What data are you looking at? Median home price for Chicago (where I live incidentally) is 229,000, for Dallas is 225,000, for Houston is 197,000 according to this source [0] and those are the 3rd, 4th, and 5th largest metropolitan statistical areas in the United States and Dallas and Houston have both grown a whopping 19% in the past decade [1]. Trick is, they all still have plenty of land to build new homes on to keep up with demand growth.

[0]: https://www.kiplinger.com/article/real-estate/t010-c000-s002...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...

The median home price doesn't mean much in Chicago. Most homes in the desirable neighborhoods are 1BR and 2BR condos and well over $300k or include outrageously high HOAs ($400 - $1K). There are thousands of sub $200k homes in the city but they're located in dangerous under resourced neighborhoods to the south and far west. In either case, you will pay 2% property taxes, which means comes out to $400 a month in property taxes -- about twice the amount you'd pay in any other part of the country. And that's in addition to 10% sales taxes and 4% income taxes. The only other places with property taxes that high have no income tax (Texas) or are near New York City.

Chicago isn't nearly as great a deal as it's made out to be.

"desirable neighborhoods" in Chicago is code for living in a bubble (should be very firmly noted that this is NOT race-related). Yes, you pay a lot more for that. There are neighborhoods in the city that have lower crime, faster access to downtown, higher median incomes, better-rated schools and lower house prices than many of the "desirable neighborhoods". The Near South Side is an obvious example.

However, you can look at the tax rates within Cook County and even compare them to the suburban counties [1]. The composite property tax rate is as low as it gets around here. Most cities are double or triple the Chicago rate.

It isn't as good of a deal as when I moved here, but if you've got a tech or other white-collar salary, Chicago is still a really good deal. It's your responsibility to consider cost when choosing a location within the metro area. If you ignore it, you shouldn't be surprised that you pay more.

[1] https://www.cookcountyclerk.com/service/tax-extension-and-ra...

EDIT - Illinois and Texas heavily depend on property taxes for local funding. The actual rates you pay have an insanely high variance from city to city. Some taxing districts don't align with city boundaries either, so one neighborhood may pay more than another. You can use it as a proxy for how well-run a city is, but on the other hand Chicago isn't a particularly well-run city - it just has a huge amount of high-value commercial and industrial property (which is taxed at double the rate of residential property). If you're going to live in either state, you really need to look at the hyper-local tax rates and put that into your decision matrix. The data isn't even hard to find.

Indeed, my shortlist is Chicago (and maybe Grand Rapids) at this point. I’ve always been in love with Chicago—such a gorgeous city. Housing wise, I’m enchanted by the industrial brick and timber loft condos that there seem to be a lot of for decent prices.

Can you recommend other neighborhoods besides Lakeview/Lincoln Park? Those are the only areas I’ve spent significant time in aside from downtown.

It really depends on where you plan to work, where your friends are, etc. I would recommend that you rent for a year or two and spend time exploring neighborhoods. You'll find a location you love eventually. There are definitely dangerous areas, but you're going to hear a lot of very outdated advice such as "never go south of Roosevelt" when in reality from Roosevelt south to Hyde Park has seen an incredible renaissance over the last 20 years.

FYI, brick and timber loft condos are super cool, but they usually have strange layouts and the buildings tend to require a lot of maintenance. Don't let me scare you off, but you're going to want to rent one for a year before buying one, just to make sure.

Strange layouts and maintenance projects are kind of my jam, so you may be increasing my enticement here. Thank you for the tips.

The Near South Side is a desirable neighborhood and the situation there is as I described. It's small condos with exorbitant HOAs. Do you mean Bronzeville?

I'm glad you think so; many northsiders do not! But you know that, for example, the Near North Side has an average price per sq foot that is $50-100 higher than the Near South Side.

I bought a 1700sq foot house that was ready to move in, in a pretty quiet and safe neighborhood, with decent (but not amazing) schools, in a suburb of Chicago for $230k with no HOA fees just 2 years ago. There are neighborhoods here that are really expensive, but others that are more affordable.

If I worked in the city I would have at least an hour commute each day, though, but it only takes me 30 minutes to get to the city outside of normal commuting hours.

Property taxes are kind of high around here though. I think I'm paying about what you're saying, and some of the homes I looked at (but decided against) were over $6000 a year in property taxes. Those were in areas with really good schools though.

Also Illinois as a whole as a state has one of the highest overall tax burdens in the country, because the state is pretty much broke, so that might be enough to stay out of Illinois.

You could actually find a place just over the border in Indiana, though, and have the same commute to downtown Chicago as I would have (about an hour) but suddenly have a much lower tax burden. I've worked with several coworkers in the past that commuted to the suburbs of Chicago for work every day from Indiana, it's doable.

The past few years have hit the construction industry hard, with the trade war spiking steel prices, the crack down on immigration combined with low unemployment reducing the workforce, and now there's a lumber shortage to go along with the pandemic. I built a house during the beginning of this mess and it was painful: it took 13 months to build a house that would normally take 8.

The cost of construction has risen such that I can't find a new construction house in my area for under $400,000 with the median on Zillow being $495,000. And this is for an area in the midwest that those reports you link report "median home price" of well under $200,000. If you can't build cheap houses, then soon there won't be cheap houses.

