> The number of cities where a typical starter home is worth $1 million or more has nearly tripled since before the pandemic, rising from 80 in February 2020 to a record 242 today.
Doubt. They don't define what constitutes a city and seem to be purposely be hiding the data. There's only a count of the cities per state with no mention their names. I followed link after link and couldn't find them and gave up. Texas supposedly has 7 of these $1m+ starter home cities. Austin is the most expensive metropolitan area, and there are plenty of < $600k homes in centrally located areas. Venture out to the suburbs like Pflugerville, Cedar Park or Buda and you'll have plenty of options with $400k to spend. There are only a handful of small pockets around the city where $1m won't buy you a starter home like Zilker and Tarrytown.
> For buyers navigating today's market, Zillow Home Loans' BuyAbility℠ tool provides a personalized, real-time estimate of the home price and monthly payment that fit within their budget. Home listings on Zillow also include a down payment assistance module to help shoppers identify local programs that may be available to them.
> For those who decide renting is the right call, Zillow Rentals® lists options across every price point and property type — including single-family homes, apartments and individual room listings. Renters can also use CreditClimb to report on-time rent payments to the major credit bureaus, building the credit history that will put them in a stronger position when they're ready to buy.
This is just fear driven advertising. BUY NOW OR YOU'LL NEVER OWN A HOME!!
> Does the US have the same distinction we have here in Australia where there will be a small local government area in the centre of a city named that?
It varies, but mostly yes. I think they're limiting the definition of a "city" to as small as possible to inflate the prices for a scary headline. Austin is the most expensive metropolitan area in TX. Fire up zillow if you can access it, search for Austin, TX with a $600k limit and it'll automatically put the city boundary on the results. You'll find plenty of listings, over 1900 standalone homes for me as of right now. Including townhomes and condos it's over 2800.
I used Austin as an example because it's the most expensive metropolitan area in Texas, which supposedly has 7 of these $1m+ starter home cities. It doesn't hold true there and it's even less true for the larger cities like Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.
Anyway, my point is that it comes across as deceptive by providing ambiguous information with no easily accessible data to reference and loading the article with as many advertising links as possible.
> they don't need to nudge you into a particular position.
That's exactly what they're doing and I even put a snippet from the article in my comment. Here it is again
> For buyers navigating today's market, Zillow Home Loans' BuyAbility℠ tool provides a personalized, real-time estimate of the home price and monthly payment that fit within their budget. Home listings on Zillow also include a down payment assistance module to help shoppers identify local programs that may be available to them.
It's fear driven advertising with no meaningful information. They don't mention the cities and I wasn't able to find them. The article is chock full of links other zillow articles, their own products and 3rd party advertisers.
Perhaps it's Sea Island which is a luxury enclave with homes in the millions. They seem to define cities as incorporated & unincorporated cities, towns, communities, etc.
The thing is homeowners benefit from denser zoning because the potential of their land is increased even if the average unit price comes down - also the amenity value of more jobs, amusements, school funding/tax base, etc in the city should show up in the price too.
Homeowners definitely do not believe that their home prices benefit from denser zoning. (I'm a housing activist, very close to killing off SFZ in my muni, knock wood).
I've spent kind of a lot of time talking directly to homeowners, and while I agree a general fear of change is one of the first principal components of this problem, housing price loss aversion is definitely a real thing.
I don't care much about price loss if it is happening everywhere, so if I ever want to move to another region selling my house here will pay for one there.
Most people don't like loss ( | || || |_ ) but rarely is it really a case of potential loss (unless "density increase" is code for "build a maximum security prison next door") - it's just a case of slower appreciation.
Here in San Francisco, you just have to look on Nextdoor for two minutes to see droves of people coming up with absurd complaints about any and every case of new housing construction, up to and including literally photoshopping bad faith concept images of buildings to try and make projects look worse.
Housing prices only come up when people try to engage in bad faith gymnastics about how actually they only paid 200K for their two million dollar house so they're totally just ordinary middle class people with middle class concerns.
yes, this is true - getting discussed a bit in YIMBY circles but definitely not common knowledge. benefits to current owners should be a topic of research and outreach.
Exactly. For most people, the housing problem is that their house isn't worth more.
