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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

My experience in driving through California's interior doesn't jibe with that headline. When I stop for lunch or a break I like to check out the local real estate scene and its often the case in these cities that there are many houses and other living accommodations available at modest prices. Hard to imagine a city like Mojave not meeting it "goal". Of course if you limit yourself to cities of 1 millions residents or more, well I could see that they were having challenges.

As other people have pointed out, if California wants to lead then the state should be something to admire. And being 42nd out of 50 on K-12 education and highest poverty rate, aren't good things to lead with. Lots of opportunities to improve.

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> My experience in driving through California's interior doesn't jibe with that headline.

So, how does driving through the interior with apparently zero knowledge of what the relevant goals are do anything to inform you of whether cities are meeting them.

> When I stop for lunch or a break I like to check out the local real estate scene and its often the case in these cities that there are many houses and other living accommodations available at modest prices.

Modest for you, perhaps. Modest for the incomes in the area? Probsbly less so. In any case, does this tell you anything about whether they are meeting the needs assessments that look at availability in multiple levels? Probably not.

> Hard to imagine a city like Mojave not meeting it "goal".

Mojave is a “census-designated place” in unincorporated Kern County; it not a city or other jurisdiction of its own subject to the targets; Kern County is (the headline about cities is wrong, jurisdictions subject to the targets include both cities and counties, the latter for their unincorporated areas.)

Kern County is among those not meeting targets, though only in the Above Moderate income Regional Housing Needs Assessment, not the Low or Very Low income assessments.

So, a couple of questions:

1. What do you consider modest prices?

2. What exactly do you do to check out the local real estate scene?

Because I recently left California to get off the street after moving around California a bit in search of affordable living and doing like 3 years of research, and my point of view and yours are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book.

He referred specifically to the California interior. Most counties not on the coast or bay have very affordable areas; I've driven the northern 2/3rds of I-5, most of US50, and all of I-80 in CA and seen hundreds of properties for a fraction of Bay Area prices. Things look different once outside of a Bay Area (or San Diego) bubble.

>> ...seen hundreds of properties for a fraction of Bay Area prices.

Anything under 300K? How about 200K? A fraction of the Bay area doesn't necessarily mean affordable.

You look at, say, Fresno and there are properties for sale under $200K (although that's below the median of $300K+). I assume those are not the most attractive places but they certainly exist. That's the 5th most populous city in California so it's not exactly the middle of nowhere.

> "... not exactly the middle of nowhere."

Anecdotally, a of my friend moved from the Bay Area to Fresno and explicitly claims it's in the middle of nowhere.

If you're in one of the largest cities in the state, I'd suggest you're pretty much not in the middle of nowhere by definition--any more than, say, Las Vegas is. Now, one may reasonably not like Fresno but that's a different matter.

I have some sympathy for why people feel there's nothing in Fresno. For a major city, it isn't very urban. It sprawls tremendously. There isn't really an urban core with high rises anywhere. It lacks a lot of amenities that people expect when moving to a big city.

Music events at Woodward Park often attracted women in shorts or skirts and cowboy boots. Culturally, the city reads sort of like half a million farmers and ranchers decided to move to the suburbs.

It is a fairly unique city, with an international airport and multiple national forests nearby. But "check out the natural beauty of our great outdoors!" is typically a small town or rural marketing pitch, not the pitch of a major city.

Last I checked, it was the 5th largest city in California and I think the 34th largest in the US. So I think there are 20 US states that don't have a city of that size. The entire state of Wyoming, our least populous state, has about the same number of people as the city of Fresno, in the neighborhood of about a half million apiece.

Fresno is a very unusual city and I think most people can't really relate to it. I spent considerable time baffled by its terrible reputation and simultaneously trying to wrap my mind around the place. It isn't like most big cities.

It has a terrible reputation for air quality. I found that weird when I lived there because I could see the stars at night better than anyplace else I had lived. On the other hand, moving elsewhere has dramatically improved my health. So, in retrospect, I think there are serious environmental issues there, though I am not entirely sure what they are because I remain baffled by the idea that air quality there is extremely bad when the stars are so much more visible than I am used to.

I lived in Fresno. A lot of the stuff under $200k is a trailer, possibly a trailer in a seniors only retirement community. I don't consider trailers fit for habitation and my two adult sons still live with me.

