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$500 million is about 500 houses here.

We are talking Seattle, Washington, right?
If so, you are clearly wrong.
Accordign to trulia ( https://www.trulia.com/real_es... ) There is only one district of Seattle proper where the median housing price is over 1M. Most of the south the the city seems to have a median around 400K.

Now, they are talking about low-income housing, so certainly houses in the lower end of the curve. Also, they are talking about the Seattle region, not Seattle proper, which is likely to be cheaper. But even at 400K, you are talking about 1250 houses.

According to seattle pi, Seattle see about 19000 application for low income housing(
https://www.seattlepi.com/seat... ), so we are talking about dealing with 7% of the problem.

I am no Microsoft chill, but this isn't negligible. That's not going to solve the whole problem, but that will make a difference.

The prices are coming up:

https://www.trulia.com/for_sal...

In case you think I'm kidding, when I did a search like that 5 years ago the low end was $100-$200 for a house. People were selling blocks for a grand. At least now they're back to a few thousand.

This is wrong in Manhattan. Yes is is true in most of the world. But in areas of high value, speculation on future profits have driven purchase prices sky high. People are renting out just to cover/reduce the costs, not to make a profit, trusting that as the market goes up their profit will come from the sale, not the rental income.

Here: is a real world example from Manhattan:

https://www.trulia.com/propert...

For sale at $649k. Estimated Mortgage = $3,760 per month (apparently includes maintenance, insurance and taxes).

Total square feet = 498.

From this website:
https://www.zillow.com/homes/f...

It says a condo 2 floors above, with the same 498 sq ft, rents for $2450/month.

So assuming you get the same rent, that means you pay $3760/month to own, get $2450/month for rent.

That is the reality of owning in Manhattan.

People make money by buying and holding. Over time, the value of the apartment goes up and eventually you can choose to rent it out at a profit.

But that assumes the real estate market goes up. It's ripe for a bubble bursting that could wipe out people's life savings.

The war on poverty has killed too many poor people.

Huh?

GP is right - being poor is strongly correlated with poor health outcomes. Diabetes, etc. lead to death very prematurely, especially without management. Availability of healthcare isn't the primary factor; people who are in poverty tend to seek care less often and are less compliant on average, regardless of healthcare availability.

The "Great Society" programs in the US have locked people into cycles of poverty. Look at the data for Eastern Kentucky, for instance: before the "Great Society" the net outflow of population was much higher. In prospective studies/experiments children who left with their families (subsidized to do so) at an early age did far better than their peers who stayed, and their life outcomes were much improved. But that's not how these programs work.

Before the "Great Society" if an area was overpopulated for its industries, the lack of work would cause people to leave. With these so-called "War on Poverty" programs, they are incentivized to stay put and collect welfare checks instead of seeking opportunity. There are multi-generational families in Appalachia who have never known a typical work environment.

Since the Green Revolution nobody is going to starve in a first-world country (obesity is our problem now). But the current Welfare State system definitively locks people into poverty and that turns out to be deadly.

You're missing a huge factor- quality education. Somehow we have managed to tie the quality of primary education completely to where one lives. The good schools are in areas with a good tax base, and the poorer areas get schools that reflect the reduced tax base. Just a quick look around Beattyville, KY (poorest white town in the USA) shows a lot of schools with GreatSchool ratings under 5/10. Multiple schools rated 2/10. The rating system may have some flaws but that is an indication that these schools have problems. Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to determine if a school is bad because of the management, the funding, the teachers, or the parents. Nevertheless, without a decent education, those kids have little hope of doing better than their parents.

>> Ten of the staff who work on early education programs -- one-third of the total -- commute two or more hours each way a day because they cannot find housing they can afford.

Bullshit. Here's your solution: move to San Jose, then commute 45 minutes to work. Here's some listings for rooms and apartments starting at just $500 if you're too fucking lazy to use one of the hundreds of "find an apartment" web sites.

https://www.trulia.com/for_ren...

Even better would be for them to find a way to make the move to San Jose, and then get a job they are qualified for locally. If enough did that, the affluent citizens of Palo Alto will find themselves freaking out that there are no longer any people to prepare or serve their meals when they eat out, sell them their overpriced coffees, clean their buildings, take care of their lawns, etc.

