6 ms·

The Starter House Is Nearly Extinct (2022)

51 points by jseliger 4y ago

mjevans 4y ago
"" “Starter” homes are a magnet for institutional investors. "" Exactly why a legal household (family, single, etc) living in a home 35% or more of the year should be taxed at a lesser rate and anyone 'investing' in rentals of any sort (not living there themselves) should be _punishingly_ taxed.
- Falkon1313 4y ago
  >anyone 'investing' in rentals of any sort (not living there themselves) should be _punishingly_ taxed At which point they raise the rent to cover those taxes, thus the people punished are the renters. Mostly people who already can't to afford to buy or the transaction costs of buying and then selling again short-term. That would be a very regressive tax. And on top of that, it discourages developing rentals and making them available, even further exacerbating the housing supply problems and making life more difficult for less-wealthy people (or really anyone who is not a homeowner).
  - kcplate 4y ago
    > At which point they raise the rent to cover those taxes, thus the people punished are the renters. Why is it that people don’t seem to grasp this?
- kubb 4y ago
  Yeah, it's such an obvious way to balance the pressure on housing prices and nobody wants to do that.
  - courgette 4y ago
    Nobody being? Some people are all about that. I'm a ( relatively new ) US citizen and I'm all about that type of taxes. I've seen what taxes can do in other part of the word, and that my go-to solution for all issue in this country. Redistribution. Pretty sure my enthusiasm will be tempered with time :) More seriously, highly touristy place impacted by AirBB landlord snatching the whole housing market would be receptive, too.
- courgette 4y ago
  I've seen countries where that is implemented, having a second home trigger a new set of properties taxes. it's often dubbed "vacation home taxes", it affects any second, third or N property you own after the first one
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Not fundamentally opposed to this, but who collects those taxes? the state? federal? locality? if I have a cottage in the next state, when I file and if I have to pay, does that go to the other state?
    - courgette 4y ago
      Why does that have to be a question for every semi hard topic? The US have to choose, are you a federation of states. EU style, or a country? I had a actual country in mind, where tax are collected on a national level. ( note my use of national, not federal ) I get your question and it’s a valid one. Sorry to be grumpy. I’m just tired of “state” being a constant push back to every single topic. I think it was a powerful idea to quickly implement the take over of the continent, but the usefulness might start to stretch.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > anyone 'investing' in rentals of any sort (not living there themselves) should be _punishingly_ taxed Agree with the first, not the second. It not only disincentivises development, it also promotes in-the-family cronyism that corrodes the connection between legal ownership and control. A tax differential which feeds a resident-owner subsidy is more than enough.
  - jackcosgrove 4y ago
    I think a distinction should also be made between single family homes as rentals and multifamily properties as rentals. The latter are purpose-built to be rented out, and that is a necessary use.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  If you are going to fiddle around with taxes, simply moving to a land tax would do a 1000x more then some marginal tax changes. The reality is a society isn't richer just because people own home. I much rather live in a society with low ownership rates and good zoning and land use policies. Then in a society with high ownership rates and bad zoning and land use policy. It seems to me the US argues way to much about home ownership and not enough about zoning and land use. The reality of the tax system is that current single family homes are ALWAYS massively undertaxed. Strontowns has lots of data on that. What you are suggesting would make this issue even worse because multi-family homes are often by institutional investors too. A land-value tax, a fee based service cost (block based) and much higher cost for the highway. Plus of course changes in the insane zoning laws. Are real solutions to real problems.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Homeowners have voting power. You need to convince the homeowners by giving them a rebate on the land value tax.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      Why? Land value tax isn't bad for home owners. It would simply replace property tax. Land value tax pushes speculators and people with empty properties or under-used property. People who live in subburb don't lose on a land value tax based system.
      - kcplate 4y ago
        > It would simply replace property tax. “Replace” seems to indicate that a tax can go away.
        panick21_ 4y ago
        Its really more of change of how a certain tax is calculated. And yes tax policy can change claiming otherwise is just nonsense.
junofan 4y ago
I look forward to the coming youth movement in the face of the current crop of geriatric leadership.
- ideamotor 4y ago
