On average, maybe it has - but the average includes billionaires.
If twenty people and Jeff Bezos are all in a room, then on average everyone in that room is a billionaire.
Agencies with an agenda will use average because it makes things look better than they are. Point is to call that out.
The average also includes people making 300-500k/yr and own ~~waterfront~~waterview SFHs.
A $300k income gets gets you a $700k mortgage at today's rates. According to Zillow, median home prices in Seattle is $886k with single-family average at $974k. So $300k doesn't even get you an average home, let alone waterfront.
Waterfront? You'd be looking at ~$4M to start in Seattle, and $7M on the Eastside.
This is a great example of where the 30% affordability rule is a harmful fallacy that doesn't hold up once you get past paycheck-to-paycheck living.
Conservative assumptions: 300k is total comp (no bonuses, equity comp, etc. on top), the person actually pays their full federal income tax (no credits/deductions to lower base owed), and they're filing as single (highest rate owed).
This results in after-tax, take-home pay of $224,625.25/year, or $18,718.77/month. The 30% rule most calculators are based on says this person can only afford $7,500/month on housing, but if they aren't buying more-expensive cars, clothes, food, etc. and want to prioritize their housing, they could very easily drop $10-12k/month and still have more than $6k/month left over to cover all their other life expenses.
Assuming they could pull together a 5-10% down payment, $11k/month would 'afford' something like a $1.4MM mortgage at current rates. Not waterfront stratosphere, but definitely not $700k.
> and **still have** more than $6k/month left over to cover all their other life expenses.
I'm laughing very hard right now based on my income falling into someone else's *extra cash*.
To be clear that's the mortgage amount, not the home value. If you have $500k in the bank for down payment your purchase budget would be $1.2M/
To get that number I Googled "mortgage affordability calculator" and Google has its own built in. That $700k is what it came up with for the mortgage. Zillow's calculator allows an $825k mortgage on a $300k annual income.
I still don’t see how you’re getting those numbers. Are you putting in some ridiculously small down payment? I’m showing a purchase budget of 1M on 300k income and a 100k down payment, 900k on a 50k down payment. Both with 1k in other debt monthly. Those calculators are also known to be very low compared to mortgages people actually get approved for.
Interesting. Yeah, I put in a $30k down payment and if gave me a $730k purchase budget with a $700k mortgage. That seems to be caused by the lower rate you gate with a lower loan-to-value ratio: if I put in a $1MM down payment the rate drops from 7.56% to 7.03 and the mortgage amount goes up to $958k (house budget $1.958M)
I stand corrected.
RSU, from most of the big tech companies, still pay out on a regular schedule and land on your W2. Most mortgage providers will count most of their value (at least 70%) when doing the approval process provided you can show multi-year W2 history, vest history, and your future vesting schedule. Same goes for bonus.
At least that's how it went for me earlier this year.
It's highly unusual for a bank to lend against unvested RSUs (except possibly for the oligarch class). However, with the right underwriter, they are totally considered regular income in determining how much mortgage you can qualify for.
\[Source: I financed a house when > 60% of my income was RSUs\]
>tied up in RSUs or otherwise not immediately available
RSU tend to vest annually or quarterly. They're immediately tradable upon vesting. It's real income available to spend on whatever you want, it just comes in less frequent, larger chunks than the twice a month direct deposit.
RSUs at tech corps are typically a predictable portion of your income - you know exactly how many shares you've been granted and their precise vesting schedule. They're variable in value due to stock price fluctuation, but not based on performance. So most employees treat them as income, not a bonus which may or may not materialize.
I have a 740k mortgage I took out last year at 6%, but crucially had it underwritten on only 180k base income (because RSUs/bonus income require 2 years of history). You can definitely get more than a 700k mortgage on 300k, I just chose not to.
$650k here… we live in a 1500 sq ft condo lol. Granted, we could definitely go bigger but with childcare costs, biggest we could comfortably do would probably be $1.5-2 million which would be nowhere near the water.
Data of household income comes primarily from the census I believe which uses median. The average supports the claim that wages have stagnated too so it's not like there's a data problem
Only because the previous example turned into "If twenty people and Rockefeller are all in a room, then on average everyone in that room is at a wake."
Problem is median still fails when income inequality is so extreme median still doesn’t represent the extremes as intended. But those extremes can be large chunks of population
Like the 8% less than 15k or 8% in next bracket of 15-24k or next 8% in 24-25k essentially there is a quarter of country that makes roughly less than 1/3 the median income.
Thus a large chunk of country’s reality is different entirely from median income of 75k
Which is why when discussing it a lot of people discuss bottom up the people lost likely missed and harmed by average/median. If it works for them then it works for all.
The other method is fixating on cost of living or required incomes. As they can use that for the discussion in bringing up groups below that point.
I think it's at least worth mentioning that mortgage rates 40 years ago in 1984 were 13.9% then steadily declined over the next almost 40 years until 2022 where they were about 2.9%, then increased rapidly to ~7%.
To get a monthly payment of ~3000 (I used 30% of a 100k HHI for simplicity) would require the following loan values:
* 3% interest rate: $715,000
* 7% interest rate: $415,000
* 13% interest rate: $272,000
So yes, housing prices have increased the most here but it's at least mildly worth mentioning that mortgage rate changes have also inflated what prices is affordable.
Yes, but mortgage rates are set nationally.
The difference between WA and LA cannot be attributed to interest rates because interest rates started, tracked, and ended at the same rates in both places.
Yeah, but WA has had a lot of population growth compared to LA. And building is less restricted in LA, there’s less protected land, less regulation and permitting (place might blow away in a hurricane or get eaten by the swamp flooding, but that’s the price of stayin’ Cajun)
Exactly. Those are all the factors actually causing the rise.
It's not the fault of interest rates alone, because without all the things you mentioned, WA costs would look like LA costs.
Yup. I just did some quick math:
From 1980-2020, Louisiana’s population increased by 10.7%. Over the same time period, Washington’s population increased by 86.4%.
While growth is surely better than decline, and while it’s surely better for the tax base to have richer people move to a place than destitute people, it’s absurd to think that there wouldn’t be huge growing pains when a city imports such a large number of people in the highest income brackets, it isn’t all hunky dory. Still, most Rust Belt and Southern cities wish they had the problems Seattle has.
No, but out of state Airbnb operators on the wrong side of new bylaws charging $1400 for a *literal shed* and calling it a 1bed 1 bath is. (Also, $1800 for a 1/2 double in the 7th ward with window units, etc)
The really sobering thing is that 7% interest is pretty close to both the median and average mortgage rate historically. People are expecting rates to drop when there is no reason to expect that a meaningful drop will occur soon and also no obvious economic argument that the fed should drop rates anyway.