Oops! You fuckers just drove away the majority of your labor pool.

Property isn't insanely expensive by historical standards unless you live in a place like NYC or San Francisco. You can get a nice modest house near where I live for $90-150K US which is entirely reasonable.

It's not just NYC and San Francisco, it's every major urban area on the east coast, west coast, and Texas. The midwest may be the only part of the country where affordable housing near urban areas is still readily available, so using it as your example doesn't really make any sense. See the March 2016 Trulia report for the current nationwide housing trends. It's even worse in the Boston area, where homes priced under $500,000 are disappearing. So unless you consider the bulk of the country outside of the midwest to be "like NYC or San Francisco," your statement simply isn't true.

And unlike other tech cities, there's still relatively (for coastal California) affordable housing to be found nearby.

Median price for just a 2-BR in Irvine is $535,000 (And let's not get started on HOA fees)... Not as terrible as the Bay Area, but I wouldn't exactly call it affordable. http://www.trulia.com/real_est...

And if you include "nearby" cities, then prepare to spend 1+ hour every day stuck in traffic, because the roads are backed-up during rush-hour(s), and you can forget about any form of public transit. A lot of people commute nearly 200-miles/day, just for more affordable housing locales.

The recreation options are pretty limited by the sprawl... Hours on the roads to get away from the urban locales and hordes of people overwhelming the all-to-few public spaces. Beaches all locked-up by property developers. The pervasive exclusionary behavior can be observed at public parks, which, upon closer inspection, you'll see lack ANY parking spaces... They're clearly meant for sole use of residents of the immediate area, with others entirely unwelcome.

I didn't think NYC had "detached" homes...

They do, although some of those might be multi-family homes (for what it's worth, Trulia claims that this house at the intersection of 109th Avenue and 164th Place is a single-family home).

But their definition of "New York" is the "megacity", which includes more than New York City; it includes:

Constituent cities: New York City (Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island); West Connecticut (Fairfield, Litchfield and New Haven counties); North New Jersey (Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Hunterdon, Mercer, Middlesex, Monmouth, Morris, Ocean, Passaic, Somerset, Sussex, Union and Warren counties), Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk counties); Mid-Hudson region (Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland, Sullivan, Ulster and Westchester counties)

which, I guess, means that, as a resident of Ocean Township, New Jersey, I grew up in "New York", and there were plenty of detached single-family homes where I grew up ("plenty" as in "all the homes in my neighborhood").

and lets take San Francisco Bay as our example (since I live here and have first hand knowledge and experience). VTA handles "some" of the South Bay, but limited to North San Jose and Mountain View.

VTA Buses go from Palo Alto to Fremont to South SJ to Gilroy. The light rail, from Mt. View down to Los Gatos and east San Jose to the Alameden valley area of SJ....in fact...just...here's the map: http://www.vta.org/getting-aro... (VTA focuses on SJ because it--SJ--has grown like a cancer or ambeoba, absorbing smaller communites, until it's most of the urban South Bay).

Caltrain handles a single strip running North to south from North San Jose to South (not the city) San Francisco.

Wrong. It goes from from SF (right next to AT&T Park) down to downtown SJ regularly, extending to Gilroy (30 miles south of the downtown SJ station) during "traditional" commute times (ie, not the 10a-8pm Valley standard time). Here's their map: http://www.caltrain.com/statio...

Bart handles SF -> Oakland, and a straight line down to Fremont.

Wrong. BART goes to SFO and Millbrae (and where it shares a station with CalTrain) up through SF and into the East Bay, extending from Richmond down to Fremont and out to Dublin/Pleasanton and Pittsburg/Baypoint. Here's BART's map: http://www.bart.gov/stations

These systems don't connect, use different payment systems, have different rates, and are _MORE_ expensive than driving.

