301–310 of 350 posts
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Ha, well in non-major cities you're right, but all the major cities cost an arm and a leg for the most part!
Leave the coasts and you can find all sorts of multiple-million-people cities with far cheaper housing.
I liked the visualization and data, but I don't think it makes sense to compare home prices to wages w/o considering alternatives to home ownership. Home prices don't exit in a vacuum. That is, if a home is 10x the median salary, you can't really say "well, if I didn't buy a home I could work 10 years less." That's because the alternative to buying is renting, which is also expensive. So sure, a mortgage in SF is $6k…
> So sure, a mortgage in SF is $6k/mo. But rent might be $6k/mo as well -- and you don't earn any equity or tax write-offs while renting. When you rent, your money is gone. When you buy, you normally get most or all of it back later. There's barely any economic comparison between renting and ownership. The tax write offs is the one of the least of your concerns. People go completely and absolutely nuts when they end…
Whoa! No, not even remotely close.
With houses getting larger every year, it's crazy to assume anything less than a couple years is possible. An average house is 2.6K square feet and is going to take at least a man-year of time to complete. Materials are about 80% of total labor costs. Those places with super-low housing costs require some combination of: 1. below average wages for construction workers 2. low standard for building materials 3. surplus…
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It's not just the salary. It's also the opportunities to do things as in for the SF Bay Area we can go to wine country one weekend, go snow boarding another, sail, surf, hike; there's a lot of stuff to do here. I'm sure people can say the same for the NY metro and other similar places. I've lived in cheaper but boring places. The financial tradeoff is fair.
>It's not just the salary. It's also the opportunities to do things as in for the SF Bay Area we can go to wine country one weekend, go snow boarding another, sail, surf, hike; there's a lot of stuff to do here. You can do all of those same things just living an hour east of SF.
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The property group takes on risk if something like a roof needs replacing unless they just keep a lot of cash sitting around for just such a thing. They may also have access to better loans but I have no idea for sure. I don't want to keep a pile of cash around waiting for housing emergencies (personal emergencies are a different thing), and I certainly don't want to sell stocks to fix a roof if my roof fails during…
What is it with US roofs? Are they really all terrible, you're the third person in about 10 posts to be scared about massive costs to replace a roof. setting aside trees, fires etc it hadn't even occurred to me that a roof may need replacing, aside from maybe the occasional tile.
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Easy access to credit is an important component to a free market. Making borrowing illegal just leads to all sorts of inefficient contortions to do it another way. For example, businesses often need to borrow money in order to get started. For another, "bridge" loans and "revolving lines of credit" allow a business to operate when the timing of receiving payments does not line up with the timing of when bills are due…
As a counterpoint Arab traders did very well for hundreds of years without interest (until Europeans came). Interestingly they are probably where our free market ideas come from: there should be no worldly market interference, the market is shaped by the invisible hand which means the rules given by god. Interest based credit is important for capitalism (use money to make more money), but certainly not for market eco…
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Doesn't the SF Bay Area include the cities an hour east of SF?
> Doesn't the SF Bay Area include the cities an hour east of SF? No, an hour east of SF is deep in the Central Valley.
High-cost cities get their high property values via network effects -- it's the proximity of other people that makes the land valuable. I wonder if a good way to circumvent high home prices is to create new cities deliberately in rural land. For instance, get a few thousand people to agree to buy a large plot of land in a sparsely populated area. All the early-adopters get a cheap plot of land to build a house on, wi…
Canberra[0] and Brasilia[1] were both created to be the capital of their respective countries, but I'd imagine it's easier when you're the government. Ireland did the opposite and tried to decentralise the government among existing towns and cities in an effort to boost local economies. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia#History [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#Decisions_to_start_an...
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> So sure, a mortgage in SF is $6k/mo. But rent might be $6k/mo as well -- and you don't earn any equity or tax write-offs while renting. When you rent, your money is gone. When you buy, you normally get most or all of it back later. There's barely any economic comparison between renting and ownership. The tax write offs is the one of the least of your concerns. People go completely and absolutely nuts when they end…
When I sell my house I'm not getting back all my property taxes paid, interest paid, closing costs, inspection cost, realtor commission, insurance payments, and routine maintenance costs.
Perhaps not - but you are deducting those from your taxes the entire time.
I have no comment to make about the appropriateness of the mortgage interest tax deduction. It exists and should be factored into your economic models.
A better metric I like to use: how many extra years of work before retiring will this large expense cost me? (Admittedly: this does not work the same for housing for lots of obvious reasons). An example: a friend of mine is renovating the exterior of his house for $100,000. He plans to live there until he dies (it's a lovely house), so he'll never see that money again. He'll just have a nicer house. My alternative op…