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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

In major cities.

So, live outside the city. Or in a smaller city.

I’m in what most on HN would consider to be a very rural area, with the closest town having a population of 1,000 and a bigger town of 20,000 30 minutes away.

Home prices are completely out of whack here too - I would guess they’ve gone up 50% in the past few years. Good luck getting anything like what you want either. I bought my home back in 2011 and my one big thing was that I wanted at least 5 acres, but preferably more. I ended up getting a home in desperate need of updates on 15 acres for 180,000. At the time places fitting that criteria in my budget popped up pretty often.

I just did a search in Zillow for anything with more than 5 acres, and all I could find is some farmland, a 40 acre lot that’s mostly swamp for 800,000, and a 12 acre lot that’s somehow split in to 3 pieces for 140,000.

Relatively crappy homes in town that were 100k back when I was looking are now north of 250k.

Just to compare, my parents bought an amazingly beautiful 60 acre lot back in the late 80s on a truck driver and school bus driver’s salary. They then built a huge brick house on it, though to be fair my dad did a lot of the work himself.

My wife and I both have degrees with good paying jobs and there’s no way we’d ever be able to afford anything approaching what they have.

It sounds like you're not really buying a house, but you're buying space. Acreage is expensive and it will only get more so because it's literally impossible to create more of it. You can build housing vertically and put them as close together as possible. You can't magically make more land.

The vast majority of people won't be buying acres of land. Nor should they, it's not sustainable.

Sure, but there's still plenty of space in the area. We're nowhere close to building vertically.

The homes without acreage have all gotten significantly more expensive too. I just looked at a random house in town with a normal sized lot for the area. It's selling for 250k, was last sold in 2020 for 212k, and was sold before that in 2016 for 163k. The listing says it's back on the market with "new kitchen hardware and fresh paint on walls and trim," so no significant updates.

A nicer home on the most desired lake in the area - 1.3 million. It last sold in 2007 for 410k. A less nice home on the same lake sold for 730k. In 2011 it sold for 335k.

I know all those prices (save the million dollar home) are definitely cheap compared to cities, but the point was that the price increase has been stupid everywhere. There are so few homes on the market in the area it's ridiculous - they're gone instantly.

Why do you want 5 acres? What are you doing with it?

I grew up on 60 acres. My best memories from my childhood are of me exploring our woods with our dogs and I wanted the same for my children.

The privacy is nice, too. My wife and I regularly go in our hot tub naked and have only been surprised by a hunter tracking a deer once ;)

>Relatively crappy homes in town that were 100k back when I was looking are now north of 250k.

We'd need to know more about your area to really assess this... $250K really isn't very much money. In my area, you could afford that house on our minimum wage, even as just a single-income household. In fact, the mortgage on it would be less than our typical area rent.

I hear a lot of stories like what you are sharing about the beautiful 60 acres back in the 80s... let's just say that baby boomers for all their complaining about 18% interest rates actually had a whole lot of things working for them that we don't today. Competition is different because capital moves around the world easily.

It's a town of 1,000 where everyone with money lives out of town either on a lake or on a piece of land. Kids that lived in town were looked down upon a bit in school because it usually meant they were poor.

That's somewhat changed as that town has had a bit of a resurgence with touristy shops. The biggest lake in the area is a popular tourist destination, and plenty of rich people own "cabins" on other lakes as well.

The point was the homes were dirty cheap, and now they're significantly more than what I paid for a much nicer house on what most would consider a ton of land.

If your idea of 'major cities' is the top 500 cities in the country, I think we need a redefinition to just 'cities'.

More accurately, houses are expensive in places where many people want to live. The recommendation would be to buy a house where people dont want to live, which is kinda lame.

Thank you, the suggestions of "Just move" are wild to me. People create a whole life with friends, kids, family in a location and saying "Just move" to afford a house is ridiculous.

"Just move" is what humans have done since time immemorial. There are folks who complain and those who act.

It is lame at first. But then eventually people in a similar situations move in, and you are surrounded by people who wanted to live in major league city, but settled for a minor league city. Then you make friends and your situation is not so bad.

No, it's affecting smaller cities too, as the article explicitly addresses.

Yes so live outside a smaller city

Housing prices are up in counties in West Virginia where the population is down since the pandemic and still continuing down.

Land prices are up in the absolute middle of nowhere Ocotillo Wells desert where it's unimaginably hot much of the year and the only reason anyone has heard of it is dirtbiking.

In short, it's up everywhere. Some places more extreme (Phoenix, Boise, Nashville, Austin) than other places.

Ocotillo Wells may be a bad example, because it is adjacent to the Salton Sea. There is an ongoing conversation about building the world's largest lithium extraction plant at the Salton Sea, which would massively increase development in tbe surrounding area, and permanently raise land values in Ocotillo Wells (among other towns).

I'm not saying you're wrong, just that OW may be a bad example because there is a separate local phenomenon going on.

Interesting. What would cause demand to increase literally everywhere?

Btw, respect to your username.

Prices are set by the relatively small number of houses that are traded at any one time. This can be either demand or supply driven.

Realistically, what’s causing this increase is the large amount of cheap money floating around in the economy at the moment. Something that should change in the near further assuming the Fed stays it’s course in tightening the money supply this year.

The other factor at play that should be noted is the shift to WFH, the vast majority of the US population lives within major metro areas, even a small shift to rural areas creates huge spikes in demand. Housing isn’t something that can be scaled up in a small town quickly.

Population growth, nimbys everywhere.

"Reduce your quality of life and distance yourself from your friends and family, it's cheaper."

yes everyone needs a 1.25 hour commute to work

That's a myth. Mine is 15 minutes. All cities are not New York or LA

You have to realize that most people's commutes are 30+ mins though, right?

> most peoples commutes are 30+ mins

Average commute time is 28 minutes [1] and if I didn't just mess it up from the raw data [2] the median is about 24.5 mins.

EDIT: median of the state level means. So it's still possible that "most" people are above these numbers, although it seems unlikely given the outlier bias can be stronger in the high direction.

[1] https://getjerry.com/newsroom/how-american-commute-has-chang...

[2] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/a...

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