The one bit that's true, but due to the compound sentence ends up being wrong. Connections are a pain in the ass, but the Clipper card is accepted by BART, CalTrain, VTA, SamTrans (San Mateo's bus service), Almeda Transit, MUNI (SF's transit system), plus more. Oh, and both VTA and SamTrans have stops at or near (ie, a block or two) almost all CalTrain stations on the Peninsula (the Atherton station is at least one exception) and VTA has service up to Fremont's southernmost BART station (and VTA is in the process of extending BART into east San Jose--it's not their fault that in the 1950s & 60s San Mateo and Santa Clara residents opted out of the BART system). And add into that that we're talking about five counties (SF, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Alameda, and Contra Costa) with all the territorialism and desire for control that brings with it (leading to different fare schedules, subsidies, etc.).

Taking our "cheap" (said with a hearty chuckle) mass transit is extremely expensive and time consuming.

Trip from Mt. View to Twitter's HQ (in SF): Leave around 8am. Car: 40-45 mines, $17.64 (31.5 mi at $.56 per mile); starting from Shoreline & 101 (hell, saving you driving from the CalTrain station to 101). (via Trulia's map...it looks like Google maps will no longer let you specify the time for traffic projections and 1am is actually one of the times the freeways are relatively empty). Pub: 1:03, $9.50: Mt. View CalTrain station to end of line in SF, then 38X followed by 2 minutes of walking (per 551.org). Oh, and you can read, sleep, etc. on the train. Plus, monthly passes and commute FSA will reduce that cost.

Yet instead of addressing the problems with mass transit, California is dumping many billions into a train from Fresno to Sacramento. Go figure..

True, but the train is also supose to go to SF, SJ, LA, and SD (PDF of rail proj

In Detroit he could get about 4 city blocks for $80k.

Less snarky: Here's a map
The closer to dark green, the lower the median price. There are many counties with a sub-$80k median and many more with a median slightly above that level (implying many individual houses listed at less than $80k)

Also, that's just the listed prices, except in a few rare cases, seller tend to accept lower offers. Especially when there is a surplus of housing on the market (like now).

Except it is paid for. The buses pay the city to use the infrastructure. What is this infrastructure you ask? It's a space on a street. When it is vacated, the city bus, on the rare occasions it's right behind a google bus, will move in and "use the infrastructure." More often than not it's the other way around because city buses are slow, ponderous, and take a long time to get people on them.

Clearly you have not actually experienced this first hand.

First, there's the google bus, then the yahoo bus, then the apple bus, then the facebook bus and then the ea bus, and then the ebay bus, and during rush how it's a mess (according to a friend of mine who used to live near Van Ness and worked near the Financial district and used to take Muni)

In the southbay, in Sunnyvale near me, a particular Gbus is parking in a VTA bus stop and waiting for a Caltrain connection nearly every day. Sometimes they get their early and wait jamming up traffic while they wait for googlers to try to get off Caltrain and attempt to make a timed transfer** I've seen VTA busses stuck in the long line of traffic behind me and I wonder if every time they did this they might cause a VTA passenger to miss their Caltrain connections. I guess it's tough shit for the VTA bus rider in this situation, because they Gbus schedules aren't public knowledge...

AFAIK, SF is currently charging $1/day for a stop. If you happen to be an uber or a tour bus operator, you would have to pay a $279 dollar ticket for doing something like this. To scale this, it's $2/person to ride muni, but only a $100 fine if you are caught by one of the 2 fare inspectors checking 1000 busses (okay, that's an exaggeration). Not that $4/stop would break their bank, but to say they these busses paying their fair share is a bit farcical, they are getting a golden deal that most uber and tour bus operators could only dream about...

The VTA (in the south bay) hasn't started charging google yet. Probably because google bribed Mountain View with some free shuttle busses (however, they only agreed to pay for the shuttle busses for 2 years). I imagine that will turn out to be even net worse because now people will get used to the shuttle, and demand that it not be terminated after the 2 years is up leaving MV footing the bill. Meanwhile, google is probably banking that all the furor of the busses will die off by then...

FWIW, here's a purported map of the problem areas on the SF side...

***note VTA doesn't have timed transfers, so if Caltrain is late, you miss the bus and have to wait for the next one. Likewize if you bus is late...

Horse shit.