  The real gerontocracy are the neighborhoods who calcify their cities by restricting what can be built.
  - erklik 4y ago
    I never understood how America with it's "freedom" situation allowed the amount of zoning restrictions to occur.
    - orthecreedence 4y ago
      "Freedom" in the USA also means "freedom to control others." It's baked into our culture. Look at our relationship with Latin America...
    - courgette 4y ago
      We all love to make fun of US citizen. It's an endless source of entertainment, but zoning restriction make sense to me? But maybe because I never lived on the west coast? Is zoning restriction a poorly use tool there?
  - mullingitover 4y ago
    It's been glorious watching the various communities in California refuse to come up with their mandated housing elements, get their zoning privileges stripped, and then flail about with various stages of grief and denial when the new builder's remedy rules bulldoze them.
    - catiopatio 4y ago
      Is it succeeding in lowering housing costs? What is the net impact on quality of life?
iamsanteri 4y ago
Wow, if true, this is outrageous!
mjevans 4y ago
The economic chart is national? I swear it's been that way 'on the coasts' my entire adult life...
bob1029 4y ago
I just got off Zillow in the Houston market and I'm not sure I can agree with any of this. Sure, the weather is shit here most of the year but you get what you pay for.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Don’t you also have the nations highest property taxes?
  - bob1029 4y ago
    Yep - property taxes are in the 2~4% range. But, when you can buy an extremely nice home for under 500k, your final tax burden turns out to be quite reasonable.
  - KirillPanov 4y ago
    And the lowest income taxes.
    - jwestbury 4y ago
      And the most robust power grid.
tomashertus 4y ago
Realtor once told me: "This is a really nice starting home" for a property that costed $1.2M around mid-2019 in Santa Clara area. Like who the heck can afford $1.2M starting house without a well paid tech job?
- masklinn 4y ago
  He’s a part-time shrimp breeder, she knits sweaters out of cat hair, their budget is 3.4 millions. The answer is trust fund babies.
  - courgette 4y ago
    And the answer to that answer is inheritance taxes and redistribution.
    - madaxe_again 4y ago
      The answer to that is vested interests and a government almost entirely staffed by fifth generation nepo-babies. But maybe they’ll pull up the ladder if you ask nicely - it would be quite advantageous for them for your children to not receive your wealth, but for them to instead redistribute it amongst themselves and their friends. And I say this as someone who fundamentally agrees with your point in essence, but can’t see a practical way that doesn’t involve the collapse of nations.
      - courgette 4y ago
        yah. I think you'r sadly right. Not sure what the answers to your point is beside some unpleasant time.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > answer is trust fund babies Trust-fund babies aren’t buying single-family homes for a million dollars in Santa Clara.
    - 4y ago
Nursie 4y ago
I’m not massively familiar with the US it in some markets (the UK, particularly the south east), what would have been a starter home is now just more expensive. Developers are still building small houses on small plots, but they sell for more than is affordable, so when you get people talking about building affordable housing, they are talking about building tiny, tiny places out of the cheapest possible materials.
- swarnie 4y ago
  The plague of modern Deano boxes really needs looking in to. Its like we forgot how to make homes in the 70s...
irjustin 4y ago
> The numbers here are not adjusted for inflation, but there is no straightforward way to do so This is extremely important because the value of 200k from 2002 is quite different than today. I get it'll never be near perfect, but I really wish they attempted some method and simply stated it instead of ignoring it. The counter example is go back to 1940's and we're all screaming what happened to the 5,000 starter home?! I want to believe the conclusions of this piece, but in a way, it's manipulating data to fit the hypothesis.
- imtringued 4y ago
  They could have divided the house price by the median wage. Then you could denominate the effort it takes to pay off a home in years of work.
  - KirillPanov 4y ago
    Actually more than median what you need is binning -- how many years for the 10th percentile income to pay off the 10th percentile house, and so on for each 10% band. For each year. That would be some really interesting data. I bet the effect is quite nonuniform.
- rich_sasha 4y ago
  Additionally, normalising to 100% obscures the overall number of houses being built / available. A dropping percentage could still mean a net increase, perhaps even relative to population growth. The argument may well be correct, but the data as presented can't reliably support it.
- dave333 4y ago
  They should quote the house prices as % of median house price that year.
dbjacobs 4y ago
Hawaii triples the property taxes for non owner occupied residences over $1 mil.
yonran 4y ago
