How affordable is housing where you live?
Is housing reasonable in your area? how much does it take to rent a 1 bedroom apartment or purchase a 2000 square foot house?
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Eugene Oregon. I live about six blocks from the University of Oregon. I pay 615 a month for a two bedroom apartment. It isn’t great. But it is clean and no bugs.
No clue about house prices since when shit goes down I like to be able to call the landlord and know it won’t cost me a thing.
Where I live now, The Billages, FL, 2000 Sq. Ft. Living Space on a postage sized lot, plus a 2 car garage and screened in covered patio is $260k to $400k in very good or new condition. The variance has to do with upgrades, location, and view, and you might get a wee bit more land too. If you go right outside of our town’s city limits, it is easily $75k less on both the lower and upper limits, and you’ll get more land too. Included in your $140 monthly maintenance fee is access to 30 free golf courses, tennis, pickle ball, exercise classes, swimming pools, tons of discussion groups, and groups for hobbies and interests.
To rent that house in my town on a year lease unfurnished it’s $1800—$2000 plus you pay electricity and cable/phone/Internet. If you rent it furnished it’s $1500 off season everything included, or $3500—$4,000 peak season everything included.
San Francisco Bay Area. A one bedroom apartment starts at $3,000 a month. A 2,000 sg foot house sells for 1.5 million. (That is considered a large house.)
Right now we pay $575 per month for a large 4 bedroom home. Rent is $550 with a $25 pet fee. This is in rural Western IL.
We’re looking for a new rental in Western Michigan and I’m having a very difficult time finding a two bedroom under $1000 per month.
The one bedroom apartment our relative recently rented is $975 a month plus $75 for water and trash, and a $50 a month pet fee. A three bedroom in the same complex is $1600. The amenities include pool, playground and gym.
The median price for a house here is $350,000.
We are asking $150,000 for the three bedroom rental house we are selling, as a fixer-upper.
Boston, MA
1-Bedroom Rental is about $2500—$3000/month.
2000 sq. ft. home within 20 miles of the city is about $500,000 to $1-million depending on the neighborhood.
@cookieman @zenvelo Yikes. I would move out of those areas so fast it would make your head spin.
I live in Southern CA, one of the highest priced areas in the country, it’s ridiculous.
A 2000 Sq ft home on about a ⅓ of an acre in suburbs here will run about 180k.
Rent on a decent apartment is roughly $900 a month.
North central Illinois, Chicago-area hinterlands. I pay $665/month in rent for a decent sized two story house.
It varies so much based on neighborhoods.
Where I live in Suburban Atlanta, a 1 bedroom apartment is 1050–1150 for a decent quality one. But you can go closer into Atlanta in the yuppie areas and pay 1600–2000. On the other hand, if you get out of the gentrified areas, you can pay $650–750. These aren’t slums, but they’re probably 40-year old brick 3-stories with no amenities.
Same with houses. A 3-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood in Alpharetta is going to be $400,000 or more. That same house in Buford or Roswell (about 20 miles closer to town, but smaller lots and older structures) will be around $180,000.
At least in this area the variability is HUGE.
The housing situation warps every other aspect of living here. This is a town where a yearly salary of 150 grand is insufficient to afford a mortgage. There are well paid tekkies here, pampered with all the necessities of living at their workplaces, but sleep in their cars. Entrepreneurs convert shipping containers to cubicles with mattresses and rent them out for prices that would easily cover the mortgage on a tract house in a Reno suburb. My advice to anyone anticipating coming here on the promise of what appears to be a lucrative pay package—Buy an RV, or small motor home where you are, being certain that it will meet California emissions standards.
I think it’s much more affordable than many places, like Seattle.
We would need to define reasonable but the numbers here border on madness.
Rent 2,000 to sky’s the limit per calendar month for a one bedroom unit.
Average house price 2,000,000.
Wow, some of the rents are so reasonable. Reminds me of when I was in college living in MI.
@JLeslie I’m looking for a home in Michigan right now. The prices have gone up the past few years, especially in Grand Rapids. I joined a housing fb group to find a home or apartment and there are so many complaints about how rent has risen.
^^It doesn’t surprise me that Grand Rapids is more on the expensive side. Grand Rapids is a very nice city (I’ve never been there, but from what I understand) I had a roommate from there. I was in a college town.
