Posted on 04/16/2020 12:42:05 PM PDT by GuavaCheesePuff
California is too expensive because it is CA...........
I live about 45 mins north of Morgantown, just over the PA line.
Reasonable property prices, beautiful country and low crime.
Only way you'd get me to NYC,Filthadelphia or some other s***hole is bound and gagged in the trunk of a Buick.
How much of California and New York rental properties are owned by CHINA?
Property taxes
Define ‘homeownership’. People with a mortgage? Paid off home? I doubt any state has a paid off mortgage rate in the 70%.
It includes properties with mortgages. This really is not news. West Virginia and Maine have always traded places as to has the highest home ownership rate. It is a function of the rural nature of both states. More recently Maine has been building more rental properties in Southern Maine along with a very large boom in single family and condo housing. I suspect building in West Virginia is probably centered around high income earners moving out of suburban Washington, etc.
I think as part of this, both Maine and West Virginia has the oldest housing stock. This is both good in bad.
Remember when New York and California people tended to look down on places like West Virginia? Now it’s just the opposite!
And there ain’t a trailer park in California, right.
West Virginia's median home value was $99,000 in September 2019.
California's was $550,800.
The income that would buy you a house in West Virginia would only get you a little more than a fifth of a house in California.
Land costs more in California than in West Virginia and there are more restrictions on building.
A California would counter the "settled culture" argument by pointing out that more people have wanted to live in California than in West Virginia.
True.
...I would rather live in a home “up on blocks” in some remote hollow than “live” in a luxury high rise termite mound in NYC.
Ditto
...Almost Heaven WV.
West (by gawd) Virginia... Montani Semper Liberi
Personally, I make $200k+ in D.C./B-more area, if I could get paid $90k+ in Michigan? Wife and I would be gone tomorrow..
Most people cannot afford to live in CA.
Only about 7.5 million single family homes. The rest are apartments. 40 million people.
Today at my very modest home in Stanislaus county I picked 5 big artichokes and watered the Lemon, Orange, Peach, Plum and Olive trees.
Where else can that be done? Nowhere.
Between regular summer fruits and vegetables, there’s also a winter and spring bounty.
For the home gardener the harvest season is literally year round.
I was kidding.
I have been to the Greenbrier. It is a beautiful place. My sister in law is from Roanoke, VA area. That is in western Virginia. I always kid her about growing up in a shack with no running water, using the out house and gettn store bought clothes. ya’ll
“OK, I will say what the rest of us are thinking but are too afraid to say:”
NOT flaming you at all, just truing to be informative.
I live in Montana, however for three years (1997-2000) I had a management position with my company which put me in seat 1-A @ 6:10 AM every other Monday. I had employees in Rhode Island & Delaware and over saw the training/skill sets of our company owned subsidiaries staff in Mississippi & Nevada and trained staff (via licensed contractors of our proprietary hardware/software) in Connecticut, Arizona, New Mexico and California. Lots of other travel dealing with state government regulation and I had work in Europe as well.
That stated the single nicest folks I met with and interacted with were from West Virginia. Wonderful folk. It did not matter if they were floor staff, supervisors, management or State required Government regulators/State Police. Really fine folks.
There was a town in far western WV that had the steel mill shut down many years Prior. Pat Buchanan actually announced his run for president in (sorry I cannot remember it’s name). I would pass through this town on my way to Wheeling, WV. It was somewhat odd, the main state road actually went THROUGH the steel mill.
There were lots on nice homes, I recall a nice looking brick home with slate roof, nice yard that was for sale literally all three years...I guess no-one could come up with the $15,000 asking price.
WV has had some tough times with coal mines being closed and the like.
Chuck Yeager came from WV, tough good ol’ boy.
What no Sensimilla ?
I thought all you California Hippies grew their own pot?
Again, I was KIDDING.
I have lived in the countryside of New Hampshire for 35 years. I grew up in western New York, south of Buffalo.
You could not pay me to live in California or New York state again.
Of any place I would consider moving would be to the mountains of NC, up around Boone of Blowing Rock.
The countryside of NH has lots of mobile homes. It also has lots of dumpy little houses. There are a few old mill towns in northern NH, away from the ski resorts and lakes that are very poor. Towns like Berlin, where the paper mills shut down years ago and they have yet to recover.
The problem with West Virginia is that are a lot of people that seem to have a drug problem. Hillbilly Heroine(METH) and real heroine and fentanyl. The per capita use of Oxycontin was highest in West Virginia. More than any other state. There was more Oxy shipped into one county in WV than any other county in the USA. When the Oxy ran out, they switched to real heroin.
WV has a much higher than average unemployment rate. Coal is gone. Nobody, except the Chinese want to use it anymore to make electricity. It is not going to change. Learn something else to do. The jobs down in the mine are not coming back.
“Again, I was KIDDING.”
“Coal is gone. Nobody, except the Chinese want to use it anymore to make electricity.”
Maybe East-coast coal is dead but it’s alive and well out here in the west (and Montana has $1,000,000,000 (that’s a billion) in cash, securities and other investments in our ‘Coal Tax Trust Fund’ which cannot be spent without 75% majority of each house and signed by the Governor. 12 coal trains rumble through my town every day. Or is it 24? They just increased the number last year...
Are all those coal trains going to Tacoma to be shipped on a boat to China? Yes, I understand that. The BNSF and UP railroads love that haul/business.
I am a lumber broker. We(my company)buy lumber from Thompson River in Thompson Falls. Stoltz in Columbia Falls. Weyerhaeuser in Kalispell(formerly Plum Creek). RY Timber in Livingston and Townsend. Pyramid in Seeley Lake. Plus Idaho Forest Products and just about every other major sawmill in the Pacific NW US and Canada.
My company sells Western Building Centers and several other lumber yard and truss plants in your state. In between our exchanges today I just sold two trucks of lumber to Coeur D’Alene and 4 trucks into Boise.
Actually, up around Hayden Lake, ID would be another place I would consider moving to.
I once was on a United Flight that had to make an emergency landing in Billings. I spent a few hours in the airport. Then caught a flight out to Spokane.
I have driven the Lewis & Clark trail over the Lolo Pass down to Missoula a couple times. I drank beer from a glass boot at a brewery in Missoula at a bar that used to be a train station. I was so drunk that night, I locked the doors on my rental car, but left the windows open in the parking lot of my hotel in Missoula. I left my briefcase and camera on the front passenger seat. It was still there the next morning.
Where do you live in Montana?
I heard there are only two things from Montana. Steers and queers. I don’t see no horns on you boy! :)
I think most of us know about the weather in CA, but a lot of us aren’t home gardeners, anyway. So, instead of picking artichokes, lemons, oranges, plumbs, and olives, we do that at the supermarket and pocket the %5000-$6000 you pay each year in higher income, fuel, sales, etc. taxes and housing expenses. It’s all a matter of choice.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.