Inner suburbs in the NYC area (what is under discussion here) are way too expensive for the average young couple, who have NO desire t0 live in a house built for a car salesman in 1949. Therefore said neighborhoods are either taken over by upwardly mobile immigrants, who knock the old houses down and build McMansions up to the property line, or they are rented out and subdivided.
Texas, on the other hand, is a place where you can get a mansion for $300K and there are no zoning laws to worry about. I've never seen cheaper housing in my life.
Go west, young man go west!
Did you settle on a place yet?
Similar situation when I lived in a D.C. suburb and in Southern California.
Therefore said neighborhoods are either taken over by upwardly mobile immigrants, who knock the old houses down and build McMansions up to the property line, or they are rented out and subdivided. Texas, on the other hand, is a place where you can get a mansion for $300K and there are no zoning laws to worry about. I've never seen cheaper housing in my life.
Here it is very common for immigrants to buy a 3-4 bedroom house and pack several families into it. There goes the neighborhood...not because of race or ethnicity...but because the type of people who are willing to live like that devalue adjoining properties. If a professional suddenly has four families move into the house next door, he'll sell in a heartbeat and move.
As for Texas having inexpensive property, two key reasons: (1) the ability to sprawl the suburbs because there is plenty of available land to do it; and (2) many still remember how the market collapsed in the late 80s with the oil bust and the S&L scandal. Prior to that bust, there was actually a neighborhood in Dallas that had the most expensive residential property in the country...people were bragging that it cost more to live there than Beverly Hills.
Ohio housing is fairly cheap, too. Of course Texas has better weather.
Yep. We found a 1974, 2050 square-foot ranch style on 4 acres for $115,000.
The only deed restriction we have is that you can't have more than 1 dwelling per every 2 acres.
Another up side is we're just 6 miles fro the boat launch on Lake Travis.
The down side is that the house WAS built in the '70's.
(Avocado green and harvest gold....what WERE they thinking?)
LOL
the main phenomena I see are multiple wage earners per home now on long island. extended families live in them, to afford the cost and the property taxes. you can easily have 4 wage earners in a household.
You haven't been here in a while obviously. Having just bought a home in December, I'm as up on DFW housing prices as anyone outside of real estate. $300k will get you a nice middle class house, but that's it. $150k will get you a 35 year old 4bdrm home. For a real nice home (still not a McMansion) you're looking at $500k+. Not at all unusual to see some of the real nice 4,000sqft homes for $800k to $1.2m.