Ohio minimum wage: $7.95/hour

5x Ohio minimum wage: $39.75/hour

Annual gross salary (8 hour day, 5 days / week, 52 weeks): $82,680 / year

Median 3 bedroom house price for Cincinnati, OH: : $120,000

Yeah, you're full of shit unless your "many cities" remark is restricted to the coastal states, and even then you're pushing it.

I found one of these houses for sale in the community listed in Grayslake, IL.

Here's a link to the listing on Trulia.

$200/mo HOA. Tax bill is INSANE for the area at around $12k/yr. House was 2300 sqft for around $250k, which is what I'd expect for the area.

Not only do you have to deal with a HOA, you have to deal with a tax bill at 5% of the worth of the property.

maybe a house in austin will be affordable again

Compared to most of America, in fact the Western world, its pretty affordable anyway.

Close.. but not exactly.

Try a median of 51k.

However that median is brought down by young kids who don't have children who go to university.

The typical wage earners in a family that send their kids to university will be arround the 45-55 mark (having had the kids around 25-35)

http://advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-Incomes-by-Age-Brackets.php

backs my figure up, and earning twice what the average earn (pre-tax) doesn't make you rich, it's just a divide and conquer that the truely rich like to put out there.

$150k a year for your household means you can afford a hosue about $400-450k, something like http://www.trulia.com/property/3029951135-8514-S-124th-St-Seattle-WA-98178, sure a nice house, but not rich by a long shot.

Only in the states is it popular to mortgage your house and minimize payments. Something about interest and taxes? Is it just in California?

Do you mean to tell me that Canadians buy homes from cash on hand?

in Canada you have a much higher percentage of people who own their house when compared to, for example, California

That might have something to do with the fact that most Canadian homes don't cost over a million dollars.

what's the rationale behind giving them benefits? would they move away if they didn't? unlikely, really

Exactly. Where else in the USA could they possibly find a lower cost of living?

Oh yeah, pretty much everywhere. (Median home price? 1.4 mil)

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Austin-Texas/
"Average price per square foot for Austin TX was $80"

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Antonio-Texas/
"Average price per square foot for San Antonio TX was $54"

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/
" Average price per square foot for San Francisco CA was $596"

Based on the idea that selling cost is 6x in SF as Austin, and 10x SA, the rent in SF is significant.

The average difference in price of fuel per gallon is $.75 (lower for Austin). The grocery index (err whatever that means, is about $20 higher for SF.

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Austin-Texas/
"Average price per square foot for Austin TX was $80"

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Antonio-Texas/
"Average price per square foot for San Antonio TX was $54"

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/
" Average price per square foot for San Francisco CA was $596"

Based on the idea that selling cost is 6x in SF as Austin, and 10x SA, the rent in SF is significant.

The average difference in price of fuel per gallon is $.75 (lower for Austin). The grocery index (err whatever that means, is about $20 higher for SF.

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Austin-Texas/
"Average price per square foot for Austin TX was $80"

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Antonio-Texas/
"Average price per square foot for San Antonio TX was $54"

http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Francisco-California/
" Average price per square foot for San Francisco CA was $596"

Based on the idea that selling cost is 6x in SF as Austin, and 10x SA, the rent in SF is significant.

The average difference in price of fuel per gallon is $.75 (lower for Austin). The grocery index (err whatever that means, is about $20 higher for SF.

bike shelters costing hundreds of thousands of dollars each.

No offence, but if you think they're actually building that at that price, you should either report every instance to the police or get your head checked out for a concussion or similar.

Considering that I can find 117 homes each costing less than 100,000 dollars each, your idea is either the result of a conspiracy mind or extreme corruption in local government, and either way you should have someone look into it.

I don't know about "pales in comparison". The valley is getting pretty damn expensive:
http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/California/Mountain_View-heat_map/

I guess we still have a ways to go before hitting London prices.

Though rent looks downright cheap, judging from
http://www.londoncommunitynews.com/2012/06/londons-apartment-vacancy-rate-dips/

According to a quote from a state employee it was on the market for months without a single bid.

You can go look at Trulia, etc and see that it's by far the most expensive house in the neighborhood, which in real estate depressions means a motivated seller is pretty well screwed. I could definitely see a 30-35% drop at the high end of the market, especially if the state was the one to *buy* the house (for likely more than they should have in the first place).