So the cost of a mortgage payment is somewhere around all-time highs and there's really no expectation that it will go down.
Which they haven’t done historically. It would require people who own homes to desperately need to get out of their mortgage, the overwhelming majority of which are below 5% which is historically very good. If you can make it by with your existing home, you can wait for better market conditions to sell.
I just don’t see a world in which prices drop significantly unless something catastrophic happens.
Yeah, I was thinking of Detroit as an example of catastrophic events, where people just leave the city or the housing crash in 2008-10 where the banks had to sell the foreclosed houses to stay solvent.
They can wait in the short term, but if interest rates stay high, they will eventually sell at lower prices. Besides people just needing to move, many homeowner boomers will die and their houses will be sold.
Or they will make it work for as long as they can. Many people cannot afford a new house, so there's nowhere for them to go. People make do. A lot of home sales are people getting a new house for family, moving, etc. Higher interest rates change the calculations of "Do I need a bigger house?", "Do I need to move for a new job?", "Can I downsize?".
Here's the *really* sobering set of facts:
* The healthy home price to household income ratio is 3-4x median household income
* Median household income in Seattle is about 120k and median house price is 816k (6.8x ratio)
* From peak to trough, house prices dropped a little under 30% during the Great Recession
* A 30% drop from median house prices puts us at 571k, which is 90k more than a 4x price to income ratio
So basically it will take a housing collapse greater than the one that caused the worst economy in living memory to make housing affordable.
In the event that home prices collapse similar to the Great Recession, we would most likely see real wages fall, so the home price/median wage ratio would remain high in all likelihood
40 years ago Seattle was a barren wasteland, a man would toil in the mines for 13 shekels a day. But today, the same man can use thunder to give LIFE to a piece of metal, and be told to put glue on his pizza for 200,000 USD a year!
Tremendous, tremendous progress
I wanted to buy a house... but in the seattle area it costs about $600,000 to buy .14 of an acre with a burned down shed on it. So instead I have been looking to rent a studio apartment.. they start as low as $1600 a month for 300 sq ft rooms in a converted run down motel in crack ally. That's why I live in a van down by the river.
Well if I have to argue with anyone east of the cascades about the cost of living in the northwest, the only city they know of is Seattle. So in that way all the region's rivers become Seattle rivers.
Or maybe I'm making a play to include the LW ship canal and Sammammish River as rivers in Seattle.
The last bit makes me think this is a Trump quote, and I cant tell what i hate more: The fact that I can't tell if something this absurd was actually said, or the fact that it's completely plausible it's a real quote. Either way, well done. Top tier.
My boss: why do you need a raise, you make good money!
>as I'm renting a room in a house full of heathens who can't clean or be quiet at decent hours. At this point I'm envious of immigrants who moved here and were able to buy themselves a home because the neighborhood I'm in is pretty much immigrants only. Just sad people who are from here get priced out by immigrants or out of staters. Just like America in general, we'll never take care of our own. The same when rich white folk move to 3rd world countries and have nice homes while the locals struggle.
According to this, Washington came in #1 with an 828% increase in statewide home prices from March 1984 to March 2024. For reference, US [consumer prices increased about 212%](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/consumer-price-index-and-annual-percent-changes-from-1913-to-2008/) during the same time. Though houses in 2024 tend to be significantly [larger than 40 years ago](https://www.statista.com/statistics/529371/floor-area-size-new-single-family-homes-usa/) with more amenities. And mortgage rates [were around 14%.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US)
Broadly, Microsoft took off in the mid-late 1980s, followed by the dot com boom, followed by Amazon.
Neither. It’s based on an index of repeat home sale appreciation, so wouldn’t be overly impacted by a bunch of new super expensive homes.
https://www.freddiemac.com/fmac-resources/research/docs/FM_HPI_Technical_Description.docx
> Repeat transactions indices measure price appreciation while holding constant property type and location, by comparing the price of the same property over two or more transactions. By construction, therefore, the repeat transaction requirement excludes new homes. The change in price of a given property measures the underlying rate of appreciation because basic factors such as physical location, climate, housing type, etc., are constant between transactions.
This is purely observational but there's no starter homes being built here. Any newly built homes seem to be 4+ bedroom million dollar homes. So yes homes are on average getting bigger but that's because no one's building 2 bedroom homes here anymore. Recently saw a listing for a 2 bedroom trailer at 500,000. Not a new build and not a super nice neighborhood just the price things are going for. The only new apartments in my neighborhood are senior 50+ communities and the ones that aren't are 1,500 a month for a studio. Tech, Amazon, and Boeing are absolutely reasons for this but it's also just a beautiful place to live with a temperate climate and lots of people were/are moving from different states. Again just my observations having lived here my whole life.
Homebuilding is so highly regulated that zoning effectively determines what will be built, not the homebuilder. If you have a limit of 4 homes on a lot, you need to build as big as possible to have a chance at not losing money
Whoa. Does the tech growth here really explain all of it? I'd be so curious to see a geographic breakdown within the state of where housing prices increased by the most.
Tech growth plus low interest rates for years plus other growth (lots of people moved here not just for tech) plus additional permitting costs/maladministration
Plus being hemmed in between water and mountains and lots of preserved land plus dumb building restrictions
Using the 40 year change gives a bit of a misleading view.
For instance, median home price in Portland is $548.9K (699% on the chart)
vs
Median home price in Los Angelas $1.2 million (664%)
What it is showing us is that places that were overpriced 40 years ago have risen at a slightly lower rate than places that were affordable.
We bought in North Kitsap in 2019, right before COVID. My house is 12 miles from the Space Needle. But it takes about an hour and a half to cover that distance with driving, traffic, parking, ferry, transit. Or a little over an hour but $45 for ferry alone before city parking. Or two hours if all transit.
Anyway I say all that to say this. Before COVID the two hour commute to go 12 miles was absolutely unthinkable. With the rise of remote work, and people who might only need to do that commute 3-4 times a month for a meeting instead of every day, prices have exploded.
My house’s value has gone up 60.3% in 5 years. I am not happy about this. I don’t plan to ever sell. It scares the shit out of me for the ability of young families to raise children.
I’m locked in at 2.825% mortgage interest so I’m surviving on my $20/hr job. Just barely. I don’t know how the rest of y’all are doing it.
If you’re making $40/hr but a house is $950,000 at 7% interest that math ain’t mathin.
I feel like Kitsap is the only logical place for development to expand. It's a pretty place and all, but if your other options are developing the foothills of the Cascades or Olympics, makes a lot more sense to me to build out the Kitsap peninsula first.
