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Dear Hermann,

Yeah, I don't entirely disagree with what you're saying.

If I were 20 - 25 again, I'd definitely think hard about costs of living in determining where I'd want to settle down.

Even now, I'm 44, and I've been thinking about southwest Virginia, maybe about halfway between Richmond and Williamsburg.

I could sell my house, pay off the mortgage, and pay cash for a house as nice as what I have now, but with more land.

I wouldn't need anywhere near as much income if I didn't have a mortgage. If my business grows some more, I might sell it and do just that. With no debt and a few bucks put away, I could be a little adventurous.

But here's the thing. DC has always been kind of expensive, but up until recently, there were plenty of places within the region that were pretty affordable. If you didn't have to live in McLean, or Fairfax at all, or lower Montgomery, or the Gold Coast of upper Northwest, you could find affordable housing, even up until the late '90s, early '00s.

I sold my four bedroom house in College Park, not far from the University of Maryland, for $130,000 in 1993. As late as 2000, that house was still around $160,000.

I was looking at houses over there. The neighborhood where I lived, houses are going for $300,000 and up.

That's only the last four or five years.

My wife grew up in a dump called Rogers Heights. Twenty years ago, it was a white, working class neighborhood. Today, it's much more crime and drug-infested.

Twenty years ago, the houses there sold for $40,000 - $50,000. Ten years ago, those houses were selling for under $100,000. Five years ago, maybe $150,000. Maybe not quite that much. Looking, I see houses listed there for $260,000 - $300,000.

And the problem is that when folks have lived in a place a long time, gotten pretty far into raising the kids, etc., and all of the sudden, things get wacky, it isn't so easy to move. When my wife and I were young and first married, we could have moved away from the DC area, very easily. But back then, it was still pretty affordable. I didn't have to live in Bethesda.

Now it isn't affordable. If your household income isn't in the high five figures, it's really tough to buy a home in any part of the region anymore. If you want a nice home in a nice community, you need six figures of household income.

If we were in a position to need to grow into another size house, we'd be out of luck. My income has not grown nearly as fast as housing values in this area. I couldn't afford my own house, if I had to buy it today. I moved to this house less than four years ago.

It only happened in the last few years. It was quite sudden.

We have friends who are just about outgrown their current house. They have five kids, and the wife would like to have one more (she's 44, more than one more might be a little bit of a stretch). But even though they have a pretty large house, it's getting a little tight with five, and six would be kinda tough. Fortunately, they're quite well off. If they have to move, they'll be able to afford it. He's got a lucrative IT job, she homeschools, and they've been shrewd in their home-buying, they're real savers, they'll be fine.

But other folks in similar situations come to a point where they can live in cramped quarters, or maybe mom goes back to work. When you're 10 or 20 years into your career, you have three or four or five little ones, with a couple or more in school, little league, etc., moving to a new region isn't so easy.

And then the question is, if it happened in Prince Georges County, Maryland, why would I think it won't eventually happen in Philadelphia? Or other places that are relatively low-cost?

It happened here in less than five years, Hermann. Five years. If you had another two or three kids, would you think about a somewhat larger home? Imagine if the prices all doubled over the course of the next five years, while your income only went up, say, 40% or so.

sitetest.