeeds it picking up the pieces. Over, and over, and over again.
We’ve already gone through two cycles of that nonsense, to increasingly destructive effect across America. I hope to god we don’t go through a third.
P.S.: For all their mutual emnity on a host of unrelated issues, I think Noah Smith and Will Stancil see eye to eye on this issue in particular.
Will’s been shouting into a gale-force wind on the perils of Democrats trying to ride an “affordability crisis” narrative back to power for much of November. I wish him luck; he’ll need it.
Insert Arnold “Epic Handshake” meme here.
This type of thing is the reason why a sensible tax policy in the US is politically impossible. Even the Democrats promise there will be no tax increases on people earning under $400,000 due to the myth that the middle class is struggling more than ever, and the other myth that the middle class extends to people making $400K.
I grew up in a high-income family but with a somewhat austere, frugal upbringing by today’s standards.
As I’ve grown older and find myself and my friends is a similar income bracket as my own parents, I can anecdotally attest that expectations have grown dramatically.
It is now normal for “middle class” families to live in gargantuan spaces, have 3 cars, take multiple expensive vacations every year, and have their kids involved in several expensive sports and activities.
This is partly why the definition of “poor” has so greatly shifted.
This will be the subject of a future post!
This is an insanely big part of this..
As a European that has been to the US very recently, including LA, that is considered one of the most expensive cities in the US, this is very funny. LA's rents of normal homes (for example) are on par with those of the largest and most desired cities in Europe, like Berlin, London, etc.
But household incomes are nowhere near 140k, they're 1/3 or at best 1/2 of that figure.
By this flawed logic it should mean that basically 99.999% of Europe is made of poor families/people.
If you ever visited Europe, do you think that Berlin or Paris or Milan are places where people live with 1/3 of the poor's income? Do they look like slums filled with the poorest?
Of course 140k $ per year is a ton of money everywhere, including the US, and it makes no sense to call it the poverty line.
No, central Paris is not a slum. But actually yes, I do think the data on consumption and GDP show that western/northern Europeans are materially poorer than Americans (yes obviously painting with broad strokes). Part of that is low incomes and punitively high taxes. Part of it is low economic growth caused by regulation strangling the markets. Part of it is a sort of hair shirt holier-than-thou refusal of modern technology.
We have lower or much lower net incomes (that often are even more unfavourable due to higher costs in a ever increasing number of goods like gasoline, electricity, and now even homes in some cases), but saying that the vast majority of citizens of Berlin, Paris, London or Barcelona are poor because households make less than 140k is pure madness.
Since I'm lazy I asked chatgpt to tell me the median household income for cities like London or Paris (but he gave me sources and checked), and the net income (after tax) is 40k for households (not personal). If the after tax income reported here of 118k is correct, then in these cities the income is about 1/3 of that.
If you tell me that having a net income under 118k means you're poor, then having 40k means you're really poor.
I think we can all agree that by no means we would define the median household in Paris or Berlin as poor, unless we empty the word poor of every sensible meaning.
Noah, you make a lot of good points, but you imply that childcare is either full-time or nonexistent. You make it sound like families temporarily pay for full-time care for children 5 and under, and then, poof! Childcare expenses just go away.
Obviously that is not the case for dual-earner families. A seven-year-old whose classes end at 1:30 pm and whose parents get home from work at 5:30 pm can’t be left home alone during those hours. He or she needs after-school care, which is a recurring expense, to say nothing of the many days when school is closed but parents have to work, like 2.5 months in the summer! Sure, this kind of care is much less expensive than full-time daycare for an infant or toddler, but it is by no means a trivial expense.
Sure, of course. But by the same token, if you have two kids spaced 3 years apart, then you only pay the full $32k for ONE year, ever. And if they're 4 years apart, you *never* pay $32k ever. So it's kind of wild to list $32k as an ongoing annual expense.
Agreed, but omitting it from the list (because you can't find good numbers?) is also kind of wild. It's a real expense that is significant for most parents' budgets. In fact, in California it's much more significant than healthcare costs for at least a decade of a young family's life. In my opinion ignoring it does a disservice to your analysis.
I was coming here to say the same thing. Also, summer camp is grossly expensive, but still essential for families where both parents work. And don't get me started on all the days the kids have off school.
Noah mentions a tax credit for child care in New Jersey, but when I looked it up, it's only $1k, which doesn't help much if you're paying $18k a year per kid.
It’s true, we spend around $15k/yr for child care during holidays.
Of course many people rely on family. When I was a kid my grandparents just watched me and it was great.