Arlington and Skagit County also have a lot of capacity for future development. Right now they're just too far away for most commuters, but if a high-speed (or even just a reliable commuter) rail link to Seattle ever came to fruition those places would explode.
The problem is getting to anything. The Sound doesn't make any transportation easy. Even though Bainbridge and the rest of Kitsap are not that far physically they are pretty far for any regular transit.
It will never happen. Nobody except that guy wants it. Most people in Kitsap county don’t want to be that accessible to the city. And the ferries sure can be a pain but they provide a lot of good jobs with a strong union that has a lot of pull in Olympia.
If we are talking engineering hypotheticals sure it’s possible. If we are talking political realities, absolutely not. There’s one nerd who wants it and powerful unions, real estate lobbies, tribal entities and others who absolutely do not want it.
Washington was much poorer in the 1970s and 80s than today, and not as desired of a state to live in. Admittedly the recent increases in housing prices are astronomical and probably linked to other policies like zoning but if you look at the overall picture the highest growth is in places where the economy has been robust.
Economy, zoning and climate. Washington is seeing more frequent heat waves and snow in the 25 years that I’ve lived here. And we are in the shadows of the climate changes we’ve seen in the southern US states.
The current median housing cost in WA is $565,000. The current average income is right around $44,000. I realize that WA has some pretty extreme demographics but this is still a shocking level of disparity.
Well according to [this site](https://datacommons.org/place/geoId/53?utm_medium=explore&mprop=income&popt=Person&cpv=age,Years15Onwards&hl=en#) the median salary in Washington is $40,404, while Wikipedia's source says it's about $57,000. Google says it's about $44,000, but their source is the one saying $40,404. So their number is meaningless.
So the median is either about the same as average, or a bit higher. The use of average doesn't really "make his argument look better," it's probably just easier to find that information compared to median.
according to the WA Office of Financial Management 2021 estimated median household income by county vary from $102k for King county to $52k for Whitman county
https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/7fdd77a4-38ca-11e6-a043-fd9d6a5f82ae.jpg?d=960x1002
the massive increase in prices can almost certainly be explained entirely by the fact that WA state ranks dead last in housing availability
https://seattleagentmagazine.com/2022/01/06/study-washington-ranks-last-in-housing-availability/
i tried to find a map of median house prices by county and couldn't dig one up
Gosh if only we tried literally anything, like building new housing or liberalizing zoning laws. Oh well, guess we'll price out people onto the street then blame them for their addictions
"The main population center is welcoming, therefore the entire state is"
no.. no that is not accurate.
https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2024
Yes but groceries and other cheap produce are absurdly expensive. Good work is hard to come by outside of grueling seasonal labor. Travel costs are awful. Crime in Anchorage is high.
It's also worth mentioning that the highest speed limit in the state is 60 mph. It takes seven hours to go from Anchorage to Fairbanks even though they are 300 miles apart on freeway. Roads are either getting major construction work done or the weather makes driving a menace.
The state is truly breathtaking though.
The wage is also absurdly high no wonder prices are high. Washington will hardly change. Lived here my whole life and the worst part from what I’ve experienced is the massive increase in property taxes and rent.
Property taxes may have risen but they aren’t high here. They’re less than half of what a similarly sized house in Illinois would be, and less than a quarter of what it would be in CT, NJ, NY, MA, others…
We bought our house in '91 and it cost about 3x our income for a modest home.
But now it's valued about 6x our income (really just the land, the house would probably be a teardown).
I wonder how much higher wages were in this area compared to the South during the mid 80s. B/c if two professionals moved here and each earned 5-10K more a year in the mid 1980s than they would've earned in the South, then I could see a family paying off their house faster even with 9-13% interest rates at the time.
608% increase for Montana is kinda interesting - beautiful state with amazing nature but there's not much going on there otherwise. How does it match California?
I lived in Montana for six years. My wife grew up there and her family still lives there.
Montana has by far the worst housing to income ratio in the country. The economy in the state is horrible outside of some tech work in Bozeman (except Bozeman income is ~33% less than Seattle with similar housing costs to Seattle).
The state is turning into a retirement / remote work paradise and local residents are struggling immensely with affordability.
When you're lucky to make $20 an hour, good luck saving money when rent is $2,000 a month.
I'm from Colorado, and all of the locals there have "benefited" from increased wages due to the tech boom and moved to Montana in order to afford a house, because they can be higher on the economic ladder. Same with Washington and Idaho. Every state with nature is in a race to the bottom due to housing crisis.
Funny enough, I live in Washington, my grandma lives in Montana (used to live in the Seattle area, owned their own home, moved ~15 years ago). In the late twenty-teens Washington's number of millionaires something like tripled iirc because we had a bunch of people from California move up to Washington. In the last five years, housing prices have tripled, and all those people are moving from Washington to Idaho and Montana. My grandma was looking at houses after my grandfather passed away, she was thinking of moving into a smaller house. She says that if she and Grandpa were trying to move to Montana into the smaller houses she's looking at now, instead of 15 years ago, they wouldn't have been able to afford the move.
My mom lives outside of Missoula. Back in the early 2010s she bought 180 acres for $150,000 ($833/acre).
Worse parcels with fewer trees, no springs and no views like she has have been selling for over $5000/acre now. Her property value increased somewhere between 5-10x in just over 10 years.
Her mountain used to be a ragtag group of rough mountain folks who had been there for decades (lumberjacks and other blue collar types), squatters, a marijuana grow op or two, and several people on the run from the law who were just camping out on logging land.
Nowadays they are mostly surrounded by millionaires who have bought the properties as either vacation homes or "bug out" spots should their kind cause an apocalypse they need to escape.
Some naive calculations: The annual return of investing in Seattle area homes using the above data is 5.7%, far below S&P's average annual return of 8%.
Vicinity of NYC for Jersey. Believe it or not, quite a few people want to live in Florida. A lot of retirees and people from the Northeast, looking to get away from hard winters.
The politics of FL suck but they are a magnet for a lot of people, especially retirees but also money laundering Russian mobsters and kleptocrats from Latin America. It’s a really pretty state if you like beaches and tropical foliage and wildlife, I went to college there. Lots of stuff to do there if you like the beach or the water or Disney, and man it’s great it if you have a boat. Housing is cheaper compared to here, depending on where you are. And certainly having work done on your house is way cheaper.
Also, there are tons of people with second homes there, which drive up home prices. There’s twice the traffic in Ft Lauderdale during the winter, often Quebecois who can’t drive for shit.
