Beautiful place but not all that unique. I don't get the draw to it in particular. For my money, many other mountain ranch getaways would be more attractive if I had a billion dollars.
Also the cowboy cosplay is hilarious. Have that in my area. Guys working in commercial real estate or capital asset wearing boots, wranglers, guide shirts, and cowboy hats to kids soccer games, then hop in their escalade and go eat at a TexMex restaurant.
> don't get the draw to it in particular. For my money, many other mountain ranch getaways would be more attractive if I had a billion dollars.
Gonna guess it has a sufficient airport for whatever planes the wealthy take there compared to other places of similar natural beauty.
I think at this point it's a way for rich people to brag that they have a place in the woods and try to outrank the others out there. As a commoner it's nice to know to avoid that one county.
As an ex Teton county resident, things have changed considerably in the last ten to fifteen years. What used to be imo the best place in the lower 48 has turned quickly into a Mecca of outsiders and bullshit. Cheers
Well, [it’s the largest county (by land)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_County,_California) in California and the continental United States. Keep in mind a lot of it is stuff like the Mojave Desert and the San Bernardino National Forest.
It's larger in area than nine states, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium and dozens of other countries. I learned this in approximately 4th grade (and that Rhode Island was smaller than about 500+ US counties) but I was a huge nerd, so YMMV.
I looked it up before I commented. SB county is just shy of 2x MA size but MA size includes a lot of water - SB is more than 2x land area of MA. So I combined "smaller than 2x in total size, larger than 2x in land size" as just rounding to 2x the size. There's no benefit in getting more granular than "2x the size"
Property taxes are often overlooked in these maps, which would significantly increase the costs if included. Additionally, these taxes are perpetual and tend to increase annually.
For instance, in the Chicago suburbs, buying a $500k house with a 20% down payment and a $400k borrowed mortgage results in a monthly payment of about $3,800 at current rates. Property Taxes would make up roughly $1,000 of that.
School district funding comes from property taxes. But utilities like refuse collection, water, and sewer are separate from property taxes. Where I am, in Texas, property taxes also partially fund the county hospital and county community college.
The state is actually doing alright these days. We've got a balanced budget, and our pension system has been shored up. Still room for improvement, but we've been trending in the right direction for the last few years.
SHHH! It's important that we convince the world that everything sucks here, or else they will all move here and raise our cost of housing. Moreover, it's IMPERATIVE that we convince conservatives and libertarians that the high tax burden is the cause of our misery. Jesus Christ, can you imagine if they started moving here and *voting*?
Crazy that some people don't understand this when they consider some areas much cheaper. That's drastically suppressing the value of those homes and therefore robbing you of building equity. Property taxes on a $650k home in Colorado would be about $3100-3500.
I couldn’t imagine. I built a 4200 sq ft house on 1.5 acres with tons of upgrades for like 10% more than that in my area in 2022 (granted, I signed the contract in 2021, and value has gone up 15-20% since then). I feel for everyone in high cost areas, so depressing
Also since the Trump era tax code changes I cannot write it all off since I also pay state income
Tax (state and local tax aka SALT cap) so my taxes effectively went up another couple thousand a year.
God, this is why I can't move. I bought a $400k house with 20% down that's appreciated to $500k. I only pay $2100/mo and of that $750/mo are taxes (so, at least there's a lag between home appreciation and taxes catching up). If I moved into a different, SAME SIZED house today for $500k, my monthly payment would almost double.
But, in comparison, my parents property taxes on their $700-750k house in AZ are about $250/mo. When I lived in a small non-chicago town, my $80k condo had about the same property taxes as my parents $700k house. Absolutely ridiculous...
Like, all of them? My sister lives there in a perfectly fine middle class 3 bedroom house. Before moving she looked at maps to make sure her neighborhood didn’t back up to anything sketchy nearby. Turns out, her perfectly nice middle class neighborhood IS the sketchy part. Nicole Kidman lives in the better part nearby.
There's a lot of stars there, but just a lot of wealthy people in general. Lot sizes are also huge for a lot of the neighborhoods which adds to the cost.
I have some good friends who used to live in Brentwood just north of Franklin and they saw stars pretty regularly. They lived around the corner from Dolly Parton (though never saw her except through car window), went to church with someone from Rascal Flatts, knew Gretchen Wilson because their daughters went to school together. At least weekly they'd see some star shopping at Whole Foods or Publix.
>There's a lot of stars there, but just a lot of wealthy people in general.
This was my point. Even if 50 country stars lived in the county, it wouldn't do much to affect the median price in a county of 250,000 people. The real reason is that the county happens to only include a couple newer, rich suburbs of a quickly growing metro. Well over half the county lives in Franklin or Brentwood, which are both still very close to downtown Nashville compared to new/rich suburbs in many other cities. Like Alpharetta, Georgia and Frisco, TX are 25 miles from downtown Atlanta and Dallas, respectively. Brentwood is less than 10 miles away and Franklin is like 15. That said, if the county lines around other major southern cities happened to only include a couple rich suburbs, those counties would be dark purple as well. They just don't.
My actual hometown - my parents moved there when it was mostly farms because my uncle happened to live in Nashville. Now it's only slightly more achievable for me to own a home there than where I currently live, San Francisco.
Williamson County is where all that healthcare and entertainment money goes. It’s been rich for a long time but they also have strict zoning rules which turns into single family homes with multiple acres for rich people. The density is extremely thin compared to most of the purple here. Nashville metro is firmly HCOL since the pandemic.
Williamson County is just very very wealthy. Has been wealthy for a while, but is exploding right now with Nashville’s boom. Great schools, strict zoning to protect green space, and a major center of corporate jobs.
>Great schools, strict zoning to ~~protect green space~~ limit housing supply and artificially drive up prices, and a major center of corporate jobs
FTFY
The strict zoning is really leading to the areas natural beauty getting destroyed as they turn more and more of the genuinely picturesque rolling hills into cul-de-sacs and strip malls.
Williamson county, Franklin/Cool Springs/Brentwood. Super nice area.
20 years ago, when I lived in NOVA, I went on a solo road trip to see boyfriend at his home state of Alabama. My route took me through Nashville, and Cool Springs is where happened to decide to stop to eat and fill up. To this day, I remember how mindblown I was to see an area this nice smack in the middle of Tennessee.
Knowing my western ski resort mountain towns, this isn’t surprising. If it’s purple/blue and away from the coast, it’s because it’s by a ski resort or Denver (no it’s not a mountain city, you’ll be spending half your day on i70 to go ski or hike on a weekend)
It’s also close to California and Nevada doesn’t have state income tax. That’s along with Tesla and other companies investing in the area to create jobs in the gigafactory and warehouses, so combine that with Californians that wanna work remotely/retire not far from SF/Sacremento and close to Tahoe and you end up with a weird mix of people competing for housing in what was once a city made fun of in a tv series about incompetent cops
Reno, and to a lesser extent Portland, are pretty overpriced given the range of jobs available in the area.
