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Comment by cwal37 | Hacker News Reader

Lots and lots and lots of dual-income lawyers and consultants. This is one of the areas where, on average, women have their first child at a very late age[1]. Lobbying across a wide array of industries but also defense contractors and such. I was actually just looking at median home sizes/prices[2] in that area for June of this year. I live in Arlington, bought a house earlier this year and discovered $425k is pretty much the bottom of the non-condo market, we only saw about 1 go up per month and everything closed immediately. Feels nuts here.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir...

[2] https://twitter.com/ConnorWaldoch/status/1070301922349981697

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$425K seems delightful here in Silicon Valley, where the bottom of the non-condo market is about $1.3M and the bottom of the condo market is roughly $900K.

Should have known I couldn't mention housing prices without comparisons to the literally-the-most-extreme outlier bay area. The DC area isn't geographically constrained the same way, doesn't have the same concentration of hyper wealth, has immediately-adjacent jurisdictions with regulatory setups more amenable to development to California, and a much better/more extensive transit system. Salaries for your typical fed or consultant here don't come close to the engineering compensation in the bay for lower level employees.

Also, it's not $425k for a single family home. It's $425k for a 60-70 year old brick or cinderblock townhome/duplex between 800-1000 sqft that was constructed as WW2-boom housing.

The $1.3M homes in Mountain View are also 60-70 year old post-war construction of roughly 800-1000 sq ft. A duplex will run you about $1.9M here. New townhomes are roughly $1.6-1.7M. The sort of house that would be considered a modest suburban middle-class dwelling in most other places go for about $2.2-2.4M; a "nice house" (like the one my sister paid $550K for in the Houston metropolitan area) goes for around $6M and can only be had in the wealthy towns like Los Altos Hills or Atherton.

Yes, this is basically an extreme outlier for the U.S. I was surprised to find that it's actually pretty reasonable compared to many urban areas in the world, though - cities like Sydney, Vancouver, Hong Kong and Shanghai are rapidly climbing past Silicon Valley in housing unaffordability.

$425k for a non-condo is downright cheap even by thirdl world Indian standards

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