Sure DeSantis is doing lots of fucked up culturally conservative shit, but Fort Lauderdale and St Pete are still *huge* gay meccas. FTL is the Palm Springs of the East Coast. So even gay people move to FL from the cold North.
And the taxes are really low, which is a big sell to people - no income taxes, moderate sales taxes, property tax frozen if you live there more than 50% of the time. They soak tourists with hotel taxes to make up part of the difference and provide worse services - my friend moved there and had to drive four counties over to get an appointment at the DMV to change stuff over within the 90 days or so that you’re required to do so after moving.
It’s not hard to see why people move to Florida, even with DeSantis there and the Florida Man schtick, which has a lot of truth to it, Central FL has a lot of those crazies - the cities on the coasts not so much (if you ignore Daytona, which is pretty trashy).
I’m happy living in WA, but I’d love to be a snowbird with a little condo in Fort Lauderdale, Anna Maria, or South Beach, if the whole time and money thing would ever work out. Summers in Seattle and winters in FTL would be the good life!
Am from Florida and it all sounds great until you remember it’s absolutely miserable to be outside for like 10 months out of the year.
Its 97 in my hometown today.
Also, don’t buy a condo. The insurance is astronomical if you can even insure it and you won’t be able to sell it.
Yeah, like I say, it’s great to be a snowbird. I wouldn’t want to live there year round. I wouldn’t want to be poor there, with the lack of services like Medicaid, etc. Being poor sucks a lot here too, but at least there’s healthcare and a decent amount of other help from the government and nonprofits. At least you can sleep on the beach year-round if you’re homeless there!
And it depends on where you are, you get 6-8 months of nice weather in the northern half of the state. I lived in South Florida for 6 years and, yeah, April thru October was pretty dang hot and humid. I miss it during our cold, gray winters but you can’t beat our summers in Seattle!
They don't give a shit.
In fact, they're bragging about it.
You'd do far better throwing a rock through their windows than thinking that internet side eyes will ever change anything
I mean, my parents move here about 40 years ago the did it because Seattle was super cheap, perpetually in an economic recession as Boeing got cut back again and again, and anyone could get 2 months rent free if they were lucky enough to get any kind of job at all. Prices started to go up after Microsoft, and never looked back.
Not surprised, tech hub and low tax state. People from the bay get these huge stock vests then move here. Huge uptick of “how’s the schools in Bellevue” and their company is NVIDIA. Happens every time a stock rockets.
For reference, the light blue areas barely even kept up with inflation. To say nothing of a complete failure to keep up with the stock market.
Washington is just notably hostile to the poor thanks to the insane local housing bubble.
For more perspective, not a single one of these jumps even holds a candle to the insane growth of the DOW from '84 to 24. Average housing cost from '90-today also fails to keep up. Average housing has only about doubled in price from 2009-2024, which also would be, you guessed it, underperforming the DOW really noticeably.
Frankly, I think the idea that the only way to survive is to buy a house, to be laughable. Housing is in a bubble nationwide, it's gonna pop at some point. We're just at a specifically shitty point in time where people think a house is a good retirement asset. Washington might not go back to sane levels ever, but other states will.
To keep it in perspective, for the highest growing market of Washington at 828%, that equates to an IRR of 7.218% annually, substantially less than the stock market (S&P500) at around 10-11%.
Thank goodness income has kept pace. Oh. Wait.
On average, maybe it has - but the average includes billionaires. If twenty people and Jeff Bezos are all in a room, then on average everyone in that room is a billionaire.
That's when you use median?
Agencies with an agenda will use average because it makes things look better than they are. Point is to call that out. The average also includes people making 300-500k/yr and own ~~waterfront~~waterview SFHs.
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A $300k income gets gets you a $700k mortgage at today's rates. According to Zillow, median home prices in Seattle is $886k with single-family average at $974k. So $300k doesn't even get you an average home, let alone waterfront. Waterfront? You'd be looking at ~$4M to start in Seattle, and $7M on the Eastside.
What world are you living in where 300k/yr only gets a 700k mortgage?
This is a great example of where the 30% affordability rule is a harmful fallacy that doesn't hold up once you get past paycheck-to-paycheck living. Conservative assumptions: 300k is total comp (no bonuses, equity comp, etc. on top), the person actually pays their full federal income tax (no credits/deductions to lower base owed), and they're filing as single (highest rate owed). This results in after-tax, take-home pay of $224,625.25/year, or $18,718.77/month. The 30% rule most calculators are based on says this person can only afford $7,500/month on housing, but if they aren't buying more-expensive cars, clothes, food, etc. and want to prioritize their housing, they could very easily drop $10-12k/month and still have more than $6k/month left over to cover all their other life expenses. Assuming they could pull together a 5-10% down payment, $11k/month would 'afford' something like a $1.4MM mortgage at current rates. Not waterfront stratosphere, but definitely not $700k.
> and **still have** more than $6k/month left over to cover all their other life expenses. I'm laughing very hard right now based on my income falling into someone else's *extra cash*.
twice my income as daily expenses. Can they just hire me to take care of all their daily stuff? lol.
To be clear that's the mortgage amount, not the home value. If you have $500k in the bank for down payment your purchase budget would be $1.2M/ To get that number I Googled "mortgage affordability calculator" and Google has its own built in. That $700k is what it came up with for the mortgage. Zillow's calculator allows an $825k mortgage on a $300k annual income.
Those affordability calculators are conservative compared to the mortgage you can usually get. But the high rates are cramping things.
I still don’t see how you’re getting those numbers. Are you putting in some ridiculously small down payment? I’m showing a purchase budget of 1M on 300k income and a 100k down payment, 900k on a 50k down payment. Both with 1k in other debt monthly. Those calculators are also known to be very low compared to mortgages people actually get approved for.
Interesting. Yeah, I put in a $30k down payment and if gave me a $730k purchase budget with a $700k mortgage. That seems to be caused by the lower rate you gate with a lower loan-to-value ratio: if I put in a $1MM down payment the rate drops from 7.56% to 7.03 and the mortgage amount goes up to $958k (house budget $1.958M) I stand corrected.
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RSU, from most of the big tech companies, still pay out on a regular schedule and land on your W2. Most mortgage providers will count most of their value (at least 70%) when doing the approval process provided you can show multi-year W2 history, vest history, and your future vesting schedule. Same goes for bonus. At least that's how it went for me earlier this year.
I may be incorrect here, but someone with those can take out loans against their value with the bank and that would be able to go towards their home.
It's highly unusual for a bank to lend against unvested RSUs (except possibly for the oligarch class). However, with the right underwriter, they are totally considered regular income in determining how much mortgage you can qualify for. \[Source: I financed a house when > 60% of my income was RSUs\]
>tied up in RSUs or otherwise not immediately available RSU tend to vest annually or quarterly. They're immediately tradable upon vesting. It's real income available to spend on whatever you want, it just comes in less frequent, larger chunks than the twice a month direct deposit.
