Message from America

[andrewducker]

My brother Hugh sent me this email when he got back from the US:

Just coming back from America its a very different picture in living over there.

A large amount of America is still very rural and America is very large. Any kind of housing shortage that might have triggered this kind of boom was really only applicable to small very urban areas.

To give the largest comparison of size. The UK is 95,000 square miles (that includes NI) and has a population of 65,000,000
Wyoming is 98,000 square miles and has a population of about 500,000 (okay wyoming is the least populated state, but still America averages 10% of the population density of the UK)

As a couple of examples;

In Lima, where Meredith's family mostly lives, the lowest I saw you can get housing repossessions at the moment is for $6,000. Yes $6,000 for a house. In poor condition and only 2 bedrooms, but a house for less than I pay in nursery fees this year.

For $100,000 you can get a very nice looking house with 3 bedrooms and gardens out of town.
For $200,000 you can get a very nice looking 3+ bedroom house with big gardens in town. That would have multiple bathrooms, a 2+ car garage, etc...

Makenzie brought a small (e.g. the rooms aren't that big) 3 bedroom house (with 2 small bedrooms upstairs, one downstairs, a reasonable living room, a kitchen, a two room basement, back and front garden and a garage) for $70,000, which is about £45,000. This house is on the outskirts of Cincinnati (56th largest city) the largest city in Ohio, which is the 7th most populated state in America. Its about a 15 minute drive into town. Edinburgh would be the 36th biggest city in America. Manchester 4th biggest.

So, in other words, land is cheap n the states. I saw vast areas with closed shops on them for sale. I mean something the size of a football pitch in parking for a single store.

Which also means that the cost base for America is much lower than it is over here. If you think to include the cost of the land/building in everything that you buy over here you can see why prices are so much higher.

If you go to a restaurant then it costs more to build the restaurant cos of the land
It costs more to ship stuff to the restaurant, as everywhere where you buy things from also has a higher cost base
It costs more to grow food for the restaurant
It costs all the workers more to live because house prices/rent is higher so you need to pay them a higher wage

It also means that over here land/housing prices won't decrease as much. In America you can walk away from a house even if you owe far more than its worth, you can't do that here.

I don't know how applicable this is to other parts of America - but housing prices over here do seem to be staggeringly higher.

I'd love to know whether he's just getting an impression based on Ohio, or whether it's common across the whole USA...

Comments

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

It's not common across the *entire* US, technically--there are a few pockets where this is the exception rather than the rule--but it's true for the vast majority of it, yes.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

It's true for the vast majority by geographical area.

If you look at the east coast urban corridor (Boston south to DC) or the west coast (from San Francisco south to San Diego by way of Silicon Valley and Los Angeles) it's anything but. These areas aren't as densely populated overall as the UK, but they're not far off -- and land prices are commensurately high.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

It's also true for the majority by population. The two coasts, while they are densely populated, do not hold the majority of the American population. When I said "a few pockets where this is not true" I had in mind mostly the First and Second coasts.

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

Also, the suburban US houses that we saw (around Idaho and Montana) were not _brick built_ (which we favour in the UK). Houses tended to be made with wooden frames, boards and clad in either wooden shingles or plastic sheets that looked like painted shingles. i.e. the house was basically made with a lot more wooden infrastructure and took a fraction of the time to put up, costing less labour.

Cheaper land, cheaper materials, cheaper labour = much cheaper houses.

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we mostly use treated pine. The majority of our houses will be lumber, though it is of course possible to find brick or masonry. But even when you do, it's most likely going to have a wood frame.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Heh.

There's a house going up in the lane across from my kitchen window, here in Edinburgh; I've been watching it grow.

First they dug a diry great hole and lined it with breeze blocks.

Then they installed a steel beam structural frame.

Then more breeze blocks as inner walls, then a damp-proof membrane, then an outer curtain wall of carved stone blocks (to match the surroundings). Cavity foam insulation going between the membrane and the inner wall, I believe (that bit's not visible).

So: steel, stone, and concrete, plus insulation.

(Admittedly the roof is timber-framed, but still: what's on top of it is good old-fashioned slate.)