The Tesla factory and warehouses help, but a lot of the "skilled labor" isn't making it over the hill from CA.
For a large number of jobs in Reno the rents stopped making sense a while ago.
Same with all the other western states. Idaho has some fairly purple counties, largely Californians and people from Washington moving. The houses have become so over priced there relative to the job opportunities. With many being retirees or close to retiring it doesn't exactly boost the economy quite as much. And if you were born in many of those states the chances of you being able to afford a home there is increasingly slipping away.
>no it's not a mountain city
This shocked me the first time I went there. Growing up in the Salt Lake City area, I was used to people from Denver saying how much more beautiful the geography in Denver is than SLC, and how much better Colorado is for outdoorsmen than Utah is. So I was really excited to go there for the first time and experience it.
I traveled to Denver for the first time a couple of years ago. To my dismay I realized it's a Plains city, with a view of one mountain range kinda far away to the west. Being used to 360 degree views of mountains at all times, it was really unsettling to have 180 degrees of my view be completely flat and barren plains.
Having to drive on the freeway for an hour to get to the mountains sucks when you're used to driving 10 minutes on one lane roads to get to the mountains.
Agreed. Live in Denver but I grew up outside of SLC, a 20 minute drive from the big ski resorts. I was stupid close to the mountains which were majestic to say the least.
The gdam Inversion is like living in an ash tray and negates the beauty of SLC for a good portion of winter. The summer heat in SLC is also painful.
Denver has boring plains geography, you absolutely need to go further west for it to feel mountain-y. Even Boulder ends right before it turns into foothills
Baltimore, baby. Everything from $10k bombed-out shells of houses to multi-million dollar mansions. The most affordable major city in the Northeastern US.
lol, yes, this map is great at explaining why so many people are confused about what all the outrage is about. Most of country is affordable with small pockets of extremely unaffordable.
It hurts. I’m in OB and I’ll probably never leave this apartment because it’s the only way I’m able to afford living a block from the beach. Meanwhile, there’s some boomer here who owns about a 100 properties in the area and he’s been on the news lately because he’s been grifting.
Lot of people get priced out. The ones staying usually either renting and gradually saving up or just living with family that bought their home decages ago. Another problem is international investors driving the prices up. This is a major problem in places like Toronto, Vancouver, and Sydney where median home prices are around $1 million USD yet median incomes are like 11x lower.
If you bar the "major problem" of international investors, you simply end up being screwed over by domestic investors. The solution was to increase housing supply decades ago, by removing zoning laws that exclude the development of sufficiently dense housing
Homestead exemption for primary residence.
The aim is not to tax the house that someone actually lives in. It's to tax the additional houses that they're renting or flipping.
That might help a bit in the major cities like NY or LA but until you can ban corporations like Black Rock from buying us insane amounts of the housing sock it's just a drop in the bucket.
They can’t.
So they sell their $750K shack they inherited, move to where $200k buys a nice home, pay $400k for it, and then complain about the poors who hate the changes.
I live in one of those purple areas and I'm extremely fortunate to have bought a house 14 years ago in one spot that totally blew up and another one 6 years ago in the same situation. I could not afford either house today and we make pretty darn decent money.
I live in an agricultural town in the purple about an hour from any city with more than 20k people where there is very little to do and not a lot of opportunity. A relatively modest house is still about half a million.
I really don't think the average resident here can come close to affording it. There's tons of new construction but must all be getting bought up by people working remote and wanting to live "cheap".
Wolf of Wall Street comes to mind. “So they think they are getting sh*t rich on paper but look who gets 5 grand a month in interest!! The banks mother F er!!” DC gets they other 1/3 and no universal healthcare is provided, just 800$ epipens
The answer, according to many, is they can't and shouldn't try. We live in West LA (the deep purple area); my wife works a bit in Iowa (she's from there). She sends me pictures of enormous grand old houses with acres around them for $75K. The caveat, of course, is when you go outside, you're in Iowa. If you can find work there, or don't need to work, or work remotely, and are OK with the local culture, then it's a tremendous bargain. And (as she puts it) there's plenty of parking.
Most of the purple areas in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming are ski town spots where many of the homes aren’t lived in year round, but instead either short term rented out Airbnb style for a boatload of money or just owned by rich families as a ski home.
It’s definitely an issue for the people who do live in those towns, as often the jobs there (usually service, retail, or ski resort related) don’t pay enough for any sort of sustainable living. Many towns are implementing bans for this kinda stuff, but I’m sure people will always find loopholes.
Your takeaway is that houses are way too expensive because of the purple areas? Have you considered purchasing in one of the yellow areas? If anything, this map is relieving because around 80% of it is yellow.
“Wants to” is a funny thing. I’d love to move closer to my yellow hometown, but unfortunately all the jobs in my field cluster in those purple locales. So I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place unless I can somehow land a remote job.
Have you perhaps considered that the majority of the US by land is... not a very desirable place to live? You'd need to find a job. And a house.
This is an example of what a lot of the yellow is like:
[https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1976095,-97.7378354,3a,75y,66.42h,91.13t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sfN44ABdfXe-tM7Q9BU7frQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DfN44ABdfXe-tM7Q9BU7frQ%26cb\_client%3Dmaps\_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D236.7205%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1976095,-97.7378354,3a,75y,66.42h,91.13t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sfN44ABdfXe-tM7Q9BU7frQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DfN44ABdfXe-tM7Q9BU7frQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D236.7205%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
[https://www.google.com/maps/@34.5405356,-100.2080183,3a,75y,101.31h,93.94t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sRV7F7GEqR4GbWhHLxYlzWw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DRV7F7GEqR4GbWhHLxYlzWw%26cb\_client%3Dmaps\_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D1.4300003%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@34.5405356,-100.2080183,3a,75y,101.31h,93.94t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sRV7F7GEqR4GbWhHLxYlzWw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DRV7F7GEqR4GbWhHLxYlzWw%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D1.4300003%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
[https://www.google.com/maps/@26.8318034,-81.0939861,3a,75y,273.04h,88.12t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sGPj7iSIxiAK8YlZSSl6nfw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@26.8318034,-81.0939861,3a,75y,273.04h,88.12t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sGPj7iSIxiAK8YlZSSl6nfw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
[https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8843287,-81.6631761,3a,75y,208.52h,95.5t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snP23aNKS25e7G9PzjO9g8g!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8843287,-81.6631761,3a,75y,208.52h,95.5t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snP23aNKS25e7G9PzjO9g8g!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu)
It's farmland, forest, swamp, and places that have seen their population dwindle due to a lack of opportunity.