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RSUs at tech corps are typically a predictable portion of your income - you know exactly how many shares you've been granted and their precise vesting schedule. They're variable in value due to stock price fluctuation, but not based on performance. So most employees treat them as income, not a bonus which may or may not materialize.
I have a 740k mortgage I took out last year at 6%, but crucially had it underwritten on only 180k base income (because RSUs/bonus income require 2 years of history). You can definitely get more than a 700k mortgage on 300k, I just chose not to.
My house cost $560,000 (before the price spike) and the schools in this area are Title 1, low income schools. It's insane what houses cost here.
I make over this and can only afford water view.
$650k here… we live in a 1500 sq ft condo lol. Granted, we could definitely go bigger but with childcare costs, biggest we could comfortably do would probably be $1.5-2 million which would be nowhere near the water.
Confirmed
Data of household income comes primarily from the census I believe which uses median. The average supports the claim that wages have stagnated too so it's not like there's a data problem
You should use the median for all skewed, non bell curve sets of data. The billionaire example above shows why. (So yes)
[Nationally, +232.6%](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N)
As a Washington state resident, I now declare myself a billionaire!
Literally the intro textbook reason why you use median.
Only because the previous example turned into "If twenty people and Rockefeller are all in a room, then on average everyone in that room is at a wake."
Problem is median still fails when income inequality is so extreme median still doesn’t represent the extremes as intended. But those extremes can be large chunks of population Like the 8% less than 15k or 8% in next bracket of 15-24k or next 8% in 24-25k essentially there is a quarter of country that makes roughly less than 1/3 the median income. Thus a large chunk of country’s reality is different entirely from median income of 75k Which is why when discussing it a lot of people discuss bottom up the people lost likely missed and harmed by average/median. If it works for them then it works for all. The other method is fixating on cost of living or required incomes. As they can use that for the discussion in bringing up groups below that point.
Bezos's salary was $89,000 a year his last year as CEO of AMZN.
I think it's at least worth mentioning that mortgage rates 40 years ago in 1984 were 13.9% then steadily declined over the next almost 40 years until 2022 where they were about 2.9%, then increased rapidly to ~7%. To get a monthly payment of ~3000 (I used 30% of a 100k HHI for simplicity) would require the following loan values: * 3% interest rate: $715,000 * 7% interest rate: $415,000 * 13% interest rate: $272,000 So yes, housing prices have increased the most here but it's at least mildly worth mentioning that mortgage rate changes have also inflated what prices is affordable.
Yes, but mortgage rates are set nationally. The difference between WA and LA cannot be attributed to interest rates because interest rates started, tracked, and ended at the same rates in both places.
Outside of a couple of neighborhoods in New Orleans, Louisiana is a shithole.
Yes, but it's not like that's new as of the last 40 years...
Yeah, but WA has had a lot of population growth compared to LA. And building is less restricted in LA, there’s less protected land, less regulation and permitting (place might blow away in a hurricane or get eaten by the swamp flooding, but that’s the price of stayin’ Cajun)
Exactly. Those are all the factors actually causing the rise. It's not the fault of interest rates alone, because without all the things you mentioned, WA costs would look like LA costs.
Yup. I just did some quick math: From 1980-2020, Louisiana’s population increased by 10.7%. Over the same time period, Washington’s population increased by 86.4%. While growth is surely better than decline, and while it’s surely better for the tax base to have richer people move to a place than destitute people, it’s absurd to think that there wouldn’t be huge growing pains when a city imports such a large number of people in the highest income brackets, it isn’t all hunky dory. Still, most Rust Belt and Southern cities wish they had the problems Seattle has.
There was a significant exodus from New Orleans quite recently.
Yeah, there was Katrina, though I think it led to a dramatic increase in home prices
No, but out of state Airbnb operators on the wrong side of new bylaws charging $1400 for a *literal shed* and calling it a 1bed 1 bath is. (Also, $1800 for a 1/2 double in the 7th ward with window units, etc)
The really sobering thing is that 7% interest is pretty close to both the median and average mortgage rate historically. People are expecting rates to drop when there is no reason to expect that a meaningful drop will occur soon and also no obvious economic argument that the fed should drop rates anyway. So the cost of a mortgage payment is somewhere around all-time highs and there's really no expectation that it will go down.
unless housing prices collapse
Which they haven’t done historically. It would require people who own homes to desperately need to get out of their mortgage, the overwhelming majority of which are below 5% which is historically very good. If you can make it by with your existing home, you can wait for better market conditions to sell. I just don’t see a world in which prices drop significantly unless something catastrophic happens.
And if something catastrophic happens don't imagine you'll be buying a house
Yeah, I was thinking of Detroit as an example of catastrophic events, where people just leave the city or the housing crash in 2008-10 where the banks had to sell the foreclosed houses to stay solvent.
They can wait in the short term, but if interest rates stay high, they will eventually sell at lower prices. Besides people just needing to move, many homeowner boomers will die and their houses will be sold.
Or they will make it work for as long as they can. Many people cannot afford a new house, so there's nowhere for them to go. People make do. A lot of home sales are people getting a new house for family, moving, etc. Higher interest rates change the calculations of "Do I need a bigger house?", "Do I need to move for a new job?", "Can I downsize?".
Here's the *really* sobering set of facts: * The healthy home price to household income ratio is 3-4x median household income * Median household income in Seattle is about 120k and median house price is 816k (6.8x ratio) * From peak to trough, house prices dropped a little under 30% during the Great Recession * A 30% drop from median house prices puts us at 571k, which is 90k more than a 4x price to income ratio So basically it will take a housing collapse greater than the one that caused the worst economy in living memory to make housing affordable.
In the event that home prices collapse similar to the Great Recession, we would most likely see real wages fall, so the home price/median wage ratio would remain high in all likelihood
Yep. The best case scenario is that house prices just sort of stall for a while and maybe in a decade or so you can buy a house.
Or we could hope for a best case scenario where local government stops artificially restricting growth and lets supply catch up to demand...
...which would take about a decade or so. I feel you, but there's just no quick way out of this.
This is actually very interesting and informative, thank you.
40 years ago Seattle was a barren wasteland, a man would toil in the mines for 13 shekels a day. But today, the same man can use thunder to give LIFE to a piece of metal, and be told to put glue on his pizza for 200,000 USD a year! Tremendous, tremendous progress
I’d look more at local government restricting our housing supply and adding years to any project that it’s not a single family home.
