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Comment by earl | Hacker News Reader

Seriously, you do understand the concept of different costs of living, right? Your astonishment at paying $0.5MM for a house is irrelevant; that's the going rate and probably cheaper than renting in that area.

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The cost of a home varies a lot more between metro areas than rent does. Similar rentals vary about 4x between the most expensive and least expensive metro areas; home prices vary more than 10x between the most and least expensive metro areas. (Both vary even more between particularly expensive and inexpensive neighborhoods - the numbers are metro area averages).

I live in an area very close to there (still in the DC metro) which has houses which go for 400K and up, and yet I pay just over $1200 in rent. Renting and buying are often out of sync with each other, for whatever reason (in east Alabama a few years ago, it was the other way around; you could easily buy for less than rent).

You pay $1200 for rent for yourself; or yourself plus a significant other; or for yourself, significant other, and three children?

if it's a major city on either coast it's pretty easy to pay $1000+ for rent. most 1 bedrooms in sf go for $1500+

Just me, but it's easy to find a three bedroom apt for less than $2000 around here.

However, after looking on Zillow, I find things have either changed considerably in the last year or I misremember, since I can see a bunch of places for well under $400K around here, now. So, never mind.

"that's the going rate"

Didn't the "going rate" turn out to be dumb and unsustainable for the nation as a whole?

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