As someone who finds these “actually $xxx,xxx is poor” articles infuriating I’m glad for this debunking. You forgot another political reason these articles proliferate in places like WSJ, CNBC and The Free Press; these outlets of an ideological predisposition towards Reaganism including economics and especially tax cuts so these articles serve as a way to help these publications mostly top 10% readership feel less guilty or even think they “need” upper class tax cuts.
But you mentioned houses being bigger today but I do think you’re underselling the fact that houses being much bigger today is not really as big a net win as it’s made out to be. As other people have noted, zoning rules mean that the supposed preference for large houses is not necessarily the true preference of all people. Add in the warping effects of the mortgage interest tax deduction and it’s not at all clear that big houses in the exurbs is truly the real desire of all Americans.
Furthermore, I think you need to consider that the marginal return to happiness diminishes very rapidly once the square footage of a house gets above a certain number. I’d love to have a dedicated guest bedroom in my house. But honestly, how often do I really have guests over to stay overnight. Basically once everyone has their own room I think we really overrate how much extra space is really going to improve your life.
It’s sort of like social media. Yes we have all this extra money for stuff like Tik tok but based on the numerous articles we’ve read about young people and depression is it actually improving our lives? Similar with very large houses. Once you factor in the extra cost of upkeep, utility bills etc. how much extra happiness is that nice big den really giving you.
It’s “reverse Wobegone-ism.” People want to redefine being in poverty as feeling that you can’t have what the median American has. Voila, half of America is poor. So stupid.
I have nothing to add to the poverty line discussion, but I think the overall thread mixes very different households. What I will say, however, despite my economic training + respect for Noah, that 140k for a young couple with children in New Jersey point very much hits home. The expense levels that original article has cited are if anything, too low.
What may be going on is massive distributional effects in the aggregates. The last 50 years seems to have been a story of the childless and old benefiting of the expense of younger families – through housing price appreciation, stock market appreciation, Medicare expansion, etc - squared against rises in childcare and until recently, educational expenses. Unfortunately, the original article collapses that important thread into a poverty line discussion aggregate, losing credibility in the process. Yet this development may be at the root of much of the societal angst we’re living through, and may present a serious threat for our social stability.
Yes, “you don’t have to live in New Jersey” is somewhat true – we moved. But many people cannot for family and other reasons. But the comment about childcare NOT being a necessity is shockingly cavalier. I can only hope other commenters that are less upset by it can provide a more logical explanation of why that will land so poorly with so many.
I think the observation that there's been a distribution via policy to the old is a good one; but I also think it has always generally been the case that young families move based on cost of living and jobs, responding to economic signals. I'm super for making it easier to build more housing, but I don't know that you're ever going to create a situation where any family can afford a 2500 sq ft House in whatever city they happen to want to be in.
Children are also not a necessity. I also want a lot of things that this "current timeline" is not supportive of. Life is full of hard and cruel choices, but that doesn't mean there are no good (or at least better) choices.
Having a child already is a very complex affair, with many prerequisites (well, at least if we assume this middle-class situation), if someone wants that they need to navigate this socially, economically, (and obviously politically) unfriendly decision space.
I agree that there's a very server poverty of the mind, but not of economic surplus.
“Children are also not a necessity.”
On an individual level, they are not; on a society-wide level, they very much are, unless you’re cool with your society going extinct in less than a hundred years.
Noah wrote a nice post about it, I think that sums up how a modern society with some sustainability in mind ought to operate.
(If "current" society values its own continuation at the level that provides a sufficiently large active population - workers, future caretakers - then it ought to fucking act like it. And if not, it's not my problem, really. I support a lot of collectivist efforts, I want the deep future to be a good one for humanity, but there are billions of people who don't even know what this means, don't have the attention span, and in general, who are too busy having kids - for example - or voting against that future, even if sometimes "just" with their wallet.)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/humanity-is-going-to-shrink
It’s a worrying trend that Americans from all groups like to participate in victimhood Olympics instead of being satisfied with what they have. Immigrants are more likely to appreciate their good fortune because they’re more likely to have experienced real poverty by American standards.
As I live in NJ and I believe Noah lives in SF, I’m going to guess that the cost of living is similar.
I can tell you that $140,000 less the high taxes people pay in CA and NJ, and it sure feels like a struggle.
When I work my side gig as a paramedic, I had calls to homes that one would consider poor. Having traveled overseas to poorer countries than the US, I have always told people that the poverty in America is far different than the poverty you can see overseas.
More often than not, everyone had a cell phone and a big-screen TV, and they all looked well fed; in fact, except for the elderly, I would say, overfed, possibly not by choice. Fast Food and high-carb meals are a staple of the less well off.