My parents were whining a few months ago about the possibility of new apartments being built not far from their house. Why? More noise, more traffic, more people. Things that would impact the value of their nearly debt-free home.
Meanwhile most people my age (mid-30s) who don't have a home have more-or-less given up on the idea of getting one, and people their age (mid-60s) are having the possibility of property tax abatements thrown their way so that they can stay in a home until they absolutely can't anymore, or pass away.
The vast majority of American economic decisions are ultimately aimed at passing off more value into the hands of asset-holding retirees. Full stop.
Yeeep. It feels like one of those “holding a wolf by the ears” situations. I don’t know how we get out of this mess.
One especially frustrating part of it is that it really benefits nobody. Your home goes up in value, cool. You owe more property taxes. And all the other homes around you also go up in value, so… you’re really no better off unless you downsize or move to a cheaper housing market.
Something akin to Georgism seems like the correct answer. But how you get there from here? Beats me!
One option is to get home prices to stop rising faster than wages by having wage growth speed up while real estate value growth slows down (not necessarily becoming negative). Then, no one is underwater on their mortgage, but buying a house becomes more accessible year over year. Of course, you'll need to eventually stop to address the normal problems with deflation, or address those in some other way.
What specific policies achieve this is also a separate question.
I don't see how home values could hold up with white collar work threatened over the coming years. Anyone's guess as to the timing but tech is aiming at this full force - what else has equivalent TAM? It's too big a prize to discount in the longterm.
I sold my company ~2 years ago for a very decent 8-figure exit where we cleared multiples, everybody got paid, fat bonuses all around, etc. just real pipedream founder stuff. Was incredibly excited and thought "we've made it!"
Currently barely affording a condo in Jersey City (not Manhattan). Don't really understand why the prices are this high, none of these homes are selling, the ones that sell are vacant EB-1 investments of which there surely cannot be that many, and there's no way an upper-middle class family could afford this.
More ludicrously taxes keep going up, property tax is super high making it impossible for buying to ever be better than renting.
Everyone in tech keeps talking about how AI might usher in a permanent underclass but it's already here. It's not "you will own nothing and be happy" for most people I think it's already "you own nothing and aren't happy." It's very confusing what is happening with the real estate market but what is obvious is that local politicians and housing regulations have invented feudalism from first principles.
I genuinely do not understand the controversy here, imagine somebody said this about bread.
1) It is the 12th century. Local lords own all the wheat farms and bakeries. Bread is incredibly expensive, nobody can buy bread, people are simply buttering the bread and licking off the butter, and still having to pay a portion of their wages to help maintain the bakeries.
2) ~1000 years pass. Everyone looks back at that time as the worst economic reality in human history, the foundation of most political systems is the ability for anyone to own bread and operate bakeries, people can buy bread.
3) One day you go to the bakery to buy some bread and it's now $120 a loaf. You say WTF this is so expensive, nobody can buy bread anymore, but there are so many loaves on the shelf. You're informed all of these loavess are spoken for by the people in the parking lot who are apparently gambling on the value of bread.
4) Nobody is saying you can't gamble on the value of bread. Instead, everyone agrees it would cost less if we would simply make more bread. But the people in the parking lot, who are already rich and supposedly champion a totally free bakery, say we can't make more bread as that might drop the value of bread and reduce their portfolio value, which would be worse than starvation, so we must limit the bakery. This is obviously ridiculous.
5) Then somebody walks into the bakery and says, I am a champion of the working class, I am one of you, I too cannot afford bread, make me your leader! So you think amazing, let's put them in charge, they will make more bread.
6) Unfortunately, no, for a variety of reasons that sound like they were made up on the spot, they further reduce the supply of bread, stop people from building more bakeries, and install a series of their supporters to 'review' the grain quality of bread at great expense. Also, a very small group of people will get a loaf of bread for free.
7) The price of soars further, everyone agrees that all of this is making it even less affordable. However it becomes culturally unacceptable to reverse any of these policies.
