Modest is $150K to $200K for a home. I get there this way; At a salary of $48,000 / year (take home $38,753) and allocating a bit less than a third of the take home to paying the mortgage that is about $1K/month or, at current interest rates a $150K - $200K house. $48K/year is about 60% of the median salary in California.
As far as checking out the scene I look at things like how many days on the market for properties that are for sale, infrastructure (markets, transportation, nominal weather, services, crime statistics, Etc) all the kinds of things that I normally would check if I were moving there.
My experience has been that people who are more comfortably well off than I am are not really looking very closely at the details of homes when they survey the lower end homes. I have had conversations with people who claim there is tons of affordable housing and they pull up some low priced listing in Detroit, a city in such a state of crisis that a woman created a non profit to pay water bills there. I have looked at listings in Detroit. The dirt cheap listings I looked at while homeless were mostly a case of "Oh, god, no! I would rather keep sleeping in a tent!" I am talking about burned out husks or houses that had been flooded and now had horrifying mold problems.
Things I was looking for in a house as someone in genuine need of affordable housing:
In walking distance of basics like a grocery store or, at minimum, able to get to such cheaply and efficiently via public transit.
I want something at $100k or less that can qualify for financing. When you look at a lot of super cheap housing, it is cash only and has defects that disqualify it from any kind of bank financing. I have seen houses listed that explicitly said "No foundation. Will not qualify for financing."
A single family detached house that is not a trailer where the price includes both house and land. When buying a trailer you are frequently buying only the trailer, not the land it sits on, and it is located in a trailer court where you have additional rental fees for being on that land on top of the purchase price of the trailer.
I want a modest home in decent shape. I don't mind a fixer, but a lot of cheap housing in the US has major defects that will cost serious money to remedy. It is a sucker's deal. You should not buy a house like that because budget matters. You buy a house like that because it has amazing views or historic significance or something and you have deep pockets. Poor people buying that kind of house are getting stiffed.
I basically want the kind of house I grew up in, something that affords one a lower middle class life with security and financial stability and a future. And it is extremely challenging to find that anywhere in the US. I concluded it does not exist in California. A lot of lower end housing is trailers and condos and stuff being sold as a tear down because it survived a fire.
So the next time you survey local real estate, maybe consider looking a little more closely at the details. Because your opinion that this is not really a problem in California flies in the face of countless articles about the affordable housing crisis in the state that routinely make the front page of HN. There is lots of homelessness there and people getting roommates to be able to afford a place at all. And I have difficulty fathoming how you can so cavalierly ignore the overwhelming evidence and pronounce this not really a problem.
I wanted to be an urban planner before life got in the way. I have formal education and have done a lot of reading related to this. It is not an uninformed opinion.
I would still be interested in the OPs answer. I wasn't just living on the coast or researching coastal communities before finally looking elsewhere and ultimately leaving.
I (coming from Europe) travelled on the East and West coast and both times was astounded by how much US living relies on having a car. I'm myself pretty anti-car-ownership by now, but I think this is much easier to do in European cities.
One of the reasons I ended up here: I had no problem arranging to get here affordably and efficiently via train and intercity bus. Many of the small towns I researched in the western half of the US were a case of "Good luck trying to get there!" and/or would have cost a great deal more just to get there, on the order of two to three times what it cost me for train and bus tickets to get here just for tickets. And the reality is that if you travel for a couple of days or so, you want the sleeper car if possible or to stay at a hotel at some point, etc. Thus,the places that are that hard to get to wind up having additional expenses involved in just getting there.
An additional benefit of that is that I don't feel trapped here. If I want to go somewhere for any reason, whether for travel or to move again, getting out of here without a car is not some intimidating obstacle. I can readily get on an intercity bus and go to a variety of places in this region. I haven't looked into it, but I imagine it would not be too hard to get to the Seattle Tacoma International Airport and, from there, out into the world.