For an explanation of the shift in policy around 2006 that caused the Great Recession and the current housing shortage, I recommend Kevin Erdmann, “Housing Policy, Monetary Policy, and the Great Recession” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667309 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667309 and his other articles https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/kevin-erdmann https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/kevin-erdmann. Erdmann disputes the standard explanation of the Great Recession that excess credit and behavioral economics caused a housing construction boom which caused a pop (e.g. the first Planet Money podcast The Giant Pool of Money, the movie The Big Short, the book House of Debt). Instead, he claims that there was never a construction boom at all; regulators killed the housing construction sector and entry-level mortgages because they mistook a shortage of homes in the Bay Area for a glut of homes in Las Vegas, and unrelated cities such as Atlanta were innocent victims.
yafbum 4y ago
Home ownership at a young age is an overrated fetish. A home is just a box to keep you and your family warm and dry. Getting attached to a box is silly. For my first 15 years out of school, renting was the best. Every year I would run the numbers based on the market prices and downpayment I could afford, and conclude that it was more advantageous for me to continue renting, in terms of total cost of ownership. Renting in my younger years allowed me to move around, following economic and family tailwinds wherever they took me without being burdened by a piece of property that has insane transaction costs (multiple percentage points). Now that I'm older and less likely to move around in my life, I'm able to afford to be a homeowner. It's good, but unexpectedly having to shell out thousands of dollars every time the house has a problem (plumbing, AC, windows, etc) takes getting used to. I feel that this was the right call when I compare with a few relatives who are about my age and bought property earlier. They had to change jobs afterwards due to economic changes, and moved to a different city or country, but they didn't manage to sell their property at the price they wanted. So they're now reluctant landlords, dealing at a distance with problematic tenants, and renting a new place of their own in a new city. That feels like a headache I'm happy not to have.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  it's more like homeowership.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  One of my best friends bought a house the moment he got his first job. His dad fronted the down payment, and he paid the mortgage. His dad's reasoning was simple: he graduated from a good college, and by all accounts, he was going to have a strong career ahead of him. It was almost a certainty that he would make more money in 10 years than he was making currently. The mortgage might be XX% of his income at 22, but at 32, it would be just X% of his income. It took a toll on his finances early on in his career, but by the time he reached 33, he'd paid off the house. Now he's starting a family and he never has to worry about saving for a house or paying off a loan. So depending on your situation, it really does make sense to take on a heavy loan upfront, especially when you have a strong career ahead of you.
dang 4y ago
Ongoing current thread: There’s no such thing as affordable housing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34528025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34528025
swarnie 4y ago
All the points raised are mirrored in the UK as well with one additional problem. Anyone who went to work around 2007-2009 has had nothing but bad luck economically, many of them still aren't on the housing ladder in their early 30s. For them a traditional cheap 2 bed starter home isn't actually sufficient any more. Using myself as an example my first home is a suburban four bed because i work from home and i should probably smash some kids out in the near future. Nothing smaller (or cheaper) would be viable. Buying by yourself, buying early and/or buying small is all but dead (unless others have different experiences and my selection of friends are all losers)
wink 4y ago
As someone in Central Europe, the idea of a "starter" house is pretty weird, but I guess the topic has been beaten like a dead horse. People buy a house once they can afford it, and that's usually not the case before 30 or 45. Exceptions exist in regions where houses are abnormally cheap, but I have exactly zero friends or family who have ever lived in a second house.
kthejoker2 4y ago
For these posts, you should.be required to state where you live or what locations helped you form your opinion. I'm here in Houston, military brat, my parents got on the property ladder, I did as well, including a "starter home" where HUD paid the down payment. (Currently in my 3rd house I bought at 35 due to a job in Austin, which is a major outlier apparently.) Still a ton of affordable, low cust suburban cookie cutter homes here in the $200s. 3 bedroom, 2 car garage, grass.. I see articles like this and think I'm taking crazy pills.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  With Houston or Austin you're gonna need to tell me 1) what neighborhood those houses are in and if I'll get shot living there, and 2) how far away those houses are from anything that matters.