8) You have obviously been betrayed by the current leader. One of the current leader's supporters decides they want to be leader. The other supporters, who again are responsible for this crisis, back this person and say this is the next leader. They say you cannot question them, you must put them in charge or you're to blame for the bread prices. They run constant smear campaigns against anybody who disagrees, branding them all the same as the people in the parking lot, and scare people on the brink of starvation. So fine, you put them in charge, but demanding they change things.
9) They say yes we have a great solution. The people in the parking lot who are gambling on the prices of bread will now let you borrow a slice from them. You cannot eat it but you may butter it and lick the butter. If the butter seeps into the bread, as tends to happen with butter, you will be charged for the cost of drying out the slice later.
10) It is the 21st century. Local lords own all the wheat farms and bakeries. Bread is incredibly expensive, nobody can buy bread, people are simply buttering the bread and licking off the butter, and still having to pay a portion of their wages to help maintain the bakeries.
There is no level of banning housing speculation that will ever make prices go down. Housing speculation is only profitable because there aren't enough homes in the first place.
I read that as more broad - housing as investment; flippers buying properties to upgrade (materially or not) and sell at a premium, removing bottom rungs on housing ladder. i.e. the mindset is an accelerant or maybe even the cause (think back to the roots of restrictive zoning, fear of property devaluation)
The house is over 100 years old. The heating is through radiators. The town has a population of 12,000 people. It has high crime. It's more dangerous than Chicago. It has poorly achieving schools. It has no way access to job markets.
Weird how everyone isn't beelining to Centralia, Illinois to capitalize on these opportunities. It definitely isn't 50 years of continuous declining population driving these bargains.
"How can there be a housing crisis when there are houses available for $1 in Pontiac, MI?"
"People don't want houses in random small towns with few local jobs, so the housing shortage isn't real" continues to be a bullshit claim every time it comes up.
With a crime rate of 32 per one thousand residents, Centralia has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 31. Within Illinois, more than 95% of the communities have a lower crime rate than Centralia.
Yeah: It's a 128 year old home in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Hit it up in street view and look at the dilapidated neighborhood in the dying town it sits in, surrounded by a 50 mile radius of farm land.
Unlike ancient European masonry homes in some of the most passive of climates globally, a 128 year old wood construction house in the central United States is not desirable for most people. This one is in a location that gets hot summers and cold winters. Homes of this age come with substantial upkeep and modernization costs, they lack modern amenities like central air and heating, good insulation, or even a kitchen that fits normal modern appliances, they creak everywhere and are drafty, floors aren't level or are warping, they have a distinctive odor that's impossible to remove, and they harbor surprises from all sorts of things that the last 7 generations of owners did for themselves over the decades. My family has owned similar properties in Missouri. The price is reflective of the market demand, not the losses the owner dumped into it.
Situated in a town with a population of 12,000. Maybe you could retire here (if you're willing to leave behind all of your connections), but you almost certainly aren't finding a job here that still makes this look affordable.
Remember $1M today is the same as $750K in January 2019.
https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
This tells you more about inflation methodology than it does home affordability.
Yes. I meant to point out that "million dollar home" has a certain psychological meaning but it's the same as what a $750K home was just 7 years ago.
Mortgage payment vs. household income is probably the best way to assess affordability.
yes, everyone’s salary also went up by the same so comparison is solid
The "everyone" in that statement needs a citation, I'm afraid
Apparently this means that the top house of the bottom 1/3rd is now $1m in 242 cities.
> The number of cities where a typical starter home is worth $1 million or more has nearly tripled since before the pandemic, rising from 80 in February 2020 to a record 242 today.
Doubt. They don't define what constitutes a city and seem to be purposely be hiding the data. There's only a count of the cities per state with no mention their names. I followed link after link and couldn't find them and gave up. Texas supposedly has 7 of these $1m+ starter home cities. Austin is the most expensive metropolitan area, and there are plenty of < $600k homes in centrally located areas. Venture out to the suburbs like Pflugerville, Cedar Park or Buda and you'll have plenty of options with $400k to spend. There are only a handful of small pockets around the city where $1m won't buy you a starter home like Zilker and Tarrytown.
> For buyers navigating today's market, Zillow Home Loans' BuyAbility℠ tool provides a personalized, real-time estimate of the home price and monthly payment that fit within their budget. Home listings on Zillow also include a down payment assistance module to help shoppers identify local programs that may be available to them.
