Plan B Forum

Today I saw a neighbor's home has gone on sale and they're having an open house this weekend. It has two thirds of the lot size that I have and less square feet of house but it has 3 bathrooms and I have 2 (unless you count the bushes out back).

They're asking $1,195,000.00

Unbelievable....

Anybody interested?

Click on the pic....

3 bathrooms? Why?

It has a small unattached room in the backyard with a bathroom in it.

Ah!! That makes sense. Unless the whole family wants to take a bath, or have a shit, at the same time, three is a waste...

And only one person lives there.

Cripes, I thought Toronto was bad. We haven't quite got to the point where a nondescript 3 bedroom house runs into seven figures, but check back with me in a couple of years.

Housing bubble? What housing bubble?

Tangent on the three most important things in real estate*: I am 64 years old with creaky knees, and have been looking for a nice, small, one-story house in a nice neighborhood. I want to be able to walk to church, to the drug store, to Starbucks (not that I'd ever patronize one), and so on. I have a 3,500 ft2 house in a nice suburb that's probably worth $350k. The small houses or "townhouses" in the neighborhoods where I would want to live START at $400k. And of course the townhouses also have the monthly maintenance cost, which averages $250/month.

_____________________________
* Location, location, and location

The prices are astounding in many parts of the Bay Area. This was the reason for the Proposition 13 in the late 1970s -- the relentless rise in California real estate values allowed rising property taxes that threatened homeowners' ability to stay in their houses. Of course, the disparity between what a long time owner pays and what the new owner of the $1.2 million home will pay creates an inequity that is similarly startling, as the property taxes can rise tenfold or more on the sale of this type of house if the current owner has been there since the 1970s.

A lot of Bay Area house prices are driven by the quality of the local schools. If the alternative is a worse school district and put your children in private schools you can pay $40,000/yr and up for two kids. A larger mortgage with the mortgage interest tax break costs less up-front, you are paying most of it with pre-tax dollars, and you recover the difference when you sell.


yrs,
rubato

It has been said that many laws are in place that are primarily purposed to protect the interests of existing homeowners. Laws that protect "green" spaces have the impact of artificially limiting the housing stock. In the interest of preserving "nice" spaces, the working class get squeezed to the point of exit. Which is the purpose, I suppose.

We had a County-wide growth control initiative back in the 1970s when local politics was split closer to 50:50, conservative:liberal than it is now. There were a range of growth limit options and the lefty-environmentalists lined up perfectly with the "lets keep RE values higher" conservatives to favor the lowest annual limit in the set.


yrs,
rubato