5 ms·
Growing, but still rural city in the Midwest I visited a few weeks back has decent homes for sale in the 50-80k range. This is not an outlier. Roughly 2/3 of A
by zdragnar 5y ago
Growing, but still rural city in the Midwest I visited a few weeks back has decent homes for sale in the 50-80k range. This is not an outlier.
Roughly 2/3 of Americans own homes.
If you live in an area where homes are priced like luxury investments, then yes, you'll have a hard time buying when you also cannot afford other luxuries. If you live in an area where they are not, it isn't unattainable at all, especially if you combine income with a marriage partner.
- bombcar 5y agoMany people would consider a suggestion to live in the Midwest as about the same as a suggestion that they spend the rest of their life living in a decrepit sewer system.
- skulk 5y agoMaybe you should try to understand why certain kinds of people (of, perhaps the non-white kind) would not want to move into an insular community?
- zdragnar 5y agoMaybe if they visited, they'd find their assumptions to be unwarranted racism. It isn't as diverse as some other parts of the country, but there's groups of people from all over the world. Within a 2 hour drive from me, you'll find enclaves from Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Mexico and others.
- skulk 5y agoIf not wanting to live in an enclave as a nominally second-class citizen is racist, then I don't know what to say. Let's not deny reality here, that's really what you end up being if you try to interact with the main racial group in a rural area, or at least the vast majority of them. It doesn't matter what race this happens to be, it's how people work. I know an Englishman who lives in an Indonesian village (not an enclave). He is constantly reminded that while his presence is cherished, he isn't, and never will be "one of them." He still loves it, though, so there's that.
- zdragnar 5y agoMost of the tightly closed enclaves are by choice (refugee communities tend to stick together harder than others, from what I can tell). Obviously, not everyone lives in an enclave. What on earth makes you think they are second class citizens? They vote, attend school board meetings, own homes and live just like anyone else.
- frurnish 5y ago
- smsm42 5y agoAs an immigrant, individualist and severe introvert, I'd probably never be "one of them" anywhere anyway, why bother? I suspect that stuff is overrated anyway.
- horns4lyfe 5y agoIf you’re not very wealthy, and you’re living on the west coast, you’re a second class citizen there too. At least in Minnesota the rent is lower.
- sha256sum 5y agoI went into an experience living in Wisconsin with exactly this viewpoint and was sorely disappointed at the shear amount of selfish, entitled, prejudiced behavior that exists only in these lands of strip malls and spoiled nature. I’m saying this so the next person reading your post isn’t swayed. And to those people: many of these towns are dead. They died long ago with the small farms and factories. The Houses are priced to sell.
- smsm42 5y agoI have been sorely disappointed by the shear amount of selfish, entitled, prejudiced behavior I observed in Bay Area, so what? The exact nature of prejudice may be a bit different, but it's still very much around here. OK, the difference in the Bay Area you pay 20x for it, I guess.
- thereare5lights 5y agoHave visited. The constant microaggressions are exactly what I expected.
- solenoidalslide 5y agoDo you have black or Hispanic friends or colleagues that you know near you? Have you asked them about their experiences with race where you live?
- zdragnar 5y agoYup. We've discussed it a fair amount, as we also frequently talk about the news. One friend in particular has lived in a half dozen states, mostly in large cities but also smaller communities, and now lives here because it is where he wants to be. He was stabbed in a metro area by a skinhead. This illusion that big coastal cities of super expensive housing as a mecca of love and diversity that exists nowhere else is just that.
- solenoidalslide 5y ago
- sethrin 5y agoHave you tried being trans there? No? Okay then.
- syshum 5y agoThere are plenty of "non-white" kind of people in the midwest. Jeeze the racist stereotypes of the midwest is laughable In my neighborhood I would say at minimum 25% of the home owners are non-white families, if not more.
- david38 5y agoExactly. The racism and class prejudice is so blatant in this discussion it’s pretty wild. Bunch of representative bias anecdotes, mostly be people who don’t live there, or haven’t in 20 years. And yet, if the same environment were to be encountered in another country, it would be “culture”.
- david38 5y agoSpoken like a coastal elite. I’ve lived on the east coast, Midwest, and Cali. The Midwest is no more insular than anywhere else I’ve lived.
- refurb 5y agoInsular? Now San Francisco isn’t that bad.
- zdragnar 5y agoFine by me; there's plenty of natural beauty and life style that would be utterly ruined by a massive influx of tech bro outsiders. In the last year or two a locally-famous lighthouse went up for sale and was bought for cash by some guy from silicon valley. Instead of being turned into an attraction, or a house, or hell even an Airbnb spot, it remains untouched much to the chagrin of the locals. I guess the new owner can't be bothered to come out here and just liked the idea of bragging that he owned it.