> For those who decide renting is the right call, Zillow Rentals® lists options across every price point and property type — including single-family homes, apartments and individual room listings. Renters can also use CreditClimb to report on-time rent payments to the major credit bureaus, building the credit history that will put them in a stronger position when they're ready to buy.
This is just fear driven advertising. BUY NOW OR YOU'LL NEVER OWN A HOME!!
Does the US have the same distinction we have here in Australia where there will be a small local government area in the centre of a city named that?
For example, the City of Sydney LGA is only one of 33 LGAs that make up what is normally known as Sydney.
> Does the US have the same distinction we have here in Australia where there will be a small local government area in the centre of a city named that?
It varies, but mostly yes. I think they're limiting the definition of a "city" to as small as possible to inflate the prices for a scary headline. Austin is the most expensive metropolitan area in TX. Fire up zillow if you can access it, search for Austin, TX with a $600k limit and it'll automatically put the city boundary on the results. You'll find plenty of listings, over 1900 standalone homes for me as of right now. Including townhomes and condos it's over 2800.
The median price of a house in Oak Park, Illinois --- the inner-ring suburb of Chicago in which I live --- is $700,000. This is an M-COL region.
Compared to a low cost of living region, that's a pretty high cost of living.
Austin had a building glut suppressing prices. The rest of the country didn't experience that.
I used Austin as an example because it's the most expensive metropolitan area in Texas, which supposedly has 7 of these $1m+ starter home cities. It doesn't hold true there and it's even less true for the larger cities like Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.
Anyway, my point is that it comes across as deceptive by providing ambiguous information with no easily accessible data to reference and loading the article with as many advertising links as possible.
FTFY: «building glut» → «adequate housing supply».
They have products for owners and renters alike, they don't need to nudge you into a particular position.
> they don't need to nudge you into a particular position.
That's exactly what they're doing and I even put a snippet from the article in my comment. Here it is again
> For buyers navigating today's market, Zillow Home Loans' BuyAbility℠ tool provides a personalized, real-time estimate of the home price and monthly payment that fit within their budget. Home listings on Zillow also include a down payment assistance module to help shoppers identify local programs that may be available to them.
They aren't going by the minima, they are taking the 33rd percentiles.
It's fear driven advertising with no meaningful information. They don't mention the cities and I wasn't able to find them. The article is chock full of links other zillow articles, their own products and 3rd party advertisers.
Ok, but your doubts were factual.
If you wanted to offer a more convincing doubt about the method, I suggest complaining about their treatment of mix shift.
There's no city in Georgia where a starter home is $1 million. This methodology has to be highly flawed.
Perhaps it's Sea Island which is a luxury enclave with homes in the millions. They seem to define cities as incorporated & unincorporated cities, towns, communities, etc.
https://www.zillow.com/home-values/27005/sea-island-ga/
" The housing problem hasn't been solved"
This assumes it is a problem that is being addressed.
When housing values soar, there are people getting rich off of that.
The "solution" is devaluation of people's assets, and all politics is local, and all local politics is housing values.
As clearly is a supply and demand issue. Supplies clearly being artificially suppressed.
Of course, the housing market merely reflects every other segment in our our "market economy"... Everything is Monopoly cartel or regulatory capture
The thing is homeowners benefit from denser zoning because the potential of their land is increased even if the average unit price comes down - also the amenity value of more jobs, amusements, school funding/tax base, etc in the city should show up in the price too.
Homeowners definitely do not believe that their home prices benefit from denser zoning. (I'm a housing activist, very close to killing off SFZ in my muni, knock wood).
Homeowners care less about their house prices than people realize - it's just a convenient excuse.
Most homeowners just don't want things to change.
I've spent kind of a lot of time talking directly to homeowners, and while I agree a general fear of change is one of the first principal components of this problem, housing price loss aversion is definitely a real thing.
I don't care much about price loss if it is happening everywhere, so if I ever want to move to another region selling my house here will pay for one there.
Most people don't like loss ( | || || |_ ) but rarely is it really a case of potential loss (unless "density increase" is code for "build a maximum security prison next door") - it's just a case of slower appreciation.
