3 ms·

Sucks for all us millennials who haven't yet been able to buy a home, and probably won't be able to going forward

by vinyl7 5y ago

runako 5y ago
Great thing that it's possible to work remotely from low-cost areas now! If the median home price in your area is more than $320k, you might consider going remote and buying elsewhere. (If home ownership is a top priority.)
- seanp2k2 5y ago
  Great thing too that many companies are applying BS “cost of labor” adjustments if you choose to not work at / near HQ.
  - runako 5y ago
    Genuine question: are they doing real COL adjustments, or window dressing? For example, the Bay Area can reasonably costs 2-3x+ relative to other major US cities. Are remote jobs really cutting total comp by 50%-60% for remote workers in the US? Or are the differences more cosmetic, like 20%? I have seen this before and it is always a huge win for the employee.
- brimble 5y ago
  Low-cost areas are almost all not places you want to live with a family, if you have a choice. They almost all have poor services for families and mediocre to bad public schools. Unless you can afford to have one parent not work and that parent is good at teaching kids at many ages and in many subjects and that parent won't go insane doing that for years on end, which is at any rate opportunity-cost probably more expensive than just moving somewhere less cheap in the first place (especially if the other parent is that capable, surely their earning potential is significant). So this works well for single people with remote jobs or couples who never want kids and for whom neither partner's work requires proximity to a decent city.
  - runako 5y ago
    > Low-cost areas are almost all not places you want to live with a family, if you have a choice. The unsaid foundation of this obvious bit of snobbery is that only a handful of coastal US cities are suitable for families. The median house price in the US is $408k. If you live in a market with a higher median price (for example: Washington, D.C. is $600k, LA is over $900k, SF has a median of $1.3m), you like in one of the most expensive US markets. It's obviously silly to say that people living in e.g. Atlanta ($375k) or Charlotte ($355k) or Chicago (median: $324k) are all living in places with "poor services for families and mediocre to bad public schools." (Also: the median sale price in SF will buy you a mansion in most of those other cities.) Everybody won't be able to buy both a home and the experience in living in one of the most expensive cities, but they should be aware that it's a choice.
    - brimble 5y ago
      > The unsaid foundation of this obvious bit of snobbery is that only a handful of coastal US cities are suitable for families. Not obvious snobbery. Lower density means greater distance to and fewer options for child care and other important (or even just nice-to-have) services. Right? Possibly also greater distance to friends, relatives, et c., who could help out. The rest is from many hours over several years trying and failing to find somewhere cheaper than my dead-center-middle-tier-city (mine's lamer than any of the cheap options you mentioned, except maybe Charlotte, but I wouldn't bet on it) 'burbs that has decent-or-better schools k-12. Conclusion: the choices are to compromise my kids' education, do home schooling, or pay for boarding school (which is not remotely something we could swing for more than, at a great stretch, maybe one kid—and there go all your savings on housing, and then some). I do not live in a rich coastal city. My house is now over your $408 median but was way under that when we bought it three years ago (and we thought that price was a rip-off, already being way higher than it was about two years prior) and our schools are... good for the area. In fact I've also struggled to find anywhere I could make a lateral move, price-wise, that would come with significantly better schools than where I am now. The trouble is that those areas are in-demand, so of course prices are higher than areas with worse schools. What it sure looks like is there are floors on how low you can go in a given price bracket without school quality starting to slip. Realizing significant savings on housing by moving somewhere lamer and with worse local economic opportunities than where I am now, comes at the price of worse schools. To get better schools (short of paying for a good private school) I'd pretty much have to move somewhere more expensive (though, to be clear, not all more expensive places have better schools than my district). [EDIT] More to the point, my personal situation is pretty OK, actually—less than ideal, but OK—but even in this not-exciting economically-middling city housing prices are rising much faster than young folks can save for them. The point is that young people are getting priced out, even here, they're getting priced out of options like what I've taken, fast. Our house is up something like 35% over 3 years, and we though the price we paid was a rip-off (~20% higher than 2 years before that).

