An affordable house in Houston for that price they will throw in automatic sprinklers and increase your detached garage to 2 1/2 car size with breezeway from house to garage.
Gah. Houston is the cheapest major metropolitan area in the country.
A good friend of mine moved to the Bay Area from Houston (where she had grown up ), more or less right out of law school. She figured as a young lawyer, no problem - No more living on the cheap as a student in apartments. The sticker shock damn near killed her, poor thing 
.
She just moved back to Houston after about 2 years or so in the Bay Area ( turning down a local job that would have paid her substantially more ), just a few weeks ago and is making an offer on a home as we speak. She’s paying maybe a third of what it would have cost her out here.
sigh Location is everything.
- Tamerlane
If you ever find it just too much to afford a good house in a good community, keep the small town of Manitouwadge, Ontario, in mind. Under $30,000 will buy you a three bedroom suburban type home in excellent condition. http://town.manitouwadge.on.ca/
Heh. Here in Concord, CA, $170,000 can get you a 975 sq. ft. condo. And that’s a two-bedroom model!
Looks like a nice place, Abby. Unfortunately commuting from Tomball every day would put a major kink in my life.
I took my Mom to dinner tonight and she was relating to me details of what she described as “mansions” with 5 and 6 bedrooms in the FM1960 area for ~$175K. Great, if you don’t work 40 or 50 miles away. The 'burbs are not really great for singles, either.
When my ex moved out she bought a house in Spring Branch. Nice little place with a huge yard, she got it for $52K. This was a few years ago, but not that long ago. That same house in this neighborhood would command at least $200K.
I work in the central city, my friends are here, I like that 7 minute commute. I’ll probably go in hock an extra $100K over what I might do in the 'burbs just to stay here.
And somewhere in the back of my mind lurks the thought that whatever you buy today will (generally*) appreciate in proportion to today’s relative price. So, if I buy a $300K house today, will it not appreciate in marginal real dollar terms more quickly than a $150K house?
*I realize there are all sorts of local collapses in real estate for a variety of reasons.
My brother is trying to sell his house. Very nice Cleveland suburb, great neighborhood, two blocks from high school, twenty minutes to downtown. Four bedrooms, 2-1/2 baths, full basement, two car garage, large lot. I think he’s asking about $225,000, maybe a bit more, though I could be wrong…and there are lots of great houses a few blocks away in the $170,000 range. Did I mention the hardwood floors?
Cleveland has recently noticed a lot of people who left for the bright lights of the bigger cities are moving back now that they have families to raise…you all can come too! And bring your friends!
I’m in Santa Cruz too. Almost anywhere else with our income, we could afford something decent without too much problem. Here, if we ever do buy something, it will be a tiny little condo or we could buy a duplex with other people. That’s what other people do. It’s insane. My parents live in Rockford, IL and their 3 bedroom house is worth about $85,000. It nees a little work but it’s decent enough. I wonder many times why we are here.
Because prices be damned, the SF Bay Area is the best place on earth 
. Santa Cruz 'taint bad neither 
.
- Tamerlane
Hear, hear.
My wife and I were shopping for a house in the Los Angeles/South Bay metropolitan area last year. Needless to say getting any sort of a house (as opposed to a condominum or apartment) for $170,000 would have been a dream. Even $250,000 would be a bargain, though odds are you’d end up with (a) a house in poor condition, (b) a neighborhood similar to a war zone, or (c) both.
Sometimes, for laughs, I fantasize about what would happen if I were to sell my current more-than-$350,000 house, relocate, and bought a house in a cheaper real estate market. I keep ending up with six bedrooms, four baths, and a jacuzzi in the living room…
Allowing for the higher US dollar, you could pick up about 45 bedrooms in Manitouwadge.
Thas about right for one of the mid 50s tract houses I bought mine 4 years ago off the hud auction list for 65,000
What was killing us was people from la didnt know the market here and was bidding la prices and inflation was setting in
houses that were listed for 60 and 70 were going for 80 and 90 and no one on the hud program was saying anything cuase the goverment was
For the new houses they go from 175 to 200,000
Of course all this depends on the job market wether lockheed ect is hiring if edwards get contracts ect
But basically were a la surburb these days
In fact in the city council race member one has the tag “I opposed the developeent of low income apartments keeping our town safe”
$170,000 would get you a small cramped apartment in Dublin, if you were lucky.