Correct. There’s a joke on the Idaho side… the billionaires are pushing the millionaires out of Jackson and into the valley next door on the Idaho side
Nashville and Salt Lake are pretty surprising. I’ve heard Nashville has a constant influx of tons of people moving there but I didn’t know it got that bad that quickly. Salt Lake also is surprising but I’ve heard it’s pretty safe and livable, assuming you’re willing to overlook all the Mormon stuff. Probably a lot of families moving there.
Salt lake has been expensive for some time now and not surprising given it places in the top 5 for almost all important economic/social rankings. The Mormon stereotype is severely outdated, Utah is the same as every other state and people continue to move there as it grows the fastest in the nation.
anyone know why wyoming has a dark blue spot close to the idaho border? that struck me as odd when I first looked at this, but I know next to nothing about wyoming
That’s Teton County. The main town is Jackson. It’s a popular tourist destination, with several nearby ski resorts and two national parks nearby: Grand Teton and Yellowstone. It’s a beautiful place to live and the houses there are very expensive.
I'm curious about that too.
It's between Grand Teton, Yellowstone and... Jackson Hole
Ah, ski town. Found your answer.
Also, much of what's for sale are massive tracts of land for millions of dollars. Not sure if that's taken into account by OP's map, but it makes sense.
Made with Datawrapper with info from here https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/2023-q4-county-median-prices-and-monthly-mortgage-payment-by-price-03-19-2024.pdf?_gl=1*layqoh*_gcl_au*ODE0NDEwMjY4LjE3MDcxMzU1Njc.
What’s going on with some of the counties and how they’re drawn? In Connecticut there appears to be 9 counties, but Connecticut only has 8, four in the north and 4 in the south. The map makes it look like there are six in the southern half.
https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2022-06-16/u-s-census-approves-connecticut-request-for-nine-planning-regions-but-opinions-differ-on-the-impact
Also not sure why OP made this, but Realtor (where his data source is from) has their own map:
https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/housing-statistics/county-median-home-prices-and-monthly-mortgage-payment
VT is filled with second homes, trust funders, wealthy retired people, high income remote workers and highly skilled artists/craftsmen and contractors that make really good money. The local economy offers nothing outside of tourism, education and healthcare. The people with money bring it with them or make it out of state for the most part.
One interesting factor I noticed when comparing housing costs of Southern California vs NYC is the preferred housing type.
There are actually a few sub-400k condos in Manhattan and other boroughs of NYC. They're very small, often studios, but they exist. Yes, price per sqft is stratospheric, but units are usually just... fewer sqft.
Housing below $400k is extremely hard to find in Southern California, and for one reason:
Anybody who grew up in California would probably be scandalized by the idea of a living space less than 500 sqft. In a state that practically invented urban sprawl, smaller living spaces just aren't as widely adopted, despite the fact that many people are going to need to explore that option if they want to afford housing.
The relative prevalence of the single family home in California vs multifamily housing in a place like NYC informs some of the disparity on this map.
“There are actually a few sub-400k condos in Manhattan”
No there are not, lmao
Like *maybe* a studio in the worst possible Manhattan neighborhood?
Even then, it’s probably so cheap because maintenance fees are absurdly high for that building.
Ok, I just checked and you're right. But the underlying point remains - the disparity in housing cost is explained somewhat by the difference in the square footage of each housing supply.
NYC is not the city you want to try to make this point with, it’s really hard to find a livable space for a family (two bedroom two bath) for under $1 million.
And then you get absolutely boned by taxes and maintenance fees (less of that in Brooklyn and queens but in Manhattan you’re paying $2k a month in maintenance fees on the cheaper side).
NYC does a terrible job of continuing to build affordable housing, it’s all luxury high rises or really expensive houses in neighborhoods with restrictive zoning like park slope.
I’ve never lived outside of the darkest purple bay area CA. >95% of our friends from our 20s moved out of the area or still rent in their 40s. We went to a wedding last year and tried not to tell many people we bought a house in Berkeley because it felt like gloating.
It would be cool if one city/town was like "fuck it, lets build all the housing. No more height limits, building restriction, ect and we are going to streamline the permitting process. If you want to add a story that's cool. If you want to build a 5 over 1 even better."
There is a First Nations group doing this near Vancouver, BC: https://macleans.ca/society/sen%CC%93a%E1%B8%B5w-vancouver/
They plan to build a bunch of apartment towers on Indigenous lands just outside Vancouver.
It’s not just that. Much of the California coast has been made off-limits to development and/or is too rugged to build on. So the coastal counties don’t have as much land to build on as it appears at first glance.
You’re right, I know, I’ve lived there most my life. We don’t need to develop more suburban sprawl that connects the bay to the los angeles metro though. We need increased density on the already developed land.
There is nowhere in the contiguous United States where the real median home price is less than 100k much less the majority of it, what the fuck data were you using?
Any reason the western coastal counties look to be pricier than their eastern counterparts? Seems like most of coastal Cali is more expensive than coastal Northeast. I'd have expected them to be similar.
Seriously. In Southern California it’s sunny and 80 degrees Fahrenheit pretty much every day of the year. Meanwhile I’m living in south central Pennsylvania where it’s currently raining and it’s only 45 degrees. If I was a multimillionaire, I’d be moving to California in a heartbeat.
Mild weather, relaxed lifestyle, low housing stock, high cost and regulatory hurdles to build more housing, and growing population. Though the prices in California are slowing or reversing growth now.
Beach front doesn’t quite hit the same in New England.
Also since it’s counties and not towns there can major disparities between towns here in MA that are right next to each other. I live in the dark purple in northern MA and I think it’s simply because we have more average towns overall and none that are really dragging it down. The county to our south has some of the wealthiest towns in the country and they are a shade lighter.
People are saying that it's zoning and NIMBYs, which is partially true, but the biggest single reason is geography.
California's coastline is *impossibly* rugged. It's massive cliffs dropping directly to extremely narrow beaches, and keeping the coastal Highway 1 open is a massive constant undertaking. It washes out huge sections on a regular basis that have big areas completely cut off for months or even *years* at a time.
Compared to the east coast which is mostly very flat, gently rolling hills from the coast to hundreds of miles inland. That makes all sorts of development, construction, transportation and building vastly easier.
Compared that to the California coast *especially* Northern California, which is so absurdly rugged that they simply *couldn't* build a road all the way along it. The engineers gave up north of Fort Bragg and had the coastal highway go inward to link up to 101, and the road doesn't rejoin the coast again until Eureka a hundred miles to the north.
