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Mapping Out US Home Prices
“US Housing Affordability Index. Years of median household income needed to buy median house. The US group Demographia says a market with a ratio of higher than five is severely unaffordable.”
Whenever I see a heat map like this, my very first instinct is to compare it with a population density map. Nine times out of ten there is a near 1-to-1 correlation between the two maps, but in this case there is very little correlation:
My second impulse is always to compare the heat map with the most recent voting map. In this case, while there is a little more correlation (particularly in that “southwest sweep” between Arizona and Colorado), it’s still not anywhere close to a perfect correlation.
After perusing these maps for just a few minutes, I’m left with one big question…
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WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON IN TENNESSEE!??!
Published in Economics
Can it break the data down by county?
It could as of a few years back, when I did a study on income vs. government property ownership in the West. I don’t remember if I needed an extension to the basic capabilities or not. Google’s more advanced functions seem to come and go – they got rid of a SQL-like feature that I had been using.
You need an average income map for context. That might explain Tennesee?
Yup. One conclusion from the study I mentioned a few comments up thread:
In many counties, particularly those in the neighborhood of government owned park or similar areas, you get very different results if you break income down into rents, interest and dividends on one hand, and salaries / small business profits on the other. Real estate can end up priced at the margin to fit the incomes in the first bucket, while the bulk of the population is in the second bucket – assuming a housing shortage which is likely given a large influx of noobs. The classic example is Teton County, Wyoming. You might have heard it called Jackson Hole.
Probably doable, but it’d take even more data cleaning, which, as I said before, is too much work for too little reward.
Now I’m a drunken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett’s Privateers
Your social credit score would be higher if you posted links.
Hey, at least you got to be a privateer.
Basically this for most of those spots including Tennessee.
Or, and hear me out here, it’s Blackrock, who as it turns out are all massive country music fans …
If the country music is good enough those rubes won’t notice the changes.
Then for the sake of my social credit score
Stan Rogers – Barrett’s Privateers – YouTube
Median household income correlates almost perfectly with population density*, but doesn’t correlate much at all with housing affordability.
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* With the notable exception of a few counties in Nevada, Wyoming, and North Dakota. Are these counties hot spots for fracking?
Resource extraction generally. Nevada is mostly gold mining. North Wyoming has been coal, SW Wyoming is oil and gas, western ND is fracking.
Interesting how those counties don’t appear to be in the red zone on the affordability map.
Those jobs pay pretty good. Brandon eliminated a lot of them, but not all.
I don’t there are significant commodities produced in Nova Scotia, PEI, NF. Halifax has a fine port (when it isn’t exploding), but what is there to export? Timber, tobacco, furs, cotton,… all come from south of there. They have fish, but Europe already had fish. The only bankable exports from Halifax are Sidney Crosby and “Rocky” Johnson.
I’d like to see a map colored by years of teacher salary to buy a 3 bedroom home.
This is one for Calif.
A nice home affordability map from Harvard.
And a nice map from 2017 data from Fed.
You need to drive through them to understand. It’s the character of the housing, and how cyclic the businesses tend to be. There’s a lot of single/double-wides, many of them company owned, and some presumably by local rental outfits. In booms it scales up easily, in busts the worst ones end up scrapped – often moldering away out in the sagebrush. A lot of the permanent housing is also low-end, some prefabs or stick built on simple plans. Everyone knows the next bust might be just around the corner, and they might be forced to move, or downsize a business, under the worst circumstances.
This is Klaus Schwab dream – you will own nothing and love it
(Klaus will still have his stiff – but you won’t)
Please don’t say Al Gore.
I don’t know, where did he buy his giant mansion?
He bought it with the money he made selling
indulgencescarbon credits from his environmental company.And selling his TV station to Qatar! But that’s how he made the money, not where he bought it. If he bought it in TN it’d drive the average up wouldn’t it?
I don’t care where he is as long as he’s nowhere near here.
That’s what they’re doing in the Austin area.
You may want to consider pursuing a career as a water diplomat to negotiate between East Texas and West Texas. We need someone with your mentality in Texas.
Several things to add to this discussion, both being reports from a friend living in Reno, NV. (The Friendliest Big Little City In The USA.)
The illegally operating Calif State Franchise Tax Board is upping its surveillance and harassment to the point that multi millionaires are fleeing California.
They are buying 3/4s of a million to multi million dollar residences in the Sparks/Reno area. The millionaires don’t actually live in these places, but they also are careful not to rent them out as then they can’t be considered citizens of Nevada.
So for the next two years, these homes will sit empty. Some upscale neighborhoods are now occupied by half of these non-occupants. This is of course increasing the price of housing in Nevada.
End of report one.
This bucketing of so much housing in resort areas being for the “haves” rather than the “have nots” ends up having affected the restaurant and hospitality industries for much of 2021 and 2022.
If there is little housing available for the have nots, they must live outside that area.
Whereas under Trump, people could fill up their gas tanks for 40 bucks and drive into Mr & Mrs Rich Man’s Land to work as a cashier, waiter, waitress, bar keep etc, but then when gas went sky high, those people making low hourly wages simply quit working. Why stand on your feet eight to ten hours a day just to pay off your bill at the gas station?
Report two out of Nevada:
My friend who was my informant for my prior Nevada report also offered up the following information.
Reno Nevada had quite a bit of “low rent” hotels, places where an individual who was semi on the skids could live for 85 to 125 bucks a week. Not exactly suitable for a young executive’s life style, but far better, I would think, than living in your car.
As time went on, more of these places were demolished. Then over the last several months, the final remaining transient hotels and motels have been bought up.
Usually the land is cleared and a very upscale resort hotel and spa goes in as the replacement.
Now the same forces that have bought up the transient hotels are going after buying up the land where trailer parks are operating. The trailer park residents will probably have six months to a year to re-locate.
But where will they go? In addition to the price of even shabby rental apartments having exploded over the past two years, their outlook is dismal. After all the trailer that they purchased not so long ago is now no longer a financial resource but a burden. Who will buy a trailer from someone if there are no longer trailer parks where the trailer can be permanently installed?