Lol that the median home price is $80k more in fucking Vegas than Chicago
Saw this info graphic a few days ago but forgot to repost here.
Was reminded of it when I was talking to a friend who has been living in Birmingham, AL. She said that in a desirable, walkable neighborhood there, teardown lots are going for $500k or more.
That’s not really typical for Birmingham. In their main nice/walkable zone (Five Points/Southside) you can find $200-300/SF decent houses.
The value for money in smaller cities that haven’t grown hugely in the last 2 decades is much better—if you can find a decent job. But even then there are ridiculous disparities: Birmingham and Columbus (GA) are cheap, but Chattanooga is nearly Atlanta prices, and Savannah has Boston prices if you want to be in the historic district and Atlanta prices if you don’t.
A lot of our housing problems seem like concentration of nearly all recent economic growth in about 50 cities.
Detroit median house price is $75k? I didn’t know that was possible in any city in the US.
Yeah west detroit is still largely abandoned. Closer to the stadiums/river/casinos is a lot nicer nowadays though.
Anyways I recommend show the detroiters obv, because why not
A house like those in my neighborhood just sold for $500k 
Yea no way either of those go for under 6 figures in my region. The land alone would be more than $75k.
Both of those houses would spark bid wars in Seattle.
Don’t a lot of the houses in Detroit come with delinquent property tax bills attached to the property, or is that something I’ve hallucinated?
Edit: a quick Google search suggests I have either hallucinated this or severely overstated how common this is.
Market has gone up a lot here along with everything else but 500k is still an elite house here.
Seems silly in today’s you can do pretty much anything anywhere to not live in some great house instead of that for that price but I guess that’s just me.
Well, for a lot of us, living in a nice house in Muskogee, OK, is still living in Muskogee. Understandable that houses where people don’t really want to live are less expensive.
It definitely used to be a thing. And they’ll still charge you a few grand per year in property taxes on your one dollar home.
most people just work then go home and watch tv/netflix/whatever the rest of the day rinse repeat
can do that anywhere
seems obvious to me that living in most cities will get worse over time doesn’t seem wise but people gonna do what they do
Maybe. I guess people that live in shitty places do that. In non-shitty places, people might want access to rivers, ocean, mountains, theater, good food, good people, and most importantly, good schools. Here’s Muskogee’s education stuff, followed my city’s:
Also, like I said a little while ago ITT, it’s a big problem that the vast majority of economic growth is happening in a handful of metro areas.
Are these exploding areas limiting housing supply? Should they get rid of single family zoning and exclusively build larger, multi resident buildings? I guess NYC is basically like that and it’s still extremely expensive to live there (rent or own). Maybe they haven’t done enough building there? Maybe land use or housing and development policies should be set by the feds or the state so the neighborhood Karen can’t veto every new development project because it blocks her view.
If you really value owning your own house on a lot with a yard and garage go out to the country or burbs. If you want to be able to walk out your door every day and experience the food, nightlife, culture etc of a city then you’ll probably have to settle for an apartment/condo.
Doesn’t seem like it would even be possible to provide affordable single family houses in all in these large cities due to space constraints. The American dream crap about owning a house needs to go away.
Retroactively, yeah, I think different zoning could have changed a lot. A ton of modern zoning is based on trying to keep minorities out of neighborhoods—it’s funny how the ghosts of the past continue to haunt us.
My neighborhood, in a big liberal city, was built in the 1930s and rezoned in the 1970s such that ~none of the exist housing stock could even be rebuilt. The city tried to liberalize zoning marginally (for instance to allow more than one ADU per dwelling) and the “protect our historic neighborhoods” and “protect our communities” yard sign campaign in these 90%+ dem neighborhoods was something to behold.
I feel like millennials are on board with townhouses, almost fully. They offer a price point and privacy/amenity combo that is really appealing. Most American cities are so far gone with SFH, we should probably just embrace the townhouse as the only practical way to deliver a large volume of housing that people actually want. Apartment blocks are great for density, but American families frankly don’t want to live in them—probably another hangover of segregation and white flight.
Simple upzoneing would help, duplexes or quadplexes
I’m certainly not here to go to bat for Oklahoma (48th in per pupil K-12 spending), but hopefully you realize that these sorts of comparisons are mostly just a proxy for wealth.