Sucks for all us millennials who haven't yet been able to buy a home, and probably won't be able to going forward

by vinyl7 5y ago

Sucks for all us millennials who haven't yet been able to buy a home, and probably won't be able to going forward

Great thing that it's possible to work remotely from low-cost areas now! If the median home price in your area is more than $320k, you might consider going remote and buying elsewhere. (If home ownership is a top priority.)

seanp2k2 5y ago
Great thing too that many companies are applying BS “cost of labor” adjustments if you choose to not work at / near HQ.
- runako 5y ago
  Genuine question: are they doing real COL adjustments, or window dressing? For example, the Bay Area can reasonably costs 2-3x+ relative to other major US cities. Are remote jobs really cutting total comp by 50%-60% for remote workers in the US? Or are the differences more cosmetic, like 20%? I have seen this before and it is always a huge win for the employee.
brimble 5y ago
Low-cost areas are almost all not places you want to live with a family, if you have a choice. They almost all have poor services for families and mediocre to bad public schools. Unless you can afford to have one parent not work and that parent is good at teaching kids at many ages and in many subjects and that parent won't go insane doing that for years on end, which is at any rate opportunity-cost probably more expensive than just moving somewhere less cheap in the first place (especially if the other parent is that capable, surely their earning potential is significant). So this works well for single people with remote jobs or couples who never want kids and for whom neither partner's work requires proximity to a decent city.
- runako 5y ago
  > Low-cost areas are almost all not places you want to live with a family, if you have a choice. The unsaid foundation of this obvious bit of snobbery is that only a handful of coastal US cities are suitable for families. The median house price in the US is $408k. If you live in a market with a higher median price (for example: Washington, D.C. is $600k, LA is over $900k, SF has a median of $1.3m), you like in one of the most expensive US markets. It's obviously silly to say that people living in e.g. Atlanta ($375k) or Charlotte ($355k) or Chicago (median: $324k) are all living in places with "poor services for families and mediocre to bad public schools." (Also: the median sale price in SF will buy you a mansion in most of those other cities.) Everybody won't be able to buy both a home and the experience in living in one of the most expensive cities, but they should be aware that it's a choice.
  - brimble 5y ago
    > The unsaid foundation of this obvious bit of snobbery is that only a handful of coastal US cities are suitable for families. Not obvious snobbery. Lower density means greater distance to and fewer options for child care and other important (or even just nice-to-have) services. Right? Possibly also greater distance to friends, relatives, et c., who could help out. The rest is from many hours over several years trying and failing to find somewhere cheaper than my dead-center-middle-tier-city (mine's lamer than any of the cheap options you mentioned, except maybe Charlotte, but I wouldn't bet on it) 'burbs that has decent-or-better schools k-12. Conclusion: the choices are to compromise my kids' education, do home schooling, or pay for boarding school (which is not remotely something we could swing for more than, at a great stretch, maybe one kid—and there go all your savings on housing, and then some). I do not live in a rich coastal city. My house is now over your $408 median but was way under that when we bought it three years ago (and we thought that price was a rip-off, already being way higher than it was about two years prior) and our schools are... good for the area. In fact I've also struggled to find anywhere I could make a lateral move, price-wise, that would come with significantly better schools than where I am now. The trouble is that those areas are in-demand, so of course prices are higher than areas with worse schools. What it sure looks like is there are floors on how low you can go in a given price bracket without school quality starting to slip. Realizing significant savings on housing by moving somewhere lamer and with worse local economic opportunities than where I am now, comes at the price of worse schools. To get better schools (short of paying for a good private school) I'd pretty much have to move somewhere more expensive (though, to be clear, not all more expensive places have better schools than my district). [EDIT] More to the point, my personal situation is pretty OK, actually—less than ideal, but OK—but even in this not-exciting economically-middling city housing prices are rising much faster than young folks can save for them. The point is that young people are getting priced out, even here, they're getting priced out of options like what I've taken, fast. Our house is up something like 35% over 3 years, and we though the price we paid was a rip-off (~20% higher than 2 years before that).