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The house I was born in sold for $4000

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Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#91

Post by acgourley »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #78
simonsarris wrote: post #37

(This is more of a response to several of the comments posted so far.) I'd like to come to the defense of low-cost living but also acknowledge that (expensive) city living has its obvious pluses that people already in SV might be taking for granted. I created a low-cost living situation while living in a big (old/pretty) house in New Hampshire by renting out all of the rooms to friends. My rent is "free" and utilitie…

What I find interesting is that communal living is not new (it has all the benefits you describe) but there hasn't been more of it recently. Historically this has been a common way for artists to get by and practice their skills. Given how much programming and design is artistic in nature I'm surprised there aren't more such communes these days.

Maybe broadcast tools (like craigslist) and reputation tools (like social networks) make it a lot easier for people to spontaneously organize shared living situations. This makes it so easy to join or form 4-5 person cells to share a house that it takes out the demand for a larger and more formal commune. Maybe.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#92

Post by rdl »

brianobush wrote: post #77
rdl wrote: post #31

I'd really like to see a low-tax, low regulation part of the US (WA, NV, TX, or TN) where someone buys a few thousand acres and lets people build "temporary" structures (with power/fiber/wifi/etc.) for living and solo-working, combined with some more permanent structures for offices, meetings, socialization, etc. Essentially like a 2-5 year Burning Man encampment campus for various startup projects. If someone's "per…

put this on a boat and we could have a tax haven like Sealand!

blueseed would be more reasonable now :) although at sea you'd have much harsher environmental conditions, so construction would be more difficult and expensive, vs. on land.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#93

Post by acgourley »

istorical wrote: post #82
rdl wrote: post #31

I'd really like to see a low-tax, low regulation part of the US (WA, NV, TX, or TN) where someone buys a few thousand acres and lets people build "temporary" structures (with power/fiber/wifi/etc.) for living and solo-working, combined with some more permanent structures for offices, meetings, socialization, etc. Essentially like a 2-5 year Burning Man encampment campus for various startup projects. If someone's "per…

There's no need for someone to buy a few thousand acres and let people build structures. You could move to several 250,000+ population cities in the Midwest and there are already startup communities, incubators, and coworking spaces. I live in Omaha and went to school in Lincoln, NE. Omaha is getting gigabit internet soon from CenturyLink, Kansas City has Google Fiber. I worked at an incubator in Lincoln for the summ…

Just a datapoint that I (as a healthy young adult) live on 18k. It's a comfortable life in a beautiful neighborhood near UC Berkeley. You could do better if you moved into an oakland apartment or bart-enabled suburb.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#94

Post by rdl »

sliverstorm wrote: post #85
nitrogen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see tech workers breaking out the saws and sandpaper and building quality neighborhoods in their spare time... Why not? Building physical things for yourself can be just as satisfying as building virtual things for others.

Because as much as engineers tend to think they are experts in all fields, they aren't actually. So take a bunch of working professionals who just came home from an 8-hour day, and see how much quality skilled labor in fields they don't know anything about you can get. I mean, I like building things, yes. I make small tables, I replace parts on my car. But I can't really hope to raise a decent house, even if I had 20…

I was thinking stuff in the 300-500 square foot range, which is far more feasible. Converted containers or other modular elements. Mobile homes/trailers at the low end. The idea would be to have private cheap/transit stuff and a few professional/serious buildings (like older converted farmhouses).

I can certainly build a shed, even from lumber, and pretty much anyone moderately competent could.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#95

Post by waps »

michaelochurch wrote: post #64

Location is basically an extortion racket enabled by the economic collapse of the U.S. outside of a handful of star cities. With NIMBY policies, people in economically vibrant locations keep supply artificially low. This way, a class of people who've ceased providing value can still enrich themselves on a self-sustaining pattern of clueless talent rushing in for the gold rush. What we see is that most of the country…

The problem is that this is happening everywhere, not just the US. Everything outside the main cities is becoming more and more worthless.

That will switch when oil becomes cheap again. Of course, that may never happen.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#96

Post by waps »

michaelochurch wrote: post #64

Location is basically an extortion racket enabled by the economic collapse of the U.S. outside of a handful of star cities. With NIMBY policies, people in economically vibrant locations keep supply artificially low. This way, a class of people who've ceased providing value can still enrich themselves on a self-sustaining pattern of clueless talent rushing in for the gold rush. What we see is that most of the country…

The problem is that this is happening everywhere, not just the US. Everything outside the main cities is becoming more and more worthless.

That will switch when oil becomes cheap again. Of course, that may never happen.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#97

Post by LowKarmaAccount »

cletus wrote: post #44

This is going to be an increasing issue and it's something that Western nations in particular just haven't had to deal with until now. The West came out of Europe. Europe is small. To put it in perspective, the distance from SF to NYC is ~2900 miles. The distance from London to Baghdad is ~3100 miles. So abundance of land is not a problem the West has traditionally had (not until colonization anyway). Added to this,…

One of the reasons that NYC and its suburbs have a higher cost of living than upstate New York is because they have higher county taxes. They have higher county taxes because each county has to pay for it's own Medicaid. The larger counties have more poor people in them. New York State is notorious for having horribly inefficient Medicaid system.

Also, just because the U.S birth rate is declining doesn't mean that it will eventually have a negative growth rate. The U.S population is still growing, but just not as rapidly.

There are countries that are experiencing negative growth rates right now; Russia is one of them.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#98

Post by Spooky23 »

outworlder wrote: post #16
yen223 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially with remote jobs becoming more popular.

That house looks big enough for a very spacious office. Google says it's a 6:30 drive to NY, which is no Valley, but should present enough opportunities. One could get up early and be there by noon, for meetings or whatever. What kind of maintenance fees would one be looking at, with a house that size?

Taxes in Upstate NY are going to be high. But keep in mind that central and western NY are depressing places. The place peakedin the 50's with industrial, rilroad and defense industries that are long gone. The city of Buffalo demolishes 2 houses a day. It was a city of 600,000, now down to 250,000.

A nice $50k house in Schenectady, NY (former industrial city 3 hours from NYC) has $5000/year taxes. The house is worth 10x the Jamestown house because of the proximity to state government (150k jobs).

If you want to live in the country, lots of cheap houses in rural towns <2 hours from NYC.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#99

Post by Spooky23 »

ultrab wrote: post #5

WTF? If an house can be built for $12000, why are flats selling for $100k+ routinely?!?!? If it's just due to land value, then why not build ultra-tall skyscrapers to amortize it?

A trailer house, which is mass produced at high efficiency, costs over $30k. No house that meets US building codes is going to be built for $12,000.

Re: The house I was born in sold for $4000

#100

Post by general_failure »

bdcravens wrote: post #76
general_failure wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better for well established players to move to low cost areas. Startups need to be in places where there is abundance of talent. Engineering salary are extremely high as-is, it would be nigh impossible to make them move to the middle of nowhere.

In a world of PaaS and the cloud, and amazing communication capabilities like Skype and Google Hangout, why? What about CA or NY makes them more talented? They're there because the work is there, not vice versa. Also, you don't have to be in the middle of nowhere. There's plenty of large American cities where you can buy a nice house for less than $150K. I realize that the SF reality distortion field would suggest th…

What you are saying makes total sense as a founder. But for an engineer there us no motivation to move to an area where there are not many opportunities.
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