[EastSideHBG]

Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc

This is happening everywhere. In Asheville since the start of the pandemic, the median price of a house has jumped by nearly $75,000, and the "living wage" as calculated by what it would take to afford those rising housing costs has jumped by $2 to more than $17 an hour... In a city where the actual average wage is less than $10 an hour.

When my husband and I started trying to buy a house we looked first in Asheville and found that with what we were approved for, we could buy a singlewide trailer in Buncombe County or, if we were willing to live on the very farthest fringes of the county, we might be able to afford a doublewide trailer. That's when we started looking elsewhere, and discovered that one way or another we were going to have move about an hour away to find anything. An hour to the north, west, or east put you in the sticks, but an hour to the south puts you in Greenville, SC, the mini-Atlanta. So that's where we went, and that's where we bagged a two-story, four-bedroom house for the same money that would have gotten us a trailer in Buncombe County (and nothing at all inside the city limits of Asheville).

Thanks to people fleeing big cities and looking for smaller cities with big-city amenities, the only places near Asheville that are even remotely affordable anymore are the town of Woodfin and the town of Canton. Woodfin because it's where the sewage treatment plant is and the place stinks, and Canton because there's a paper mill there that blankets the entire area -- and sometimes if the wind is right, even as far as West Asheville -- with the aroma of fresh, piping hot fart.

It's really a sad situation. The pandemic has exploded towns that were already unaffordable, and just accelerated the rise of housing costs to the point that normal people just cannot afford to live anywhere close to their jobs. It's one thing to just come to play in a resort town, but it's another to have to work there and try to afford to live there on the crap wages, and where even the shittiest fixer-upper costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

I wonder what's going to happen when some of these companies reverse course and start wanting people back into the office again. If you moved 1.5 hours away from your job and then they suddenly say yeah we need you back in here 3+ days a week, that is going to cause some issues.