Here in San Francisco, you just have to look on Nextdoor for two minutes to see droves of people coming up with absurd complaints about any and every case of new housing construction, up to and including literally photoshopping bad faith concept images of buildings to try and make projects look worse.
Housing prices only come up when people try to engage in bad faith gymnastics about how actually they only paid 200K for their two million dollar house so they're totally just ordinary middle class people with middle class concerns.
yes, this is true - getting discussed a bit in YIMBY circles but definitely not common knowledge. benefits to current owners should be a topic of research and outreach.
Exactly. For most people, the housing problem is that their house isn't worth more.
My parents were whining a few months ago about the possibility of new apartments being built not far from their house. Why? More noise, more traffic, more people. Things that would impact the value of their nearly debt-free home.
Meanwhile most people my age (mid-30s) who don't have a home have more-or-less given up on the idea of getting one, and people their age (mid-60s) are having the possibility of property tax abatements thrown their way so that they can stay in a home until they absolutely can't anymore, or pass away.
The vast majority of American economic decisions are ultimately aimed at passing off more value into the hands of asset-holding retirees. Full stop.
Yeeep. It feels like one of those “holding a wolf by the ears” situations. I don’t know how we get out of this mess.
One especially frustrating part of it is that it really benefits nobody. Your home goes up in value, cool. You owe more property taxes. And all the other homes around you also go up in value, so… you’re really no better off unless you downsize or move to a cheaper housing market.
Something akin to Georgism seems like the correct answer. But how you get there from here? Beats me!
One option is to get home prices to stop rising faster than wages by having wage growth speed up while real estate value growth slows down (not necessarily becoming negative). Then, no one is underwater on their mortgage, but buying a house becomes more accessible year over year. Of course, you'll need to eventually stop to address the normal problems with deflation, or address those in some other way.
What specific policies achieve this is also a separate question.
I don't see how home values could hold up with white collar work threatened over the coming years. Anyone's guess as to the timing but tech is aiming at this full force - what else has equivalent TAM? It's too big a prize to discount in the longterm.
I sold my company ~2 years ago for a very decent 8-figure exit where we cleared multiples, everybody got paid, fat bonuses all around, etc. just real pipedream founder stuff. Was incredibly excited and thought "we've made it!"
Currently barely affording a condo in Jersey City (not Manhattan). Don't really understand why the prices are this high, none of these homes are selling, the ones that sell are vacant EB-1 investments of which there surely cannot be that many, and there's no way an upper-middle class family could afford this.
More ludicrously taxes keep going up, property tax is super high making it impossible for buying to ever be better than renting.
Everyone in tech keeps talking about how AI might usher in a permanent underclass but it's already here. It's not "you will own nothing and be happy" for most people I think it's already "you own nothing and aren't happy." It's very confusing what is happening with the real estate market but what is obvious is that local politicians and housing regulations have invented feudalism from first principles.
I genuinely do not understand the controversy here, imagine somebody said this about bread.
1) It is the 12th century. Local lords own all the wheat farms and bakeries. Bread is incredibly expensive, nobody can buy bread, people are simply buttering the bread and licking off the butter, and still having to pay a portion of their wages to help maintain the bakeries.
2) ~1000 years pass. Everyone looks back at that time as the worst economic reality in human history, the foundation of most political systems is the ability for anyone to own bread and operate bakeries, people can buy bread.
3) One day you go to the bakery to buy some bread and it's now $120 a loaf. You say WTF this is so expensive, nobody can buy bread anymore, but there are so many loaves on the shelf. You're informed all of these loavess are spoken for by the people in the parking lot who are apparently gambling on the value of bread.
4) Nobody is saying you can't gamble on the value of bread. Instead, everyone agrees it would cost less if we would simply make more bread. But the people in the parking lot, who are already rich and supposedly champion a totally free bakery, say we can't make more bread as that might drop the value of bread and reduce their portfolio value, which would be worse than starvation, so we must limit the bakery. This is obviously ridiculous.
5) Then somebody walks into the bakery and says, I am a champion of the working class, I am one of you, I too cannot afford bread, make me your leader! So you think amazing, let's put them in charge, they will make more bread.