So in the end people are talking about some big conspiracy, when reality is the price difference is from the height of a bubble to the bottom of a recession. So maybe they could have gotten $100k more if they kept it on the market another year. That's not a conspiracy, that's the real estate business.

well, many of the high poverty areas in dallas/houston/san antonio also have high gang activity which leads to higher violence. a lot of senseless killing for "respect" or lack of, payback, or debts (real or perceived).

take a look at this map of dallas homicides in 2010. South and South East Dallas is predominately minority and low income with high gang activity.

I've included a heat map of home prices just so you know I'm not guessing about those areas economically.
It's a chicken and egg question though as to crime/poverty and I won't even go there.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/graphics/homicides/
http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/Texas/Dallas-heat_map/

Half of the homes (give or take half of a house) would be under the "median price", in either case. Unlike the mean, how far some go above or below it doesn't affect it. If the prices were $5, $5, $5, $60000, $80000, $80000, and $85000, $60000 would be the median.

Well, that example would be true, and I realize that half of the homes would be below the median price and half would be above. My point essentially was that I thought (and was correct) that the median price he was quoting sounded a little on the high side.

I know we're off on a tangent from the main story's topic, but I just took issue with the idea that someone making $75,000 a year can't own a home. Consider that if you calculate his monthly, bring-home pay, he's looking at between $3900 and $4000 (depending on 401k, benefits, other deductions). Consider also that even if he gets a home for $325K, if you calculate his monthly mortgage payment at current iterest rates, he's looking at a payment of around $1900/month which should be quite do-able.

I agree that the guy's not going to have money coming out his ears, I just disagree with the idea that trying to own a home at that salary, even in that town, doesn't necessarily have to be "living beyond your means". All it really ends up being about is, how much are you willing to work/sacrifice to make it happen.

I'm gonna have to call "shenanigans" on your $$ figures there. According to this it would appear there are plenty of homes one could buy that are FAR less than your supposed $625K "median" price.

That's the wrong point to make. Half of the homes (give or take half of a house) would be under the "median price", in either case. Unlike the mean, how far some go above or below it doesn't affect it. If the prices were $5, $5, $5, $60000, $80000, $80000, and $85000, $60000 would be the median.

You do appear to be correct about his first figure (the "bad place in the Bay" being wrong, though.

A total of 7,271 new and resale houses and condominiums sold last month in the nine-county region, marking a 0.5 percent uptick from August. The median sales price fell 36 percent from a year earlier to a five-year low of $400,000, MDA DataQuick said.

$400,000 / .64 = 625,000. It did "hit" 625K, evidently, but certainly isn't there any more.

I want a 1 bathroom, no bedroom house too!

Median home price hit 625k here. A bad place in the bay is about 425k, condos *start* at 450k and quickly move to 550k.

I'm gonna have to call "shenanigans" on your $$ figures there. According to this it would appear there are plenty of homes one could buy that are FAR less than your supposed $625K "median" price.

While we're on it, according to this:

A total of 7,271 new and resale houses and condominiums sold last month in the nine-county region, marking a 0.5 percent uptick from August. The median sales price fell 36 percent from a year earlier to a five-year low of $400,000, MDA DataQuick said.

I was giving prices mostly to counter:

"An utterly ordinary 2 bedroom, 1 bath house would sell in some places for $300,000." since for $300,000, in Mountain View, you'll get nothing. Not even a crappy 1 bedroom, 1 bath foreclosure.

If you're looking to move here, and are looking to get a better/larger/whatever place *and* you're willing to drive, then you have options. For example, if you want to work in San Jose/Mountain View, you could live in Fremont or Santa Cruz and save a lot of money. Or if you work in San Francisco, you could live in Fremont or Dublin.

Trulia does heat maps for house prices. Check out http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/California/ if you want an idea of a city you might get a good place you can afford. Granted, Trulia gives you house prices and not rental prices, but it will give you relative expensiveness.

You can do all this on these "vertical" search engines:

For jobs, indeed.com
For real estate, trulia.com