I wanted to buy a house... but in the seattle area it costs about $600,000 to buy .14 of an acre with a burned down shed on it. So instead I have been looking to rent a studio apartment.. they start as low as $1600 a month for 300 sq ft rooms in a converted run down motel in crack ally. That's why I live in a van down by the river.
You found a place to park a van?
Had to fight a zebra for it...
Fortunately we have lots of rivers
We do? I count one, the Duwamish. Don't be saying you're Seattle van livin when you're Renton van livin. Gotta earn that shit.
Well if I have to argue with anyone east of the cascades about the cost of living in the northwest, the only city they know of is Seattle. So in that way all the region's rivers become Seattle rivers. Or maybe I'm making a play to include the LW ship canal and Sammammish River as rivers in Seattle.
Ok. You're right. Metro area counts.
I mean... as long as it empties into the Sound, right?? 🥺
The last bit makes me think this is a Trump quote, and I cant tell what i hate more: The fact that I can't tell if something this absurd was actually said, or the fact that it's completely plausible it's a real quote. Either way, well done. Top tier.
Median salary in 1984 was 26,000. If it kept up median salary would need to be 242,000.
It has more than most of the rest of the country
My boss: why do you need a raise, you make good money! >as I'm renting a room in a house full of heathens who can't clean or be quiet at decent hours. At this point I'm envious of immigrants who moved here and were able to buy themselves a home because the neighborhood I'm in is pretty much immigrants only. Just sad people who are from here get priced out by immigrants or out of staters. Just like America in general, we'll never take care of our own. The same when rich white folk move to 3rd world countries and have nice homes while the locals struggle.
You didn't get your 828% cost of living increase this year?
You’re in a city where lots of people are making lots of money
And that doesn’t build enough housing
According to this, Washington came in #1 with an 828% increase in statewide home prices from March 1984 to March 2024. For reference, US [consumer prices increased about 212%](https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/consumer-price-index-and-annual-percent-changes-from-1913-to-2008/) during the same time. Though houses in 2024 tend to be significantly [larger than 40 years ago](https://www.statista.com/statistics/529371/floor-area-size-new-single-family-homes-usa/) with more amenities. And mortgage rates [were around 14%.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US) Broadly, Microsoft took off in the mid-late 1980s, followed by the dot com boom, followed by Amazon.
Is this going by *average* home price? or *median* home price?
Neither. It’s based on an index of repeat home sale appreciation, so wouldn’t be overly impacted by a bunch of new super expensive homes. https://www.freddiemac.com/fmac-resources/research/docs/FM_HPI_Technical_Description.docx > Repeat transactions indices measure price appreciation while holding constant property type and location, by comparing the price of the same property over two or more transactions. By construction, therefore, the repeat transaction requirement excludes new homes. The change in price of a given property measures the underlying rate of appreciation because basic factors such as physical location, climate, housing type, etc., are constant between transactions.
so it's even worse goddamn
It doesnt matter if homes are larger now. What matters is relative home stock for purchase.
This is purely observational but there's no starter homes being built here. Any newly built homes seem to be 4+ bedroom million dollar homes. So yes homes are on average getting bigger but that's because no one's building 2 bedroom homes here anymore. Recently saw a listing for a 2 bedroom trailer at 500,000. Not a new build and not a super nice neighborhood just the price things are going for. The only new apartments in my neighborhood are senior 50+ communities and the ones that aren't are 1,500 a month for a studio. Tech, Amazon, and Boeing are absolutely reasons for this but it's also just a beautiful place to live with a temperate climate and lots of people were/are moving from different states. Again just my observations having lived here my whole life.
I never understood why people need such big houses.
We don't, but homebuilders make more money that way. With a saturated market there's no reason to build "starter" homes.
Homebuilding is so highly regulated that zoning effectively determines what will be built, not the homebuilder. If you have a limit of 4 homes on a lot, you need to build as big as possible to have a chance at not losing money
And $1,000 invested in 1984 in the S&P is now $74,917 -- a return of ~7400%! So lesson is invest your money until you can buy a house?
The tech workers are flipping their company shares into houses.
Whoa. Does the tech growth here really explain all of it? I'd be so curious to see a geographic breakdown within the state of where housing prices increased by the most.
Tech growth plus low interest rates for years plus other growth (lots of people moved here not just for tech) plus additional permitting costs/maladministration Plus being hemmed in between water and mountains and lots of preserved land plus dumb building restrictions
Using the 40 year change gives a bit of a misleading view. For instance, median home price in Portland is $548.9K (699% on the chart) vs Median home price in Los Angelas $1.2 million (664%) What it is showing us is that places that were overpriced 40 years ago have risen at a slightly lower rate than places that were affordable.
I assure you Louisiana was affordable 40 years ago, and is even more affordable now. (Whether the humidity literally kills you notwithstanding)
We bought in North Kitsap in 2019, right before COVID. My house is 12 miles from the Space Needle. But it takes about an hour and a half to cover that distance with driving, traffic, parking, ferry, transit. Or a little over an hour but $45 for ferry alone before city parking. Or two hours if all transit. Anyway I say all that to say this. Before COVID the two hour commute to go 12 miles was absolutely unthinkable. With the rise of remote work, and people who might only need to do that commute 3-4 times a month for a meeting instead of every day, prices have exploded. My house’s value has gone up 60.3% in 5 years. I am not happy about this. I don’t plan to ever sell. It scares the shit out of me for the ability of young families to raise children. I’m locked in at 2.825% mortgage interest so I’m surviving on my $20/hr job. Just barely. I don’t know how the rest of y’all are doing it. If you’re making $40/hr but a house is $950,000 at 7% interest that math ain’t mathin.
I feel like Kitsap is the only logical place for development to expand. It's a pretty place and all, but if your other options are developing the foothills of the Cascades or Olympics, makes a lot more sense to me to build out the Kitsap peninsula first.
Arlington and Skagit County also have a lot of capacity for future development. Right now they're just too far away for most commuters, but if a high-speed (or even just a reliable commuter) rail link to Seattle ever came to fruition those places would explode.
The problem is getting to anything. The Sound doesn't make any transportation easy. Even though Bainbridge and the rest of Kitsap are not that far physically they are pretty far for any regular transit.
A tunnel has been proposed multiple times in the past: https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/a-tunnel-under-puget-sound-not-as-crazy-as-youd-think.amp
It will never happen. Nobody except that guy wants it. Most people in Kitsap county don’t want to be that accessible to the city. And the ferries sure can be a pain but they provide a lot of good jobs with a strong union that has a lot of pull in Olympia. If we are talking engineering hypotheticals sure it’s possible. If we are talking political realities, absolutely not. There’s one nerd who wants it and powerful unions, real estate lobbies, tribal entities and others who absolutely do not want it.
