Impressions after my first visit to Raleigh/Duraham. (Durham, Cary: cheap house, safe neighborhoods)

[rnc2mbfl]

Originally Posted by sliverbox

Here's another article taken from the same site. Its conclusion is that Raleigh is by national standards moderately unaffordable, standing at around 3.7 out of a 6, with 6 being severely unaffordable. Interesting read.

New Survey: Improving Housing Affordability – But Still a Way to Go | Newgeography.com

The thing that's noticeable to me about the Raleigh housing market in the last few decades is that the supply of homes being built has seemed tilted to the wealthy side of the area's median income. The size of the average home built also seems to grow over time.
I just don't see Raleigh as moderately unaffordable unless one measures unaffordability by not being able to get everything one "wants" for the price one wants to pay. When I look at real estate websites, I am always struck by the large number of good homes for sale that would easily be affordable to the area's median income. But, that's not what people want. Anecdotally, I see it pasted all over this forum weekly in posts from those who want to move to Raleigh. It goes something like this...."I want at least an acre of land, 4 bedrooms, quiet street, double garage for under $225K....blah, blah, blah...." Some other factors that I think push Raleigh statistically into the moderately unaffordable category are:

1. The general age of homes in the metro. Raleigh's housing supply is much younger than other metros of similar size since it has grown rapidly in the last few decades. Newer houses typically cost more (unless they are old enough to exude charm). Most metro areas have large swaths of moderately priced neighborhoods built in days gone by when expectations were more balanced.
2. speaking of which....factor 2 is that Raleigh has such a limited supply of charming older neighborhoods that the demand for them outstrips the supply and drives those prices up.
3. The market was built over the last few decades for higher paid newcomers or those with deeper pockets due to their home sales in more expensive markets like NY, NJ, CA or MA

When researchers compare average median incomes and housing prices to years gone by, they never seem to take into account the unrealistic growing demand of Americans everywhere. People want more space, bigger kitchens with luxury finishes, spa bathrooms, separate theater rooms, home gyms and offices. These are not just things desired by the very tippy top of the market. These are things that a growing number of people want. Well, guess what? Those things cost money. My dad was raised in a 1100 square foot house + a basement and his parents had 6 kids. They had one bathroom! Can you imagine? No wonder homes were more "affordable" then. My parents raised 4 kids in 1600 s.f. 25 years later. Now, 1600 s.f. is seen by more and more people as a starter home.

[lovebrentwood]

Originally Posted by rnc2mbfl

My dad was raised in a 1100 square foot house + a basement and his parents had 6 kids. They had one bathroom! Can you imagine? No wonder homes were more "affordable" then. My parents raised 4 kids in 1600 s.f. 25 years later. Now, 1600 s.f. is seen by more and more people as a starter home.

Yeah, I can imagine. I was raised in a home with six kids, two parents, one dog, one cat. And one bathroom. It was the same house my father was raised in, a standard Victorian-era home.

We all survived.

[ScranBarre]

Why are there so many apologists on the Raleigh forum for unchecked suburban sprawl? While in the short-term it might be feasible for seemingly half (and that's sadly probably not a gross exaggeration) of your metropolitan population to be residing in subdivisions with your two-story vinyl-clad McMansions, what will occur when fuel prices escalate, isolating many who are just marginally being able to keep their heads afloat now financially when they can't afford to put gas in their vehicle to access any other destinations? You might say "I'll be dead by then so I don't care," but isn't that a selfish way to think? Aren't you just leaving subsequent generations with a huge mess on their hands to atone for?

Growth can be a wonderful thing if it is well-managed. One need only spend an hour zooming all over the Triangle via satellite imagery to see that this love affair with urban sprawl has become a near pandemic in not only your area but many others. So many of you sitting here right now reading this would probably admittedly be totally clueless on how to get to work, how to get to the grocery store, how to get to the park, how to get to church, how to get anywhere if you woke up tomorrow morning and found that someone had stolen your only vehicle. What contingency plan is available for those who live in an area like the image I'm going to show you below if automobiles ever become obsolete (and since gasoline is a non-renewable resource this eventually WILL happen, causing massive chaos to ensue).



