Posted on 04/02/2011 2:11:48 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I’m not sure what the point is of the article. Looks like each of the 10 “ghost towns” is a vacation/tourist area that has always had an off-season. These are “ghost towns” off-season in any event. I gather the point is that people are unloading their vacation/second homes and therefore there is a huge inventory of vacant homes in these areas.
These areas pale next to places like Las Vegas and others that have immense “ghost towns” of incomplete new developments that were meant to be the owners primary residences.
Actually Mono County sits right in the middle of the Sierra Nevada with 14,000' peaks.
Two of the three killed off by lefty green jihad
I have family connections in Sawyer County, Wisconsin. Most of the empty homes are summer homes that were built by people from Minneapolis. People said they were crazy to build million dollar homes where the economy could not support them. The local real estate market has gone down, but hasn't hit bottom yet. You might find a good deal if you are retired or have another independent means of support. Notice how there are nearly as many homes as residents? That is a pretty good clue that most of the empty homes are vacation homes.
What a strange article. It uses census data to claim that houses are vacant. Well, most of those houses may be second homes, and we don’t want people to be counted twice. If they are seasonal rental properties, again they would most likely not have a tenant on April 1, 2010.
For example, Worcester County, Md includes Ocean City, a hugely popular summer resort. So 49000+ people show up in 19000+ households on the census, in a county that has 55000 housing units. Almost all of the “empty” housing units are fully occupied in the summer by people who live elsewhere.
http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/24/24047.html
Friggin leeches.
Those unions are killing Wisconsin.
Yes. I don’t know what the point of the article is either.
Martha’s VIneyard (Dukes County-MA) has always been like that - the running joke for decades is that the island raises up a foot when the tourists leave.
Every town on the island shuts down at 5pm there and off season when I was young the most fun you’d get as a kid was watching the A&P truck unload at the store - now that was exciting!
There are something like 4 counties in Michigan with less than 10,000 people. According to the recent census results they were among the counties with growing populations. Keweenaw county has less than 2500 people.
Frankly, the sparsely populated upper peninsula is my kind of place. Incidentally the Bing background photo today is from the UP.
I was wrong. It was 9 counties with less than 10,000 in them.
As for the point of the article ... I kind of appreciate that it wasn't trying to make one. As far as I'm concerned, it was just giving me interesting information to compute. If there was a point, it was that property tax receipts for the counties were taking a drop because the tax is based on the value of the property, and as the property value drops, so does county funding, and so county-run things are closing, etc. I say -- fine with me. People can be self-sufficient in most of the areas the county government gets into, anyway, with the exception of law enforcement.
Real estate prices are fascinating things. I noted that all those presumably scenically lovely places had seasons, times of year when it's not a place for pleasantness. Second homes in tourist areas that are temperate year-round ... I don't see any on that list, including Florida, where humid summers are plain gruelling.
The inland portion of Dare County, NC would qualify. The islands are breezy and cooler than the southeastern coastal summer norm, though. The Labrador Current is cold. It clashes with the bathwater of the Gulf Stream at Cape Hatteras, which is in Dare County.
Yup, the census counts seasonal second homes as vacant. Maine has a lot of those. According to the Census, 22% of all the homes in Maine are vacant. They’re vacation homes, they’re not vacation homes for sale, or anything like that. Vacation homes. It’s completely useless except to tell us where the vacation homes are.
As for the point of the article ... I kind of appreciate that it wasn't trying to make one. As far as I'm concerned, it was just giving me interesting information to compute. If there was a point, it was that property tax receipts for the counties were taking a drop because the tax is based on the value of the property, and as the property value drops, so does county funding, and so county-run things are closing, etc. I say -- fine with me. People can be self-sufficient in most of the areas the county government gets into, anyway, with the exception of law enforcement.
Real estate prices are fascinating things. I noted that all those presumably scenically lovely places with high vacancy rates had seasons, times of year when it's definitely not a place for pleasantness. Naturally those places have higher occupancy certain seasons than others, and we expect that, but they're also experiencing higher vacancies than average, presumably.
High vacancy rates in tourist areas that are temperate year-round ... I don't see any on that list; Florida doesn't qualify because its humid summers are plain gruelling. What's my point? Weather has a whole helluva lot to do with the "location, location, location" mantra of real estate. At least, that's how it looks to me.
Which is why we vacation farther south. Bill and Tom would love to go hang-gliding on the dunes at Kitty Hawk, but the little kids need to be able to go in the water, or we might as well stay home and clean the baseboards with toothbrushes.
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