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Re:Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment Was a Colossal Mi... by keerthiko on Monday March 06, 2023 @02:11PM (#35046093)
In NYC, a lot of the affordable housing stock are part of co-ops, where the board has to approve your finances before you can move forward with a purchase. If your monthly income is less than a certain multiple (you would think 3x, but it's usually 5x - 10x depending on the co-op) of your monthly payments ie maintenance + mortgage + insurance, they can reject your application.

And even if you found a condo (usually 2x as expensive as a co-op for same QoL) without a board to reject you or just lived in a city without co-ops holding a lot of housing stock, banks have similar requirements in co-op applications as well. So you really need to have a massive income to go in without a >20% down.

Among the young people who may like to buy a house, this probably applies to a few rare folks working for a bay area tech company salary but are allowed to live in any other city where the home prices are more affordable.

Re:Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment Was a Colossal Mi... by Nemo_bis on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:09PM (#35046884)
"A lot"? I've been researching this earlier in another place and didn't come up with much, do you have a link on how to list them?
Re:Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment Was a Colossal Mi... by theIV on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:19PM (#35047010)
Anecdotal, but: Head over to https://streeteasy.com/ & do some searches with whatever you deem to be "affordable," then compare between the various "building types" in their filtering.

It's been a little while since I've done this–I, at least temporarily, gave up the idea of buying something in the city–but I noticed similar trends to keerthiko. Similar to when I was actually looking at places with a broker.

Re:Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment Was a Colossal Mi... by keerthiko on Monday March 06, 2023 @03:21PM (#35047028)
I used streeteasy[0] almost exclusively during my home search. They label every listing by home type (co-op, condo, townhouse, etc)

I don't think I found a condo under 800k, while there are plenty of co-ops across the boroughs, including Manhattan, in the 300-800k range.

EDIT: just noted you said "in another place". In my experience it's very hard to find this information in America outside NYC without investigating individual buildings.

[0]: https://streeteasy.com/for-sale/nyc/price:300000-800000

Re:Maybe Treating Housing as an Investment Was a Colossal Mi... by Nemo_bis on Monday March 06, 2023 @04:09PM (#35047632)
Thanks! I was looking in https://opencorporates.com (for Georgia) but I didn't know what to look for.

Super interesting: "Today, there are over 1,100 HDFC coops that make up a significant part of the fabric of New York City's affordable housing stock. " https://www.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/hdfc.p...

"5,578 NYC Co-ops and Apartments for Sale" https://streeteasy.com/coops/nyc

Though many of these might be from giant projects, it's still interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell%E2%80%93Lama_Housing_...

This is what you can do if you don't delegate all the management of the housing market to the Fed.