Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities • Hacker News Board

Re: Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities

#51

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 11:17 PM UTC

41latitude wrote: post #46

aik wrote: post #28

I'm confused about the populations. For example, it mentions the population of Kansas City is 143K. Wikipedia says 482,299, and "greater" KC is closer to a million. What exactly is measured here?

The population of Kansas City is 143,000--Kansas City, Kansas , that is. (They're mistakenly using population data for Kansas City, Kansas , instead of the much larger Kansas City, Missouri .)

[deleted]

Re: Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities

#52

Post by mkinsella » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 11:18 PM UTC

aik wrote: post #28

I'm confused about the populations. For example, it mentions the population of Kansas City is 143K. Wikipedia says 482,299, and "greater" KC is closer to a million. What exactly is measured here?

Having just moved to KCMO, I was very confused by this though happy that I'm renting

Re: Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities

#53

Post by stevoski » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 11:19 PM UTC

cletus wrote: post #29

I'm from Australia but now live in NYC and I've been debating the question about whether to buy or rent. It's amusing to me to see a big red circle on this graphic for NYC. I can understand why. NYC is a special case in many ways. For one thing, from a purely financial perspective, your best bet is to find a rent stabilized apartment that is well under market value and then invest your money elsewhere, possibly on bu…

Are you figures in real terms or nominal terms? If nominal, then sentences like "where once you could build a house for $80k, now anything less than $150-200k is unrealistic" are unsuitable for building an argument upon.

Re: Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities

#54

Post by grav1tas » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 11:19 PM UTC

What would be cool on top of this is if they figured in mortgage prices, the average home upkeep costs for a certain area, insurance prices, and property taxes (whew, it'd be hard) to determine if you're flat out better of renting or buying in an area over an arbitrary period of time. This has always been something I've wondered about, whether or not buying a home or renting an apartment is actually cheaper based on a bunch of different factors. In the US, there's always this big push for home ownership, but sometimes I question the wisdom (financially) of buying a home for 'equity building' or whatever else. That's not to say that owning your own home can't be totally fun and a great place to raise a family or whatever else..obviously that's pretty hard to weigh objectively, but still. I think this would be an interesting direction for this site to go.

Re: Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities

#55

Post by callmeed » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 11:21 PM UTC

I was talking to a real estate broker from phoenix on my flight last weekend. He said you can buy distressed homes for < $100k and condos/townhomes for < $50k. He's got clients buying properties, renting them in less than a month, and having instant positive cash flow.

Re: Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities

#56

Post by prawn » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 11:22 PM UTC

keyle wrote: post #38

cletus wrote: post #29

I'm from Australia but now live in NYC and I've been debating the question about whether to buy or rent. It's amusing to me to see a big red circle on this graphic for NYC. I can understand why. NYC is a special case in many ways. For one thing, from a purely financial perspective, your best bet is to find a rent stabilized apartment that is well under market value and then invest your money elsewhere, possibly on bu…

Hey mate. Interesting perspective. without knowing your financial situation, I'd suggest to keep working in the U.S. and invest in housing back in Australia. Both are great prospects but you might be able to buy 2 houses near the beach in Australia (say Perth / Adelaide) for the price of one in NYC. In a way, it gives you diversification that NYC doesn't. Also buying walking distance from the beach gives you that sec…

Amusingly, there are media stories here in Australia about people working in Australia and buying property in the US. Might have the details wrong, but one woman had sold an investment property (in Darwin maybe?) and bought five apartments (in Florida, I think?) in the US with that money.

Re: Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities

#57

Post by mtigas » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 11:24 PM UTC

The choice of a red-green gradient is probably not wise, considering the prominence of people with red-green colorblindness. ( Screenshot http://bit.ly/fcRHRk vs filtered screenshot http://bit.ly/frqlxP — Note the similarity of NYC and Jacksonville.)

Otherwise, I really dig the execution of the map.

EDIT: Cached the filtered screenshot so as to not hit the (relatively slow) colorfilter.wickline.org server.

Re: Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities

#58

Post by keiferski » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 11:25 PM UTC

showerst wrote: post #35

keiferski wrote: post #4

Cleveland is included, but not Pittsburgh? Someone's a Jets fan... On a technical note, the information in the hover bubble is mis-aligned; the right side is a space below the left side, at least on this older version of Firefox.

They just pulled the top 50 cities from the census, Cleveland is 43, Pittsburgh is 61. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_Unite... (Cities vs metro areas, oh the perils of using census data.)

Ah, I see. That makes sense, especially because the actual "city" of Pittsburgh isn't all that populated.

Re: Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities

#59

Post by grav1tas » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 11:27 PM UTC

aik wrote: post #28

I'm confused about the populations. For example, it mentions the population of Kansas City is 143K. Wikipedia says 482,299, and "greater" KC is closer to a million. What exactly is measured here?

It appears to be using the data from KCK. If it's pulling the population data from there it might be a safe bet that everything else is from KCK, too. That being said, regardless, I think the entire bit about KC being ranked up near San Fran and NYC is way off. There's very reasonably priced housing in the greater metro area. I don't think the sample they're using on this site is very accurate at all. I find it really hard to believe that of all the midwestern places to live on this site, Kansas City is the most expensive in terms of Rent:Buy. 200-300k? This probably isn't true of some of the big swaths of outer KC I've driven through, and it definitely isn't true of the suburban areas.

Aside from this little sampling problem, and it's easily fixed, no big deal, I think this site is really cool and a great way to look at affordable places to live.

Re: Rent vs. Buy Visualization of Top 50 Cities

#60

Post by grav1tas » Mon, Jan 24, 2011, 11:27 PM UTC

aik wrote: post #28

I'm confused about the populations. For example, it mentions the population of Kansas City is 143K. Wikipedia says 482,299, and "greater" KC is closer to a million. What exactly is measured here?

It appears to be using the data from KCK. If it's pulling the population data from there it might be a safe bet that everything else is from KCK, too. That being said, regardless, I think the entire bit about KC being ranked up near San Fran and NYC is way off. There's very reasonably priced housing in the greater metro area. I don't think the sample they're using on this site is very accurate at all. I find it really hard to believe that of all the midwestern places to live on this site, Kansas City is the most expensive in terms of Rent:Buy. 200-300k? This probably isn't true of some of the big swaths of outer KC I've driven through, and it definitely isn't true of the suburban areas.

Aside from this little sampling problem, and it's easily fixed, no big deal, I think this site is really cool and a great way to look at affordable places to live.