This is part of why I want details. I need a house under $100k. After looking at what that kind of money buys in Cali -- anywhere in Cali -- and looking at what it buys outside of Cali, I eventually concluded it made more sense to go elsewhere. If you can't afford at least $200k in Cali, you can expect it to be a shithole. It would undermine my fragile health and also need ten's of thousands of dollars worth of work. I am happy to buy a fixer, but not one that will ruin my health and my finances.

I can see that you're facing challenges that put you in an untenable situation. And no, I haven't seen any place in California that has any sort of public services and employment prospects and housing where you own the house and land for under $100K.

Thank you.

I don't even need employment prospects. I have alimony and I make my money online. So that wasn't even a factor, and, no, it didn't fly in Cali.

> That's the 5th most populous city in California so it's not exactly the middle of nowhere.

It really is the middle of nowhere, despite being the fifth most populous city in the state.

But, you say, how can that be: the bigger cities are all embedded in even bigger urban clusters [0]. Fresno is, well, in the middle of nowhere.

[0] And even the smaller central cities; Sacramento, is a little smaller than Fresno if you look at the city itself, but the metro area is a time and a half the Fresno metro area.

Houses under $200K in Bakersfield, CA:

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Bakersfield-CA/3506_ri...

The two best suggestions are Bakersfield and Fresno (edit: or the middle of unincorporated desert LOL)

You're telling OP to live in hell and it still costs more than they can afford.

Per Wikipedia [0]:

> Between 1970 and 2010, Bakersfield grew 400% (from 70,000 to 347,483),[33] making it one of the fastest growing cities in California.[17]

It can't be too much hell if so many people want to live there that the population quadrupled in 40 years.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakersfield,_California

Does that follow?

Here, I found another example: > Between 1968 and 1975 the Dubai's population grew by over 300%

Maybe OP could find a sweet oil job there!

I am sorry you got downvoted. I have been to Bakersfield. I absolutely consider it undesirable.

I don't know if you realize it, but oil is, in fact, a big part of the economy in Bakersfield. And air quality is terrible because of it.

https://www.bing.com/search?q=bakersfield+economy+oil&FORM=E...

I was in Fresno for more than 2 years. I spent a lot of time doing research on the internet. I was willing to move anywhere within California where I could afford to buy a house and where I could make my life work without a car. This means, no, it can't be some cabin in the middle of nowhere where you have to drive for an hour to get to a grocery store.

I would still be interested in the OPs answer. I wasn't just living on the coast or researching coastal communities before finally looking elsewhere and ultimately leaving.

May I ask where you ended up? If you're uncomfortable sharing the city, state would be fine. But: Where are the walkable cities in the US?

I (coming from Europe) travelled on the East and West coast and both times was astounded by how much US living relies on having a car. I'm myself pretty anti-car-ownership by now, but I think this is much easier to do in European cities.

I am in a small town in Washington state, maybe a couple of hours from Seattle. It doesn't have everything I want, but I am off the street and my life is slowly coming together here.

One of the reasons I ended up here: I had no problem arranging to get here affordably and efficiently via train and intercity bus. Many of the small towns I researched in the western half of the US were a case of "Good luck trying to get there!" and/or would have cost a great deal more just to get there, on the order of two to three times what it cost me for train and bus tickets to get here just for tickets. And the reality is that if you travel for a couple of days or so, you want the sleeper car if possible or to stay at a hotel at some point, etc. Thus,the places that are that hard to get to wind up having additional expenses involved in just getting there.

An additional benefit of that is that I don't feel trapped here. If I want to go somewhere for any reason, whether for travel or to move again, getting out of here without a car is not some intimidating obstacle. I can readily get on an intercity bus and go to a variety of places in this region. I haven't looked into it, but I imagine it would not be too hard to get to the Seattle Tacoma International Airport and, from there, out into the world.

I was a military wife for a lot of years. I like living within a couple of hours of a major city and a major airport. I have not flown in years, but I have friends and family all over the planet and I always keep it in mind that I might need access to the ability to seriously travel.

Many years ago, I previously lived in Richland, WA and its downtown center was fairly pedestrian friendly as well. I don't know how easily you could get there without a car. It did not make my radar for where to go to get off the street.

