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The Sunbelt is not sustainable. What natural disasters won't destroy, water shortages will. Sure, Dayton is better for families...there's nothing wrong with that. If singles and the childless grow bored with Dayton's brewpub scene and handful of clubs and ethnic restaurants, they can always move to Columbus. I agree with most everything Schmooky posted; why would I pay $1800/mo to rent a house in Maryland or Oregon what I pay in less than $600 in mortgage in the Dayton area? I can shop at the same Trader Joe's and drink similar IPA here as I would there.
I'd not hanker to pay $1800/month for an apartment anywhere. But if one is in a market where apartments go for $1800/month, chances are overwhelming, that that's a healthy real-estate market. Then I'd buy a house, and enjoy the long-term price appreciation, even subject to the misfortune of having bought at the height of a bubble.
The whole point of a high-COL area is that COL is high because there's high demand. Sure, there are momentary anomalies. But apart from those, high COL --> long-term opportunities. Living in the Dayton area over the long-term implies an opportunity cost. Year after year, I cringe with envious disgust, at how my coastal buddies are pulling ahead.
The brewpub and restaurant scene in Dayton is quite good, as I've reiterated multiple times. I'm grateful to the many enterprising local business-people who saw an opportunity, took a risk and now have fine thriving restaurants serving the community. The challenge locally isn't finding good food or entertainment. It's finding social opportunities.
Ultimately, what makes an area attractive - at least to me - isn't the museums or orchestras or art galleries. I enjoy those things, but honestly, it's not very often that I bother to go. What makes an area attractive, is being around the sort of people who enjoy museums, orchestras and art galleries - people who have the time, the money and the inclination of taste and breeding.
Ultimately, what makes an area attractive - at least to me - isn't the museums or orchestras or art galleries. I enjoy those things, but honestly, it's not very often that I bother to go. What makes an area attractive, is being around the sort of people who enjoy museums, orchestras and art galleries - people who have the time, the money and the inclination of taste and breeding.
You've said this before, but I, for one, have one heck of a time trying to figure out exactly what you wish for.
I can barely stand most popular music, starting with rock 'n' roll, and much prefer something like Strauss Waltzes with or without a live orchestra. I don't need a companion or crowd.
I can also wander a museum alone, and view that notion well beyond Ming vases or a Buddha statue in a corner. Even 15 minutes in the Taft house in Cincinnati was a delight.
You don't need money beyond a few dollars for a ticket or a computer disk. You don't need any extra time -- you do that instead of playing poker or going swimming. And, I don't think it can be reduced to any inclination of taste and breeding.
Does it really matter if the value of your house doesn't go up if you live in it for 30+ years? I mean, if you are able to stay in the same place for that long, you probably don't need the money. Now, if you plan on only owning a house for a few years, then sure, it would be nice if the prices went up.
For example, my mother has lived in the same house (Dayton area) for probably 40 years. I am sure it's value is greater now than when she bought it, but I bet she doesn't really care.
My sister lived in the San Diego area for around 8 years and recently sold her house. Her house was worth a lot more, so she was able to make some money, but that isn't why she sold the house. She was moving for other reasons.
The fact is, as long as it didn't lose value, she would be fine. I'd imagine that most people don't care that much if the value of their house goes up. They just don't want it to go down.
Yes, you seem to be pinning a lot on housing as an investment. But those returns are actually quite poor over the long term and it is, first and foremost, a consumer good and not an investment asset. Oh, it's been treated like on the last two decades or so, but that's has come back to bite a lot of people.
Also, you're assuming staying in one place multiple decades. Fact is, most people move every ten years or even more, or move to a different home within the same city. And some places where they don't do that, like California, it is because of prop 13 and trying to maintain a manageable property tax amount. Are you factoring those taxes paid each year against the home's appreciation? Maintenance costs? You should be, because that is taking money out of your pocket the home's value might never put back in, especially if those taxes are 5-10k per year for that home, and in another jurisdiction they'd be 2k. Most of these home's aren't appreciating that quickly, or won't maintain that fast appreciation over the life of the loan to buy them or term of ownership.
This is a truly spectacular blog post on the subject of rent vs own and elucidates a lot of facts in whether owning a home is a wise decision, and under what market conditions. His entire blog is fantastic investing advice, actually: Why your house is a terrible investment
A stable housing market, especially long term, is a good thing. A declining market is tough because of the time it takes to offload inventory, but a market with slow appreciation and change isn't inherently a bad thing at all. It means the price of the good closely follows the demand curve for it and there aren't bubbles forming and short term fluctuations that can artificially raise or catastrophically drop the prices.
You can dislike things about the Midwest, but the grass isn't always greener. Move if you hate it - secure a job in a different state with a higher wage, rent the cheapest apartment you can find, and search for real estate. Stay fifty years like you're advising. Good luck to you! Your life is your own set of choices and circumstances, not a statistic. So if you really aren't suited for the place you are at it's perfectly fine to move - that and plain good sense is why I left San Diego. But *in general*, Dayton and a fair bit of the cities and suburbs in Ohio offer many high points and surprisingly few drawbacks for young adults and young families.
