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I paid $190k for my house here in Duluth, MN. It is fairly historic and is across the street from Lake Superior. I think Duluth is not a bad bargain, but YMMV.
I looked up the sale history on the one in Denver. I was also surprised to find anything for under $200K, but for perspective, it last sold in 2011 for $62,900. If the seller can get the $18X,000 that’s a 3x return in 7 years. Crazy.
I paid $190k for my house here in Duluth, MN. It is fairly historic and is across the street from Lake Superior. I think Duluth is not a bad bargain, but YMMV.
Much of the Midwest and a good chunk of the South are indeed affordable. You have a Lake Superior view for 190k, while in San Diego another poster showed a similar priced listing for a 3
400 sq foot condo. Yea Minnesota is very cold but is it cold enough to accept living in a 200k shoebox to escape......uh No! Lake Superior is beautiful by the way, a HUGE perk to have that view.
I live in East Tennessee surrounded by green mountains and our climate is fairly mild. I paid less for my house than that San Diego condo and i have four times the size of that condo.
There are parts of this nation where a floor working Walmart employee will have a better life than a person with a professional level job will in a place like San Francisco, San Diego or Boston. People in these places just don’t realize how overinflated thier cost of living is. Some of it is literally being caused by thier local governments who work to keep developments at a minimum and only approve more high end developments when they are approved. It is not normal to ask people to pay 500k for a starter home, or ask 3000 per month rent on an apartment. The rest of the nation does not live like that.
Always wondered where the people live who work in grocery stores, restaurants and small factories? If you live in one of these overpriced places please tell me where the guy cooking at your favorite restaurant might live. Does he live in a cardboard box under a nearby bridge? Not everyone has a 100k job even in places like that so what do you do with those who don’t have huge incomes?
Much of the Midwest and a good chunk of the South are indeed affordable. You have a Lake Superior view for 190k, while in San Diego another poster showed a similar priced listing for a 3
400 sq foot condo. Yea Minnesota is very cold but is it cold enough to accept living in a 200k shoebox to escape......uh No! Lake Superior is beautiful by the way, a HUGE perk to have that view.
I live in East Tennessee surrounded by green mountains and our climate is fairly mild. I paid less for my house than that San Diego condo and i have four times the size of that condo.
There are parts of this nation where a floor working Walmart employee will have a better life than a person with a professional level job will in a place like San Francisco, San Diego or Boston. People in these places just don’t realize how overinflated thier cost of living is. Some of it is literally being caused by thier local governments who work to keep developments at a minimum and only approve more high end developments when they are approved. It is not normal to ask people to pay 500k for a starter home, or ask 3000 per month rent on an apartment. The rest of the nation does not live like that.
Always wondered where the people live who work in grocery stores, restaurants and small factories? If you live in one of these overpriced places please tell me where the guy cooking at your favorite restaurant might live. Does he live in a cardboard box under a nearby bridge? Not everyone has a 100k job even in places like that so what do you do with those who don’t have huge incomes?
You have to realize that for many of us in these ultra-high priced areas that they weren’t always that way. Twenty years ago on a waiter and military contractor’s salary we bought our house here in San Diego when it was pricier than most cities but only about 30% more. That house that we still live in was about exactly the price of that condo and is worth a million dollars more today. We have a high household income but there is no way we could afford to buy our house today.
We live a very good life and love the house/neighborhood/city that we are in and can easily afford it because the housing cost is effectively removed from our budget as we paid off our house a couple of years ago. I still would want to live in a nice city and not the suburbs or a small town but if I was making less than $100k a year no way we would stay here or even think about moving here if we were just starting out. It is in fact a huge issue in our city how to house the middle class here.
There are plenty of perfectly fine cities that one could have a great life in and not have to live in a shoebox. I’ve never been to Duluth but hear it is a very nice city, great for outdoor activities (with the right winter weather gear) and a great setting with historic architecture on the lake. We were just in Pittsburgh last October and were in fact checking out the neighborhoods of Brookline and Dormont, that’s a great area and Pittsburgh is fantastic. No place is perfect and it would have to be what each individual’s priorities are but certainly there are some areas that you can still carve out a fine life in.
Those pricy areas are what they are for a reason and to get in a place in the urban core in many cities is just becoming crazy expensive so there are fewer and fewer choices for young urbanites to make a go of it where there is a chance of affording to settle in and that’s kind of sad.
I have mixed feelings regarding Phoenix because the city limits are so large. This goes for Jacksonville as well. I can't speak for Jacksonville but in Phoenix proper if you look in the city center you might be able to get an 800 square foot apartment for 200k, or maybe even smaller, but you'd be hard pressed to find something larger.
City of Phoenix incorporates some of the metro's poorest neighborhoods and some extremely low density borderline rural areas that are probably raising the square footage significantly. I could probably get that kind of square footage mentioned in the image in Sunnyslope and Maryvale (some of the most ghetto areas in Phoenix) and maybe near New River which is ridiculously far out of town. New River at the very northern end of the city and Ahwatukee, another neighborhood in town, at the very southern end is a 50 mile difference. That's absolutely massive. That's not including Phoenix's massive east-west spread either.
When you compare Phoenix's massive city limits versus say, the city limits of San Francisco, it does make me wonder if Phoenix's really is all that accurate...
I say this a bit tongue in cheek, but where in Downtown Boston and Downtown San Francisco can you find 371/260 sq/ft for $200k respectively? That means ~750 sq/ft for $400k in Boston, and 500+ sq/ft for $400k in San Fran!?
No chance, unless we're talking Tenderloin or Dorchester..
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