[cybik.livejournal.com]

It's a shame that we use more expensive materials*, but manage to make terrible, terrible housing that is badly designed and badly put together. New housing estates are generally awful.

*more expensive, but not necessarily better.

[drplokta]

Manchester has a population of under 400,000, and would be the 45th largest city in the US, not the 4th largest. It's in a much larger metropolitan area, but so are plenty of US cities (it would be the 23rd largest metropolitan area in the US). (Source: Wikipedia)

[helen-keeble.livejournal.com]

This is generally true, even in very affluent parts of America (though the mid-West is much cheaper than either of the coasts). I grew up in suburban Virginia, near Washington D.C., and I remember being shocked when we moved to the UK at how crowded together everything was. My UK friends always exclaimed over how huge our house (in semi-rural Sussex) was - but it was literally _half the size_ of our American house (and less than 1/4 of the land). And that was _after_ my parents put on an extension to increase the size by 25%.

For comparison: our US house was a new-build with 4 double bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, 6 assorted other rooms, and 5+ acres. Moving to the UK (which involved a promotion for my dad at his company), our buying power got us 2 double bedrooms, 1 single bedroom, 2 bathrooms, 4 assorted other rooms (very much smaller than US counterparts), 1.5 acres of land, and an awful lot of work that needed to be done on the house (it was priced cheap due to very poor condition).

On the other hand, in the US I would never have been able to walk to school, or to the corner shop. There are some advantages to having things close together!

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

These property prices are definitely not true in New York or San Francisco, FWIW. Or Vancouver for that matter.

[darkoshi]

Brick houses are more expensive than others. But, in my region at least, even the brick houses still have a wooden framework, and the brick is just a veneer. Many new houses that are built may have the front side, or one part brick, just to look nice and fancier, but vinyl siding on all the other sides.

On the other hand, some "cheap" housing is made out of the big stone/brick blocks, without a wood structure (as far as I'm aware). But those aren't very common.

When I was shopping for a house 4 years ago, at first I was looking in the range of $80-90,000. There are a lot of houses available for less, but they generally seemed unpleasant in one way or the other - a bad neighborhood, or with a dampness inside, or windows and heating and fixtures in bad condition, or smelling very bad from pet-pee in the carpets. Even some of the houses in the 80-90k range were like that - especially if they were more expensive due to being brick. People make money buying houses like those and fixing them up and then selling them higher (at least before the decline in house sales).

I eventually started looking in a higher price range, and the house I ended up getting was for about $125,000. It's mostly brick - it has additions that were done in vinyl siding, and the garage is vinyl siding. The price was somewhat higher than other houses in the area, but I still think I got a good deal, simply because it was in very good condition and very nice, and it has a great view.

And this is in a mid-sized urban area in the South - where prices are generally much cheaper than up North.

[andrewducker]

My flat, on the other hand, was £165k - for a ground floor flat with a bedroom, living room, study, bathroom and kitchen. That's $270k...

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

My state's nickname is "The Natural State". My hometown officially has a population of 80,000 residents and it's the second largest city, so it's very close to how your brother describes it. Land and cost of living is much cheaper here, and we're in the top five of retirement states because of that. It's an interesting dynamic.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

When I was in Ann Arbor last year there were a lot of very large family houses (4-6 bedrooms, plus multi-room basements) going for ca. $10k. At the same time, there were entire blocks of suburban Detroit going for the same kind of money (taking the houses to less than $1k each!) but you'd have needed to reorganise water and electricity.

[beachpsalms.livejournal.com]

I'm just here to boggle at the notion that the US is sparsely populated.

Canadian Population Density

[andrewducker]

It's all comparative:

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

This varies drastically depending on which state you're in.

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Wow, cool report.

I live in Indiana, right next to Ohio, and I think land is cheaper in the Midwest than on the coasts. The house I live in now would have cost three times as much in the Philadelphia (East Coast) area.

Huh. Interesting and thanks for sharing. :)

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

NZ and the UK are similar sizes, geographically. We have 4 million people though, compared to your 65 million. And 4 million's an ample number, I assure you. People are overrated, compared to space.