Comment by siruncledrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by siruncledrew | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how long of a lasting impression this creates? I've seen videos from Japanology on Youtube about rural communities trying to come up with incentives and revitalization measures to varying success. From an outside perspective, it's commendable to see small communities care and try to be creative and "startup-y".

At the same time, this also is like the analogy "a solution looking for a problem". Supply exists, but demand does not.

For example, across the Rust Belt in the US, probably someone could buy a house for $10k or an entire block of homes for dirt cheap, but it would be rundown and not very much fun to live in a town with more inconveniences than amenities.

Unless someone is trying to do the homesteading(?) thing, having a free/cheap house somewhere is only a small part of the equation. Maybe I'm wrong, but I would bet even if someone from a city like San Fran, LA, or NY took a deal to live in (e.g.) rural Missouri in a $500 house, they wouldn't be able to last 2-3 years before going stir-crazy.

> For example, across the Rust Belt in the US, probably someone could buy a house for $10k or an entire block of homes for dirt cheap

In 2021?

> Maybe I'm wrong, but I would bet even if someone from a city like San Fran, LA, or NY took a deal to live in (e.g.) rural Missouri in a $500 house, they wouldn't be able to last 2-3 years before going stir-crazy.

According to zillow, uninhabitable \ barely habitable wood frame homes requiring substantial repairs still sell for about $30,000 in rural Missouri.

A while back I did some research related to this, and while I wouldn't want to get into the uninhabitable house part of it, there do appear to be habitable and in fairly good condition 3BD size houses in very rural areas for sale in some small midwest towns in the USA for around $40-50k. If you go look at some small towns in southern IL and set the zillow max price to 50-60k you'll see them.

At the very lowest end of the scale I found habitable houses in the 20-30k range in KS, OK and that area in small farming towns that have seen significant post-1960s exodus and population decline.

If you have the budget to build your own custom house and do something like an off grid solar setup, there's plenty of places in rural eastern WA state where you can buy 20 or 40 acres for $1k per acre.

I think the point, though, is that irrespective of the exact price in the Rust Belt, prices are a fraction of those in desirable places like SF or NYC.

You can't create demand by government fiat. People aren't living in rural Japan or Missouri because nobody wants to live there, for a littany of reasons of which the direct financial cost of home ownership is but one.

I think the bigger issue is that prices may be extremely inflated in both locations, relative to construction cost of replacing current improvements with new improvements of equal utility, due to national or global real estate credit bubbles, which have the power to wreck the economy.

The external value of the location should not be heavily capitalized into the sales price regardless of the amenities of the location. When someone asks $400,000 for a building which costs $200,000 to replace, the buyers are likely to build a new building next door for cheaper unless the land is impossible to acquire or being held off the market at high prices. The duration which private owners are allowed to hold vacant land off the market and hold out for higher prices is ultimate determined by public financial policy.

https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/house_type/?searchQuer...

I found some dirt cheap ones.

The cheapest listing I see in Iowa City is $25,000 for a vacant lot with no building.

edit: This is a good indication of real estate bubble btw.

Dayton, OH

$11,700

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/114-S-Ardmore-Ave-Dayton-...

I live in the Dayton area - packages of homes have popped up listed on Zillow for a million or so for 10-20 homes. The one you linked is close to perhaps the worst, most economically depressed area in the city. Crime ridden food desert were the heroin epidemic persists.

that is a sad looking street

There are a lot of really crappy streets like that in Dayton. It was once ranked as one of America's fastest dying cities. Several years ago I heard there was a multi-year backlog of abandoned houses to demolish. They also have had deals similar to the ones you hear about in rural Japan where you can get a house practically for free if you just agree to fix it up. I used to live there, which I how I knew to look there when the discussion turned to how cheap of a home you could buy.

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