And keep in mind that Irish wages are among the lowest in Western Europe.
nightshadea: I’m pretty sure dad’s house was built in the early-'70s. In the 1980s dad’s house would have sold for close to $80,000 but he was good friends with the landlady (they were both in the FAA) and he’d always left the houses he rented from her in better condition than when he moved in, so he got it for $58,000.
I left Lancaster in 1987 at the start of the housing boom up there. New houses were being built all over the place. Housing in the metro area was (and is) so expensive that people were moving up from the Valley and L.A. Then after a few years they must have looked around and said, “Hey, wait a minute. We’re living in the desert!” And the commute to L.A. (which I made for two years myself) could be two hours – especially the commute back. The housing market plummetted. There was a Sylvester Stallone movie that was being made, and they needed to burn down some partially completed houses. Rather than build them on a lot, they found a developer who was going to tear down their partially completed houses because it was cheaper to do that than to complete them and sell them at a loss. So the film company was allowed to burn them down for a fee. The developer recovered some funds, and the film company made a little money.
For years I’d see billboards advertising brand new 3-br homes starting at $80,000. The market must have recovered, because all of those places I used to ride my Enduro are now covered with houses. I think you can still get a new home up there for around $100,000. But dad’s house had big yards. The new houses are packed together like four green houses on a Monopoly board.
When I lived in Lancaster there were three types of families there: Those who were military, worked in aerospace, and farmers. Now in addition to those, there are a lot of commuters. I hear traffic reports for the 14 freeway, and it sounds packed; compared to when I commuted on it when it was wide open.
I live in Baltimore, and housing prices here are very low. A gigantic 2Br, 2Bath apartment is $800 a month, and the house prices are so low that the parents of two of my classmates bought them houses.
Guess where I’m moving in a few months though? Boston. It sounds like a great city, but studio apartments go for more than 1k a month and I’m having trouble finding a one bedroom for under $1200 sigh
Its pretty simple economics. While disposable income has been rising steadily over the last couple of years, land, especially good land has been fairly stable in quantity.
When you get increasing demand with constant or shrinking supply (people with good houses arent likely to sell them off soon if prices are still rising), prices shoot through the roof.
The plus side of this, though, is that if you manage to buy a house in a sought after area, the price will keep on rising which will hedge against the interest paid for the high price… That is, of course, until people realise they are paying incredible amounts for an intangible product (Internet Bubble anybody?)
The townhouses someone earlier in this thread disdained go for anywhere between $600,000 and 2 mil where I live. A 3 bedroom house in the most crime-filled, drug infested, empty-lot-next-door-to-you neighborhood is at least $200,000.
My question is: Who in the hell are buying these houses? How can the housing market sustain these prices? My husband and I make decent money, yet there’s no way on Earth we could ever afford one of the houses in the nicer nabes and you couldn’t pay us to live in some of the not-so-nice ones.
I live in San Jose and my parents bought our house for about 375,000…Keep in mind this was about ten years ago. The good news is the value has nearly doubled since then. I often hear my mom talking about selling our house after I move out and buying a condo somewhere using bags of money as pillows
Unfortunately for me I will probably have to move some distance away just to be able to afford it; I’m not going anywhere anytime soon with only a part-time job and being 2 years away from graduating college.
Well, I’m not in Tomball either (and that is not my house), I just posted it as an example in the same general price as the article linked mentioned.
Biggirl. that’s what I was trying to get at. Who is $170k affordable to? The Strib article talks about a family of four - but you must not have any daycare expenses for those two kids if you are paying that mortgage, or have two car loans, or lots of other debt - or you make a significant chunk of money. (For the record, my household falls in the significant chunk of money class, but I know few people with our incomes).
And yes, I realize $170k looks cheap from the East or West coast - but this is Minnesota! - and its sticker shock to someone who bought their first home for under $60k (granted, not much of a house). Now you can’t get a tar paper shack in the Twin Cities for $60k.
The company I work for is out of San Jose, and I know a bunch of folks who live on that hill between San Jose and Santa Cruz - I have no idea how they manage their payments - and if I ask them, they don’t know either.
How does anyone manage to raise a family in a city like San Francisco or Boston?
What is it that make’s so many people want to live in Dublin as opposed to elsewhere in the country?