Reality about Portland affordability (Gresham, Lake Oswego: rental, condos, crime)

[Minervah]

Originally Posted by Skerzz

Comparing just housing prices is misleading. I lived in Portland from 2015-2018 (moved from San Diego), the price I paid for my house was relatively affordable, but close to everything else was more expensive.... food, property taxes, state income tax, water, childcare, house cleaners, gardeners, etc. the only thing cheaper was sales taxes ��

My $600K house in Portland has property taxes that are 50% more than my $1M house in Scottsdale, Az and my water bill out here in the desert is lower too... makes no sense to me other than perhaps the fact that Portland has out of control public service payroll/pension liabilities? The state income taxes are also out of control with the 9% marginal tax rate kicking in at income over $8,500 for single filers. What a joke, you’d think for that type of tax revenue Citizens would at least get mediocre roads (PDX roads are junk) and a few snowplows to keep the city from shutting down in 1-2” of snowfalls. Instead, that money goes to the liberal political elite who claim they “care” about the hardworking people. But reality is that money is used to support street people, illegals, public pensions, etc. ...No thanks; I’ll instead visit during summer!!!

Here's something else you might find interesting. It also costs more to die in Portland than many other places.

Getting up in years, I decided to check out various prepaid funeral plans. According to the salesman, the one I decided upon actually was $300.00 less here in the Cleveland area than it would be in Portland.

Who knew?

[snackdog]

A median studio in SF is about $2550/month. In Portland about $1125/month.

Source: zumper.com

Two-bed apts in Portland have increased from $1030/mo in Jan 2011 to $1828/mo today or an annual increase of about 7%.

[Skerzz]

Originally Posted by snackdog

A median studio in SF is about $2550/month. In Portland about $1125/month.

Source: zumper.com

Two-bed apts in Portland have increased from $1030/mo in Jan 2011 to $1828/mo today or an annual increase of about 7%.

Makes sense. Rents have increased at approximately the same pace as home prices (per the Case-Shiller PDX PDX home price index) which suggests rents are not out of line.

[DKM]

Measuring median income to median house price is not an accurate way to measure affordability. It discounts the relative % of affluent vs. ghetto areas and ignores the property tax rate, which can be a huge difference. Higher property tax areas like Houston and Portland are always going to have cheaper priced homes than California.

[FSF]

Originally Posted by DKM

Measuring median income to median house price is not an accurate way to measure affordability. It discounts the relative % of affluent vs. ghetto areas and ignores the property tax rate, which can be a huge difference. Higher property tax areas like Houston and Portland are always going to have cheaper priced homes than California.

I'm not sure what you mean by "discount". A median cuts the population in half. And every area has rich and poor people relative to the median. That's life everywhere.

As for property taxes, I have no idea what you're talking about. A person buying a median SF home today would be hit with an annual property tax of about $20K per year, probably over 3 times as much as Portland or Houston in absolute dollars.

[texasdiver]

Originally Posted by FSF

I'm not sure what you mean by "discount". A median cuts the population in half. And every area has rich and poor people relative to the median. That's life everywhere.

As for property taxes, I have no idea what you're talking about. A person buying a median SF home today would be hit with an annual property tax of about $20K per year, probably over 3 times as much as Portland or Houston in absolute dollars.

Right. But some areas tilt wealthy and some areas tilt poor. Lake Oswego might have a lower medium income to medium home value ratio than Gresham because a lot of wealthy people live there. That doesn't make Lake Oswego more affordable than Gresham.

[psichick]

I came across this while looking for something else. Looks like it was published in May 2018.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/...-whack/561404/

Los Angeles 9.6
San Francisco 9.2
Portland 5.6
Seattle 5.6
New York 5.4
Boston 5.2

And some interesting info on median household income:
https://www.wweek.com/news/state/201...ional-average/

IMHO, numbers tell only part of the story. Who's making the $80k? People who have lived here over 10 years or people just moving here? Who feels the rents in downtown Portland aren't extreme? Those that are moving here from SF/LA/Seattle or those who were living there for the past 20 years?



For those that move here from other west coast cities, yeah, it's cheap because most of them are bringing their west coast salaries with them. If they got the paycut I did when I moved here, they wouldn't think it's cheap, that's for sure.



