Re:Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
by ghaff on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @11:35AM
(#12590364)
That's one of the reasons that COL factors, by themselves, don't mean an awful lot. If I were to move into a city it's clearly not even meaningful to talk about the price of the equivalent property to my exurban house on a fair bit of land. The relevant comparison is to what I would/could realistically and at least somewhat contentedly live in.
As I said elsewhere you need to make that after-tax housing cost comparison. Aside from a few other potential factors like private schools, most of the other purely cost deltas are going to be relatively modest.
Re:Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
by dionidium on Tuesday September 27, 2016 @12:13PM
(#12590694)
>If I were to move into a city it's clearly not even meaningful to talk about the price of the equivalent property to my exurban house on a fair bit of land.
To be fair, it's a lot worse than that. I live in a nice, spacious, modern loft in the middle of an urban area. We're not talking about a big, suburban house. Just a nice apartment. I'm looking at apartments in the high-COL city that resemble my current apartment's entryway in size and in conditions I wouldn't even consider here.
Housing will swallow everything in any real apples-to-apples comparison. But if you can accept that you'll be living in a much worse apartment, then the COL differences aren't as extreme as they're generally stated to be.