51 points by jseliger 4y ago

"" “Starter” homes are a magnet for institutional investors. "" Exactly why a legal household (family, single, etc) living in a home 35% or more of the year should be taxed at a lesser rate and anyone 'investing' in rentals of any sort (not living there themselves) should be _punishingly_ taxed.

Falkon1313 4y ago
>anyone 'investing' in rentals of any sort (not living there themselves) should be _punishingly_ taxed At which point they raise the rent to cover those taxes, thus the people punished are the renters. Mostly people who already can't to afford to buy or the transaction costs of buying and then selling again short-term. That would be a very regressive tax. And on top of that, it discourages developing rentals and making them available, even further exacerbating the housing supply problems and making life more difficult for less-wealthy people (or really anyone who is not a homeowner).
- kcplate 4y ago
  > At which point they raise the rent to cover those taxes, thus the people punished are the renters. Why is it that people don’t seem to grasp this?
kubb 4y ago
Yeah, it's such an obvious way to balance the pressure on housing prices and nobody wants to do that.
- courgette 4y ago
  Nobody being? Some people are all about that. I'm a ( relatively new ) US citizen and I'm all about that type of taxes. I've seen what taxes can do in other part of the word, and that my go-to solution for all issue in this country. Redistribution. Pretty sure my enthusiasm will be tempered with time :) More seriously, highly touristy place impacted by AirBB landlord snatching the whole housing market would be receptive, too.
courgette 4y ago
I've seen countries where that is implemented, having a second home trigger a new set of properties taxes. it's often dubbed "vacation home taxes", it affects any second, third or N property you own after the first one
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  Not fundamentally opposed to this, but who collects those taxes? the state? federal? locality? if I have a cottage in the next state, when I file and if I have to pay, does that go to the other state?
  - courgette 4y ago
    Why does that have to be a question for every semi hard topic? The US have to choose, are you a federation of states. EU style, or a country? I had a actual country in mind, where tax are collected on a national level. ( note my use of national, not federal ) I get your question and it’s a valid one. Sorry to be grumpy. I’m just tired of “state” being a constant push back to every single topic. I think it was a powerful idea to quickly implement the take over of the continent, but the usefulness might start to stretch.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> anyone 'investing' in rentals of any sort (not living there themselves) should be _punishingly_ taxed Agree with the first, not the second. It not only disincentivises development, it also promotes in-the-family cronyism that corrodes the connection between legal ownership and control. A tax differential which feeds a resident-owner subsidy is more than enough.
- jackcosgrove 4y ago
  I think a distinction should also be made between single family homes as rentals and multifamily properties as rentals. The latter are purpose-built to be rented out, and that is a necessary use.
panick21_ 4y ago
If you are going to fiddle around with taxes, simply moving to a land tax would do a 1000x more then some marginal tax changes. The reality is a society isn't richer just because people own home. I much rather live in a society with low ownership rates and good zoning and land use policies. Then in a society with high ownership rates and bad zoning and land use policy. It seems to me the US argues way to much about home ownership and not enough about zoning and land use. The reality of the tax system is that current single family homes are ALWAYS massively undertaxed. Strontowns has lots of data on that. What you are suggesting would make this issue even worse because multi-family homes are often by institutional investors too. A land-value tax, a fee based service cost (block based) and much higher cost for the highway. Plus of course changes in the insane zoning laws. Are real solutions to real problems.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Homeowners have voting power. You need to convince the homeowners by giving them a rebate on the land value tax.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Why? Land value tax isn't bad for home owners. It would simply replace property tax. Land value tax pushes speculators and people with empty properties or under-used property. People who live in subburb don't lose on a land value tax based system.
    - kcplate 4y ago
      > It would simply replace property tax. “Replace” seems to indicate that a tax can go away.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        Its really more of change of how a certain tax is calculated. And yes tax policy can change claiming otherwise is just nonsense.

junofan 4y ago

I look forward to the coming youth movement in the face of the current crop of geriatric leadership.

