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Comment on The time and expense of commuting is theft, if that job can be done from home.

Ok, so we have a lot effed up in our system right now and I’m not trying to discount that. But this is like high school economics level stuff when I ask…

At $150/hr, you could afford to buy a an average home with a years pay.

Between the lowered supply of creating houses (in that it becomes more expensive to produce a house because everyone is getting paid a hell of a lot more) and the increased demand for housing because everyone has a bigger number in their bank account… Do you really expect that housing prices would just… Stay the same?

I’m also curious when any society at any point in history has been able to sustain decent housing with about a year’s worth of wages?

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CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Agreed. My wife and I are doing pretty well and we don’t even make anywhere near $150/hr combined. Maybe in the Bay and NYC that wage would make sense but not most places.

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chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
Maybe not one year, but it looks like a median home in the US in 1965 cost around 6 years of a median income.

In the 1854 book Walden by Thoreau, he gives a pessimistic account of how long it would take to afford a property in a town, that is still less than today:

An average house in this neighborhood costs perhaps eight hundred dollars, and to lay up this sum will take from ten to fifteen years of the laborer’s life, even if he is not encumbered with a family- estimating the pecuniary value of every man’s labor at one dollar a day, for if some receive more, others receive less

Although he goes on to describe building his own more remote cabin for $28.

Something is very, very wrong with incomes and housing prices currently that wasn’t as bad a problem in the past.

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