Bonus points since they lived in one of those highly desirable coastal cities.
There are lots of reasons to own a home, and very good ones. But investment potential and asset appreciation aren't really on that list. We have owned two homes and are renting while we build a new one in Beavercreek. We won't lose money, even on building it, but we won't gain much when we sell compared to if we'd invested even a quarter of the amount into an index fund and let it sit for two or three decades, as you're thinking with a home. That would be true even if we built it in Asheville or Portland, except the initial construction and land cost would be even higher and eat into our return on investment even more.
But for customizing a living space you love and never want to leave? Buying or building makes sense. I highly recommend it. But your reasoning about it as an investment is so flawed. You're better off renting, shuffling those maintenance costs and selling expenses and the cost of being stuck in one area to your landlord, and putting the money you'd spend replacing a roof into another investment type. Or heck, buying and becoming the landlord yourself, where the asset doesn't appreciate much compared to the gains in income from your renters. That's real estate investing as an asset, not picking a primary residence and hoping it nets you more than you lose over a period of time.
And as an aside, for real estate investing with rental properties? The cap rate in Dayton is fantastic. Rental returns are very high compared to the cost to own the properties on a month to month basis. So if you really want to invest in dirt and can't move, that's the way to do it. May I suggest the Afford Anything site for lots of details on that? Paula is great and her advice is spot on
You've said this before, but I, for one, have one heck of a time trying to figure out exactly what you wish for...
We're all the products of our respective backgrounds. I'm reluctant to delve much into biographical details, but suffice it to say that my perspective was heavily influenced by grad school in Los Angeles (now some 20 years ago), and the sort of people whom I met there. These folks had a classical education, including Latin and Greek, though all were engineers or physicists. After graduation - these were the dot.com boom years - these students either went to Wall Street, to management-consultancies, or professorships. Few ended up in the Midwest, let alone the small-town Midwest.
While most assuredly a creative person can find entertainment and enlightenment by him/herself, going to museums and concerts alone, etc., the social element is crucial - at least for some. I am not complaining about Dayton's putative lack of things to do. But I am complaining about Dayton's lack of the sort of social opportunities that I had in grad school. It's a blue-collar, family-raising town.
As for the real-estate question, yes, of course there are better opportunities in rental-housing or in the stock market. Please have a look at my copious postings over in the Investment forum, regarding index-funds. But the point is that in the more prosperous metro areas, homeowners get paid merely for sitting on their proverbial behinds. An enterprising, imaginative and energetic person will always find opportunities - whether in Dayton, in San Francisco, or in Somalia. My point instead is about lazy and unimaginative persons, such as yours-truly.
As for the cost of maintenance, well, a $10,000 new roof is a lot more painful on a $120K house in Beavercreek, than on the same house - costing $1,500,000 - in Palo Alto. A $6000 property tax bill in California is a lot less painful than a $3000 property tax bill in Ohio - on a house that's worth 5X less. Isn't that backwards? No, because the California tax is lower as a percentage of house-value. In the vignette cited above, a single person without kids bought a house. Of course that's inefficient, whether said house is in Seattle or Dayton - due to the cultural paradigms of American housing.
None of these factors are slights against Dayton in particular. They hold regarding any Heartland area, anything outside of the top 2-3 dozen growing metro areas in America (mostly on the coasts). The assertion isn't that Dayton is somehow inferior to its sister cities, its competing markets in the region, or even in distant regions. Rather, that Dayton isn't special, like say New York City is special.
So why not just move? I'm an aeronautical engineer. I came here because unfortunately the Wright Brothers settled here. It's the curse of my field, that the best jobs are in America's Daytons, not its New York Cities. Now if only I'd done the same as my grad-school stablemates 20 years ago, having taken a job on Wall Street....
I think I know the kind of social circles you are thinking of. And yes, Ohio (outside old money in Cleveland possibly) doesn't have that. While it might be nice, it isn't me and it probably doesn't describe at least 90% of the people moving to the Dayton-area, whether they are young and single or a recently started family, if we want to stick to a younger demographic (22-34 year old college grads - four-year and graduate students).
Agreed also that outside of LA, Washington DC, Houston, Florida, Dayton (thank you, WPAFB), Boston, etc. you won't find many aeronautical engineering positions. Less you look. All those places mentioned have a plethora of those jobs. Maybe not with the federal government, but at least contractors or within the private sector. If anything, NYC is great to visit, but overrated unless you come out making well over $150K a year entry-level. The only people doing that are young lawyers and MBA students from Penn, Yale, Princeton, Stanford or Harvard. And many of them come from the same coastal high-money social circles. Or they come from outside the US (I prefer the non-native body because they tend to be less pretentious and more motivated). Regardless, many aren't from middle America, let alone a place like middle-class or even upper-middle class Dayton. Whether that is a good trajectory for this country remains to be seen. Personally, to briefly interject politics in a discussion of regions, the answer is frankly, no.
