The basic takeaway from this is that the American median income precludes buying a decent home in a big desirable city with good jobs. Don’t worry about the homes going unbought, though: private equity firms and hedge funds are buying them up, keeping prices high while securing long revenue streams from life-long renters with no other choice.
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Your original post said “LA,” not the “LA metro area,” which is definitely a different animal.
I still disagree that it could be considered “huge swaths of very cheap housing” by most people’s understanding of that term. What is your personal price threshold for when you consider a home to be “very cheap?”
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Oh come on. Nobody who lives in LA considers only the precise boundaries of the City Of Los Angeles to be LA.
Then I assume you have never lived in LA or in California for that matter. It’s all relative and all relative to local salaries. Jobs pay more here to offset the cost of living, so a 119k manufactured home in Harbor City is very cheap indeed.
You are not arguing in good faith and I’m done with you. You’re going on mute, my dude, so feel free to win this argument in my absence.
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I’m a lifelong Californian, and I’m sure that there are many others on this forum who can attest that California has a real, significant housing affordability crisis, your personal experience notwithstanding.
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When I did the same search, Redfin listed 9 single-family homes within the city of Los Angeles and 35 homes when expanded to include townhouses, condos, mult-families, and co-ops (there’s another ~40 mobile homes but I assume that means one wouldn’t own the land so affordability calculation is very different).
Anyway, if anyone uses “LA” or another city, I assume they mean the metro area, not just what’s within the political boundaries.
In summary, prices are still:
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Looks like ATL is still below national average, but that depends on where you’d like to live, I’m sure. Intown vs. the rest of metro is very different… there is a reason why the burbs have grown so fast in the past decade or so - lots of working class people are being priced out of intown neighborhoods. They’re coming for East Point and the West End / West side now…
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I wasn’t able to buy my own home in California until I was in my mid-40s and I consider myself lucky in terms of my living situation. The housing affordability crisis here is real, and a huge part of the reason we have a such a large and growing population of unhoused people.
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This article is a few years old, but it has really stuck with me. Luxury real estate in Miami is going to be under water, but buyers/sellers believe that it will be someone else’s issue.
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Pittsburgh residents be like, “Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”
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Usually that’s just a metaphor for someone owing more than their current property value.
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I agree.
Just LOOK at those low numbers in the Rust Belt. Chicago is a bit higher, but all those other cities are at or around 50k. Now I can’t speak for any of the other cities represented, but Buffalo is a city on the rise and we’d love to have you all move here to the City of Good Neighbors.
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Thanks, and yeah that explains it. That’s a really wide swath and negates some areas that are much closer to DC than the borders but count as Baltimore. Hell, parts of Baltimore are closer to DC than a couple of those counties.
Eh still better than no number and can still show it’s expensive AF to buy a house in the area and unattainable to a lot of people onc e you add in a ton of other reasonable expenses (like commuting).
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Maybe my experience is a bit dated. And you are right that Cambridge condo is insane, and glad to be out of that market.
You’d think more people would consider moving away from the coasts and back to the middle of the country. The coastal cities are never going to be cheap again. You can change the zoning, make rules about foreign ownership, tax vacant housing, and all the rest, but fundamentally coastal land is going to be expensive, building materials are expensive, labor is going to be expensive. Erosion and water supplies are going to be ongoing challenges. At this rate we will be lucky if some areas are still livable in the future, let along affordable.
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*BYO Snow Blower
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@pesco You need to pull a newer screen capture, since the one posted with this still shows the carelessly spelled abbreviation for Louisiana as “LO”. It has been corrected on the site link.
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Climate Change Silver Lining: It’s looking like our winters will be milder in the coming years!
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