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> I think the housing market is so fucked no one really grasps the scale of the problem. I don't think I agree with this assessment. I live in a very rural are

> I think the housing market is so fucked no one really grasps the scale of the problem. I don't think I agree with this assessment. I live in a very rural area two hours northwest of Austin, literally in the middle of nowhere. I've studied the local economy and understand how things work here. I think the characteristics you've identified in the rural housing supply are not unusual and also not as serious in a practical sense as you seem to be indicating. For example, in San Saba, Texas, 20-30% of the households are under the federal poverty threshold. The median household income in the town of San Saba is about $32K/yr. People just don't have any excess cash so the maintenance on dwellings is neglected. That means folks become extremely thrifty and resourceful patching what needs to be patched, very cheaply, if not for free. Some dwellings simply aren't maintained and one day won't be there anymore. Families live on small budgets, don't require much and generally just "get by". The municipal and county governments have very small budgets but extremely resourceful staff who accomplish a lot with very little. Everyone comes together as a community when needed (see: February 2021 freeze event) and it all works very efficiently, actually. To someone who is not from here and who doesn't understand that dynamic, they might see those properties as you described and believe a tragedy was unfolding. But that doesn't reflect reality on the ground vis-a-vis my neighbors.

h2odragon 5y ago
I'm in rural TN; not that different a place at all. I'm not speaking of family owned homes tho. I'm talking about the Abandoned, uninhabited homes that are now owned by some out of state thing per county records... which is a lot of them. LLC's and INCs whom I believe have the properties valued highly on some book somewhere and haven't done anything to maintain them. Our local Craigslists always have "Property inspector" jobs listed. You go take some cell phone shots of buildings to prove they exist. The people I have spoken to who have done those say they didn't bother going to the places as often as not and took pics of some neighbors house. Even when people actually do that job and document the true state of these properties I can't help but suspect the information is buried or lost because thats not the narrative management would want. The actual family owned housing stock got better the last two years, our population doubled for the last 3/4ths of 2020, and all those relatives did a lot of renovation and rebuilding.
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  I actually used to work with people from East Tennessee for the past 2.5 years. They described how the Knoxville area was growing like crazy with folks from the coastal states moving there. I understand what you're saying. The ripple effect created by that dynamic would unjustifiably inflate local property values, reducing affordability for locals, creating synthetic demand by reducing supply as the land could otherwise be auctioned.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    West TN; we've got that happening too. The neighbor's $750k McMansion has ludicrous "market value" implications for the hunting camp trailers beside it and the doublewide up the road. and (ahem) East TN is more "western Arlington VA" IMO. I said rural. I'd have to walk a half mile to get a decent rifle shot at a neighbor. It's getting too crowded here.
    - SteveGerencser 5y ago
      You just described my road here in Henderson County,TN. We bought 100 acres and built a dream home. In the last years (ish) 4 new single wides went in and a couple of new smaller homes. We were told during the entire build that we will never get out of it what we are putting into it and we don't care. We aren't building for resale, selling it is our kid's problem. But there are so many abandoned places out here. People have just walked away and never looked back. We had one across the road that over the last 10 years the woods has reclaimed and unless you knew that it was there, you would drive right past it.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        Could you use it for hiking, hunting or woods?
conductr 5y ago
My observations passing through rural Texas matches this. You frequently see houses that probably only served 1 maybe 2 generations and then they are in a poor condition uninhabitable by even those folks used to roughing it. Housing stock in rural areas just doesn’t last long.
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  Finding good carpenters out here who can do structural repairs is effectively impossible.
- 01100011 5y ago
  FWIW I lived in San Diego and saw this too. Houses bought by parents for $50k in 1973 ended up being unmaintainable for some of the families even with Prop 13 keeping their taxes low. Then you'd have houses passes to kids, sometimes with drug problems, but in any case, no resources or knowledge sufficient to maintain a house.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
How are the schools funded?
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  Both local property taxes and property taxes from urban areas that are redistributed to rural communities by the state of Texas. San Saba ISD is probably the best funded entity in the whole county. Every student has a laptop and home internet. The graduation rate is 100%. It's a small school; the senior class is only 50 students. They built the new school in the middle of town, thus highlighting its position of import within the community.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    So Texas funds education at the state level via property taxes? That sounds surprisingly progressive of them. Washington state does something similar, though it’s more of a subsidy. Education is still mainly funded locally, but the state kicks in with its own funding for poorer districts, so Seattle property taxes subsidize schools across the state in Spokane.
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      > So Texas funds education at the state level via property taxes? That sounds surprisingly progressive of them. It sounds like that funding decision predates the current crop of state leadership
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        Everyone forgets it used to be a Democratic state when Republicans were the reviled coastal elites.
        seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        That was when "Southern Conservative Democrat" was still a thing. Republicans were reviled in the South because they were literally the party of Lincoln, the most unpopular politician among southern whites for a long time (suffice it to say, black southerners had no problem voting for Republicans when they were allowed to vote at all). The turning point didn't really start until Nixon's southern strategy, and took a three decades to finish. I'm still surprised that Texas would distribute property taxes equally like that for education. Even if they were run by Democrats, they were never run by the liberal kind.
registeredcorn 5y ago
I've noticed similar situations to this in my own area. In your opinion, what do you think the most effective way to help these families out might be?
- jason-phillips 5y ago
  > In your opinion, what do you think the most effective way to help these families out might be? This is a question that I'm well-positioned to answer. I moved to this rural area in 2018 after living in Austin for 24 years. I immediately looked for ways to volunteer and help. I developed relationships with elected and community leaders, started my own "technology incubator" to teach technology skills and classes. I explored establishing a regional technology council with my county judge and Texas state leadership. The community liked that I was volunteering but the actual uptake, expending effort to learn and implement what I was teaching, wasn't there. They didn't know what to do with it. The gap between their world and the world we know at HN was too wide to be bridged effectively. My experience is applicable to every problem here where someone thinks they may be able to help in some way. Whether it's teaching job skills, helping those who are addicted to meth or whatever, I believe people can't be helped if they don't want to expend the effort to get from A to B themselves. There are many reasons for this, why offering to help in an economically-depressed or disadvantaged community doesn't yield results. Locals are apathetic, comfortable living in the middle of nowhere with very low expectations, or else they have poor self-esteem and don't believe they can do better. I don't "push" anymore. I just try to be empathetic and understand their situations. This past Thanksgiving I asked the community to tell me if anyone was unable to get a turkey for Thanksgiving and would like one. Two families responded; I was glad to help. It's little things like that which I can do to help their situation which I feel is the best approach now. Edited to add: There is an organization here called "Mission San Saba" where a group of ~30 volunteers will pick one house per year to renovate, typically for an older or economically-disadvantaged family. That has been very successful here.