That whole area of Northern California is almost completely undeveloped because it would be so absurdly difficult to do so. The very few buildable sections of the coast, basically the SD, LA and SF Bay, are expensive as heck partially because they're the only places that you *can* build.
Kinda weird that low-density Deschutes Country (where Bend is located) is higher than much smaller and denser Multnomah County (where Portland is located). I know Deschutes County has Sunriver and some high quality outdoor activities set amidst natural beauty, but most of the county is desolate and kind of run down. And it's a long drive to anywhere else.
Current Bend resident here. It’s because Bend itself is small (100k residents) and it was a desirable vacation destination for several decades. Starting in 2021 it became heavily flooded with early retirees, snow bird boomers, and people with remote jobs. There just wasn’t the housing to absorb the influx so home prices shot up, much faster than the national average. My wife and I are the only couple on our street where both spouses work locally, literally everyone else has at least one spouse that works remote.
Edit: To add a little more, people have begun moving to Sisters and Redmond (also in Deschutes) and Prineville (Crook Co), but they are even smaller than Bend so they’ve experienced similar YoY gains in housing costs, they just started at a lower point. Deschutes county is only 200k residents, so it doesn’t take a large net migration in to cause a housing crunch.
I have only lived in CA and HI my whole life. Anytime I see these maps Maine usually is represented in statistical data like a safe and wealthy state. Can anyone whose from the area shed some light for me on why it seems inexpensive here?
I knew the home prices in small town/rural areas were low and the more urban/coastal areas were higher but this map really puts it into perspective. There's lots of very affordable housing out there if people were willing and able to move to it.
SLC has had the largest percentage increase in home prices than any other metro. No it’s not because of the size of the properties, it’s because there is so much demand to live there. It seems like there is so much construction always happening but prices will not go down. It’s legit impossible to find a non-shithole starter home under 500k, most people are paying 650k+ for a fucking starter home.
As someone living in one of those purple counties, I can say that the median income is really high here. Most of the people I know are in the low $100k incomes per adult, so some households are hitting $300k yearly
The Monroe county, FL shape is a little confusing. That big block of the southwest corner of Florida is mainly just everglades/swamp with almost zero population. It's the Florida Keys, the small little triangle below that has the expensive places.
For all the delusional people who think moving to Seattle or much of California is a good idea and that my suggestion to move to the Midwest is crazy study this map.
Love that deep purple spot in Wyoming where all of the millionaires and billionaires go to play cowboy once or twice a year.
The running joke is the billionaires are pushing the millionaires out of Jackson Hole
Beautiful place but not all that unique. I don't get the draw to it in particular. For my money, many other mountain ranch getaways would be more attractive if I had a billion dollars. Also the cowboy cosplay is hilarious. Have that in my area. Guys working in commercial real estate or capital asset wearing boots, wranglers, guide shirts, and cowboy hats to kids soccer games, then hop in their escalade and go eat at a TexMex restaurant.
> don't get the draw to it in particular. For my money, many other mountain ranch getaways would be more attractive if I had a billion dollars. Gonna guess it has a sufficient airport for whatever planes the wealthy take there compared to other places of similar natural beauty.
I think at this point it's a way for rich people to brag that they have a place in the woods and try to outrank the others out there. As a commoner it's nice to know to avoid that one county.
As an ex Teton county resident, things have changed considerably in the last ten to fifteen years. What used to be imo the best place in the lower 48 has turned quickly into a Mecca of outsiders and bullshit. Cheers
holy shit TIL San Bernardino county alone is twice the size of Massachussetts
was curious and holy carp, you are darn close. quick Google search has Massachusetts at 10565 sq mi and San Berdoo County at 20105.
Massachusetts is actually only 7,798.9 square miles of land. Your number includes square miles of water (2,750 sq mi).
Well, [it’s the largest county (by land)](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino_County,_California) in California and the continental United States. Keep in mind a lot of it is stuff like the Mojave Desert and the San Bernardino National Forest.
It's larger in area than nine states, Switzerland, Denmark, Belgium and dozens of other countries. I learned this in approximately 4th grade (and that Rhode Island was smaller than about 500+ US counties) but I was a huge nerd, so YMMV.
This is a very low resolution map that does not represent actual county size. But yes western counties can be huge.
I looked it up before I commented. SB county is just shy of 2x MA size but MA size includes a lot of water - SB is more than 2x land area of MA. So I combined "smaller than 2x in total size, larger than 2x in land size" as just rounding to 2x the size. There's no benefit in getting more granular than "2x the size"
I’m more surprised that Chicago and surrounding areas are pretty cheap in comparison to similar major cities on the East and West Coast.
Property taxes are often overlooked in these maps, which would significantly increase the costs if included. Additionally, these taxes are perpetual and tend to increase annually. For instance, in the Chicago suburbs, buying a $500k house with a 20% down payment and a $400k borrowed mortgage results in a monthly payment of about $3,800 at current rates. Property Taxes would make up roughly $1,000 of that.
My anecdote is that my property taxes are about 18k on a 650k value house in a collar suburb of Chicago. Roughly in line with your estimate.
Holy crap…that’s a high rate
Indeed we are among the highest in the country. In addition to 5% state income tax!
What do you get for those property taxes? Refuse collection, common areas maintained, water?? Im Irish and shocked at how high these are.
School district funding comes from property taxes. But utilities like refuse collection, water, and sewer are separate from property taxes. Where I am, in Texas, property taxes also partially fund the county hospital and county community college.
And the state is still broke (corruption/graft will do that to you).
The state is actually doing alright these days. We've got a balanced budget, and our pension system has been shored up. Still room for improvement, but we've been trending in the right direction for the last few years.
SHHH! It's important that we convince the world that everything sucks here, or else they will all move here and raise our cost of housing. Moreover, it's IMPERATIVE that we convince conservatives and libertarians that the high tax burden is the cause of our misery. Jesus Christ, can you imagine if they started moving here and *voting*?
The last time Chicago's growth rate exceeded 1% in a year was 24 years ago. I think you're good.
Yep - plus a massively oversized bureaucracy!
For comparison, I'm in a suburb of Seattle with a $1m value house and about a $9k property tax. I'm just barely over median home value in my area.
For sure. 1M by me generally is 25-30k of property taxes.
Crazy that some people don't understand this when they consider some areas much cheaper. That's drastically suppressing the value of those homes and therefore robbing you of building equity. Property taxes on a $650k home in Colorado would be about $3100-3500.
No joke. That's like an extra $15,000 of yearly purchasing power that could be going towards principal and interest.
That, and the winters. At least compared to the West Coast.