Many had pets. Few could afford the $900 vet bill I just paid, but the trappings of a better life than abject poverty were evident. Subsidized housing, subsidized utilities, SNAP, child tax credits, these are the things of the American poor.
Still, car and home insurance rates have increased. Repair costs and parts for repairs have increased. Noah may be able to disprove my theory, but I suspect we have been in a wage-price spiral. Costs rise, workers demand higher pay, which raises prices, which in turn prompts workers to demand higher pay.
The UAW and Boeing workers demanded large pay increases, and we see unionization efforts at Starbucks and Amazon. I can say that in NJ, a teacher and a paramedic, between them, could have made $140,000, and they would be struggling to do more than just pay bills.
Now, as to Child Care, whoever came up with this ill-informed statement, "ultimately, it’s not something you need in and of itself to live a good life,” is just ignorant.
Everyone who works in a hospital works 12 hours. If a flight attendant has a child and a firefighter husband, who is watching the kids? My paramedic partners, working their 12-hour shifts, had to constantly juggle child care for their 7- and 8-year-old kids.
My wife, a teacher, would, of course, hear from a mother of a sick child who cannot be left alone at home, forcing a working parent to call out sick or frantically find someone to come to the house at 6:30am so those who work in the city could start their two-hour commute.
I’ll just say that who ever said child care ends after five years is a dope.
When I was 7-8 I ran around the neighborhood with all the other kids after school. If people want to perpetuate this myth that kids are helpless and need constant adult supervision, and if they want to spend $32K a year on it, then fine, but I have no sympathy if they are struggling financially for their stupid choices.
Unfortunately, the government won’t let parents leave children under some age (around 14 I guess, depending on the state) alone in a house, in a car or playing in a park and any nosy neighbor can call CPS or the cops and you are then in a world of pain. This wasn’t the case in the 1970s, as far as I know. I did have my nosy neighbor (Uncle Bill) call my mom on me when us kids crawled out of our bedroom dormer window and were playing on the second story sloped roof, but no authorities got involved.
I think your struggles are very real, but they may not be representative. Nor do they reflect poverty.
For example, most people do not work 12 hour shifts, and it is certainly a small minority of two-income households that have young children and both adults working long and/or evening hours.
A two hour commute from NJ to NYC is also unusual. The median American lives in a mid-sized city, much closer to their place of work.
NYC and SF are some of the most expensive places in this country. $140,000 doesn't go nearly as far there as it does everywhere else.
And, I should add, if the median family of 4 in the US makes $125,000, the median family in the NYC suburbs makes considerably more than that.
The median family doesn’t live in SF/NYC. In those markets probably $140k is quite hard to live on for a family of four. But the post was discussing the median.
We also aren’t very good at spreading income and expenses throughout our lives. A family with two young children has very high expenses and less ability to make income. Whereas 20 years later their income is much higher and yet their expenses are lower. So a lot would rely on intergenerational wealth transfer or other support (free child care).
https://www.kiplinger.com/real-estate/603612/15-us-cities-with-the-highest-average-home-prices
The average home prices in the top 15 cities.
KIplingers list of the top 15 cities for housing might surprise you. NYC Manhattan is the outlier at $3 million. They start at just over a million and go up to $1.9 million in San Jose CA. Brooklyn and Queens are there and so is Orange County CA. So are Seattle, Bethesda MD and Boston. Cities are expensive, period.
This alone had me thinking how ridiculous the ideas of US middle class 'poverty' is: "How about shelter? About 14% of American children have living situations with more than one person per room, which is how we define “overcrowded”." errr.... the horror of two kids sharing a room????
Although the reocurring prevalance of this does highlight the self-harming (in political as well as economic terms) of degrowth thinking.
I was wondering about this too. ChatGPT thinks this is based on total rooms in the house, not just bedrooms.
https://archives.huduser.gov/periodicals/researchworks/march_08/RW_vol5num3t4.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com
That would make more sense although still something a bit iffy to me (but okay statistical data collection needs some simplification).
I wish there were a deeper investigation of the why at the end.
I think it is too easy to cynically blame it on politicians trying to get voters on their side. You see the same exact dynamic in Vietnam...but there is no voting there!
And there are tons of examples of people NOT pretending they are struggling. You've got people pretending everything is fine when their lifestyle is supported by a house of cards of debt. You've got nouveau riche who infamously blow money on all kinds of things. And there are many cultures -- Asia is a prominent one but not the only one -- where showing off wealth to prove you aren't struggling is a big thing.
So there's something very curious and intriguing going on with all these various currents and countercurrents.
It is hard not to feel that the "housing theory of everything" plays a role, even if just a supporting one.