6) Unfortunately, no, for a variety of reasons that sound like they were made up on the spot, they further reduce the supply of bread, stop people from building more bakeries, and install a series of their supporters to 'review' the grain quality of bread at great expense. Also, a very small group of people will get a loaf of bread for free.
7) The price of soars further, everyone agrees that all of this is making it even less affordable. However it becomes culturally unacceptable to reverse any of these policies.
8) You have obviously been betrayed by the current leader. One of the current leader's supporters decides they want to be leader. The other supporters, who again are responsible for this crisis, back this person and say this is the next leader. They say you cannot question them, you must put them in charge or you're to blame for the bread prices. They run constant smear campaigns against anybody who disagrees, branding them all the same as the people in the parking lot, and scare people on the brink of starvation. So fine, you put them in charge, but demanding they change things.
9) They say yes we have a great solution. The people in the parking lot who are gambling on the prices of bread will now let you borrow a slice from them. You cannot eat it but you may butter it and lick the butter. If the butter seeps into the bread, as tends to happen with butter, you will be charged for the cost of drying out the slice later.
10) It is the 21st century. Local lords own all the wheat farms and bakeries. Bread is incredibly expensive, nobody can buy bread, people are simply buttering the bread and licking off the butter, and still having to pay a portion of their wages to help maintain the bakeries.
Genuinely incredible
Talking about "gambling" is entirely missing that there is a genuine and massive housing shortage in literally every major US metro area. https://www.fanniemae.com/research-and-insights/perspectives...
There is no level of banning housing speculation that will ever make prices go down. Housing speculation is only profitable because there aren't enough homes in the first place.
I read that as more broad - housing as investment; flippers buying properties to upgrade (materially or not) and sell at a premium, removing bottom rungs on housing ladder. i.e. the mindset is an accelerant or maybe even the cause (think back to the roots of restrictive zoning, fear of property devaluation)
You can't convince me there's a housing crisis when houses like this exist,
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/404-W-Broadway-Centralia-...
Walkable. Passenger rail. Fiber internet. Affordable with a single income.
The house is over 100 years old. The heating is through radiators. The town has a population of 12,000 people. It has high crime. It's more dangerous than Chicago. It has poorly achieving schools. It has no way access to job markets.
It's a total bargain!
Weird how everyone isn't beelining to Centralia, Illinois to capitalize on these opportunities. It definitely isn't 50 years of continuous declining population driving these bargains.
"How can there be a housing crisis when there are houses available for $1 in Pontiac, MI?"
With STL the nearest job center, not doable on transit and not near even with a car (1h15). That's the catch.
"People don't want houses in random small towns with few local jobs, so the housing shortage isn't real" continues to be a bullshit claim every time it comes up.
With a crime rate of 32 per one thousand residents, Centralia has one of the highest crime rates in America compared to all communities of all sizes - from the smallest towns to the very largest cities. One's chance of becoming a victim of either violent or property crime here is one in 31. Within Illinois, more than 95% of the communities have a lower crime rate than Centralia.
https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/il/centralia/crime#descrip...
Also house is built in 1890s. Had renovations, but who knows how much more work it needs.
Something has to be horribly undesirable about that.
Yeah: It's a 128 year old home in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Hit it up in street view and look at the dilapidated neighborhood in the dying town it sits in, surrounded by a 50 mile radius of farm land.
Unlike ancient European masonry homes in some of the most passive of climates globally, a 128 year old wood construction house in the central United States is not desirable for most people. This one is in a location that gets hot summers and cold winters. Homes of this age come with substantial upkeep and modernization costs, they lack modern amenities like central air and heating, good insulation, or even a kitchen that fits normal modern appliances, they creak everywhere and are drafty, floors aren't level or are warping, they have a distinctive odor that's impossible to remove, and they harbor surprises from all sorts of things that the last 7 generations of owners did for themselves over the decades. My family has owned similar properties in Missouri. The price is reflective of the market demand, not the losses the owner dumped into it.
Situated in a town with a population of 12,000. Maybe you could retire here (if you're willing to leave behind all of your connections), but you almost certainly aren't finding a job here that still makes this look affordable.
It was built in 1898, for starters.