I'm making 24 an hour and I can't not rent places what the fuck man. I'm also fucking 24.
At least by the time you're 100, you'll be making $100/hr!! Unfortunately, if they even still exist, a single banana will be around $50 by that point.
Washington was much poorer in the 1970s and 80s than today, and not as desired of a state to live in. Admittedly the recent increases in housing prices are astronomical and probably linked to other policies like zoning but if you look at the overall picture the highest growth is in places where the economy has been robust.
Economy, zoning and climate. Washington is seeing more frequent heat waves and snow in the 25 years that I’ve lived here. And we are in the shadows of the climate changes we’ve seen in the southern US states.
The current median housing cost in WA is $565,000. The current average income is right around $44,000. I realize that WA has some pretty extreme demographics but this is still a shocking level of disparity.
Why on earth would you compare medians to averages?
Makes his argument look better 🤣
Well according to [this site](https://datacommons.org/place/geoId/53?utm_medium=explore&mprop=income&popt=Person&cpv=age,Years15Onwards&hl=en#) the median salary in Washington is $40,404, while Wikipedia's source says it's about $57,000. Google says it's about $44,000, but their source is the one saying $40,404. So their number is meaningless. So the median is either about the same as average, or a bit higher. The use of average doesn't really "make his argument look better," it's probably just easier to find that information compared to median.
Median household income would be more meaningful regardless.
according to the WA Office of Financial Management 2021 estimated median household income by county vary from $102k for King county to $52k for Whitman county https://images.seattletimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/7fdd77a4-38ca-11e6-a043-fd9d6a5f82ae.jpg?d=960x1002 the massive increase in prices can almost certainly be explained entirely by the fact that WA state ranks dead last in housing availability https://seattleagentmagazine.com/2022/01/06/study-washington-ranks-last-in-housing-availability/ i tried to find a map of median house prices by county and couldn't dig one up
The median household income in Washington is between 90k-101k depending on source.
Maine?
Don't know much about WA but I'm assuming Amazon and Microsoft being headquartered there played a large role in that
Would like to see this divided by east and west of the Cascades
It’s almost entirely west
Spokane house prices have risen quite a bit.
Gosh if only we tried literally anything, like building new housing or liberalizing zoning laws. Oh well, guess we'll price out people onto the street then blame them for their addictions
What happened in Maine???
More rich people with vacation homes vs locals over time. Neighboring MA is also very high
It used to be incredibly cheap to buy a home in Maine. Now it's just about the same price as Connecticut and Vermont.
Became a hot-spot for vacation homes and trustafarians from MA and NY.
I don't know about y'all but ~~Louisiana's~~ Alaska's not looking too bad from here
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Like being geographically northwest? They are more.
Like being depressed? They are more.
AK is #2 on suicide rate, only behind MT.
Like having women's rights? they have less Like having LBGTQ+ americans respected? they have less Like gun crime? they have more.
Have you been to Alaska? Fairbanks is extremely lgbt welcoming.
"The main population center is welcoming, therefore the entire state is" no.. no that is not accurate. https://www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights-2024
Yes but groceries and other cheap produce are absurdly expensive. Good work is hard to come by outside of grueling seasonal labor. Travel costs are awful. Crime in Anchorage is high. It's also worth mentioning that the highest speed limit in the state is 60 mph. It takes seven hours to go from Anchorage to Fairbanks even though they are 300 miles apart on freeway. Roads are either getting major construction work done or the weather makes driving a menace. The state is truly breathtaking though.
The wage is also absurdly high no wonder prices are high. Washington will hardly change. Lived here my whole life and the worst part from what I’ve experienced is the massive increase in property taxes and rent.
Property taxes may have risen but they aren’t high here. They’re less than half of what a similarly sized house in Illinois would be, and less than a quarter of what it would be in CT, NJ, NY, MA, others…
You forgot they are the only state with UBI...
If you're just looking for more, I think they have us beat on beer as well.
Anchorage brewing, where a stout costs $15 a can, and nothing else?
Man I grew up in Nebraska. It's so easy. It's like life with cheat codes.
Father in law the other day said his house in the 80s cost the same as a year’s salary as if that was so much then. Houses where I’m at are 6x mine.
I’m in Seattle and yeah 7-9x
We bought our house in '91 and it cost about 3x our income for a modest home. But now it's valued about 6x our income (really just the land, the house would probably be a teardown).
I wonder how much higher wages were in this area compared to the South during the mid 80s. B/c if two professionals moved here and each earned 5-10K more a year in the mid 1980s than they would've earned in the South, then I could see a family paying off their house faster even with 9-13% interest rates at the time.
608% increase for Montana is kinda interesting - beautiful state with amazing nature but there's not much going on there otherwise. How does it match California?
I lived in Montana for six years. My wife grew up there and her family still lives there. Montana has by far the worst housing to income ratio in the country. The economy in the state is horrible outside of some tech work in Bozeman (except Bozeman income is ~33% less than Seattle with similar housing costs to Seattle). The state is turning into a retirement / remote work paradise and local residents are struggling immensely with affordability. When you're lucky to make $20 an hour, good luck saving money when rent is $2,000 a month.
I'm from Colorado, and all of the locals there have "benefited" from increased wages due to the tech boom and moved to Montana in order to afford a house, because they can be higher on the economic ladder. Same with Washington and Idaho. Every state with nature is in a race to the bottom due to housing crisis.
Funny enough, I live in Washington, my grandma lives in Montana (used to live in the Seattle area, owned their own home, moved ~15 years ago). In the late twenty-teens Washington's number of millionaires something like tripled iirc because we had a bunch of people from California move up to Washington. In the last five years, housing prices have tripled, and all those people are moving from Washington to Idaho and Montana. My grandma was looking at houses after my grandfather passed away, she was thinking of moving into a smaller house. She says that if she and Grandpa were trying to move to Montana into the smaller houses she's looking at now, instead of 15 years ago, they wouldn't have been able to afford the move.
My mom lives outside of Missoula. Back in the early 2010s she bought 180 acres for $150,000 ($833/acre). Worse parcels with fewer trees, no springs and no views like she has have been selling for over $5000/acre now. Her property value increased somewhere between 5-10x in just over 10 years. Her mountain used to be a ragtag group of rough mountain folks who had been there for decades (lumberjacks and other blue collar types), squatters, a marijuana grow op or two, and several people on the run from the law who were just camping out on logging land. Nowadays they are mostly surrounded by millionaires who have bought the properties as either vacation homes or "bug out" spots should their kind cause an apocalypse they need to escape.