I also wonder how much is people having unrealistic expectations about the relationship between wealth and happiness and then overcorrecting and being unduly pessimistic.
For that theory imagine something like "people naively assume that 2x wealth means 2x happiness". They aren't dumb and they can see they are 2x richer than their grandparents. But they definitely aren't 2x happier -- especially when, as Robert Gordon pointed out, the improvements we do see feel less revolutionary than "now we have electricity" and "now we have cars". (Though smart phones have been pretty transformative and people have completely taken them for granted after less than 2 decades, so I dunno.) People rarely change foundational beliefs when evidence contradicts them so we get society wide cognitive dissonance.
Why this kind of thing appeals to people is a subtle and difficult question. I'll ask David Shor.
I am not sure there is a contradiction between individuals doing all they can to appear prosperous and successful, while simultaneously applauding an aggregate view of their class as struggling. If for no other reason, this highlights the individual's triumph over adversity.
But I also think that contemporary communications technology has resulted in every subgroup going off into ever narrower bubbles to sulk over the myriad injustices the rest of the population visits upon them. It's not just red and blue by a long shot. Gender resentments multiply, generational divides explode, everywhere you look, the divisive screeds get more strident, more mainstream. With the result that, within your group it is very easy to take as obvious truth some overblown claim of victimhood, especially if it is numberish.
The most important take away from this article is the inflation in expectations that has occurred in the U.S. over this time period as we have gotten richer. The house size is the most telling example but within the house we have been taught that we all need things like 3 bathrooms, swimming pools (even in NJ), granite counter tops (thanks HGTV house porn) and 2-3 car garages which still cannot hold our stuff so we need to rent a storage garage nearby. I spend summers in Czechia (not Prague) and to me it is not a trip to a different place it is a trip to a different time. The time I grew up in NY in the 1960's and 1970's. A few people seem to be rich there but nobody seems to be really poor. Multi-generational households really help with both childcare and eldercare. Almost no two car families and I don't think I ever saw a granite countertop while kids sharing rooms is the norm rather than the exception. That is what I remember.
> Multi-generational households really help with both childcare and eldercare.
Quite true, but in a complex way, because then the labor of care is off the books, so you don't have to formally pay for it, but you personally have to *do* it. And the fact that middle-class Americans don't expect to do that labor needs to be factored in to the poverty level.
I think geographic dispersion is the main reason we see less of it in the United States.
This column spends an inordinate amount of space criticizing some guy's statement about pre-tax income for a family of four in New Jersey. Unfortunately, Noah's criticism is itself flawed. And besides, who wants to devote substantial time to reading what Noah thinks about some guy Mike Green? In sum, who cares? ...
Much more interesting would be a brief outline of Noah's own opinions on (i) the conceptual definition of poverty, (ii) what the pretax poverty income is for a family of four, and (iii) how the poverty income differs across states (eg New Jersey vs Mississippi) ...
Perhaps an editor who will tell you to get to the point? ...
Well he created this substack because he doesn’t like having an editor. He seems to be making several $megabucks a year based on his subscriber numbers, so I guess he made the right decision. I think this was a good article, and most of them I are, which is why I pay for it. I hope he spends his income on more rabbits instead of an editor, and if you aren’t a paid subscriber there isn’t really a basis to complain about it.
we are the editors of the world https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04854XqcfCY
Yeah seriously I think a lot of writers are over indexed to what is trending on Twitter. I had never heard of Mike Green or the comment that < $140k is poverty. That said I am tired of middle class people throwing around the term poverty because they are stressed financially, or when people act like this is the worst time to be alive in history.
yes I will volunteer for the Florida desk personally.. Noah need an editor??? Kidding
I was with Noah until he started talking about large homes. Once starting homes of 800-1100 sw. ft were relatively common but they are no longer built. Is that a function of consumer demand or caused by zoning and other regs around new home construction that caused fixed costs to rise and made starting homes uneconomical>
I think it's both. It is true that building small homes is, mostly, illegal. But my anecdotal experience is that many first time homebuyers are willing to trade location in the city proper for a newer, larger house out on the edge of town, given equal purchase price. The exurban lifestyle is ultimately more expensive -- mostly because they spend more time commuting, have to own more cars as a family. But this is the unconstrained choice of many people.
Exurban living is less expensive, not more. Many out here work remote, and any commute is typically to the outer suburbs, not the city proper.
The motivation is frequently preferring green space and a more peaceful environment. Not just expense.
Most of the housing stock is older homes. I actually intentionally purchased a smaller (older) home with a nicer location than a larger one further away. But most don’t seem to want to make that choice.
The perverse enjoyment people get out of claiming that they live in poverty is baffling to me