I didn't live in the city here or in SoCal, but with the housing increase, even with my promotions and raises, my ratio was about the same as when I lived there (and adjusted it accordingly to today's value). So, for the "average" Portland person, sure, not expensive. For the average person, it probably is expensive. Unfortunately, the biggest things that kill the "affordability" IMHO, is that the cost of everything besides housing is the same as it was in SoCal (okay, maybe not gas, but there are times our gas prices are higher than down there).



Just my $0.02 adjusted for inflation. :P

[Leisesturm]

It was, and still is common for lenders and landlords to use a comparison of your monthly gross income vs your monthly rent or mortgage plus mortgage insurance as a basis for determining 'affordability'. It held at 4:1 for decades. You had zero chance of getting a mortgage or decent apartment if you didn't make at least 4x the rent or mortgage. In my late 20's when my monthly income was over $1500.00 my rent was $300/mo. That was a 2 bedroom in a sketchy Brooklyn ghetto in the late 1980's. I managed a Health Food Store for a living.



If our present landlord insisted on the 4:1 rule we would not make the cut! Our modest 2 bedroom with the 1970's appointments in gentrifying NE Portland is just about 3x our monthly gross combined incomes. And they would have taken us at 2.5! That or the apartment would sit empty for another six months. Plenty of U.S. homeowners live where they live because bankers looked the other way at wage misrepresentation by clients to get into houses that really weren't affordable.



That $58K median income quoted earlier sounds about right. What isn't widely known is that someone making that $58K in 1990 had a much higher standard of living than now. Mainly because their mortgage or their rent would have been less than 1/5 of what it is now! Just imagine that if your rent were slashed to 1/5 of what it is? What would you do? Where would you live? What kind of life would you be able to have? And not just your housing ... your food was probably half then of what it is now.



Think about that when the $15/hr. minimum wage comes up again. A lot of us think a minimum wage is supposed to be some kind of 'floor' to hold a person at just above homelessness so they don't become wards of the state. Wrong. The earliest recipients of minimum wages LIVED on those wages. Lived at a middle class standard! Now we have people earning many, many times the minimum wage that cannot really be said to be living at a middle class standard. A modest home and vehicle is about it. Health care, Dental care, entertainment, keepsakes are all forsaken because food and shelter take every bit of the wages earned. And we have normalized this. Defend it. Believe that people who aren't thriving deserve the misery somehow.

[FSF]

Originally Posted by texasdiver

Right. But some areas tilt wealthy and some areas tilt poor. Lake Oswego might have a lower medium income to medium home value ratio than Gresham because a lot of wealthy people live there. That doesn't make Lake Oswego more affordable than Gresham.

I'm not exactly sure what your point is? It's a ratio that transcends different neighborhoods. And in fact, higher cost neighborhoods usually have HIGHER ratios (usually way higher ratios), not lower. I'm not sure that is specifically the case with LO vs Gresham but the proof is already been given in the data that I've posted. LA, SF, Seattle, New York, Boston, DC are ALL high cost areas with HIGHER ratios, implying less affordability for those who live in affluent areas.

That's why I posted this thread, because there are all of these very unaffordable (beyond and sometimes well beyond "Portland is too expensive" narrative) areas dealing with not only the same issue as Portland in terms of affordability, but often worse, and sometimes MUCH worse.

[texasdiver]

Originally Posted by FSF

I'm not exactly sure what your point is? It's a ratio that transcends different neighborhoods. And in fact, higher cost neighborhoods usually have HIGHER ratios (usually way higher ratios), not lower. I'm not sure that is specifically the case with LO vs Gresham but the proof is already been given in the data that I've posted. LA, SF, Seattle, New York, Boston, DC are ALL high cost areas with HIGHER ratios, implying less affordability for those who live in affluent areas.

That's why I posted this thread, because there are all of these very unaffordable (beyond and sometimes well beyond "Portland is too expensive" narrative) areas dealing with not only the same issue as Portland in terms of affordability, but often worse, and sometimes MUCH worse.

My point is that you are measuring "affordibility" by comparing the median income in an area to the cost of housing in that area. I'm simply pointing out that there is a great deal of self-selection going on when people chose a place to live. Wealthy people in the Portland metro area are going to tend to self-select for places like Lake Oswego that are more expensive and poorer people are going to tend to self-select for cheaper places like Gresham. I haven't looked at any actual data, but it is conceivable that the ratio of income to housing cost is actually lower in wealthy enclaves like Lake Oswego simply because many extremely wealthy people live there. However, that doesn't in any way mean that Lake Oswego is going to be more affordable than Gresham for the average person moving in from out of state.