ideamotor 4y ago
The real gerontocracy are the neighborhoods who calcify their cities by restricting what can be built.
- erklik 4y ago
  I never understood how America with it's "freedom" situation allowed the amount of zoning restrictions to occur.
  - orthecreedence 4y ago
    "Freedom" in the USA also means "freedom to control others." It's baked into our culture. Look at our relationship with Latin America...
  - courgette 4y ago
    We all love to make fun of US citizen. It's an endless source of entertainment, but zoning restriction make sense to me? But maybe because I never lived on the west coast? Is zoning restriction a poorly use tool there?
- mullingitover 4y ago
  It's been glorious watching the various communities in California refuse to come up with their mandated housing elements, get their zoning privileges stripped, and then flail about with various stages of grief and denial when the new builder's remedy rules bulldoze them.
  - catiopatio 4y ago
    Is it succeeding in lowering housing costs? What is the net impact on quality of life?

iamsanteri 4y ago

Wow, if true, this is outrageous!

mjevans 4y ago

The economic chart is national? I swear it's been that way 'on the coasts' my entire adult life...

bob1029 4y ago

I just got off Zillow in the Houston market and I'm not sure I can agree with any of this. Sure, the weather is shit here most of the year but you get what you pay for.

TylerE 4y ago
Don’t you also have the nations highest property taxes?
- bob1029 4y ago
  Yep - property taxes are in the 2~4% range. But, when you can buy an extremely nice home for under 500k, your final tax burden turns out to be quite reasonable.
- KirillPanov 4y ago
  And the lowest income taxes.
  - jwestbury 4y ago
    And the most robust power grid.

tomashertus 4y ago

Realtor once told me: "This is a really nice starting home" for a property that costed $1.2M around mid-2019 in Santa Clara area. Like who the heck can afford $1.2M starting house without a well paid tech job?

masklinn 4y ago
He’s a part-time shrimp breeder, she knits sweaters out of cat hair, their budget is 3.4 millions. The answer is trust fund babies.
- courgette 4y ago
  And the answer to that answer is inheritance taxes and redistribution.
  - madaxe_again 4y ago
    The answer to that is vested interests and a government almost entirely staffed by fifth generation nepo-babies. But maybe they’ll pull up the ladder if you ask nicely - it would be quite advantageous for them for your children to not receive your wealth, but for them to instead redistribute it amongst themselves and their friends. And I say this as someone who fundamentally agrees with your point in essence, but can’t see a practical way that doesn’t involve the collapse of nations.
    - courgette 4y ago
      yah. I think you'r sadly right. Not sure what the answers to your point is beside some unpleasant time.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > answer is trust fund babies Trust-fund babies aren’t buying single-family homes for a million dollars in Santa Clara.
  - 4y ago

Nursie 4y ago

I’m not massively familiar with the US it in some markets (the UK, particularly the south east), what would have been a starter home is now just more expensive. Developers are still building small houses on small plots, but they sell for more than is affordable, so when you get people talking about building affordable housing, they are talking about building tiny, tiny places out of the cheapest possible materials.

swarnie 4y ago
The plague of modern Deano boxes really needs looking in to. Its like we forgot how to make homes in the 70s...

irjustin 4y ago

> The numbers here are not adjusted for inflation, but there is no straightforward way to do so This is extremely important because the value of 200k from 2002 is quite different than today. I get it'll never be near perfect, but I really wish they attempted some method and simply stated it instead of ignoring it. The counter example is go back to 1940's and we're all screaming what happened to the 5,000 starter home?! I want to believe the conclusions of this piece, but in a way, it's manipulating data to fit the hypothesis.

imtringued 4y ago
They could have divided the house price by the median wage. Then you could denominate the effort it takes to pay off a home in years of work.
- KirillPanov 4y ago
  Actually more than median what you need is binning -- how many years for the 10th percentile income to pay off the 10th percentile house, and so on for each 10% band. For each year. That would be some really interesting data. I bet the effect is quite nonuniform.
rich_sasha 4y ago
Additionally, normalising to 100% obscures the overall number of houses being built / available. A dropping percentage could still mean a net increase, perhaps even relative to population growth. The argument may well be correct, but the data as presented can't reliably support it.
dave333 4y ago
They should quote the house prices as % of median house price that year.

dbjacobs 4y ago

Hawaii triples the property taxes for non owner occupied residences over $1 mil.