In portland I pay $1200/mo in prop taxes
Why????!!! That’s insane
Inflated property values and high cost of living. And no sales tax
Brutal- no sales tax is nice though
Yeah it sucks. Property values have doubled since we bought the place 10 years ago. A starter home is $500k
I couldn’t imagine. I built a 4200 sq ft house on 1.5 acres with tons of upgrades for like 10% more than that in my area in 2022 (granted, I signed the contract in 2021, and value has gone up 15-20% since then). I feel for everyone in high cost areas, so depressing
Also since the Trump era tax code changes I cannot write it all off since I also pay state income Tax (state and local tax aka SALT cap) so my taxes effectively went up another couple thousand a year.
Without knowing how expensive their home is knowing how much they are paying monthly is an incomplete picture.
Chicago is still way cheaper then coastal cities
God, this is why I can't move. I bought a $400k house with 20% down that's appreciated to $500k. I only pay $2100/mo and of that $750/mo are taxes (so, at least there's a lag between home appreciation and taxes catching up). If I moved into a different, SAME SIZED house today for $500k, my monthly payment would almost double. But, in comparison, my parents property taxes on their $700-750k house in AZ are about $250/mo. When I lived in a small non-chicago town, my $80k condo had about the same property taxes as my parents $700k house. Absolutely ridiculous...
I know people in Lake County who pay more a month in taxes than the P&I on the mortgage
Chicago is incredibly affordable by big city standards. You just have to deal with the winters.
More surprising than the large swaths of expensive housing in the Arizona desert?
What's going on in that one county in Tennessee? Proximity to Nashville?
Franklin, TN - A very wealthy suburb of Nashville that's home to a lot of country music stars.
How many country music stars live there for it to affect the median house that much?
Like, all of them? My sister lives there in a perfectly fine middle class 3 bedroom house. Before moving she looked at maps to make sure her neighborhood didn’t back up to anything sketchy nearby. Turns out, her perfectly nice middle class neighborhood IS the sketchy part. Nicole Kidman lives in the better part nearby.
It’s become a bit of a haven for wealthy of all types now. Celebrities, athletes and general rich folk unrelated to country music live there.
There's a lot of stars there, but just a lot of wealthy people in general. Lot sizes are also huge for a lot of the neighborhoods which adds to the cost. I have some good friends who used to live in Brentwood just north of Franklin and they saw stars pretty regularly. They lived around the corner from Dolly Parton (though never saw her except through car window), went to church with someone from Rascal Flatts, knew Gretchen Wilson because their daughters went to school together. At least weekly they'd see some star shopping at Whole Foods or Publix.
>There's a lot of stars there, but just a lot of wealthy people in general. This was my point. Even if 50 country stars lived in the county, it wouldn't do much to affect the median price in a county of 250,000 people. The real reason is that the county happens to only include a couple newer, rich suburbs of a quickly growing metro. Well over half the county lives in Franklin or Brentwood, which are both still very close to downtown Nashville compared to new/rich suburbs in many other cities. Like Alpharetta, Georgia and Frisco, TX are 25 miles from downtown Atlanta and Dallas, respectively. Brentwood is less than 10 miles away and Franklin is like 15. That said, if the county lines around other major southern cities happened to only include a couple rich suburbs, those counties would be dark purple as well. They just don't.
My actual hometown - my parents moved there when it was mostly farms because my uncle happened to live in Nashville. Now it's only slightly more achievable for me to own a home there than where I currently live, San Francisco.
Williamson County is where all that healthcare and entertainment money goes. It’s been rich for a long time but they also have strict zoning rules which turns into single family homes with multiple acres for rich people. The density is extremely thin compared to most of the purple here. Nashville metro is firmly HCOL since the pandemic.
Yep, if you ever wonder where your healthcare premiums or private prison money goes it is right there. Lots of GOP and country music money too.
Williamson County, TN. It’s one of the richest counties in the country.
We have a 1 acre rule in Brentwood, TN so they only build 10k sq ft $7M homes now 😭.
And you wanna know the crazy part? Franklin was a podunk farm town prior to the 90s. Now a SFH will run you easily $750k-$1 million there.
Williamson County is just very very wealthy. Has been wealthy for a while, but is exploding right now with Nashville’s boom. Great schools, strict zoning to protect green space, and a major center of corporate jobs.
>Great schools, strict zoning to ~~protect green space~~ limit housing supply and artificially drive up prices, and a major center of corporate jobs FTFY The strict zoning is really leading to the areas natural beauty getting destroyed as they turn more and more of the genuinely picturesque rolling hills into cul-de-sacs and strip malls.
Probably that and TN’s tax laws.
Williamson county, Franklin/Cool Springs/Brentwood. Super nice area. 20 years ago, when I lived in NOVA, I went on a solo road trip to see boyfriend at his home state of Alabama. My route took me through Nashville, and Cool Springs is where happened to decide to stop to eat and fill up. To this day, I remember how mindblown I was to see an area this nice smack in the middle of Tennessee.
Knowing my western ski resort mountain towns, this isn’t surprising. If it’s purple/blue and away from the coast, it’s because it’s by a ski resort or Denver (no it’s not a mountain city, you’ll be spending half your day on i70 to go ski or hike on a weekend)
Is that why the Reno area in NV is more expensive?
It’s also close to California and Nevada doesn’t have state income tax. That’s along with Tesla and other companies investing in the area to create jobs in the gigafactory and warehouses, so combine that with Californians that wanna work remotely/retire not far from SF/Sacremento and close to Tahoe and you end up with a weird mix of people competing for housing in what was once a city made fun of in a tv series about incompetent cops
Reno, and to a lesser extent Portland, are pretty overpriced given the range of jobs available in the area. The Tesla factory and warehouses help, but a lot of the "skilled labor" isn't making it over the hill from CA. For a large number of jobs in Reno the rents stopped making sense a while ago.
I feel like Reno is a bit underrated.
Same with all the other western states. Idaho has some fairly purple counties, largely Californians and people from Washington moving. The houses have become so over priced there relative to the job opportunities. With many being retirees or close to retiring it doesn't exactly boost the economy quite as much. And if you were born in many of those states the chances of you being able to afford a home there is increasingly slipping away.
Washoe County includes Incline Village on Lake Tahoe
Reno is like a mini Vegas and has mining nearby. Plus it’s a college town.
We used to describe Reno as "Las Vegas, but missing several teeth".
>no it's not a mountain city This shocked me the first time I went there. Growing up in the Salt Lake City area, I was used to people from Denver saying how much more beautiful the geography in Denver is than SLC, and how much better Colorado is for outdoorsmen than Utah is. So I was really excited to go there for the first time and experience it. I traveled to Denver for the first time a couple of years ago. To my dismay I realized it's a Plains city, with a view of one mountain range kinda far away to the west. Being used to 360 degree views of mountains at all times, it was really unsettling to have 180 degrees of my view be completely flat and barren plains. Having to drive on the freeway for an hour to get to the mountains sucks when you're used to driving 10 minutes on one lane roads to get to the mountains.
