Quick cheatsheet to the CoL crisis: Economic production requires capital and labor.
If you own stock, you reap the returns from capital.
If you own real estate, you reap the returns from labor.
It doesn't have to be this way, of course. At one end of the spectrum, if there were no artificial housing supply restrictions, the returns from labor would go to the laborers themselves.
At the opposite end, with a fully-controlled housing supply, all the income is extracted. The laborers' rent and rent-derived prices - all locally-provided products and services, a.k.a. non-tradeables - exactly equals their paycheck. Perfect camouflaged servitude.
Are the housing supply restrictions new since 2008 when the real estate bubble pop revealed an oversupply of housing ?
In '08 people walked away from underwater mortgages. The market was already undersupplied and overpriced, the price inflation trajectory expectations were just exuberantly overshot.
If you want to see a healthy housing market, look at pre-1970, or at (much of) Texas today.
The national median home price in the US is $385k according to the most recent Redfin data point on 15 Sep.
I find it very hard to believe that the "top 20 most expensive micropolitan areas" has 1/3 of the listed areas cheaper than the national median home price.
Isn’t the median price going to be heavily weighted by metropolitan prices since that’s where the vast majority of homes are located?
Is that median value, or median price of recent home sales? And then what metric does the article use exaxtly?
Six of the top 50 are in Oregon, which is a bit of a surprise to me. But then again perhaps not — the small town lifestyle here is pretty compelling.
> Vineyard Haven, Mass., Jackson, Wyo., and Breckenridge, Colo., are the towns with the most expensive real estate in the U.S.
These are resort towns. Rich people buying larger (than typical for the area) 2nd, 3rd or more homes. If such activity is the majority of the sales then numbers are going to skew up.
That doesn't mean there aren't more reasonably priced homes. It just means those transactions aren't happening as often, that those people aren't leaving, that similarly income'd people are moving in.
Best I can tell the data being used is biased in a sense and perhaps not reflective of the whole of those markets.
> These are resort towns. ... numbers are going to skew up
I would assume real estate prices for ski town would be really different and scale with the walking distance to a chair lift.
20 most-expensive areas with population 10,000–50,000
Vineyard Haven, Mass.
Jackson, Wyo.
Breckenridge, Colo.
Steamboat Springs, Colo.
Hailey, Idaho
Gardnerville Ranchos, Nev.
Hood River, Ore.
Ellensburg, Wash.
Los Alamos, N.M.
Astoria, Ore.
Juneau, Alaska
Fredericksburg, Texas
Kill Devil Hills, N.C.
Easton, Md.
Sandpoint, Idaho
Prineville, Ore.
Ketchikan, Alaska
Brookings, Ore.
Sheridan, Wyo.
Montrose, Colo.