"Think Indianapolis and Cleveland."

[Lancer]

Most affordable housing markets...

http://realestate.msn.com/Buying/Article_forbes.aspx?cp-documentid=5352739&GT1=10431

Why do you think this is?

[Will9]

People who want to sell there house in Indiana (Indianapolis most of all) have to make their house cheap so people will actually buy a house in Indiana and therefore live or continue living in the state (its a very hard thing to do).

[Lancer]

Hard to live in the state? How so?

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Greensboro, N.C., also made our list of the country's most affordable real-estate markets.

I can't explain the larger phenomenon, but I can tell you about Pittsburgh.

I owned a house in Pittsburgh from 1998-2006 -- during the whole long housing bull market -- and sold it for a whopping 15% more than I paid; if it hadn't been for the equity and rental income, I actually would have lost money (after inflation).

The deal with Pittsburgh is that it's an utterly stable city. Hardly anybody moves in, hardly anybody leaves. It's also off the coasts, and therefore somewhat immune to fads, trends, and aspiration-for-aspiration's-sake; Pittsburghers tend to be content with what they have. For both those reasons, multi-generational house ownership -- young marrrieds living in a deceased grandparents' old house -- is not uncommon.

I suspect those two things -- flat supply and demand plus a lack of status-consciousness -- made Pittsburgh largely immune to the housing bubble. I suspect a similar set of circumstances prevail in most mid-size, non-coastal cities. (Hell, even among the great American cities, Chicago probably remains the most affordable, because it is at heart Midwestern.)

I often thought, during the housing price hysteria, that the national media were reporting on what was going on immediately around them -- in NYC, DC, and LA -- rather than in the country as a whole. This confirms that sense, to some extent.

[Lancer]

Damn I wish I'd known when I was living in Sussex County NJ, we could have gone out for a beer.

Pittsburg had a dying steel industry so the job market must have been slim. That doesn't help pay the mortgage...

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Originally posted by Lancer
Damn I wish I'd known when I was living in Sussex County NJ, we could have gone out for a beer.

Pittsburg had a dying steel industry so the job market must have been slim. That doesn't help pay the mortgage...

Actually, Pittsburgh did a pretty nice job reinventing itself as a minor tech center (thanks to CMU and the University of Pittsburgh hospitals), so it's probably doing better, overall, than it was during the heyday of big steel.

And yeah, a beer would have been nice -- although I didn't actually join 'Poly until I left Pittsburgh forr Turkey.

[Kuciwalker]

Pittsburgh

[Lancer]

I was in Oregon when I joined. I left Jersey in '88. Still, I'm hopeful we'll get together in the Phils someday. However this leaving asia thingy...bummer.

[Lancer]

In '88 was the stock market slide which popped the real estate bubble. I got out just during that as my house was under contract. I got 2.5x what I paid for it, the last man out.

[Will9]

Originally posted by Lancer
Hard to live in the state? How so?

An Indiana congressman compared Indiana to Iraq.

[Lancer]

[Rufus T. Firefly]

Here's your compare-and-contrast (Kuci should especially appreciate this):

$215k in Pittsburgh buys you a four bedroom, two bath single-family home in the pleasant, safe, solidly-middle-class neighborhood of Squirrel Hill.

The roughly same amount of money, spent in a similar DC neighborhood (I chose Friendship Heights), gets you this studio condo.

Sometimes I really miss Pittsburgh...

[Kuciwalker]

$215k in Pittsburgh buys you a four bedroom, two bath single-family home in the pleasant, safe, solidly-middle-class neighborhood of Squirrel Hill.

Holy ****, I didn't know it was that good here.

Yeah, the contrast with DC is pretty big.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

The contrast with DC is especially striking given the metric the article uses -- the ratio of median housing price to median income. In Pittsburgh, that ratio is 2:1, while in DC it's 10:1 -- and that's because the median DC home is ~4x the price of the median Pittsburgh home, but the median DC houshold makes only ~2/3 what the median household in the 'burgh does.

And I'll eventually have to move to DC.

[OzzyKP]

I work for a small non-profit in DC and I make well below the median income. (closer to the poverty line actually). So unless I marry up I'm pretty much never going to own a house.

Or I'm gonna move really far out and have a horrendous commute.

I rent a room in a very modest house in a fairly nice middle class neighborhood and it is worth like half a million dollars. *sigh*