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The number of US cities where first-time homebuyers are faced with at least a $1 million price tag on the average entry-level home has nearly tripled in the past five years, according to new research.
A Thursday report from Zillow indicates that a typical starter home is now worth $1 million or more in 237 cities, up from 84 cities in 2019, underscoring America’s ongoing home affordability crisis.
“Affordability has been strained across the board,” Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist at Zillow, said. “We see the largest number of million-dollar starter homes in expensive coastal markets. We see them in markets with very low homeownership rates and we see them in markets with more building regulations.”
This smells like bullshit. I mean, if they define “Beverly Hills” as a city, I can see where it might be literally true, but I wouldn’t call even the cheapest house in Beverly Hills, Scarsdale, or Paradise Valley a “starter” home. There’s homes in the LA, New York, and Phoenix metros under $3-400k, if you’re not so choosy about the neighborhood.
From a canadian perspective, it sounds believable. About 10 year ago, you could get a new build on half an acre for 350k in my hometown. Today the oldest, run down, needs lots of renovations houses in the city on a quarter acre are going for over 400k. Those 350k new builds are easily into 700-900k range.
My biggest mistake in life was not buying a house fresh out of high school, but i was an “idiot” who looked at housing as a place to live, not an investment.
Stupid millennials, should have saved up our lunch money for a down payment and spent recess house hunting. If only we had known we were supposed to start saving for retirement ten years before we were born…
Im pretty old but I often think about how much better off I would be if I got an associate degree and some certs and then bought a house asap.
Yes and no. We own a house and we would love to move to another city, but since we live in a less desirable city, we can’t afford a house anywhere else. So if you don’t want to be stuck somewhere forever, be glad you didn’t.
Beverly Hills is literally a city. It is autonomous from the Los Angeles city government. It has its own government and its own laws.
And do please show me where the L.A. homes under $400k are. There weren’t L.A. homes that cheap outside of Watts when we lived there over a decade ago and I’m not even sure about Watts.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/20159-Cohasset-St-UNIT-9-Winnetka-CA-91306/68991194_zpid/ I’m sorry if that doesn’t fit your criteria for a “L.A. home,” but it is a place you can live, in Los Angeles, under $400k.
But that’s my point: some cities do not have any “starter” homes, at all, and defining a “starter home” as just the bottom third of every municipality is misleading bullshit. It implies that you need $1M to buy a home, and you don’t.
I agree that home prices have gotten crazy and unaffordable for many. I just want to have a realistic discussion of what that means so we can work on realistic solutions, and “you need $1M mortgage just to get your foot in the door” doesn’t help.
Oh, okay. Sure. If you want to live in the middle of the SFV and are okay with a 3-hour commute, it’s doable. I don’t think you realize how big L.A. is. It took me well over an hour to get from NoHo, which is in the SFV, to the guy I bought weed from in Canoga Park, which is next to Winnetka. But sure. Go out far enough and the homes get marginally cheaper.
I think we’re working with different definitions for ‘starter home.’ To me, ‘starter home’ is a real estate agent’s euphemism for ‘undesireable shithole.’ It is a home you expressly do not want to live in long-term. It’s temporary housing to build equity while you’re young, able to sacrifice living standard and comfort, and waiting to earn enough to upgrade to an actually desirable house.
From the goalposts you’re moving, it sounds like you think a starter house is somewhere affordable that you’d be willing to move into today and live indefinitely. And yeah, that’s probably going to be unavailable to most people. Most people don’t get to live in their dream house in an ideal neighborhood. Never have.
You do realize that you’re calling a house that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars an undesirable shithole, right? I think you’re proving my point.
What exactly is your point? Because my point is that undesirable shitholes costing hundreds of thousands of dollars is a more pressing problem, with different solutions, than not being able to find a house in Beverly Hills under $4M.
So your point had nothing to do with the article, which isn’t about $4 million Beverly Hills homes (which would be cheap for BH)?
It’s almost like we’ve let a ton of rich neighborhoods become cities so they don’t have to pay as much in taxes and they can prevent their staff from living near them. Unless of course they want to live in the “staff quarters”.