I’m starting a new collective in Detroit, Omni Commons Prestigilexcellence.
We are starting with a housing rehab collective but are also going to be pursuing building a startup community with plans to integrate the best technology with lifestyle management for a new Detroit. Join us!
I’d be tempted, except we native San Diegans dislike rust. I need m’sunshine!
He didn’t say which direction off the chart, now did he?
Really? The stuff I’m seeing on Zillow in the $400k-$600k range looks pretty nice and spacious. You’d certainly have a better idea than I do about the state of the neighborhoods, but the houses themselves don’t particularly look like shacks.
By way of comparison, peep this 736-square-foot hovel in Echo Park, for which they hope to get $738k.
L.A. is insane.
It’s more of a bigraph, really.
Ah, yes - in terms of cost of living.
I still have to haul my own trash to the transfer station.
There in lies the rub.
Yeah I could move back to St. Louis or go back to the general contract and have to move to Pittsburgh and my 70K job plus what I sell the house here for would set me up nicely but then I would have to live in either of those cities which I would rather not do if it can be avoided.
Gracious! I always figured that someday we’d sell our house (just outside D.C.), take the proceeds and move back to Austin, where the money would go farther. Now I think it may have inverted. I also think they’re going to run out of potable water.
Well, at least in Pittsburgh they know what they like.
I miss that town … went to da U.
I bought my 1400 Sq. ft 1960s ranch house for $100K 6 years ago. Only $75 K to go!
Good gravy, $400-600k! That’s rich people houses. The notion of spending over half our take-home pay in housing is absurd. I don’t consider that to be affordable if you also have to own a car and stay warm in the winter in this state. And the taxes…if the house in the listing sells at the list price, the taxable value gets reset to half the sale price, making the tax bill just under $8k, and doesn’t include garbage collection. It’s also not in Ann Arbor, it’s in the sticks, half way to Plymouth.
<a href=“http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/428-Spring-St_Ann-Arbor_MI_48103_M37061-38226#photo0"target=”_blank">This house is walking distance from downtown A2. I hate the layout and all the carpet in a house that almost certainly was built furnished with reasonable hardwood floors, and WTF is up with that spiral staircase? But, hey, Ann Arbor schools, so it must be worth starving to live there. I guess. Living in the shadows of the <a href=“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ypsilanti_Water_Tower"target=”_blank">Tower of Power isn’t always the greatest, but at least we’re not paying too much for housing, and still got the sprout in A2 schools (thanks, Governerd).
Real estate in much of California is simply ridiculous. I get why you live there, though. Your other option is NYC, or find a new career. And I do suspect you’d be found as a frozen block of ice by the end of October if you tried to live here.
Better hurry. Real estate here in the greater Austin five-county metroplex is red hot. I suppose if you have the money to live near DC, you too could be one of Austin’s beautiful people, regardless of whether you are in The Leisure Class or not.
I am reminded by a former reporter for the local alternative newspaper that Austin Business Journal has mentioned, very briefly and in his opinion in an underreported way, all the foreign investment money largely emanating from Saudi Arabia and Qatar via various hedge- and other fund schemes. Oh and oil money from Dallas, apparently. If someone here howls for citations, I can dig in my spare time to see if this is well-documented. I hear Rudy Guiliani’s investment firm has been busy running one pioneering local retailer into the ground with their own fun cool green home improvement megastore, which sells many of the same items as the local retailer at half the price.
The City of Austin gummint, in the meantime, welcomes the additional revenue but is hamstrung by the skyrocketing demands in infrastructure. A well-placed friend speaking on background says the City’s water department is still trying to sell nonexistent water, and the City’s world-famous green building program now has to tax green buildings because such buildings/entities do not buy enough electricity from the City-owned electric utility.
Getting loved to death ain’t easy, or pretty. This town has cycled through at least three housing/building bubbles since I moved here. This relevant convo on Reddit interested me and got me thinking there’s another one coming, don’t know quite when…
My longstanding question is “where the hell does all the water for the newcomers come from?”