h2odragon 5y ago

I'm in rural TN; not that different a place at all. I'm not speaking of family owned homes tho. I'm talking about the Abandoned, uninhabited homes that are now owned by some out of state thing per county records... which is a lot of them. LLC's and INCs whom I believe have the properties valued highly on some book somewhere and haven't done anything to maintain them. Our local Craigslists always have "Property inspector" jobs listed. You go take some cell phone shots of buildings to prove they exist. The people I have spoken to who have done those say they didn't bother going to the places as often as not and took pics of some neighbors house. Even when people actually do that job and document the true state of these properties I can't help but suspect the information is buried or lost because thats not the narrative management would want. The actual family owned housing stock got better the last two years, our population doubled for the last 3/4ths of 2020, and all those relatives did a lot of renovation and rebuilding.

jason-phillips 5y ago
I actually used to work with people from East Tennessee for the past 2.5 years. They described how the Knoxville area was growing like crazy with folks from the coastal states moving there. I understand what you're saying. The ripple effect created by that dynamic would unjustifiably inflate local property values, reducing affordability for locals, creating synthetic demand by reducing supply as the land could otherwise be auctioned.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  West TN; we've got that happening too. The neighbor's $750k McMansion has ludicrous "market value" implications for the hunting camp trailers beside it and the doublewide up the road. and (ahem) East TN is more "western Arlington VA" IMO. I said rural. I'd have to walk a half mile to get a decent rifle shot at a neighbor. It's getting too crowded here.
  - SteveGerencser 5y ago
    You just described my road here in Henderson County,TN. We bought 100 acres and built a dream home. In the last years (ish) 4 new single wides went in and a couple of new smaller homes. We were told during the entire build that we will never get out of it what we are putting into it and we don't care. We aren't building for resale, selling it is our kid's problem. But there are so many abandoned places out here. People have just walked away and never looked back. We had one across the road that over the last 10 years the woods has reclaimed and unless you knew that it was there, you would drive right past it.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      Could you use it for hiking, hunting or woods?

