I think that’s the key to success(?) in the Seattle real estate market–don’t stop drinking.
Yeah, no kidding. The house we bought 8 years ago? I couldn’t afford it now.
Hey y’all I grew up in a small log castle on top of a mountain deep in a forest in Tennessee that probably cost less than my college education; my views on home values are enormously skewed :P
Log castle?? We need pics, stat!
I live in L.A., so… yeah.
Probably worth noting I exaggerate a little, but it’s somewhere in the ballpark of 2K square feet with, well, all of that yard.
You could get a pretty big and good house here for 400k, unless it’s on a river or a lake then you need 1.5 mil. The other places I’ve visited… heh, not even close.
There are so many people around me that want to see housing crash again so they can afford a house. These idiots don’t seem to realize that housing falling does a lot more than just bring housing down but good to know they want to watch it all burn so they can have some.
How much effect does an approval rating in 2017 have on the outcome of the 2016 election?
When you said castle I thought you meant something like this:
I pass by that now and then. More info here.
That looks pretty awesome actually, especially with all the snow.
It does cut both ways though - an HOA in a mostly conservative area that bans political signs means you won’t have to drive home every day past a wall of MAGAs.
I lived in a spot where the HOA was contracted but never officially formed; the main thing it would have done is forced people to mow their yards. Because something like 4 of the properties are used as rentals, and renters by and large suck, many of the yards never get maintained; but since the rental properties were still owned by the person that built the subdivision, she desperately did not want to be on the hook for yard care, and so has made the rounds every couple of years drumming up votes to prevent the HOA from being formally incorporated. I imagine the moment she’s thinking of selling out though her tune will change and will suddenly see the enormous benefits of having pristine yards when potential buyers are judging the area.
Sure I get the value of an HOA. I just see them frequently abused. We had a year or two of just horrific HOA cases that hit the news that reminded everyone just how ridiculous these groups can become if run by the wrong people. And that’s the rub isn’t it, you need it to be run by reasonable people and understand the contract you signed. If any of that doesn’t line up well you can spend months or years in court at the expense of everyone over something stupid like not allowing someone to park their truck in their driveway because it’s too big to fit in the garage.
Apparently that’s the way our government runs too. It works okay when everyone involved has a stake, a reasonable understanding and is generally competent. When that’s not the case, it makes news and costs a lot money to settle the issue.
Yea, HOAs have some very significant downsides. There was this famous story about a wife who became so depressed when her husband was deployed to Iraq she stopped paying her bills, including her HOA dues; the HOA then legally foreclosed on her home and flipped it to another buying for pennies on the dollar. https://www.aol.com/2010/06/07/u-s-soldier-evicted-by-homeowners-association-while-serving-in/
It is like more or less everything in life; shitty people given power will do shitty things. The real question is what is the % of shitty vs non-shitty people in a society, and then you fit that expecation of bad behavior to the laws and limitations on their authority you create as a government and society.
Note that it was Howard Jarvis’s insight into how HOAs could be mobilized as a political bloc that led to California’s ruinous Proposition 13. HOAs have a lot to answer for.
As long as we’re still on our little real estate porn tangent, here is the house I lived in as a kid, in Great Barrington, MA.
My parents bought it in 1983 for I think around $100,000. Apparently that’s about $250,000 in today’s dollars.
According to Zillow another house on the same street has been converted to condos, one of which sells for $392,000. Not clear from listing how much of the house that constitutes…
My modest bungalow in close-in north Portland would be out of my reach now. Bought it 20 years ago before this neighborhood (Overlook) blew up. I could probably just hand someone the keys and walk away for 3 times what I paid for it.
House I grew up in was bought by some far-too-rich nutsack and gutted, nuking all the original woodwork that my parents had painstakingly preserved. Last I heard he’d spent 3x the purchase price in refurb costs.
Fuck that whole shit. But mostly fuck the insanity of our society, where the concentration of wealth is so absurd that these things happen.
I’m way too angry about all this right now to put an actual useful post together. But this Gini coefficient shit is going to burn our society down, mark my words.
My sister-in-law’s mom recently passed away, they listed her house in Silicon Valley for $1 million… they ended up getting an offer of 1.5million… and probably just to raze it to the ground and rebuild.
You’re being ridiculous. I’ve never owned, say, a battleship, yet I don’t have much trouble comprehending that they’re ridonkulously expensive. And every kid who’s ever bought a slipcover grasps the concept of protecting the value of an investment.
Maybe you have some brain thing that prevents you from being able to generalize concepts, I don’t know.
A battleship doesn’t cost several orders of magnitude more depending on where it’s docked at.