The new bars in various sections of downtown and midtown Austin seem to be owned by very foreign foreigners, not just Good Ol’ Boys playing with daddy’s oil money, or some kinda Ammrrkn out-of-towners. My south Austin homies and most of Austin’s creative class are just the collateral damage we can see: diaspora. They were [at least part of] the magic that made Austin different, attractive and fun. Austin is now a victim of its own successful self-promotion. The trade-offs we see are the same ones as in San Francisco: stratospheric rents amid homeless people begging on the streets, regular people with regular-paying jobs fleeing to the margins like Wimberley, Dripping Springs, Round Rock, Pflugerville, Kyle, Buda, Elgin, Leander and Spicewood, which notably ran out of water a few years ago during our Exceptional Drought of Record.
I personally clear ~$12-15K annually. I work 4 paying jobs, and work at least two of those every day of the week. Most of it is flex-time. I am married to man who in good years can earn 5 or 6 times as much as a programmer/IT professional, which is good because we have kids and I am primary caregiver, as I am for my elderly mom who lives down the street in a rented condo. In bad years, when dot-coms dot-bust, we live about ~$2000 above the U.S. poverty line for a family of our size, after we bottom out our accounts at the credit union.
We eat very low on the food chain and zeroed out most nonessential expenses like cable/NetFlix, “shows” (excepting truly wonderful concerts like Tuvan throatsingers or kodo drummers), newspapers, magazines, paywalled subscription sites, movies (libraries: yay!) , alcohol, meat, vacations, toys/electronics not strictly related to one of our businesses, fancy foods, fancy clothes, recent-model cars/trucks, and gold-plated healthcare. Our dog is our luxury item (take one look at his vet bills: aye carumba!). I make dang near every meal we eat, from scratch. We have an orchard and a vegetable patch, which are jobs in themselves. The kids help at fruit harvest time but are at this time of their lives unwilling/unmotivated to join me harvesting vegetables for some reason.
I contemplate “retirement” with dread. I’ll probably be working until I die or close to it.
Some of my work is uncompensated work for the community I live in. No pay, slow pay or low pay labor is the only way this community has been able to exist as long as it has.1 Many associated with this place (whether they live here or not) are now of an age and mindset wherein contributing physically just ain’t gonna happen, period, regardless of naming and shaming, carrots or sticks. That said, this patch of the planet is truly beautiful2 and there are some mighty fine and honorable people living near me.
I am hoping for some young new blood now that several homes are for sale in the neighborhood. First sale when to an aging boomer: ouch! Not what I envisioned. C’mon cosmos: some good quality help please!
Austin’s the same: its massive building boom and development frenzy is staffed by a lot of undocumentados and underpaid or unpaid–if a contractor/subcontractor can threaten to call the INS re: a worker’s immigration status, on payday. ¡Sin undocumentados trabadores, no hay Austin!
That is, when it rains reliably.
Here in Honolulu the median house price is over $630k and the median size is something like 1200ft^2. I thought this was expensive until I spent most of the year in Oslo a couple of years ago. Everything is very relative.
Well, I was just going by the monthly mortgage payment. I figured if you bought a $400,000 house and had a 10% down payment for a 30-year fixed at slightly under 4% interest, you’d have a mortgage payment under $1900/mo, not counting taxes. My take-home pay was around $1500/week for the nine months a year I was working when we bought our house, so that was around $54k a year for me, and my schoolteacher wife made around $36k. So our net take-home pay was around $90k combined, and our $400k mortgage (30-year fixed at around 6% interest–this was 2006) cost us $2300ish, not including taxes… which was a couple hundred bucks more than half my take-home pay, not counting my wife’s pay at all. At 4% it would have been a couple hundred bucks under half my take-home pay.
I don’t know how expensive heating oil is, and I’m kinda glad I don’t. As you rightly point out, I’m a warm-weather guy, through and through. I enjoyed the six-month-long winter I spent in Bigfork, MT when I was ten, but that’s largely because I didn’t have to shovel or drive in all that snow. But I do wish I had the training to land a job I could do somewhere other than L.A. As a schoolteacher, my wife could work anywhere, but my job means we’re kinda stuck here.
The notion of spending less than 50% of my income on rent has not ever been an available option.
I must have missed the penis size poll. Probably good - it’ll just be depressing.