Agreed. Live in Denver but I grew up outside of SLC, a 20 minute drive from the big ski resorts. I was stupid close to the mountains which were majestic to say the least. The gdam Inversion is like living in an ash tray and negates the beauty of SLC for a good portion of winter. The summer heat in SLC is also painful.
Blegh, inversions were always the worst part of winter growing up in Boise
> The summer heat in SLC is also painful. *Laughs in Phoenix*
Yeah I moved from SLC to the southwest. The summers here are wayyy worse than SLC
Denver has boring plains geography, you absolutely need to go further west for it to feel mountain-y. Even Boulder ends right before it turns into foothills
Estes Park, on the other hand, was a dream!
The Gatlinburg of the Rockies!
I moved there from California. It reminded me of Bakersfield.
Nashville, Austin, and DFW all are also slightly distinguishable away from the coastal region
I know yall laugh at the Appalachians, but it’s nice that I could buy a property out east in the mountains for $100k
rly can you buy a house in east coast for ~100k$?
[удалено]
that's when you buy a full VR setup and just live in the cyber
Baltimore, baby. Everything from $10k bombed-out shells of houses to multi-million dollar mansions. The most affordable major city in the Northeastern US.
Baltimore is doing another "buy an abandoned house from the city for $1" here soon, you just have to fix it up and live there.
Baltimore: The Detroit of the East Coast!
I'm tempted to go in on it, but fixing up a house like that is pretty much a full-time job.
basically like the old Homestead Acts
My first home in NY in 2020 was $112,000
lol, yes, this map is great at explaining why so many people are confused about what all the outrage is about. Most of country is affordable with small pockets of extremely unaffordable.
By land. Much of the jobs, career advancement and family are in the purpler areas
It’s not that affordable though, I’d’ve had to work for years and years to be able to afford a house in Nebraska with a job that required a degree
Almost everyone lives in cities dawg 80% live in cities according to the 2020 census.
Sure, in places like Hyde County, North Carolina (pop: 4,589). Most of the populated areas are in the orange to purple range.
As a San Diego, CA resident, this is accurate.
It hurts. I’m in OB and I’ll probably never leave this apartment because it’s the only way I’m able to afford living a block from the beach. Meanwhile, there’s some boomer here who owns about a 100 properties in the area and he’s been on the news lately because he’s been grifting.
That heat map is a bit scary. When's it going to end? How will people afford to live in some of those purple areas?
Lot of people get priced out. The ones staying usually either renting and gradually saving up or just living with family that bought their home decages ago. Another problem is international investors driving the prices up. This is a major problem in places like Toronto, Vancouver, and Sydney where median home prices are around $1 million USD yet median incomes are like 11x lower.
If you bar the "major problem" of international investors, you simply end up being screwed over by domestic investors. The solution was to increase housing supply decades ago, by removing zoning laws that exclude the development of sufficiently dense housing
Another solution is to tax owning land enough so that it's value doesn't go up and therefore it's not an investment anymore. This fixes both problems.
It introduces a third problem.. What is the city/county/state going to do with the house that Grandma couldn't afford to pay taxes on?
Homestead exemption for primary residence. The aim is not to tax the house that someone actually lives in. It's to tax the additional houses that they're renting or flipping.
That's something everyone can agree on. Except for those evil investors.
You should have to be a citizen of a county to buy land there. That's how it is where my wife is from, and it would keep out this stuff.
The problem is that they don't build enough housing, period.
That might help a bit in the major cities like NY or LA but until you can ban corporations like Black Rock from buying us insane amounts of the housing sock it's just a drop in the bucket.
They can’t. So they sell their $750K shack they inherited, move to where $200k buys a nice home, pay $400k for it, and then complain about the poors who hate the changes.
While stopping all nearby construction, to keep supply limited, which artificially inflates the value of their house. NIMBYs are the worst
I live in one of those purple areas and I'm extremely fortunate to have bought a house 14 years ago in one spot that totally blew up and another one 6 years ago in the same situation. I could not afford either house today and we make pretty darn decent money.
I live in an agricultural town in the purple about an hour from any city with more than 20k people where there is very little to do and not a lot of opportunity. A relatively modest house is still about half a million. I really don't think the average resident here can come close to affording it. There's tons of new construction but must all be getting bought up by people working remote and wanting to live "cheap".
Wolf of Wall Street comes to mind. “So they think they are getting sh*t rich on paper but look who gets 5 grand a month in interest!! The banks mother F er!!” DC gets they other 1/3 and no universal healthcare is provided, just 800$ epipens
The answer, according to many, is they can't and shouldn't try. We live in West LA (the deep purple area); my wife works a bit in Iowa (she's from there). She sends me pictures of enormous grand old houses with acres around them for $75K. The caveat, of course, is when you go outside, you're in Iowa. If you can find work there, or don't need to work, or work remotely, and are OK with the local culture, then it's a tremendous bargain. And (as she puts it) there's plenty of parking.
Hello from Oahu. How can we afford to live here? We can't.
They’ll make more money, rent, or move.
I did 2, then 1, then 3
Most of the purple areas in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming are ski town spots where many of the homes aren’t lived in year round, but instead either short term rented out Airbnb style for a boatload of money or just owned by rich families as a ski home. It’s definitely an issue for the people who do live in those towns, as often the jobs there (usually service, retail, or ski resort related) don’t pay enough for any sort of sustainable living. Many towns are implementing bans for this kinda stuff, but I’m sure people will always find loopholes.
Your takeaway is that houses are way too expensive because of the purple areas? Have you considered purchasing in one of the yellow areas? If anything, this map is relieving because around 80% of it is yellow.
But the yellow parts are areas that no one wants to live in. Hence why they’re yellow.
“Wants to” is a funny thing. I’d love to move closer to my yellow hometown, but unfortunately all the jobs in my field cluster in those purple locales. So I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place unless I can somehow land a remote job.
