Median price homes aren’t affordable, start home and median price home are mutually exclusive.
Median price home literally is going to be about the halfway point between a starter home and a fucking mansion
It boils my blood everytime I see these info dumps starting off with average or medium house prices.
That’s not a fucking starter home price.
It’s like looking at the median price of a car and then trying to say that cars aren’t affordable for your first car.
You don’t spend 20k to 30k in your first car, you buy near the bottom percentile as your starter. Your first car is like a fraction of the cost of the median.
Exactly. The median purchase price for new cars is ~$45k or something, yet I’d never spend that much despite making more than median salary. Things don’t scale like that.
Not sure what you are talking about. Starter homes are still the same. Basic features, unfinished basement, no garage, 2-3 beds, 1-2 baths, likely 20-30 years old and requires some repairs.
Typically will be farther out of the city. It will be a longer commute but still within city limits. It will have some amenities nearby but not exactly on main street, but enough to suffice.
For most large cities I have looked at, usually is in the range of 150k to 250k. Totally affordable for someone making a decent wage of 50k+ to save up the down payment of 7.5k to 12.5k over the course of 1-2 years.
Where I’m at even manufactured homes are being built and starting at 100-200k. Shoot, my 50yo house was 400 and is now estimated to go for 500k which is wild to me after living here for a while.
I wish I was closer to where you’re at 😂
Edit: my house isn’t too crazy either. 1 car garage, 1 1/2 bath, 1300sq ft
It’s funny because living on the West Coast, we tell people the same thing to scare them away, but when you say it about the Midwest, I suspect you’re actually being truthful.
My dumbass had a nice 3 bed 2 bath home in NM that I was paying a measley $600 a month as a first time buyer. I then sold it and moved to the Boston area.
My husband and I recently bought a house here in Portland. We’re on two software engineers’ salaries with no kids so we can very much afford it, but it would have been a squeeze without an inheritance from my grandparents. It’s times like these where I truly appreciate the ubiquity of privilege. If they had been your average Black citizen, they would not have been given the opportunities to accumulate the wealth that I then inherited.
Now that insurances against natural disasters start costing a fortune in places like Florida, and you probably have to have such an insurance to get a mortgage there, it, the costs for housing down there will probably skyrocket soon.
At current interest rates, 5% down, and an 800 credit score, you’re monthly piti is still like 2,700. Assuming you make that 92k/yr, and are traded at 22%, you’re monthly take home is 5900. That’s 45 percent of your monthly income. “Affordability” is for dinner heavy lifting here
Using the median home price is severely underestimating the cost of a decent home in an okay neighborhood.
With these salaries, you can afford a house that needs severe repairs or in either an unsafe or really inconvenient area.
I bought a house in one of these cities in 2017 with slightly more than what they say is the required salary. It was 195k with 4.5%. The school district reassessed the house from the sale, my taxes skyrocketed, and my mortgage increased $600 a month. I ended up selling the house after 3 years to move in my parents with 25k in credit card debt.
Today, that house would cost at least 300k and interest rates are around 8%. I’ve almost tripled my salary since then and my budget is probably max 330k.
Barely scrape by in “luxury cities” where non-millionaires are an afterthought. But at least you’ll have an easier time meeting fellow “undesirables”.
Have slightly more money that will mostly just go to paying for a car to traverse car-dependent hell…but you have to have vapid neo-nazis for neighbors.
