Moving is more than just tough for some people, though. There are so many factors…
I left the Bay Area for southern CA in 2000 during the first crazy boom, running with my equity and starting over. And I mean REALLY starting over, which is a long and boring story.
But I was single - newly divorced - so that part was easier for me. Though I still left family up there, which can be hard.
As for this tear-down in PA, I still don’t get who’s buying these things or ones like it. And they are buying them. In the little neighborhood I grew up in south a bit from downtown San Jose, those 60’s tract homes are going for 1.2 or way more depending on condition. And they always go for over asking.
Glass door sez that the average salary of a senior engineer in the Bay Area is ~150K. That would never qualify for the above house. TWO married people each making that would barely qualify. Are there that many VP’s and such snatching up homes?
to me $2.6 million asking price is just the beginning and nowhere near the ultimate selling price. i think there are hidden costs that aren’t fully realized, so let me explain:
this bungalow address features the highly auspicious chinese number 128.
if you say one-two-eight in chinese it sounds like ‘easy money’ or ‘easy fortune’. and in chinese culture things that sound or look prosperous are extremely desired.
another example of numerology in chinese culture is 888. eight sounds like prosperous in chinese and anything eight-eight-eight is highly sought after. on the flip side, the number four is a homophone for death, so that number is highly frowned upon.
i know, it doesn’t make sense, but this is engrained in the chinese culture and even the most logical, scientific-fact based chinese i know are also extremely superstitious. so buckle your seatbelt for a bidding war.
Care to actually give reasons? It’s a 4,360 sqft lot, what is the lot coverage zoning restriction? Clearly multistory residences are legal, as there are several on the block.
I’m sure that Valley municipalities could find uses for the revenue, but what is the mechanism by which this actually produces more housing? If we just shuffle around the existing units so that more of them go to working class people, it just changes who lives close in and who has a long commute.
Yeah, as soon as the people, businesses and govs of the world wakedafukup and quit paying absurd prices for PoS software licenses that they 1) don’t need, and 2) would be better off without anyway.
It’s likely still more restrictive than it used to be, but yea, someone will likely just tear that down and put in two stories and a basement.
There was a time when people were tearing down bungalows in Palo Alto and other cities in the Bay Area on lots that size and putting in McMansions that dwarfed the other homes and stretched the limits of what even made sense on the lot itself.
Came to check this had been said. The lot may be small but a two-storey house, for example, would double the space (no idea if local regs would permit that, in this case, though). Construction costs out there ought to be low (largely timber construction?) though perhaps contractors’ costs force higher prices. This is certainly not a price per square foot.
Everything is relative. In my city that’s a big lot, a standard single lot is 25x100, and in the default zoning you can put up a 35’ high 2 family on it with like 70% lot coverage. And that zoning needs to go to allow more density, low density=high housing prices.
I sold my house in Oakland for $135,000 20 years ago. It recently sold for $420,000. They remodeled the inside, but nothing to the outside. Not as shocking but it surprised me and showed why I didn’t move back to the Bay Area.
Yea ok, but I wouldn’t pay that half-a-million for a small cottage a block from the freeway, in a sketchy neighborhood, no matter how nice they fixed it up.
Only a problem for tree huggers, right? You’re stuck in the provincial view that there should be more yard than house . Dense urban dwellers everywhere appear to have gotten over it, but people hate change.
I work at a major fabless semiconductor company in the Bay Area and several engineers regularly bring RVs or trailers and sleep in the parking lot when they visit. But they regularly work remotely from southern California, or even Colorado. But for them they really only show up a couple times a year for a week, it’s not like they really have to commute every day.
That’s my retirement plan. You can get a coffee shack house in rural Hawaii for $250k. All I need is one of those crazy bay area homes that sells for $2.6m and I’m done with this place.
. Dense urban dwellers everywhere appear to have gotten over it, but people hate change.