do montanans just hate people from california or do they hate any out of staters? (buying, live in)

[Haakon]

Originally Posted by Klapton

Another thing that transplants do is drive up real estate prices. California's real estate has been grossly over-valued for a very long time. So someone can sell modest home in CA for $350,000 and move to MT or some other more reasonable place, and think it's a bargain to buy a home for $250,000... A home that SHOULD probably be priced at $150,000 if it weren't for the fact that some outisder thinks it's a bargain at 250.

So the more of these artificially wealthy folks move in, the harder it gets for locals who have been there all along to afford anything. I grew up in western WA, and watched this phenomenon happening as I grew up. Many of us resented it quite a lot. And the Microsoft happened, and now NO ONE can afford to live there except Bill Gates.

/sigh...

Did that make any sense? lol. I hope so.

Makes perfect sense. In King County (the county where Microsoft is) the median home price is $477,345! In Seattle it's over $500,000. Not average home price, a few multi million dollar mansions can bring up the average, but the median, meaning 1/2 of the single family homes cost more than $477,345 even today.

I don't know if we can blame people from California for all of it, but they sure started the ball rolling in a big way when they flooded the state in the 80's.

[Reziac]

Originally Posted by Haakon

Makes perfect sense. In King County (the county where Microsoft is) the median home price is $477,345! In Seattle it's over $500,000. Not average home price, a few multi million dollar mansions can bring up the average, but the median, meaning 1/2 of the single family homes cost more than $477,345 even today.

Small change!! In Pleasanton CA, at the top of the spike the cheapest house in town was over $700k. Not the median, the LOW end. Median was somewhere around $1.2M.

What I'd like to know is what sort of job lets you cough up ~$12,000/month just for your house payment? And remember, you don't make 12 annual payments, you make 17 or 18, if you include property tax and insurance!

(Well, maybe the payment wasn't quite that high when they bought it with an ARM, but it WILL be once that ARM adjusts, and the taxes WILL be that high regardless... Hello foreclosure, goodbye overpriced house.)

There's a procedure you can do where you get the house reassessed, then do a financing adjustment where you tell your bank "This is how much it is REALLY worth; either take that and be happy, or we'll have to default" and generally if your new price is within reason on the current market, the bank will take it rather than wind up with yet another white elephant property.

[BeartoothPeaks]

Originally Posted by Klapton

Another thing that transplants do is drive up real estate prices. California's real estate has been grossly over-valued for a very long time. So someone can sell modest home in CA for $350,000 and move to MT or some other more reasonable place, and think it's a bargain to buy a home for $250,000... A home that SHOULD probably be priced at $150,000 if it weren't for the fact that some outisder thinks it's a bargain at 250.

So the more of these artificially wealthy folks move in, the harder it gets for locals who have been there all along to afford anything. I grew up in western WA, and watched this phenomenon happening as I grew up. Many of us resented it quite a lot. And the Microsoft happened, and now NO ONE can afford to live there except Bill Gates.

/sigh...

Did that make any sense? lol. I hope so.

It makes perfect sense. That being said, we bought a cabin just outside of Red Lodge last year, and our neighbors were the first to ask if we were granola eaters from Cali because we weren't the least bit interested in hunting. (the answer is no, we aren't from Cali).

One afternoon during a walk a farmer stopped to tell us about a mountain lion and coyote that were terrorizing locals. He made some comment about people from Cali coming in and building huge houses and raising the taxes and changing things. Almost made us want to pull a "scooby-doo" and fake run away and pack our things. We didn't, but it would have been pretty funny.

From my perspective, the land values get high, so people with larger acreages in need of money, sell off a few chunks of land for a high price. The only people that can afford those prices are ones building McMansions. They build the large homes and taxes go up. It's a never-ending cycle.


Personally, I love it out here. We have had nothing but positive experiences from everyone. Our neighbors were welcoming and we have fit right in. Mostly because I think we came here wanting to fit into this atmosphere rather than change it.

[AQHA]

Originally Posted by Radical_Car

Do Montanans hate people from california?

Yes. I hate them all. Mostly I hate the guys who wear eyeliner. California people are evil. They are the cause of all bad. I had a headache yesterday, I think it was the California peoples fault.

[Mt-7]

AQUA,
Your just jealous cause your hands are not steady enough!
I expect better stories from you, Get to writing.

[Reziac]

I think Seven just made AQHA poke hisself in the eye with his mascara stick

[AQHA]

I'd probably look good in eyeliner but its in violation of man-law so we'll never know.

[Reziac]

Originally Posted by AQHA

I'd probably look good in eyeliner but its in violation of man-law so we'll never know.

Depends whether you want your chest waxed and your eyelashes plucked.

[Reziac]

Originally Posted by Haakon

In King County (the county where Microsoft is) the median home price is $477,345! In Seattle it's over $500,000.

From the article:

A worker would have to earn $57 an hour — about $119,000 a year — to afford that Seattle home, according to the Seattle chapter of the Urban Land Institute.

And on the Eastside, a worker needs to earn nearly $152,000 a year to afford a house with the $643,750 median price there in August.

[That latter stat works out to required earnings of $72/hour. Remember it's about twice this bad in the San Francisco Bay area.]

On noting the Microsoft connection, I had these thoughts:

I don't think it's coincidence that the housing bubble got its real start in Silicon Valley -- where during the Dot Bomb era, even a newbie programmer with no post-highschool education could command $100/hour. People were flinging venture capital around like there was no tomorrow, and many newly-fledged or newly-expanded companies ran up high stock values despite having few or even NO hard assets.

When that bubble burst, a lot of people were newly rich and looking for another investment, or just too used to living high (having never lived any other way since they left mom's basement, armed with a smattering of C and Visual Basic) and that helped feed the real estate frenzy and its concomitant inflation.

[Timberwolf232]

So basically what you are saying is that it's GREED that screwed over the markets, and if people didn't have such a "get mine" attitude we would all be better off.

This is exactly why most locals here in Montana don't like to see all the out of staters and the suburban "California" attitude coming into Montana.