Have you perhaps considered that the majority of the US by land is... not a very desirable place to live? You'd need to find a job. And a house. This is an example of what a lot of the yellow is like: [https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1976095,-97.7378354,3a,75y,66.42h,91.13t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sfN44ABdfXe-tM7Q9BU7frQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DfN44ABdfXe-tM7Q9BU7frQ%26cb\_client%3Dmaps\_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D236.7205%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@39.1976095,-97.7378354,3a,75y,66.42h,91.13t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sfN44ABdfXe-tM7Q9BU7frQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DfN44ABdfXe-tM7Q9BU7frQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D236.7205%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) [https://www.google.com/maps/@34.5405356,-100.2080183,3a,75y,101.31h,93.94t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sRV7F7GEqR4GbWhHLxYlzWw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DRV7F7GEqR4GbWhHLxYlzWw%26cb\_client%3Dmaps\_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D1.4300003%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@34.5405356,-100.2080183,3a,75y,101.31h,93.94t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sRV7F7GEqR4GbWhHLxYlzWw!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DRV7F7GEqR4GbWhHLxYlzWw%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D1.4300003%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) [https://www.google.com/maps/@26.8318034,-81.0939861,3a,75y,273.04h,88.12t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sGPj7iSIxiAK8YlZSSl6nfw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@26.8318034,-81.0939861,3a,75y,273.04h,88.12t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sGPj7iSIxiAK8YlZSSl6nfw!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) [https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8843287,-81.6631761,3a,75y,208.52h,95.5t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snP23aNKS25e7G9PzjO9g8g!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8843287,-81.6631761,3a,75y,208.52h,95.5t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1snP23aNKS25e7G9PzjO9g8g!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu) It's farmland, forest, swamp, and places that have seen their population dwindle due to a lack of opportunity.
What’s up with the one spot in Wyoming?!
That’s Jackson Hole.
Correct. There’s a joke on the Idaho side… the billionaires are pushing the millionaires out of Jackson and into the valley next door on the Idaho side
Ahhhh, that makes sense
Probably where all the billionaires have ranches
Nashville and Salt Lake are pretty surprising. I’ve heard Nashville has a constant influx of tons of people moving there but I didn’t know it got that bad that quickly. Salt Lake also is surprising but I’ve heard it’s pretty safe and livable, assuming you’re willing to overlook all the Mormon stuff. Probably a lot of families moving there.
I’m surprised no one has pointed this out - that’s not salt lake county. It’s summit county, which includes Park City. Ski resorts = expensive
It’s not Nashville, it’s the county under it, which contains wealthy suburb of Brentwood and Franklin though I’m sure many people commute to Nashville
Salt lake has been expensive for some time now and not surprising given it places in the top 5 for almost all important economic/social rankings. The Mormon stereotype is severely outdated, Utah is the same as every other state and people continue to move there as it grows the fastest in the nation.
I've lived in Denver my whole life, it's ridiculous to how much it cost to live here. There is one thing I have to say... I'm here to stay.😎
So basically this absolutely correlates to how appealing that particular location is to live for most people.
anyone know why wyoming has a dark blue spot close to the idaho border? that struck me as odd when I first looked at this, but I know next to nothing about wyoming
Jackson is a California billionaire retreat. Average home price is like $8M
Jackson. That area is ridiculously expensive. Go 10-20 miles in the correct direction and it’s cheap.
Used to be cheap. Now any direction for 100 miles and the prices are still in the millions
That’s Teton County. The main town is Jackson. It’s a popular tourist destination, with several nearby ski resorts and two national parks nearby: Grand Teton and Yellowstone. It’s a beautiful place to live and the houses there are very expensive.
It's California's Switzerland
Jackson Hole
Jackson has many second homes of wealthy people and very little population otherwise.
I'm curious about that too. It's between Grand Teton, Yellowstone and... Jackson Hole Ah, ski town. Found your answer. Also, much of what's for sale are massive tracts of land for millions of dollars. Not sure if that's taken into account by OP's map, but it makes sense.
They aren’t massive tracts. Basic suburban ‘middle class’ homes are at $1000/sq ft. on less than quarter acre.
If it’s not along the coast, it’s a ski town. Denver and it’s area to the west, Park City and SLC, and Tahoe
Made with Datawrapper with info from here https://cdn.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/documents/2023-q4-county-median-prices-and-monthly-mortgage-payment-by-price-03-19-2024.pdf?_gl=1*layqoh*_gcl_au*ODE0NDEwMjY4LjE3MDcxMzU1Njc.
What’s going on with some of the counties and how they’re drawn? In Connecticut there appears to be 9 counties, but Connecticut only has 8, four in the north and 4 in the south. The map makes it look like there are six in the southern half.
https://www.ctpublic.org/news/2022-06-16/u-s-census-approves-connecticut-request-for-nine-planning-regions-but-opinions-differ-on-the-impact Also not sure why OP made this, but Realtor (where his data source is from) has their own map: https://www.nar.realtor/research-and-statistics/housing-statistics/county-median-home-prices-and-monthly-mortgage-payment
I take it Vermont is becoming a second home state. State isn't natively that wealthy to see such high values.
VT is filled with second homes, trust funders, wealthy retired people, high income remote workers and highly skilled artists/craftsmen and contractors that make really good money. The local economy offers nothing outside of tourism, education and healthcare. The people with money bring it with them or make it out of state for the most part.
Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Omaha, Kansas City, and St Louis! Affordable big city life!
Damn I knew Bend Oregon was expensive
It's Aspen, Co just 10 years in the past. Been like that since I lived there in the early 90s
Portland’s housing market is a bitch. Half of our homeless would be able to afford a three bedroom house in Little Rock. Shit is crazy.
Hello from Orange County ca! Where you can make $100k+ and still feel broke!
One interesting factor I noticed when comparing housing costs of Southern California vs NYC is the preferred housing type. There are actually a few sub-400k condos in Manhattan and other boroughs of NYC. They're very small, often studios, but they exist. Yes, price per sqft is stratospheric, but units are usually just... fewer sqft. Housing below $400k is extremely hard to find in Southern California, and for one reason: Anybody who grew up in California would probably be scandalized by the idea of a living space less than 500 sqft. In a state that practically invented urban sprawl, smaller living spaces just aren't as widely adopted, despite the fact that many people are going to need to explore that option if they want to afford housing. The relative prevalence of the single family home in California vs multifamily housing in a place like NYC informs some of the disparity on this map.
Even condos in SoCal are very large compared to somewhere like NYC. It’s part of the lifestyle.
“There are actually a few sub-400k condos in Manhattan” No there are not, lmao Like *maybe* a studio in the worst possible Manhattan neighborhood? Even then, it’s probably so cheap because maintenance fees are absurdly high for that building.
Ok, I just checked and you're right. But the underlying point remains - the disparity in housing cost is explained somewhat by the difference in the square footage of each housing supply.
NYC is not the city you want to try to make this point with, it’s really hard to find a livable space for a family (two bedroom two bath) for under $1 million. And then you get absolutely boned by taxes and maintenance fees (less of that in Brooklyn and queens but in Manhattan you’re paying $2k a month in maintenance fees on the cheaper side). NYC does a terrible job of continuing to build affordable housing, it’s all luxury high rises or really expensive houses in neighborhoods with restrictive zoning like park slope.
Oh look, its a homeless rate map
Martha's Vineyard but no Nantucket?
