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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

NYC is unlike most housing markets in that for a lot of people, an international pied-a-terre in NYC is a sign of luxury and wealth, whereas no one really gives a crap if you have a second home in Seattle or Chicago or Boston.

In the US the only other markets that operate like that are probably LA, Miami, maybe Honolulu.

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"is a sign of luxury and wealth"

I wish they'd just go to therapy instead

. . . or they're rich enough to buy it, but they legitimately enjoy having it?

For a lot of people, many more I would guess, there is no substitute for access to the city, culture, highly skilled dynamic people and organizations, etc.

LA is a huge sprawling pile of homes of various prices. Portions of LA have some cachet but a "second home" in LA could be this wonderful box:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/10955-S-Spring-St-Los-Ang...

Nearly all metropolitan housing markets have bad areas; you can find a home for <200k in the South Bronx in NYC, for example.

Yeah, my point was that I doubt a 10% increase in prices is being driven by people shopping zip codes.

They want the actual residence for whatever reason - more than they want the money.

While they want specific residences, it does also have the effect of driving the market up more broadly, because people who would otherwise buy those units must then bid up the next available units.

That’s not even really a listing for a house, if I was interested in purchasing it I would take the land value and subtract the cost to demolish the building to get a fair value.

Some bits of Colorado maybe?

ski towns and places like Jackson Hole or Bozeman are unique in their own right but my understanding is that the demand there is mostly domestic-driven, amplified by a by-definition small housing market size.

this doesn't affect big cities near nature nearly as much, like SLC or Denver.

Does New Jersey get no love ?

Well no, because the entire point of using an NY address for clout is that it's in NY. NJ is definitively not NY for that purpose.

Housing is also pricey in NJ adjacent to NYC in cities like Jersey City and Hoboken, but its a ferry / PATH train away from Manhattan.

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