I lived actually in Lansing right in the border of East Lansing. Where I lived it has improved quite a bit though, a really nice outdoor shopping and restaurant area opened up about 5 minutes by car, and a few other commercial things. My guess is that raised the rents a little.
It surprises me to see so many of us living in high cost of living areas. I felt like it was getting unsustainable here but clearly it’s much worse in other areas.
There’s a 3 bedroom house on a postage stamp lot on my street that recently got renovated and is now on the market. Asking price is $2 million.
Fucking Boston.
My boyfriend and I are renting our 2 bedroom apartment, which one floor of a two-story house, for $1050 a month per person.
@Mariah: Agreed. I love it here so much, but it’s crazy expensive to live.
Yep, I love it too, but man. My boyfriend and I would like to become property owners sometime in the next, y’know, decade, and we’re trying to figure out how far away from the city we need to go in order to optimize our affordability to commute-non-shittiness ratio, and….just ugh.
Yeah, I have no room to complain here.
Aside from liking the area and perhaps not finding work somewhere else what keeps many of you living where it costs so much?
@ARE_you_kidding_me Really….we have a ton of folks moving from Cali to here, because the house and land they get for their money is unbelievable. Of course, I’d assume they’d want to be where the ‘action’ is (aka culture, restaurants, museums, etc…) or something that makes it worth it to them.
Housing is affordable in places like Nashville, Atlanta, Asheville, Chattanooga, Greenville and there is all kinds of culture there.
Matt’s family and many of our friends from college are close by, Boston has the perfect job market for me (booming software and biomedical industries; I work at the crossroads of software and medicine), and I just like the town. MA is also probably the safest state for someone like me who is afraid of what happens if federal healthcare law changes.
Pay tends to be higher in areas where the cost of living is high, and Matt and I are DINKs each working in software. We’re not struggling….but a house is a long way off.
consider investing in property elsewhere. The current lopsided fortunes ditinguishing regions of the country means there are some fantastic deals in places one might be content to live but lacking in employment opportunities (currently).
I always think that I’d like to buy a prefab home here for $50,000 and truck it to Seattle where I could sell it for 5,000,000.
If I was sitting on a multi million dollar home I’d sell when the market was hot and relocate to where that money buys a lot. The couple who bought my condo purchased like eight or nine units to rent out. They sold a house in one of those crazy expensive markets and came here. I’m estimating they probably clear 10k/month in just rental income.
@Dutchess_III I’ll finish the math !
When you can buy a lot in Seattle for $4,949,999 to put the house on and trucking the house would only be about $110,000. So you’re out about $100,000.
@Mariah: Yeah, my wife and I were DINKs for seven years before we became parents. We ended up buying a small house 17-Miles north of the city.
We’ve found over the years that remodeling it was cheaper than buying a bigger house elsewhere.
Of course, my commute, with traffic, was an hour and a half into Boston.
Eurgh, that’s a rough commute. My life is further complicated by having no car and being terrified of city driving, so I need to stay on a commuter rail line (or grow the fuck up and learn to drive).
My Aunt and Uncle bought some beautiful property in 60’s. It’s like, 5 acres of prime Pacific Northwest glory. It was cheap back then. Bet it goes for millions now. Although housing has gone up all around it, when you’re on their property you feel like you’re all alone. It’s so secluded.
We moved here because the company hub works for moved here, and they made it worth our while. They paid a relocation bonus plus all moving expenses of selling our previous house, buying a new house and living expenses in between. The company continues to show their appreciation financially.
We bought a home for son in a lower cost neighborhood. We are now selling it for what could be a nice profit.
That commute thing would drive me insane. 2 hours a day of what amounts to forced overtime, and gasoline on its way to $4 a gallon.
Decent apartments are around $1300 for 2br. Decent houses are around $200,000 and rent for about $2000. The economic bust in 2008 hit real estate here harder than anywhere in the country. Now they are doing the same thing here again…artificial inflation of real estate. I tell people to get a cheap rental and wait to buy until it falls again. I bought my place for nothing in 2014, gutted it and completely rebuilt the inside and have a nice home with a lot of equity now.
The house I live in currently has an estimated value of 400k. It’s a 2 bedroom / 2 bathroom house located in a pretty bad neighborhood (we hear gunshots on a weekly basis and drive past multiple hookers daily).
This is in nearby Oklahoma.
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