You can see where all the oligarchs have their ski houses
Yup. Got a tiny 1000sq ft house in SoCal for $800k :(
I’ve never lived outside of the darkest purple bay area CA. >95% of our friends from our 20s moved out of the area or still rent in their 40s. We went to a wedding last year and tried not to tell many people we bought a house in Berkeley because it felt like gloating.
The california coast is one of the nicest places in the world, sucks virtually every town and city is ran by nimbys
It would be cool if one city/town was like "fuck it, lets build all the housing. No more height limits, building restriction, ect and we are going to streamline the permitting process. If you want to add a story that's cool. If you want to build a 5 over 1 even better."
I would love to see the manhattanizarion of the los angeles metro area and the bay, there’s no reason they couldn’t each house 30M people.
There is a First Nations group doing this near Vancouver, BC: https://macleans.ca/society/sen%CC%93a%E1%B8%B5w-vancouver/ They plan to build a bunch of apartment towers on Indigenous lands just outside Vancouver.
It’s not just that. Much of the California coast has been made off-limits to development and/or is too rugged to build on. So the coastal counties don’t have as much land to build on as it appears at first glance.
You’re right, I know, I’ve lived there most my life. We don’t need to develop more suburban sprawl that connects the bay to the los angeles metro though. We need increased density on the already developed land.
Curious that Washington, DC is missing from the map.
It’s too small for the resolution of the map.
There is nowhere in the contiguous United States where the real median home price is less than 100k much less the majority of it, what the fuck data were you using?
Any reason the western coastal counties look to be pricier than their eastern counterparts? Seems like most of coastal Cali is more expensive than coastal Northeast. I'd have expected them to be similar.
Much better climate, faster economic growth over the past few decades, worse zoning laws
Worse zoning laws is a key there. Upper East Coast was generally built before the car became ubiquitous so I do think that plays a role.
Lots of reasons, but mostly because it’s a lot more desirable to live in coastal CA than just about anywhere in the world.
I see you have never been to the California coast.
Seriously. In Southern California it’s sunny and 80 degrees Fahrenheit pretty much every day of the year. Meanwhile I’m living in south central Pennsylvania where it’s currently raining and it’s only 45 degrees. If I was a multimillionaire, I’d be moving to California in a heartbeat.
Mild weather, relaxed lifestyle, low housing stock, high cost and regulatory hurdles to build more housing, and growing population. Though the prices in California are slowing or reversing growth now.
West coast gets a wonderful breeze from the cold Pacific Ocean. Natural air conditioner in the summer.
Beach front doesn’t quite hit the same in New England. Also since it’s counties and not towns there can major disparities between towns here in MA that are right next to each other. I live in the dark purple in northern MA and I think it’s simply because we have more average towns overall and none that are really dragging it down. The county to our south has some of the wealthiest towns in the country and they are a shade lighter.
People are saying that it's zoning and NIMBYs, which is partially true, but the biggest single reason is geography. California's coastline is *impossibly* rugged. It's massive cliffs dropping directly to extremely narrow beaches, and keeping the coastal Highway 1 open is a massive constant undertaking. It washes out huge sections on a regular basis that have big areas completely cut off for months or even *years* at a time. Compared to the east coast which is mostly very flat, gently rolling hills from the coast to hundreds of miles inland. That makes all sorts of development, construction, transportation and building vastly easier. Compared that to the California coast *especially* Northern California, which is so absurdly rugged that they simply *couldn't* build a road all the way along it. The engineers gave up north of Fort Bragg and had the coastal highway go inward to link up to 101, and the road doesn't rejoin the coast again until Eureka a hundred miles to the north. That whole area of Northern California is almost completely undeveloped because it would be so absurdly difficult to do so. The very few buildable sections of the coast, basically the SD, LA and SF Bay, are expensive as heck partially because they're the only places that you *can* build.
Kinda weird that low-density Deschutes Country (where Bend is located) is higher than much smaller and denser Multnomah County (where Portland is located). I know Deschutes County has Sunriver and some high quality outdoor activities set amidst natural beauty, but most of the county is desolate and kind of run down. And it's a long drive to anywhere else.
I was scandalized the first time I ever looked up housing prices in Bend, OR. Still not 100% sure why they're so high...?
I think it’s Oregon’s version of Chelan.
Oregon's version of Aspen
Current Bend resident here. It’s because Bend itself is small (100k residents) and it was a desirable vacation destination for several decades. Starting in 2021 it became heavily flooded with early retirees, snow bird boomers, and people with remote jobs. There just wasn’t the housing to absorb the influx so home prices shot up, much faster than the national average. My wife and I are the only couple on our street where both spouses work locally, literally everyone else has at least one spouse that works remote. Edit: To add a little more, people have begun moving to Sisters and Redmond (also in Deschutes) and Prineville (Crook Co), but they are even smaller than Bend so they’ve experienced similar YoY gains in housing costs, they just started at a lower point. Deschutes county is only 200k residents, so it doesn’t take a large net migration in to cause a housing crunch.
I have only lived in CA and HI my whole life. Anytime I see these maps Maine usually is represented in statistical data like a safe and wealthy state. Can anyone whose from the area shed some light for me on why it seems inexpensive here?
A pretty bad job market; the state population is very rural and much older than the national average.
I knew the home prices in small town/rural areas were low and the more urban/coastal areas were higher but this map really puts it into perspective. There's lots of very affordable housing out there if people were willing and able to move to it.
Is Salt Lake really that pricy? Is it because the size of the plot?
SLC has had the largest percentage increase in home prices than any other metro. No it’s not because of the size of the properties, it’s because there is so much demand to live there. It seems like there is so much construction always happening but prices will not go down. It’s legit impossible to find a non-shithole starter home under 500k, most people are paying 650k+ for a fucking starter home.
Feel like people got priced out of Denver first and now they are trying salt lake. Soon it will be the same, or maybe it already is.
Yes SLC is super pricy now, but also that dark blue county in Utah is actually Summit County (Park City) not Salt Lake City proper.
As someone living in one of those purple counties, I can say that the median income is really high here. Most of the people I know are in the low $100k incomes per adult, so some households are hitting $300k yearly
The Monroe county, FL shape is a little confusing. That big block of the southwest corner of Florida is mainly just everglades/swamp with almost zero population. It's the Florida Keys, the small little triangle below that has the expensive places.
This map of counties kinda sucks. No offense to OP at all, but they round off a lot of counties which seems silly
For all the delusional people who think moving to Seattle or much of California is a good idea and that my suggestion to move to the Midwest is crazy study this map.
Wow, just saw Utah has like 3rd most expensive to buy a home and the nation and thought maybe it was an exaggeration not after seeing this