yonran 4y ago

For an explanation of the shift in policy around 2006 that caused the Great Recession and the current housing shortage, I recommend Kevin Erdmann, “Housing Policy, Monetary Policy, and the Great Recession” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667309 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3667309 and his other articles https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/kevin-erdmann https://www.mercatus.org/scholars/kevin-erdmann. Erdmann disputes the standard explanation of the Great Recession that excess credit and behavioral economics caused a housing construction boom which caused a pop (e.g. the first Planet Money podcast The Giant Pool of Money, the movie The Big Short, the book House of Debt). Instead, he claims that there was never a construction boom at all; regulators killed the housing construction sector and entry-level mortgages because they mistook a shortage of homes in the Bay Area for a glut of homes in Las Vegas, and unrelated cities such as Atlanta were innocent victims.

yafbum 4y ago

Home ownership at a young age is an overrated fetish. A home is just a box to keep you and your family warm and dry. Getting attached to a box is silly. For my first 15 years out of school, renting was the best. Every year I would run the numbers based on the market prices and downpayment I could afford, and conclude that it was more advantageous for me to continue renting, in terms of total cost of ownership. Renting in my younger years allowed me to move around, following economic and family tailwinds wherever they took me without being burdened by a piece of property that has insane transaction costs (multiple percentage points). Now that I'm older and less likely to move around in my life, I'm able to afford to be a homeowner. It's good, but unexpectedly having to shell out thousands of dollars every time the house has a problem (plumbing, AC, windows, etc) takes getting used to. I feel that this was the right call when I compare with a few relatives who are about my age and bought property earlier. They had to change jobs afterwards due to economic changes, and moved to a different city or country, but they didn't manage to sell their property at the price they wanted. So they're now reluctant landlords, dealing at a distance with problematic tenants, and renting a new place of their own in a new city. That feels like a headache I'm happy not to have.

readthenotes1 4y ago
it's more like homeowership.
spaceman_2020 4y ago
One of my best friends bought a house the moment he got his first job. His dad fronted the down payment, and he paid the mortgage. His dad's reasoning was simple: he graduated from a good college, and by all accounts, he was going to have a strong career ahead of him. It was almost a certainty that he would make more money in 10 years than he was making currently. The mortgage might be XX% of his income at 22, but at 32, it would be just X% of his income. It took a toll on his finances early on in his career, but by the time he reached 33, he'd paid off the house. Now he's starting a family and he never has to worry about saving for a house or paying off a loan. So depending on your situation, it really does make sense to take on a heavy loan upfront, especially when you have a strong career ahead of you.

dang 4y ago

Ongoing current thread: There’s no such thing as affordable housing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34528025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34528025

swarnie 4y ago

All the points raised are mirrored in the UK as well with one additional problem. Anyone who went to work around 2007-2009 has had nothing but bad luck economically, many of them still aren't on the housing ladder in their early 30s. For them a traditional cheap 2 bed starter home isn't actually sufficient any more. Using myself as an example my first home is a suburban four bed because i work from home and i should probably smash some kids out in the near future. Nothing smaller (or cheaper) would be viable. Buying by yourself, buying early and/or buying small is all but dead (unless others have different experiences and my selection of friends are all losers)

wink 4y ago

As someone in Central Europe, the idea of a "starter" house is pretty weird, but I guess the topic has been beaten like a dead horse. People buy a house once they can afford it, and that's usually not the case before 30 or 45. Exceptions exist in regions where houses are abnormally cheap, but I have exactly zero friends or family who have ever lived in a second house.

kthejoker2 4y ago

For these posts, you should.be required to state where you live or what locations helped you form your opinion. I'm here in Houston, military brat, my parents got on the property ladder, I did as well, including a "starter home" where HUD paid the down payment. (Currently in my 3rd house I bought at 35 due to a job in Austin, which is a major outlier apparently.) Still a ton of affordable, low cust suburban cookie cutter homes here in the $200s. 3 bedroom, 2 car garage, grass.. I see articles like this and think I'm taking crazy pills.

red-iron-pine 4y ago
With Houston or Austin you're gonna need to tell me 1) what neighborhood those houses are in and if I'll get shot living there, and 2) how far away those houses are from anything that matters.