How did an entire state price itself out for entry-level home buyers?
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Re: How did an entire state price itself out for entry-level home buyers?
#2This is a fascinating and shocking number:
"Typical fees in San Francisco are $72,600 per home; in Sacramento, they’re $62,000. And for the six California markets highlighted in the Zelman & Associates report, the average is $51,650. "
Re: How did an entire state price itself out for entry-level home buyers?
#3The more prohibitively expensive California (and the Bay Area in particular) becomes, the better it is for the rest of the country - entrepreneurial talent has already started to relocate elsewhere, and I expect this trend to continue, perhaps even accelerate, in the future. There are advantages to having a single, super-dense concentration of business, marketing, and engineering talent but there are also (in my opinion, greater) advantages to having multiple regions competing fiercely for that talent.
Re: How did an entire state price itself out for entry-level home buyers?
#4> you’re in the hole by at least $50,000 before you even put a shovel in the ground
So, the equivalent of people's downpayment in the rest of the country is lost to regulation. That's insane.
Re: How did an entire state price itself out for entry-level home buyers?
#5The problem is when Californians start to move elsewhere, they raise prices in those cities too. e.g. Portland, Bend, Seattle.
Re: How did an entire state price itself out for entry-level home buyers?
#6> you’re in the hole by at least $50,000 before you even put a shovel in the ground So, the equivalent of people's downpayment in the rest of the country is lost to regulation. That's insane.
50K isn't that much if we are talking about a development where that cost is spread over dozens of homes. It's possible they just misspoke, but the quote about Chico did not say "per home."
Meanwhile in my home town of Fremont, a developer is putting in hundreds of new homes in North Fremont, and the school district has no way to charge those homes enough to actually build a school for them. The four nearest elementary schools are over-capacity, so the buyers will have the fun of commuting over five miles to school.
Consider the source: the linked article is from a Home Builder Industry magazine.
Re: How did an entire state price itself out for entry-level home buyers?
#7On the flip side, does this state have enough water for the other 10-odd million people who'd be living in those 3.6 million homes?
Re: How did an entire state price itself out for entry-level home buyers?
#8This is a fascinating and shocking number: "Typical fees in San Francisco are $72,600 per home; in Sacramento, they’re $62,000. And for the six California markets highlighted in the Zelman & Associates report, the average is $51,650. "
I built a few homes in a new (didn't really exist in 1998) city in Utah. Fees were about $20,000. I thought that was high! Most of those fees went to the infrastructure that was put it so people had a lot to build on. Getting water power and gas out there isn't cheap and the city owned the power, water and gas utilities - so they had to pay the bonds with something.
Since then I built in the middle of nowhere - no city, no inspections (except electrical) and it costs about $20,000 to get water (a well and equipment) and power. Anything much more than that and it seems like it is well beyond recovering the costs.
Re: How did an entire state price itself out for entry-level home buyers?
#9Started out with an every-man appealing headline and quickly showed its stripes of being a developer funded prop 13 hit article - totally separate from the horror show environmental impact has turned into.
The examples given are completely out of whack and strawmen. prop 13 allows for effective tax increase through reassessment of value, but that reassessment is capped so when the market goes crazy people aren't driven out of their homes - the increases effectively keep pace with inflation which should handle increased outlays on part of the localities.
Re: How did an entire state price itself out for entry-level home buyers?
#10Central Valley was sort of ground zero for housing meltdown, since we are talking here about the entire state, places like Modesto which are about 2-3 hours from SFO are also out of reach for population? That is surprising, Central Valley is predominantly Agri, but when people of thinking of flying all the way to Colorado, why not move 3 hours East or South ?