I was a military wife for a lot of years. I like living within a couple of hours of a major city and a major airport. I have not flown in years, but I have friends and family all over the planet and I always keep it in mind that I might need access to the ability to seriously travel.
Many years ago, I previously lived in Richland, WA and its downtown center was fairly pedestrian friendly as well. I don't know how easily you could get there without a car. It did not make my radar for where to go to get off the street.
Very affordable by coastal standards, but with very low incomes by coastal standards, too. Which somewhat offsets the affordability, unless you are talking about, e.g., long-distance commuters working in the Bay Area.
Nevertheless, yes, the interior is better at meeting the targets for Low and Very Low income affordable housing as specified in the report finding the 97.6% miss rate; lots of the interior jurisdictions are only missing on the Above Modest income targets. (Though there are exceptions, e.g., Fresno County also misses on the lower income targets.)
Anything under 300K? How about 200K? A fraction of the Bay area doesn't necessarily mean affordable.
This is part of why I want details. I need a house under $100k. After looking at what that kind of money buys in Cali -- anywhere in Cali -- and looking at what it buys outside of Cali, I eventually concluded it made more sense to go elsewhere. If you can't afford at least $200k in Cali, you can expect it to be a shithole. It would undermine my fragile health and also need ten's of thousands of dollars worth of work. I am happy to buy a fixer, but not one that will ruin my health and my finances.
I don't even need employment prospects. I have alimony and I make my money online. So that wasn't even a factor, and, no, it didn't fly in Cali.
It really is the middle of nowhere, despite being the fifth most populous city in the state.
But, you say, how can that be: the bigger cities are all embedded in even bigger urban clusters [0]. Fresno is, well, in the middle of nowhere.
[0] And even the smaller central cities; Sacramento, is a little smaller than Fresno if you look at the city itself, but the metro area is a time and a half the Fresno metro area.
Anecdotally, a of my friend moved from the Bay Area to Fresno and explicitly claims it's in the middle of nowhere.
Music events at Woodward Park often attracted women in shorts or skirts and cowboy boots. Culturally, the city reads sort of like half a million farmers and ranchers decided to move to the suburbs.
It is a fairly unique city, with an international airport and multiple national forests nearby. But "check out the natural beauty of our great outdoors!" is typically a small town or rural marketing pitch, not the pitch of a major city.
Last I checked, it was the 5th largest city in California and I think the 34th largest in the US. So I think there are 20 US states that don't have a city of that size. The entire state of Wyoming, our least populous state, has about the same number of people as the city of Fresno, in the neighborhood of about a half million apiece.
Fresno is a very unusual city and I think most people can't really relate to it. I spent considerable time baffled by its terrible reputation and simultaneously trying to wrap my mind around the place. It isn't like most big cities.
It has a terrible reputation for air quality. I found that weird when I lived there because I could see the stars at night better than anyplace else I had lived. On the other hand, moving elsewhere has dramatically improved my health. So, in retrospect, I think there are serious environmental issues there, though I am not entirely sure what they are because I remain baffled by the idea that air quality there is extremely bad when the stars are so much more visible than I am used to.
https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Bakersfield-CA/3506_ri...
You're telling OP to live in hell and it still costs more than they can afford.
> Between 1970 and 2010, Bakersfield grew 400% (from 70,000 to 347,483),[33] making it one of the fastest growing cities in California.[17]
It can't be too much hell if so many people want to live there that the population quadrupled in 40 years.
Here, I found another example: > Between 1968 and 1975 the Dubai's population grew by over 300%
Maybe OP could find a sweet oil job there!
I don't know if you realize it, but oil is, in fact, a big part of the economy in Bakersfield. And air quality is terrible because of it.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=bakersfield+economy+oil&FORM=E...
1. What do you consider modest prices?
2. What exactly do you do to check out the local real estate scene?
Because I recently left California to get off the street after moving around California a bit in search of affordable living and doing like 3 years of research, and my point of view and yours are so not on the same page, they aren't even in the same book.