So, if you have had a taste of that high society and educated social circle, be my guest and go seek it out. Less the AFRL or AFMCHQ are holding you back, that degree should work in any of a number of major, much larger and growing metros. NYC is probably not a top location though.
As a final note, I have a friend currently a Chem-E PhD candidate at Cornell who attended Columbia for undergrad. While I remember hanging with her and loving NYC (almost as much as she appeared to love the city), she is now saying she will come back to Cincinnati or the Midwest because of the costs associated with NYC living (and that is more than just monetary - COL, taxes, crowds, housing, job prospects). Someone who has lived in Panama, Florida and elsewhere around this country, growing up and hated Beavercreek (High School) because of its backwardness (it can still be that way in parts of SWOH), wants to return because of the opportunities available here. Granted, her job prospects with a place like P&G are grand as well with a Chem-E PhD. For this particular thread, it's all in the individual's details.
So it isn't about Dayton, but your choice of major within the engineering disciplines and preference for the world's top tier cities? (For what it's worth. we specifically went with mechanical, then civil and structural engineering instead of aeronautical precisely because of the limited opportunities and scope of work.)
What I'm hearing from you is that it is not about money, about appreciation, or anything else. Your personal preference for other cities isn't a big deal. But trying to frame it as a flaw to the Midwest even when there is data to the contrary on each point you specified is where I quibble.
The article was about good cities for millenials on multiple index points, which were qualified and explained. Your criticisms are pretty off base, honestly. And as someone who is classically educating my kids, coming from a fairly wealthy and cultured background, and with a spouse who did indeed go to a top tier university and STILL selected the Midwest, I personally think you're making yourself miserable with the comparison game and it's not even particularly valid. My NYC friends are moving to Connecticut and Minnesota. My Los Angeles friends are ending up in Temecula and Hemet, or just plain leaving for Denver, San Antonio, Charlotte, and yes, even places like Dayton. And it's not just because of spouses or kids. Quality of life in big cities on the coast is getting more and more difficult for reasons specific to each of those states and their queen cities. What makes NYC so special? Asking seriously, because I don't see it. If you really want to move then start working side hustles until you can relocate. Go back to school for a different engineering degree, a masters program isn't that much time and I can tell you there is oodles of work for civils there that we personally passed over.
But coming into threads about Ohio complaining that Ohio isn't New York or California is really weird. If you hate it here, you're the one with the power to make changes to your life and redirect your course, even a decade or three after grad school. You don't have to be stuck because of your career by a long shot. Of course, if you're lazy you won't manage any of it, but complaining AND being unwilling to change your life and take a new path is misery of your own making
Good analysis by all, even if you folks are a tough crowd! Is the objective for me to relent, and to acquiesce to praising Dayton’s beauty? Should I join one of those trendy local booster associations? It’s obvious, of course, that the city and metro-region would improve, if we encouraged more persons who’d be the target-audience of the above-cited article, to relocate here. Thereby we’d all benefit. But isn’t that a bit self-serving?
One more point of elaboration. The aim isn’t to hobnob with the high-society from a Henry James novel, but with what in Eastern Europe would have been called the “intelligentsia”. These are writers, artists, philosophers, journalists, and their counterparts in the hard-sciences. They’re not poor, but neither are they on the oceangoing-yachting circuit. These would, in modern parlance, be upper-middle class in pecuniary terms, commensurate say with the typical family in Oakwood or Washington Township, but definitely one-percenters in terms of their contributions to culture. The closest approximation in the Dayton region would be parts of the UD community, and perhaps parts of Yellow Springs.
Quote:
Originally Posted by wrightflyer
...I have a friend ... she is now saying she will come back to Cincinnati or the Midwest ...Someone who has lived in Panama, Florida and elsewhere around this country, growing up and hated Beavercreek (High School) because of its backwardness (it can still be that way in parts of SWOH), wants to return because of the opportunities available here. ...
The situation is markedly different for a native-son/daughter, returning after exploring alternatives. Naturally, there's advantage to living in or near a region, where one has family or cultural connections.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Schmooky
...What makes NYC so special? Asking seriously, because I don't see it. ...
For me personally: lots of Russian-speaking immigrants.
One more point of elaboration. The aim isn’t to hobnob with the high-society from a Henry James novel, but with what in Eastern Europe would have been called the “intelligentsia”. These are writers, artists, philosophers, journalists, and their counterparts in the hard-sciences. They’re not poor, but neither are they on the oceangoing-yachting circuit. These would, in modern parlance, be upper-middle class in pecuniary terms, commensurate say with the typical family in Oakwood or Washington Township, but definitely one-percenters in terms of their contributions to culture. The closest approximation in the Dayton region would be parts of the UD community, and perhaps parts of Yellow Springs.
For me personally: lots of Russian-speaking immigrants.
Nice of you to notice UD has engineering professors.
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