A lot of cities on that first list are reporting 10%+ YoY changes. That's significant. Those used to be numbers you'd see in Seattle Washington, not fucking Allentown Pennsylvania...

Here is some data backing up what I’ve been (mostly subjectively) observing. In particular, look at the skyrocketing median list/sale price (+10% YOY) and the YOY changes in sale price since ~2010. Also, medians are of course just an aggregate measure that does not tell the full story—low quality cookie cutter developments drag the medians down. Older homes in decent neighborhoods are even hotter.

[0]: https://www.redfin.com/blog/data-center/

[1]: https://www.zillow.com/research/zillow-weekly-market-report-...

>secondary cities (Grand Rapids MI)

Grand Rapids? Unaffordable? Are you looking at condos downtown? Here's[0] a 3bd/2br with 1800 sq ft that admittedly is outside of downtown a bit, but is under $1000 a month. This condo [1] is more expensive, but would be totally affordable if 2 people were able to pay $1250 in rent by themselves. Both of these were on the first page of Trulia results when I searched for Grand Rapids.

[0] https://www.trulia.com/p/mi/grand-rapids/1546-escott-ave-nw-...

[1] https://www.trulia.com/p/mi/grand-rapids/60-monroe-center-st...

A condo in GR is a possibility for sure, though you have to admit the market there has gotten ridiculous in recent years. Most of the decent houses near downtown get multiple offers instantly (same in Kalamazoo).

Is $1250/mo a realistic amount to charge a roommate in GR?

If you really want that downtown life, then it may be realistic. It's definitely a lot cheaper than a corresponding condo of that size in a major city.

If you're considering Chicago unaffordable, I'm really curious what you think is affordable!

When I moved here, I was blown away that house prices where I live, about 30 minutes from downtown, are on average $150k, or less than 3x median yearly income here. This isn't actually drastically different from a semi-rural Missouri town I lived in for a bit.

Do you live in Indiana? Did you move ten years ago? I can't think of a single safe neighborhood in Chicago or its surrounding suburbs that are $150k today.

Yeah, Indiana, as of two years ago.

I'm an outsider, but when I look at the US market there seem to be really cheap houses away from the major cities. Far cheaper than Australia.

For example: https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-search/Rochester_...

Now I don't really know anything about Rochester. But you would be hard pressed to find anything in a city for ~50-60k in Australia. Not comparing Apples to Apples, but the 1 bedroom apartment I bought in Melbourne suburbs in 2016 was AU$265k

If I look at somewhere like Bendigo (about 2 hours from Melbourne). The cheapest houses are about 250k.

https://www.domain.com.au/sale/bendigo-vic-3550/?ptype=apart...

Does Australia have housing problems as well? Possibly.

Rochester is definitely cheap, but for a reason: It's a city on the down slope past its peak. It's a deindustrialized rust belt city with a population down 38% from its pre-WWII high. That goes a long way to explain why housing is so affordable. And I wonder what the tech job situation is like there (though that may matter less now, what with the pandemic increasing the acceptability of WFH).

It's hard to move somewhere for cheap housing where you literally wouldn't know a single person, though. Social life is important.

Also, there's the winter weather. I hope you like cold and snow.

> It's hard to move somewhere for cheap housing where you literally wouldn't know a single person, though. Social life is important.

And this is fine, but it seems very disingenuous to say that it's a crime that you can't afford to buy a home when you refuse to move out of arguably one of the most expensive cities in the country. It's equivalent to crying about not being in the 1% when you're in the top 1.5%, and you could move if you wanted to.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to live in San Francisco, but expecting to buy a home a few years after graduating from college is ridiculous in my opinion.

> but it seems very disingenuous to say that it's a crime that you can't afford to buy a home

It's also very disingenuous to misrepresent other people's statements like this. Literally no one is saying it's a crime.

This tale does not reflect reality when you look at the numbers. Housing prices have more-or-less always gone up, especially on time scales long enough to spread out market corrections. If housing prices 2-3 years ago "seem like a steal" (they don't), and the same has been true every 2-3 year cycle (it hasn't), an FHA/USDA mortgage with 3.5-5% in basically every market other than San Francisco and NYC makes sense, and if you're making software developer salaries it should take less than a year to save up 3.5% of a home you can afford (again, other than NYC and SF which are outliers).

Since you're spent a lot of time researching this: have you ever found a way to correlate 3rd-tier and below cities with fiber internet speeds and infrastructure? Seems like that info would be useful to a lot of people here, who are looking to move to a more rural area but are working tech jobs remote long term or even permanently and need fast internet.

By “research” I really meant “searching, then searching again...and again”, not actual research. Word choice is important in HN comments because you all are too sharp.

I haven’t looked at that, but I have wondered how universal satellite internet coverage and the more permanent (?) move towards remote work will affect rural areas. It is an interesting trend to keep an eye on.

This is a great idea. I’d take it a step further and correlate it to the availability of municipal fiber and also a Costco within a 30min drive.

I live in a small town, about 20min away from the larger city, with FTTH and reasonable cost of living. There are disadvantages to living in the country (you have to drive everywhere), but it's just a balance.I definitely enjoy zero crime, no traffic, fresh air and a large lot so I am not crammed with my neighbors. The downside is that I can't walk everywhere, but that is fine.