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And generally, the more rural you’re able to go the less expensive the real estate will be. Rural eastern Ohio, Tennessee, etc, has plenty of small older homes that are a steal. Metro areas will always cost more because of their proximity to amenities and employment.
I'm from northeast TN.
Anything at $50,000 here is likely going to be a trailer or need extensive work. That's way below median in this area.
My girlfriend used to live in a Rust Belt city in central IN called Anderson. There are all sorts of towns like that where the manufacturing jobs have left, and many are commutable to Indianapolis. Rural Indiana and probably rural Ohio will have much lower property prices than much of Tennessee.
$50,000 might be a stretch, but $100,000 is very doable.
Well put another way, our temporary home is in the nicest suburb of Dayton, and a 4/2 ranch on a quiet cul de sac, with some of the best schools in the state. We bought it for under 200k, and a comparable home in, say, Chattanooga was priced similarly (we looked at jobs there too). But either way, we moved here from out of state for a very well paying job and love the area. The inner city area of Dayton has a lot of aging real estate and was hit hard in the recession, but it’s far from a hole even in those spots. The schools are the real issue and I know they’re actually pulling themselves back out very well with remedial reading and math programs, but it’s a slow statistic to change.
It is one of the most undersold areas I’ve ever been in my life. The quality of life for the salary here is excellent, especially if you’re willing to spend closer to 100k for the better school districts. But if you don’t have kids it makes little difference. This area is way less ghetto than where I used to live in California, despite the prices being quintuple for the same house and worse school districts there.
Springfield, too, has a whole lot to offer someone with little money to plunk down. They’re both recovering and on the mend.
The general Pittsburgh area.
We needed a cheap place to retire to and it ended up being Weirton WV which is about 30 miles to Pittsburgh, not that we go there much but it is there is we want it.
We bought a habitable 3 story, 5 bedroom 3 bath brick house with 2 car brick garage for $36K. Many of the other small cities in WV are the same.
But it's one of the highest crime rates in the nation, which probably has a lot to do with the low price.
Downtown Dayton or Springfield? For inner core urban it’s not bad at all. And none of these were in Englewood or similar; where the violent crime is a little higher. Opioids are an issue right now, but that’s not really something you notice day to day in terms of safety so much as when driving around and seeing people clearly stoned. No worse than my much more expensive and ritzy previous zip codes, though.
Springfield is a little worse than Dayton on that, but still not really a place you’d want to pack a knife to walk to the bus stop or anything.
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Lol