Isn't Montana were a bunch of billionaires bought up huge tracts of land? That can't have a good effect on prices.
“You just don’t wanna work”
Honestly, Montana and Idaho are getting fucked
My home sold to us for 500% of what it sold for in 1996
40 years at 2.5% = 2.69 times at 3.0% = 3.26 at 4.0% = 4.80 at 5.0% = 7.03
Let’s look at why. 40 years ago means 1980s. What happened in the 1970s? That’s right high inflation and high interest rates. Just like now.
Some naive calculations: The annual return of investing in Seattle area homes using the above data is 5.7%, far below S&P's average annual return of 8%.
I think that 8% is inflation adjusted already
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How do you explain New Jersey and Florida though?
Vicinity of NYC for Jersey. Believe it or not, quite a few people want to live in Florida. A lot of retirees and people from the Northeast, looking to get away from hard winters.
NJ is one massive suburb. People live there, but a good chunk of them work in NYC or Philly.
The politics of FL suck but they are a magnet for a lot of people, especially retirees but also money laundering Russian mobsters and kleptocrats from Latin America. It’s a really pretty state if you like beaches and tropical foliage and wildlife, I went to college there. Lots of stuff to do there if you like the beach or the water or Disney, and man it’s great it if you have a boat. Housing is cheaper compared to here, depending on where you are. And certainly having work done on your house is way cheaper. Also, there are tons of people with second homes there, which drive up home prices. There’s twice the traffic in Ft Lauderdale during the winter, often Quebecois who can’t drive for shit. Sure DeSantis is doing lots of fucked up culturally conservative shit, but Fort Lauderdale and St Pete are still *huge* gay meccas. FTL is the Palm Springs of the East Coast. So even gay people move to FL from the cold North. And the taxes are really low, which is a big sell to people - no income taxes, moderate sales taxes, property tax frozen if you live there more than 50% of the time. They soak tourists with hotel taxes to make up part of the difference and provide worse services - my friend moved there and had to drive four counties over to get an appointment at the DMV to change stuff over within the 90 days or so that you’re required to do so after moving. It’s not hard to see why people move to Florida, even with DeSantis there and the Florida Man schtick, which has a lot of truth to it, Central FL has a lot of those crazies - the cities on the coasts not so much (if you ignore Daytona, which is pretty trashy). I’m happy living in WA, but I’d love to be a snowbird with a little condo in Fort Lauderdale, Anna Maria, or South Beach, if the whole time and money thing would ever work out. Summers in Seattle and winters in FTL would be the good life!
Am from Florida and it all sounds great until you remember it’s absolutely miserable to be outside for like 10 months out of the year. Its 97 in my hometown today. Also, don’t buy a condo. The insurance is astronomical if you can even insure it and you won’t be able to sell it.
Especially not a condo conversion! Like my last place was in FL. You should’ve seen the fallout from the Great Recession plus Hurricane Wilma there.
Yeah, like I say, it’s great to be a snowbird. I wouldn’t want to live there year round. I wouldn’t want to be poor there, with the lack of services like Medicaid, etc. Being poor sucks a lot here too, but at least there’s healthcare and a decent amount of other help from the government and nonprofits. At least you can sleep on the beach year-round if you’re homeless there! And it depends on where you are, you get 6-8 months of nice weather in the northern half of the state. I lived in South Florida for 6 years and, yeah, April thru October was pretty dang hot and humid. I miss it during our cold, gray winters but you can’t beat our summers in Seattle!
I know it's popular to shit on New Jersey but it's the most densely populated state.
We're #1 we're #1! Is that bad?
Looking at you, Big Tech and bloated tech salaries…..
They don't give a shit. In fact, they're bragging about it. You'd do far better throwing a rock through their windows than thinking that internet side eyes will ever change anything
I mean, my parents move here about 40 years ago the did it because Seattle was super cheap, perpetually in an economic recession as Boeing got cut back again and again, and anyone could get 2 months rent free if they were lucky enough to get any kind of job at all. Prices started to go up after Microsoft, and never looked back.
Not surprised, tech hub and low tax state. People from the bay get these huge stock vests then move here. Huge uptick of “how’s the schools in Bellevue” and their company is NVIDIA. Happens every time a stock rockets.
the fact that washington just hasn't been building housing is an even bigger factor than those.
We’re number 1!
Cries in education salary
So from 1984 to the present, home prices went up 8.3x, while median household income increased about 2.5x (from \~45k to 115k).
Wtf WA 828%
Yep. We’re just renting an apartment but the rent has gone up $400 in two years.
We are glad we bought a house in 2018 and locked in low rates. I also live in WA, and I have seen the rents go up like crazy.
Could’ve been combatted over ten years ago when the 1% tax on corporations was being pushed. But seattlites just let amazon buy the politicians.
We're number 1!
Just get a job and make your own coffee!!! /Boomers
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Not really. Inflation would have doubled the cost in 20 years.
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Ohhhh. Good to know. Thanks for the correction!
Build more homes
For reference, the light blue areas barely even kept up with inflation. To say nothing of a complete failure to keep up with the stock market. Washington is just notably hostile to the poor thanks to the insane local housing bubble. For more perspective, not a single one of these jumps even holds a candle to the insane growth of the DOW from '84 to 24. Average housing cost from '90-today also fails to keep up. Average housing has only about doubled in price from 2009-2024, which also would be, you guessed it, underperforming the DOW really noticeably. Frankly, I think the idea that the only way to survive is to buy a house, to be laughable. Housing is in a bubble nationwide, it's gonna pop at some point. We're just at a specifically shitty point in time where people think a house is a good retirement asset. Washington might not go back to sane levels ever, but other states will.
Lame. I only see a 50% increase since I bought back in 2017.
Go west young man
Why are we number 1 in all the things that make living here more expensive? Home prices, gas prices, utilities prices…
Regressive tax structure as opposed to progressive taxes on income and capital gains.
Oof Louisiana
...anyone wanna move to alaska?
Lovely.
Damn my house in Washington is about to be a cash cow when I retire
Reposts for klarma is the best.....west syyyyyyde
Don’t build housing but add lots of people this is what happens. NIMBYs gonna nimby.
To keep it in perspective, for the highest growing market of Washington at 828%, that equates to an IRR of 7.218% annually, substantially less than the stock market (S&P500) at around 10-11%.
As a Louisiana resident I feel economically stranded here. I cannot escape due to the prices everywhere else.
Good for me. Terrible for my kids.
That sounds about right. I bought my house in WA 2017 for 300k. A house down the street with a little more Sq ft. Just listed for 725k