The Housing Squeeze
Well, the Seattle Times just went in pissed in our Corn Flakes with a feature article called “The Housing Squeeze”. The tagline for the Seattle Times story?
Only nine areas in King County left for middle-income buyers.
The gist of the story is that housing prices are skyrocketing, but incomes aren’t keeping pace, and pretty soon, there will be no middle-America left … at least, not in Seattle. Right now, the only housing left in Seattle for middle-income buyers is in a little mountain town called South Park. OK, it’s not a mountain town, that’s from a cartoon, but the South Park area of Seattle is well-known for having crime problems making it fairly undesirable.
I’m starting to wonder, would it be worthwhile to start teaching kids young about the virtues of home ownership, maybe establishing first-house funds instead of college funds or retirement accounts? After all, you’ll always need somewhere to live, and college loans are far cheaper than mortgages. If a child was unfortunate enough to have been born in a high-cost community, maybe we need to prep them for life away from home? Maybe a more pessimistic view is in order … let’s prepare our kids now for the likelihood that they will simply never own a home.
The part that kills me about all of this is that my wife and I were all set to buy a house in 2000. The day we were supposed to close, I was laid off, and as newlyweds, we struggled with whether or not to sign the papers. We made what I still believe was the right decision at the time … we walked away. We couldn’t have known that our future home in the Mill Creek area of Bothell would have appreciated more than $100,000 in the following years. We also couldn’t have known that it would take me more than two years to find a job after that, or that I would end up going back to school. But if we could have made our payments, we would have come out way ahead, and have had a great home in a reasonable distance from Seattle.
The reality of the situation is finally hitting us, and the tough part is that both of us have career paths that will keep us tied to major metropolitan areas. I’m sure there’s an answer, but I’ll be damned if I know what it is yet. Are lottery tickets an “investment opportunity?”
3 comments:
I don't know about the Seattle area, but I know that in California real-estate value is artificially inflated because liberal governments restrict new construction for silly environmental reasons.
If you're having the same problem there, then one potential answer is a change of government.
Yes, the Seattle legistature restricts building here as well.
Too bad a change of government is somewhat difficult to accomplish :)
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