- true_religion 5y agoI’m sure they had some plans for it, but a little thing called COVID detailed most plans. Who knows, maybe the owner isn’t even with us anymore and their heirs are still figuring things out.
- saurik 5y agoI am confused: you are simultaneously complaining about the tech bros ruining the natural beauty and style but are then unhappy that this particular tech bro didn't do a bunch of development on this lighthouse?
- noasaservice 5y agoAnd you'll get the politics and the religosity of the bible belt to boot. There's a few islands of sanity here in the midwest, primarily around college towns. But... prices have doubled since 2016, at least in my area. We're closing on a house. $375k. I'm one of the lucky ones. Like, super lucky. But it sold back in 2016 for $170k.
- watwut 5y agoI am willing to bet that if those places had well paid jobs easily available, people would start to move in. For all the cultural likes and dislikes, mass of people is generally moving when they have pragmatic reason to do so.
- seabird 5y agoI hope they never think otherwise. Every time the Midwest comes up on this site, you get these laughably stupid takes that it's some bombed-out shithole with no jobs other than crime, and where people kill minorities on sight. At least once every couple weeks, there will be a decently sized comment thread about how it's economically desolate and morally evil, and that no sane person would ever move here. My only response to that is please don't ever stop believing that. Stay away. Don't come crush the housing market with your $200k+ FAANG salary so you can tut-tut the people that live here about how racist, sexist, classist, etc. they are despite having never actually talked to one of them in your life. For those that got dealt a bad hand in life, there is at least a chance for them in the Midwest. If keeping that chance alive means that somebody living in a coastal city thinks my community is human garbage, so be it.
- patrick451 5y agoAnd yet, it's only these coastal "livable" towns that I've ever seen somebody defacate on the sidewalk. In the midwest, at least people are potty trained.
- spacemanmatt 5y ago40% of U.S. residents can be described as "coastal" so you're painting with a pretty broad brush.
- thereare5lights 5y agoNot a great suggestion if you’re not white. The Midwest is not place I would want to subject my children to.
- heavyset_go 5y agoThe places I've seen with houses in the $50k to $80k range are in Rust Belt-esque areas whose time has long passed, or in places where a "career" means working at Walmart or cooking methamphetamine. Their economic prospects aren't that great, and their long term economic prospects are even worse. Rural areas also tend not to be great places for LGBT people, either.
- kortilla 5y agoThe Bay Area was nothing in the 80s either. NYC wasn’t even a desirable place to be during that time either. People who pick just what’s attractive at the moment are pretty short-sighted and I have no sympathy for them.
- heavyset_go 5y ago> People who pick just what’s attractive at the moment are pretty short-sighted and I have no sympathy for them. What's attractive and what's viable are often two separate things. NYC is not viable for someone making $40k a year, but neither is moving to the Rust Belt where their "options" are working part-time in department stores or literal crime. Something tells me that this is a situation that can't be won in some people's minds. If someone makes the rational decision to not move somewhere that is not economically viable, in an area that's projected to become even more unviable with time, that's not good enough for some. If someone lives in a shitty area and moves elsewhere for better career prospects, but still can't make ends meet, well, according to posts like this, they should just have moved somewhere shitty instead. If we applied the same to degrees, I doubt you'd feel the same about all of the "short-sighted" people who chose to study trades or liberal arts at a state school and now have poor economic prospects, instead of choosing what's attractive at the moment like STEM.
- Clubber 5y agoThe most obvious solution is remote work. The main economic reason people even live in large cities is jobs. If the jobs can be done anywhere, that would certainly revitalize a lot of the US to points we haven't seen in decades. I'd much rather live in a quiet rural area than in a city with high traffic, high crime and high costs. Remote work would also have a cascading effect. Say 20 people move to a rural area, well they need food, and their vehicles fixed, and their house maintained, etc. They need to fund their hobbies and generally would bring more money to those areas. Big cities with a lot of power don't want that to happen because they will lose their tax base. I suspect some city governments are incentivizing businesses to bring employees back to the office because of this.
- mattalex 5y agoIn those places the wages are also considerably lower. The 2/3 are not the people buying, it's the people inheriting existing property: First-Time buyers only make up 33% of home owners.
- zdragnar 5y agoConsidering how long the average family stays in a home without moving, the first time buyer number sounds about right, sans the inheritance bit. I don't know of anyone who kept a home passed on by their parents except for cottages and cabins in the woods. Those typically aren't meant for year round residence anyway.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Copernicron 5y agoWhat if you want to live in an area with employment opportunities? I grew up in a small town in British Columbia. You can't even get a bachelor condo for $50-$80k there. There is nothing available for that price. There's also no industry at all outside of mining. You have to go where the jobs are and for a lot of people that means larger centres.