Does anyone have a clue as to why housing prices in the State are so expensive? It’s even expensive on the Western part and the expensiveness spills over into New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. It only gets normal toward northern New York. What forces are at play that make housing so expensive in the area? I’m from Michigan where you can get 2 bedroom house with a fence, yard, basement with water included for $450 a month - so the prices I’m seeing for a 5 x 10’ room are incomprehensible. Why is that? How can it be so expensive? Does this increase in housing prices mean that people in MA pay substantially more for food, fuel, and clothing than the Midwest?
Honesty
Background on why I’m asking:
I got a job (which I’m eternally grateful) about 20 miles outside Boston and will be heading out this week. I’ve never been to MA before and I am totally stoked!
I live in the Boston area and the general area usually comes in at #2 or #3 in the country for housing costs. San Francisco and New York are the other players with positions that flip-flop over time. Like both of those, it is a combination of things but mainly geography, urban planning, and the affluent population (in other words, supply and demand). Boston proper sits right next to the Atlantic ocean so you can only build in certain directions. Zoning laws can be strict as well limiting the supply. Some suburban and exurban towns require at least an acre of land before you can build a house on it and that alone cost several times what a house in the rest of the country costs before the foundation is even laid.
Boston itself is very small geographically for a city of its size and influence like San Francisco which makes living in one of the nicer areas of the city impossible without big concessions. To this day, I have never figured out how many people afford it because I know they make way less than I do and I can’t.
Look at a cost of living calculator online to compare your present location with the Boston area. Boston runs about 130 - 150% of the national average. If you are coming from a low cost of living area, you really need to multiply your old standard of money by a lot.
Not everything is more expensive however. Really nice clothing can be had at a discount easily because discount retailers like TJX among others are based here. Gas may or may not be more expensive but you might not care about that if you decide to live in the city and have to pay either several hundred dollars in parking tickets a month or rent a space of your own for $200+. It really adds up so be aware of it.
State income taxes aren’t that high at 5% but Massachusetts is a genius at figuring out other taxes. Be prepared to pay tax bills on things you own outright (such as vehicle) every year even if you bring it with you. If you live in the western suburbs, it is very nice but Mass Pike tolls can easily be $200+ a month just to get to work. In other words, there is no way out of it. You really do have to walk around flush with cash to hand out when you move here. That was something that shocked me coming from Louisiana.
Let us know where you plan on living. There are a number of Boston area Dopers that can give you tips. The various towns run right into one another but there are about 200 in the Greater Boston area and they differ wildly. You can’t just pick one off a map and know what you are getting without an insider perspective.
If you’re coming from the Detroit area, you’re coming from an area where housing prices are significantly depressed.
A 1-bedroom apartment in a nice area of Boston is going to cost $1200. Depending on the neighborhood, it’ll cost another $200 for parking. You can get a room with some rommates for $500 or so.
And yes, the cost of living is gonna be higher than in Michigan, as will the state taxes. Hope you took this into account when you negotiated your salary.
This is something everyone should be aware of anytime they accept a job offer in another city. Some years ago a nephew of mine who was a relatively recent college grad (he had 2 years of experience) got a job offer in the D.C. metro area that paid around $55k. I can’t remember what the numbers were at the time, but I basically talked to him and showed him that his actual disposable income would decrease even though he was only making around $45k right now. This is because he was in Oklahoma City, and the D.C. metro area is vastly more expensive than the Oklahoma City area.
Based on current figures, if you make $45k in Oklahoma City you would need to make $68k in the D.C. metro area for the increase in pay to be a real increase, any pay under $68k would actually be a reduction in compensation from your $45k pay in OK City.
That doesn’t of course mean it’s a bad move. In some career fields certain areas of the country are pretty much where you need to be to seriously advance yourself. So sometimes making a move from a place like Oklahoma City to NYC, even if you take a cut in pay due to the highest cost of living destroying any increase in actual compensation, it might set you up for still higher life time earnings even adjusting for differences in CPI and thus may be worth the move. Any valuations on personal desire to live in say San Francisco or New York versus Oklahoma City can only be priced on an individual preference basis.
Nonsense. CA has a population density closer to MI than that MA, and our housing prices are the highest in the nation (maybe with the exception of HI).
Of course it doesn’t make sense to look at density over the whole state. California has vast amounts of mountain and desert and farmland that have very few people, with a couple of giant conurbations on the coast.
The statistical abstract of the United States for 2012 lists the top 5 median home price states to be:
Hawaii $517k
California $384k
New Jersey $348k
Massachusetts $338k
Maryland $318k
Hawaii is obviously dramatically more expensive than any of the other states, and for obvious reasons. DC, while not one of the states, also ranks in at $443k.
Median home price is probably more useful than average home price, because many states (like California) have cities like San Francisco with a lot of extremely high price houses that would probably throw the whole state’s average off.
I will say one difference between Massachusetts and California, is because of the massive physical size of California you can probably find small towns that aren’t near the San Francisco Bay or San Diego where home prices are substantially cheaper. Massachusetts and the Boston area are basically the same thing because of how tiny the state is.
Don’t tell that to the people that live in extreme Western Massachusetts. That is a long drive. They are more like Vermont or Upstate New York. The point still stands however. The Greater Boston area encompasses at least Southern New Hampshire and Northern Rhode Island and a case can be made for some border towns in Connecticut and Maine. I live closer to Providence, Rhode Island than Boston proper and it is still both a small city of its own and a Boston suburb.
The population density of the state is only a rough approximation to the population density that really matters in deciding to take any particular job. The real calculation is closer to the following:
Take everything within the longest conceivable commuting distance to the job which you’re considering. For each neighborhood within that distance, figure its population density. That will tell you approximately how expensive it is to live in that neighborhood. It’s necessary to adjust according to how expensive it is to commute from that neighborhood to the job you’re considering and the difference in state and local taxes among the neighborhoods to be considered. That’s a better approximation to the costs of rent, etc. Even this sort of analysis ignores a few factors.
Even in California, it’s far more expensive to live in Los Angeles than in, say, Barstow.
Look into living someplace like here: FAIRHAVEN, MA. (I’m the guy in the hat.) We’re an hour away and there’s a commuter bus line from here to South Station. No toll roads between here and Boston. Much cheaper to live here. Free parking everywhere. And it’s a really beautiful town.
You can pretty much own a house in Fairhaven for the price of an apartment in Boston.
