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It’s even more deceptive as it’s quoting for a single family detached home. Condos are nearly twice that affordability metric. Again, the median, meaning half t

It’s even more deceptive as it’s quoting for a single family detached home. Condos are nearly twice that affordability metric. Again, the median, meaning half the condos available are more affordable than that median. I think when most people, especially urban dwellers, think of as a “home” as a primary residence, and don’t constrain it to single family detached housing.

za3faran 3y ago
Don't condos usually have HOA fees in the hundreds of dollars per month?
- schmookeeg 3y ago
  As do most tract homes built sometime after the 1980s.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  It depends on the condo how much. But usually millage and values for tax purposes are often less than houses. I’ve not done the fully loaded math, but I would expect including maintenance and other expenses condos are less per month than an equivalent priced house.
oceanplexian 3y ago
I don’t think it’s unfair to expect that a person making the median income can afford a Single Family detached home. This is the definition of the American Dream. The USA has an abundance of space and natural resources. California is a big place. There’s no technical reason homeownership should be out of reach. If you want to live and die in an apartment, that’s great, but it should be a choice.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  A dream and fairness don’t have a lot to do with each other? Maybe a noble goal, but the goal may not be attainable. You can buy land for cheap in rural areas of California and build a house there for less than this quoted median (substantially so). But where will you work? Your kids, where do they go to school? Want a latte? Learn to make your own I guess, and appreciate the hour drive to the store. California has many reasons not market related for its situation. But people want to live in the cities because they offer services hard to literally impossible to get in the rural areas (like high speed internet?). If population keeps growing the American dream will be a memory. That’s sad, I admit. I don’t like this. But it’s the reality of limited space proximate to desired services.
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    Ok lets pretend we run the universe instead of having to deal with inconveinient things like organic choice. Can't we take some pressure off cities by requiring jobs that can be done remotely to be able to be done remotely and requiring employers to equally consider remote workers located anywhere? Furthermore lets imagine we are looking at 10% more people is it absolutely necessary that they be distributed the same way they are now? Wouldn't it make sense for some smaller cities to expand and become worthwhile competition to our present largest cities?
    - fnordpiglet 3y ago
      Doesn’t solve the other issues. Where do your kids go to school? Latte?
      - michaelmrose 3y ago
        So you are planning on deciding ahead of time where to put folks and you have a small city of Smallville with lots of room to expand and 100k people and Megalopolis with 5M with water on all sides and nowhere to go up save bulldoze the already tall buildings and build taller ones. You don't think that one could theoretically with 1M people's taxable income produce good enough schools to educate folks in the plethora of land available near Smallville. Logically this isn't the sims what actually happens is that Megalopolis gets relatively much more expensive to live in than Smallville driving investment and folks who can't afford $5000 a month in rent to locate themselves there. Note I'm talking about other metro areas not in the woods in rural Idaho. The relative availability of remote work, government locating offices outside of existing metros, tax breaks, major public works could all be factors in making this easier rather than harder but the process is all but inevitable given that current metros seem unlikely to be able to expand indefinitely
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        There are many rural and suburban schools far from CA population centers that dramatically outperform schools in denser population areas. I live in one such area. As for lattes, I don’t know what to say. If access to overpriced bean-milk is actually a driving factor in one’s choice of where to live, that’s a problem I’m not going to try to solve on HN.

za3faran 3y ago

Don't condos usually have HOA fees in the hundreds of dollars per month?

schmookeeg 3y ago
As do most tract homes built sometime after the 1980s.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
It depends on the condo how much. But usually millage and values for tax purposes are often less than houses. I’ve not done the fully loaded math, but I would expect including maintenance and other expenses condos are less per month than an equivalent priced house.

oceanplexian 3y ago

I don’t think it’s unfair to expect that a person making the median income can afford a Single Family detached home. This is the definition of the American Dream. The USA has an abundance of space and natural resources. California is a big place. There’s no technical reason homeownership should be out of reach. If you want to live and die in an apartment, that’s great, but it should be a choice.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
A dream and fairness don’t have a lot to do with each other? Maybe a noble goal, but the goal may not be attainable. You can buy land for cheap in rural areas of California and build a house there for less than this quoted median (substantially so). But where will you work? Your kids, where do they go to school? Want a latte? Learn to make your own I guess, and appreciate the hour drive to the store. California has many reasons not market related for its situation. But people want to live in the cities because they offer services hard to literally impossible to get in the rural areas (like high speed internet?). If population keeps growing the American dream will be a memory. That’s sad, I admit. I don’t like this. But it’s the reality of limited space proximate to desired services.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  Ok lets pretend we run the universe instead of having to deal with inconveinient things like organic choice. Can't we take some pressure off cities by requiring jobs that can be done remotely to be able to be done remotely and requiring employers to equally consider remote workers located anywhere? Furthermore lets imagine we are looking at 10% more people is it absolutely necessary that they be distributed the same way they are now? Wouldn't it make sense for some smaller cities to expand and become worthwhile competition to our present largest cities?
  - fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Doesn’t solve the other issues. Where do your kids go to school? Latte?
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      So you are planning on deciding ahead of time where to put folks and you have a small city of Smallville with lots of room to expand and 100k people and Megalopolis with 5M with water on all sides and nowhere to go up save bulldoze the already tall buildings and build taller ones. You don't think that one could theoretically with 1M people's taxable income produce good enough schools to educate folks in the plethora of land available near Smallville. Logically this isn't the sims what actually happens is that Megalopolis gets relatively much more expensive to live in than Smallville driving investment and folks who can't afford $5000 a month in rent to locate themselves there. Note I'm talking about other metro areas not in the woods in rural Idaho. The relative availability of remote work, government locating offices outside of existing metros, tax breaks, major public works could all be factors in making this easier rather than harder but the process is all but inevitable given that current metros seem unlikely to be able to expand indefinitely
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      There are many rural and suburban schools far from CA population centers that dramatically outperform schools in denser population areas. I live in one such area. As for lattes, I don’t know what to say. If access to overpriced bean-milk is actually a driving factor in one’s choice of where to live, that’s a problem I’m not going to try to solve on HN.