Without a car, what can you access in areas like this? While this is a snap shot of a part of Northern Virginia, it is not at all unlike many parts of the Triangle. When "Peak Oil" finally hits, what contingency plans do those of you living in these areas have? Do you all have Segways?

One member several pages upthread made a defensive reference, citing the area as having poor urban planners but that things would balance themselves out someday. How can you "balance out" images like the one above? Do you just bulldoze all of that and reintroduce vegetation while transplanting all of those people into mixed-use developments? Who would finance the trillions of dollars needed to do this on a national scale now that the majority of Americans live in suburbia?

How much worse are those of you in the Triangle going to let your poor long-range land usage policies get before you start to take action? In 20 years given current growth rates and trends you may very well be eerily similar in nature to Long Island or New Jersey. It's not too late NOW to try to make some semblance of positive differences. For example I'm in the process of moving to Reston, Virginia, which, while "suburbia", is working to infill itself and increase its density with projects like this one:

Reston Town Center - Information

People can now live in a project like this and be within walking distance of restaurants, a grocery store, a movie theater, parks, an ice skating rink, an ice cream parlor, festivals, houses of worship, etc., and best of all is that I'm personally moving within walking distance of this complex! Even though I'm priced out of the city I'm moving near (Washington, DC) and have to work in the suburbs anyways as a requirement for my position, I am still being a part of the long-term solution by moving to a part of the suburbs where I will very rarely need to use my car and can walk to nearly any amenity I'd ever need. How many in Cary can say the same?

[ScranBarre]

By the way, I take it some of you criminalizing the original poster and a few subsequent posters really have no idea where they are coming from. Try living in Northeastern Pennsylvania, which is very similar to the once-pristine and now "ruined" areas from which they are derived. Many people in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania who are "natives" of PA are being priced out of their homes. Why? Their incomes have remained relatively flat while the cost-of-living has mushroomed due to the influx of new residents from NY and NJ all around them, which required the construction of new schools (tax hike), wider roads (tax hike), regional police squads (tax hike), paid fire departments replacing volunteer forces (tax hike), etc., etc. Some people had property taxes rising more quickly every year than their incomes were going up, so now the "mass exodus" of people from NJ/NYC to the Poconos who cashed in their $600,000 homes for $200,000 ones in exchange for a four-hour round-trip daily commute has initiated a "mini-exodus" of the Poconos natives to the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area (our population has now been growing moderately for the past several years after decades of decline to reflect this).

Trees are coming down all over NEPA for massive planned communities (many of them gated, which I still don't understand the need for, but I digress), strip malls, big-box stores, etc. Flooding/water runoff issues have only worsened as more vegetated hillsides are stripped and more porous soil is paved over with non-permeable asphalt. The best example of this is perhaps Scranton itself, which has a ghost town for an urban center replete with half-abandoned office buildings with an entire mountainside (Montage Mountain) just over the city line destroyed of its natural beauty for numerous shiny new office buildings. Americans in general are a very wasteful society (conspicuous consumption, anyone?), and if you can't see evidence of poor long-term urban planning in the Triangle YET, then you're going to experience it before too many more years.

What happens when a plague of locusts descends upon a hearty field? They suck up all of the resources and then move on to the next fertile land. The same can be said for the Triangle, where torrents of transplants from all over the nation have been pouring in since the 1990s. How much longer do you think that is sustainable given current land usage policies? If you think traffic congestion is bad now then just wait until 2020!

[needcaffeine]

You're scaring me; I just bought a house ITB.

[ScranBarre]

Originally Posted by needcaffeine

You're scaring me; I just bought a house ITB.