Hey, thank you for the reply. Very interesting insight into living without a car in the US!

> Most counties not on the coast or bay have very affordable areas

Very affordable by coastal standards, but with very low incomes by coastal standards, too. Which somewhat offsets the affordability, unless you are talking about, e.g., long-distance commuters working in the Bay Area.

Nevertheless, yes, the interior is better at meeting the targets for Low and Very Low income affordable housing as specified in the report finding the 97.6% miss rate; lots of the interior jurisdictions are only missing on the Above Modest income targets. (Though there are exceptions, e.g., Fresno County also misses on the lower income targets.)

Both fair questions.

Modest is $150K to $200K for a home. I get there this way; At a salary of $48,000 / year (take home $38,753) and allocating a bit less than a third of the take home to paying the mortgage that is about $1K/month or, at current interest rates a $150K - $200K house. $48K/year is about 60% of the median salary in California.

As far as checking out the scene I look at things like how many days on the market for properties that are for sale, infrastructure (markets, transportation, nominal weather, services, crime statistics, Etc) all the kinds of things that I normally would check if I were moving there.

Thank you.

My experience has been that people who are more comfortably well off than I am are not really looking very closely at the details of homes when they survey the lower end homes. I have had conversations with people who claim there is tons of affordable housing and they pull up some low priced listing in Detroit, a city in such a state of crisis that a woman created a non profit to pay water bills there. I have looked at listings in Detroit. The dirt cheap listings I looked at while homeless were mostly a case of "Oh, god, no! I would rather keep sleeping in a tent!" I am talking about burned out husks or houses that had been flooded and now had horrifying mold problems.

Things I was looking for in a house as someone in genuine need of affordable housing:

In walking distance of basics like a grocery store or, at minimum, able to get to such cheaply and efficiently via public transit.

I want something at $100k or less that can qualify for financing. When you look at a lot of super cheap housing, it is cash only and has defects that disqualify it from any kind of bank financing. I have seen houses listed that explicitly said "No foundation. Will not qualify for financing."

A single family detached house that is not a trailer where the price includes both house and land. When buying a trailer you are frequently buying only the trailer, not the land it sits on, and it is located in a trailer court where you have additional rental fees for being on that land on top of the purchase price of the trailer.

I want a modest home in decent shape. I don't mind a fixer, but a lot of cheap housing in the US has major defects that will cost serious money to remedy. It is a sucker's deal. You should not buy a house like that because budget matters. You buy a house like that because it has amazing views or historic significance or something and you have deep pockets. Poor people buying that kind of house are getting stiffed.

I basically want the kind of house I grew up in, something that affords one a lower middle class life with security and financial stability and a future. And it is extremely challenging to find that anywhere in the US. I concluded it does not exist in California. A lot of lower end housing is trailers and condos and stuff being sold as a tear down because it survived a fire.

So the next time you survey local real estate, maybe consider looking a little more closely at the details. Because your opinion that this is not really a problem in California flies in the face of countless articles about the affordable housing crisis in the state that routinely make the front page of HN. There is lots of homelessness there and people getting roommates to be able to afford a place at all. And I have difficulty fathoming how you can so cavalierly ignore the overwhelming evidence and pronounce this not really a problem.

Thank you for your very detailed thoughts. In your experience, are the barriers to small, good quality, affordable homes mainly market dynamics, or do housing codes and local regulations play an outsized role as has been mentioned in other comments?

Government policy, tax incentives, zoning codes, and financing mechanisms are a very large part of the problem. This is not just local. It goes all the way up to the federal level.

I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. I have formal education and have done a lot of reading related to this. It is not an uninformed opinion.

I have seen your comments on many threads here on HN. I just wanted to say I always come away more enlightened about difficulties and nuances of the housing crisis after each additional read. Thank you.

You might have simply picked a bad example, but Mojave isn’t a city, it’s a CDP (census designated place). Most of rural California isn’t a city - but an unincorporated area.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave,_California

Part of the point of SB 827 is to reduce CO2 emissions from transport by building at walkable density and increasing demand for existing mass transit services. Building a house in Mojave does none of those things.

Are you gonna commute from Mohave to Santa Monica for work every day?

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