Then you must be living in a really expensive city.
Financial sector means being in a financial hub though so not much choice.
I'll probably end up moving further out and accepting a long commute eventually.
That solves my property too expensive problem how?
More seriously...not super keen on living in the US to be honest. Could probably do it practically, but given my life circumstances it would be a net loss.
This forum isn't Teamblind.
Like if you want to do that power to you, but this seems like such an insane question to just ask a stranger on the internet given that there are very obvious reasons why a person might not want to do that
My parents grew up in the "golden years" of the 60's and they couldn't afford it either. That's why they moved to a small town with cheap housing.
There's a reason Pittsburgh's population declined by the hundreds of thousands since the 1970s. Sure you can get a cheaper house. But you aren't making coastal money.
In the 60s those "small towns" had manufacturing plants you could just walk in and get a job at, many of which were union and paid extraordinarily well.
As many jobs as there are in SF, LA, NYC, etc, they don't comprise 100% of all jobs.
The reason many of these places have cheap housing is largely because of abandoned neighborhoods, vacant lots, condemned housing, ancient housing which requires A TON of work...the neighborhoods people want to live in are pretty expensive still.
Not to mention the old school mentality and opportunity cost. I left one of those old school firms. It was 8-5 everyday, no variation, no flex hours. No vacation in your first year. No comp time for travel. Expectation of working additional hours. Poor yearly raises, etc. Small job market = small network = less salary jumps.
I'm not surprised there is a utopian city where salaries are high and housing is cheap.
There are a lot of options for everyone, regardless of which trade-off one chooses to make.
Yea if you want to live in a crap, run down neighborhood with a crappy school district and a house built a century ago that isn't code and will cost 50k to fix. I lived there - these statistics are nonsense. They don't tell the whole story.
The median home is not always "crap, run down with a crappy school district". Yes, there exists a quality distribution, and the bottom quintile often has the worst quality, but that's true in every State and every Country.
This data isn't groundbreaking either, Zillow shows a comparable median home value in Pittsburgh: https://www.zillow.com/pittsburgh-pa/home-values/
Just eyeballing some CURRENT listings, you'll find:
On Zillow: A 3BR house in a top 10 Pittsburgh school district (Greater Latrobe School District) for $179K https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/34-Loretta-St-Latrobe-PA-...
On Redfin: A 2BR house in a top 5 school district (Hampton Township district) for $130K https://www.redfin.com/PA/Allison-Park/2695-Ginger-Ln-15101/...
These are perfectly good homes in perfectly good school districts.
Again, single data points only get you so far in an argument — but most importantly, the aggregate data corroborates it. Nobody claims that outliers don't exist, but we're talking about medians here.
Hampton is in Allison park which is a nice suburb. The median home price there is 295k. The house you selected is pretty small, 2 br, 1 bath, which makes a ton of sense - not a lot of young people looking for good jobs are going to want to live in a suburb with older people and families.
> Again, single data points only get you so far in an argument — but most importantly, the aggregate data corroborates it. Nobody claims that outliers don't exist, but we're talking about medians here.
But you cherry picked a value WELL BELOW THE MEDIAN IN HAMPTON. The median is 295k and rising fast. So tell me again, what cheap housing are you talking about?
Oh btw, unless you're lucky and at a FAANG (which have fewer jobs here) you ain't making anywhere near 6.
Go ahead, move to Braddock for that 50k house and breathe in the wonderful air from Clairton Coke Works and Edgar Thompson. I doubt you'd read that on zillow.
> Not a lot of young people looking for good jobs are going to want to live in a suburb with older people and families
You’re moving the goalposts. You started off talking about school districts — not a lot of young people care about that. If you want affordable housing outside of nice school districts, and not in the suburbs, you’ll find plenty of that in the Pittsburgh city center, also.
The fundamental argument is that if you earn the median income, and you need to live in a good school district, it is more than easy to own a home and build equity in property — you just have to sacrifice being able to live near dim sum and access to “Hamilton”. If you don’t care about school districts, you can find a place with a short commute from work. You might even be able to get some dim-sum action. Trade-offs!
> Pretty small, 2br, 1 bath
Are young people looking for 4BR’s? I seriously think you misunderstand what the “median home” means — it’s not a McMansion. Also 2BR is large enough for a couple with one child.
> Go ahead, move to Braddock for that 50k house
Yeah but...you don’t have to do that. You can move to a far nicer neighborhood in the Pittsburgh area for $150k. It all depends on which trade-offs you’re willing to make given your personal circumstances. $50k is many standard deviations below the median, we’re not talking about that. You don’t have to be a FAANG engineer to earn the median income, especially at the household level.
> But you cherry picked a value WELL BELOW THE MEDIAN IN HAMPTON
No, I showed you the aggregate median home value in the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area on 3 different sources now, and then made a cursory sweep of the current state of the housing market to corroborate the aggregate metrics. It was pretty easy to do. The data doesn’t lie. That’s far more than you’ve done in this discussion: un-verified personal anecdotes devoid of any citation or sources. It’s honestly pretty remarkable.
That's why people left Pittsburgh en masse and other cities have larger populations. Ultimately if it didn't make sense to go to big cities people would stop because of the costs - clearly the market says it's worth it.
Not everyone wants to live in the midwest with terrible food options just so they can afford a house built in 1940 with knob and tube wiring. These costs are never considered because people just want to say things like "lol move" without considering why people just don't move.
That said remote work makes middle american and rest of the world post wuflu much more possible.
I wonder what will happen to big expensive cities after all the young people leave for the midwest and south?