Posted on 03/15/2015 6:27:28 PM PDT by artichokegrower
Houses in my Silicon Valley area are going for well over $1M and selling in 3-5 days. Unreal.
A friend of mine grew up in Palo Alto. His parents worked at Stanford University. His parents bought thier house in 1955 for $28k. His mom still owns the house and is 85 years old. Rent on the house has financed her retirement in AZ very well.
Tell them they can voluntarily pay more.
As the cost of homes goes up, the number of desirable places to live goes down.
Yes, that's a lot of "assuming" for a 400K house.
If you have 80K in the bank for your down payment, I guess you could squeak by on 78K per year in CA.
Who writes this kind of article?
Back in the late 70s early 80s we would go. Shooting out that way old ridge. Routes road
you couldn’t pay me enough to live in california
this has been tested...
I was reading and scrolling down, and read and passed yours, then three posts later I laughed and scrolled back up. Rofl! Love it. (Slow, blonde)
A crappy little (1300 sq ft) house down the street just sold for $1.03M. The asking price was $984k. It had 5900 sq ft lot, no landscaping, 1960’s bathrooms, tiny galley kitchen. http://www.zillow.com/homes/recently_sold/19661671_zpid/37.270958,-121.978685,37.267201,-121.98862_rect/16_zm/?view=map
Un-frikkin-believable...there were 4 offers the first day it was on the market.
Last year we remodeled our kitchen......the Hall Monitors in the planning dept. coast us at least 15k more than we planned to implement rules and regulations to help keep “stupid” people safer......
My kids will NEVER be able to afford anything around here......ugh!
You forgot Newhall in that list.
“A big factor has to do with all the rich Asians moving here, for the most part from China. They are buying homes sight unseen through brokers.”
My realtor friends in Orange County have been telling me this for a few years now. All cash offers from Chinese buyers. It has driven prices above what most American natives can afford.
I’ve done some work on a place down in that area that has 33 units going in on 2 acres. All 33 have sold and they haven’t even poured floor slabs yet. Lowest priced one was 1.29 million.
It’s not so much legislated and regulated as simple supply and demand. The Merc today says there is 7 million sq ft of office space being built on the thin strip of land be Google east of 101. There’s probable another 5 million being built along 237 and North First St in San Jose. That’ll hold about another 100,000 workers all earning high tech salaries.
I thought about this article I read in Newser yesterday, linked from my ISP.
NASA: California Out of Water in a Year
Some of this is being done on purpose I am now convinced. Not all; nature still is as nature does. Then it gets blamed on us and our "carbon" footprints. I wish I knew to what end this is happening and who is behind it or bankrolling it.
CA did get a lot of rain but evidently not enough. I'm looking up what I formerly thought was kook stuff. Geo-engineering the weather.
In the past century and prior, there was little water to be had. But the haves had money to divert the water from other locations. LA in particular sucked water from surrounding states, and from Northern California.
Problem now, is that the surrounding areas were sucked dry and it doesn't matter how much money the haves can pay; you can't buy what isn't available. If the drought continues, drastic actions will need to be taken. One of those is to build desalination plants, and it will be even more expensive to live in California. On the other hand, the weather works in cycles. We alternate between dry spells and wet flood times. Can't predict when the next wet cycle will hit.
I mentioned the Chinese. But close behind are natives from India (also lumped into the Asian category). There are lots of Indians here in Silicon Valley, and they also come to buy homes for cash.
What you say is true, right on the money. And there are pictures of low water in reservoirs.
But something else is involved as well, methinks.
Those stats don’t seem right to me either, so I went to zillow and did a search for Beverly Hills. The article claims the median price for a home in BH is $2.2 million. The only way I can see that is if they incorrectly include all the rental rates and foreclosure opening auction prices as the asking price (and they will sell for more than twice those prices). Otherwise, you aren’t going to touch a home in BH for under $1.4M, and that would be a condo or townhouse.
I think the statistics are way off, on the low side.
Low side. Yes, agree.
Several other factors, so I can only guess what you mean. I'll skip divine punishment, because there are a lot of good folks in California living amongst the evil liberals.
One factor is population. Cramming millions of people into a desert area was not such a good idea, as water was already in short supply. And that's what large areas of Southern California are - desert areas. A huge influx of people over the last fifty years made a bad situation worse.
Another factor is politics. Liberal greenies are flushing millions of water away for the sake of their favorite tiny plants and fish, diverting the water away from where it is truly needed. It's a nice thought to restore wetlands and marshes to what they were 500 years ago, except for the fact that millions of people are here now and the greenies won't give consideration to the needs of those people.
So maybe divine intervention is how you remove millions of people to restore a balance. Cut off the tap and they'll leave?
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