Houseboat current hijacked by Somali pirates
Options 5 and 6 are the same, depending on the area. My actual house is closer to option 6, except with actual space about it. Option 5 is obviously an older home, but it can be considerably more expensive in the right neighborhood.
Of course the poll is for where do I (currently) live, not where is my house. I currently live in one of the most desireable residential-commercial areas in the greater Mexico City area. It’s expensive as all hell, even by American standards. Despite that, it’s still just an apartment, and while it’s a nice apartment, the fact that it’s an apartment period makes it a piece of feces in my book. Not sure how to work that one into any of the poll classifications.
I live in a barn (inside photos if you’re interested). It’s a rural area but I’d say it’s middle-class. Which option do I check?
I’d say #5.
OK. Done. I was vacillating between 5 and other, but thought 5 too since most of my neighbors fit that category.
I live in what has become an upper-middle-class neighborhood; in the oldest house on the street; a tiny little fixer-upper.
All my neighbors probably hate me.
:D:p
Fervour, that’s a really unusual set-up. Where is that?
I vascillated between option #4 and other, eventually choosing other because while I live in an awesome apartment that I don’t pay too much money for in what seems to be a low-rent neighborhood (North Harlem) to my eyes the fact that I live in Manhattan takes the “low rent” option right off the table. Even in what could be termed “ghetto” neighborhood everything here is clean and safe with fabulous restaurants and shops nearby. By S&TC standards I am low rent but by more normal NYC standards I wouldn’t consider it to be so. Hell, I have a dishwasher in New York City and by that standard alone I could be considered wealthy!
My wife and I have lived full time in our motor home for almost seven years - wandering around, seeing the country and avoiding cold and hot weather. That’s an other I think.
Southeast Alabama. Technically it’s a duplex. Half of the barn is mine and half is my sister’s studio. We had a local agri-building company erect the shell and we each finished the insides to our own specifications. You can get a lot more square footage for your dollar, but it certainly isn’t for everyone. It came out to about $23.50/SF once the inside was completed. I don’t know if we could recoup the money if we were interested in selling—shouldn’t be an issue since it’s on land where we grew up.
As per a couple of threads I’ve done on the subject, I recently moved to small-town, low-income WV, into an apartment building we own so I can properly manage it.
The area is definitely low income. Out of our 15 rental properties, at least half are on public assistance. We may well be the only family in the whole place that earns much above minimum wage. However, the apartment building itself is not in bad shape, and the apartment we moved into was designed to be the “Owner’s Unit” and is by far the nicest in the building, and most likely one of the nicest apartments in town.
I’m not saying all this to brag, just to explain a little about our situation.
We could afford a nicer place, but we’re here to run the place because, under proper management, it’s something of a minor goldmine.
One of the nice things about living in a low-income area is that the cost-of-living, in general, is low. Not just rent/housing, but everything. I took my daughter out to breakfast at the local diner the other day, and it cost us less than I would have spent at your average McDonald’s! I went into the local thrift shop when they were having a ‘bag sale’. It was $1.00 for a grocery bag, and you could stuff as much as you wanted in there. Well, after I looked around, all I found that I wanted was a jacket for me, and two shirts for the kid. The woman looked in the bag and said “Hmph. That ain’t even half-full!” so she just charged me 50 cents plus tax! That’s not the kind of consideration you’d get in a bigger/higher-class place! 
I live in an apparently small (from the exterior) house in a small village in the south of France - set among the outliers of the Pyrenees, about an hour from the Spanish frontier, and 40 minutes from the Mediterranean Sea. It’s in the middle of the Languedoc vinyards in a most beautiful location.
It has kitchen, dining room my den, large storeroom, garage and toilet on the groundfloor. Above (European 1st floor) there are two bedrooms, toilet and shower room in the west end. East end has a large salon/lounge, about 35 feet x 18 ft. and an open terrasse (terrace) which is my ‘garden’ in pots, which is slightly larger than the salon.
Above the salon (European 2nd floor) is the guest room with its own bath/shower/toilet facilities, opening off a bedroom with two single beds.
The walls of the house are remarkably thick - it’s old, about 350 yrs. The thickness keeps us cool in the heat of summer, and warm in the bitterly cold (but short) winter.
The main disadvantage is that being on the edge of a village, we can occasionally get snakes sneaking in, or field mice. However, Portia, the cat, takes care of them for us.
Would I move? Who wants to leave heaven?
Can I vote 4.5? It’s not really low rent, but it’s not quite the average for the rest of the suburbs, either. The biggest problem is that the houses are smaller than most these days, so the prices are lower, even allowing for differences in square footage. But it’s a nice residential town, with a halfway decent standard of living.
I like how, at the moment, the ‘perfectly average’ option is at exactly 50%
I live in Five Points, Athens, GA. A mix of old rental houses next to beautiful older big upper-middle class houses.
I live in a rental duplex. I love my neighborhood (best thing this town has). 
So what if you live in a walled compound that is very nice, but it is very much the Third World outside the wall?
I would consider the house pictured in option #6 to be straight up middle class, not upper middle class.
To my eye, Option 5 looks a lot nicer than Option 6, but I wouldn’t call either “average”. Both those houses are pretty large by UK standards.
I live in a typical end of terrace house in a middle-class commuter town. This is the type of thing, although a bit more expensive than mine. (Yes, that price really is more than half a million US dollars 
)
No idea what option this equates to. By British standards, 5, I guess.
I picked low rent, but not ghetto. It is a perfectly nice, middle class area, but I just happen to liive on one of the streets that are all apartments, so it’s a little more low rent than the rest of the neighborhood.
I picked the low rent option although I think of ourselves as middle class owners. However, I’ve been told we’re not exactly on the good side of town, so I suppose that puts us firmly in the #4 camp.