conductr 5y ago

My observations passing through rural Texas matches this. You frequently see houses that probably only served 1 maybe 2 generations and then they are in a poor condition uninhabitable by even those folks used to roughing it. Housing stock in rural areas just doesn’t last long.

jason-phillips 5y ago
Finding good carpenters out here who can do structural repairs is effectively impossible.
01100011 5y ago
FWIW I lived in San Diego and saw this too. Houses bought by parents for $50k in 1973 ended up being unmaintainable for some of the families even with Prop 13 keeping their taxes low. Then you'd have houses passes to kids, sometimes with drug problems, but in any case, no resources or knowledge sufficient to maintain a house.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

How are the schools funded?

jason-phillips 5y ago
Both local property taxes and property taxes from urban areas that are redistributed to rural communities by the state of Texas. San Saba ISD is probably the best funded entity in the whole county. Every student has a laptop and home internet. The graduation rate is 100%. It's a small school; the senior class is only 50 students. They built the new school in the middle of town, thus highlighting its position of import within the community.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  So Texas funds education at the state level via property taxes? That sounds surprisingly progressive of them. Washington state does something similar, though it’s more of a subsidy. Education is still mainly funded locally, but the state kicks in with its own funding for poorer districts, so Seattle property taxes subsidize schools across the state in Spokane.
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    > So Texas funds education at the state level via property taxes? That sounds surprisingly progressive of them. It sounds like that funding decision predates the current crop of state leadership
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      Everyone forgets it used to be a Democratic state when Republicans were the reviled coastal elites.
      - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
        That was when "Southern Conservative Democrat" was still a thing. Republicans were reviled in the South because they were literally the party of Lincoln, the most unpopular politician among southern whites for a long time (suffice it to say, black southerners had no problem voting for Republicans when they were allowed to vote at all). The turning point didn't really start until Nixon's southern strategy, and took a three decades to finish. I'm still surprised that Texas would distribute property taxes equally like that for education. Even if they were run by Democrats, they were never run by the liberal kind.

registeredcorn 5y ago

I've noticed similar situations to this in my own area. In your opinion, what do you think the most effective way to help these families out might be?

jason-phillips 5y ago
> In your opinion, what do you think the most effective way to help these families out might be? This is a question that I'm well-positioned to answer. I moved to this rural area in 2018 after living in Austin for 24 years. I immediately looked for ways to volunteer and help. I developed relationships with elected and community leaders, started my own "technology incubator" to teach technology skills and classes. I explored establishing a regional technology council with my county judge and Texas state leadership. The community liked that I was volunteering but the actual uptake, expending effort to learn and implement what I was teaching, wasn't there. They didn't know what to do with it. The gap between their world and the world we know at HN was too wide to be bridged effectively. My experience is applicable to every problem here where someone thinks they may be able to help in some way. Whether it's teaching job skills, helping those who are addicted to meth or whatever, I believe people can't be helped if they don't want to expend the effort to get from A to B themselves. There are many reasons for this, why offering to help in an economically-depressed or disadvantaged community doesn't yield results. Locals are apathetic, comfortable living in the middle of nowhere with very low expectations, or else they have poor self-esteem and don't believe they can do better. I don't "push" anymore. I just try to be empathetic and understand their situations. This past Thanksgiving I asked the community to tell me if anyone was unable to get a turkey for Thanksgiving and would like one. Two families responded; I was glad to help. It's little things like that which I can do to help their situation which I feel is the best approach now. Edited to add: There is an organization here called "Mission San Saba" where a group of ~30 volunteers will pick one house per year to renovate, typically for an older or economically-disadvantaged family. That has been very successful here.