I'm sorry. My intention isn't to be a fear-monger, but at some point these topics eventually will have to be discussed, so why not now? People have been putting off these "touchy" issues for decades, and when someone tries to bring it to public light I'm not surprised they get tarred and feathered (I was given an infraction on the NoVA sub-forum recently for a massive argument that ensued about land usage policies in a thread similar to this one). Eventually we will run out of gasoline, and given the current state of affairs in our nation (along with the rapid rise of the middle-class in Asia who are now also buying vehicles) I'm afraid we'll deplete ourselves of gasoline sooner than we predict and before we can account for this with alternative methods of transportation, in which case anyone living in an image like the one I snapped above are going to have some tough decisions to make. It is true though, is it not? If some of you were to wake up in the morning with slashed tires you'd have to call off work, right? Some of you live in areas where driving your own personal vehicle is the only method of transportation you have because you're not near a bus route, near a light rail station, near a subway, etc. I'm a firm believer that we need to EXPAND our nation's mass transit options instead of funding so many pork barrel projects, but I don't foresee that happening any time soon.

I know I'll get some "heat" for this along the lines of "you don't live here, so you can't have an opinion" (I get that on every forum when some people don't know how else to respond), but this problem is NOT unique to the Triangle. It's a problem all over the nation. We've built ourselves entirely TOO dependent upon gasoline, and if God forbid our supply is interrupted with some sort of foreign conflict and gas prices shoot up to $10/gallon, what are most of us (including myself as I'm stuck in suburbia as well so people don't think I'm a hypocrite) going to do? I can't even ride a bike anywhere because my subdivision is adjacent to a congested four-lane highway without shoulders. What would someone like me do?

Urban planners in this nation ought to be ashamed of themselves.

[fnord]

Great posts, ScranBarre. I just read through this entire thread. You and the OP are right on.

[needcaffeine]

Originally Posted by ScranBarre

I'm sorry. My intention isn't to be a fear-monger, but at some point these topics eventually will have to be discussed, so why not now?

Actually, not at all scared. I live in downtown Raleigh and the house we just got under contract for is also in downtown Raleigh, walkable to most everything. I want to say that people who go live way the f out deserve what they are getting eventually, but they may not always be living in some ridiculous location because that's their only intention. Maybe they can't afford to live close to amenities.

[memorytheatre]

I'm interested in seeing what will happen when housing in the triangle is three or even four times more expensive than equivalent sized homes in the older Northeastern cities like Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Erie, PA. It's is already almost there.

The sprawling nature of development here and the growth pains of mass migration will surely continue to impact Quality of Life. Also, there will be more and more of a desire to live in walkable villages or neighborhoods within a city. Most of the places where that is possible in the triangle are newish developments built as suburban enclaves. I know about Watts in Durham, but I'm sorry $400,000 for a three bedroom near downtown Durham is insane.

I personally like southern culture and Carolina and barbeque and lightening storms and do not much like northern culture or northern accents, so it would be tough getting me to move to these areas. But for someone who likes a good Cannoli or real italian food or real bagels or whatever it seems like some of those beautiful old refurbished houses in Buffalo that are like 3200 sq ft. for $250,000 and look like English cottages or Wattle and Daub palaces would start luring people back.

Of course you have snow in Buffalo and grey skies in Pittsburgh, So the weather I'm sure is a HUGE factor. But a city like Buffalo, from an outsiders perspective, that was once a thriving city built up for twice the present population with a current median home price of $60,000 seems like an attractive option. Granted, I have never lived up north, nor do I want to. But have traveled all over the place up there and it's pretty nice and CHEAP these days. Anyway, I know people follow the hype and that is that North Carolina is the golden land, but I wonder if people spend enough time looking around for golden opportunities in their own backyards.

These are some of the sentiments I found on City Data that argue my point.

I am originally from NYC and Westchester and Buffalo attracted me because it is affordable to live in the city, meaning that one can easily walk or bike ride to everything one needs. Thats a lot of quality-of-life to me.

I think it would be insulting to say that Charlotte was like Buffalo. Aside from Buffalo residents moving there, they are nothing alike. Buffalo has unique historic architecture, unique restaurants, ethnic enclaves, 4 seasons, etc. Charlotte is like a giant boring suburb.

[Charlton Dude]

Originally Posted by ScranBarre

Without a car, what can you access in areas like this?

Well of course I am going to use a car. I sure as hell ain't goin' to use public transportation.