Most liberal cheap/affordable cities?

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by CaliNative

Plus the heating bills are enormous.

They are?

That's news to me.

It costs us about $700 dollars to heat our home with natural gas through a typical chicago winter.

That's hardly a back-breaking expense that's gonna be the difference maker in affordability for your average American family.

[Centropolis]

PG+ E bills in a mediterranean/bay area climate for an average sized house are higher than my heating/cooling bills in st. louis.

[Chef]

Originally Posted by CaliNative

Minnie & Maddie may be liberal but not very affordable anymore. Not CA expensive but not cheap either. Plus the heating bills are enormous. If you want really cheap the Rio Grande Valley is that. Laredo, MacAllen, Brownsville etc. The crime rates are lower than you would expect near the border. San Antonio is fairly low cost compared to Austin. Birmingham Alabama is cheap and on the rebound. Nowhere in CA is cheap except maybe Modoc County.

Minneapolis is more expensive than it used to be but it isn't outrageously expensive yet. You can still rent a 1br apartment in a decent city neighborhood for $900 a month and the median home price is $290,000. Given that it has a similar pay scale to the big cities of the coasts those prices aren't that bad. The parts of the Midwest that are significantly cheaper than that also have much lower pay scales.

Also, if you rent in Minneapolis you don't pay for heat.

[Via Chicago]

Originally Posted by CaliNative

Minnie & Maddie may be liberal but not very affordable anymore. Not CA expensive but not cheap either. Plus the heating bills are enormous. If you want really cheap the Rio Grande Valley is that.

its pretty disingenuous to single out heating in northern cities without factoring the massive cooling costs/energy output required to make desert living possible. south texas can get hotter than death valley.

[subterranean]

I was going to say pretty much any anywhere urban in Texas. For what I could sell my 1300 sq. ft. 3/2 in metro Portland, I could get a McMansion in Dallas. Metro Detroit is still pretty affordable, too, but not like it used to be. A couple years ago, Aretha Franklin's house sold for $300k.

[CaliNative]

Originally Posted by Via Chicago

its pretty disingenuous to single out heating in northern cities without factoring the massive cooling costs/energy output required to make desert living possible. south texas can get hotter than death valley.

I stand corrected.

[JManc]

Originally Posted by subterranean

I was going to say pretty much any anywhere urban in Texas. For what I could sell my 1300 sq. ft. 3/2 in metro Portland, I could get a McMansion in Dallas. Metro Detroit is still pretty affordable, too, but not like it used to be. A couple years ago, Aretha Franklin's house sold for $300k.

Her house was also a mess and probably needs at least a half million in repairs and updating.

As for Texas, it's not that affordable. You could easily find that McMansion in suburban Dallas but not so much in Dallas proper or at least in a stable area.

[subterranean]

Yeah, it was a mess and needed a lot of work. It was an extreme tongue-in-cheek example but there are still plenty of affordable areas and overall it’s a liberal area.

And as for Dallas, I could easily double my square footage for the average sale price in my area.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by JManc

Her house was also a mess and probably needs at least a half million in repairs and updating.

And it's in Detroit city proper, which totally unrepresentative of the Metro Detroit real estate market. Very few professional households, esp. with kids, are gonna live in a home in Detroit proper. If that home were in a nice suburb, it would cost millions.

Metro Detroit has higher median home prices than most of the traditional Rust Belt metros (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Columbus, Cincy, Indy, etc.) and taxes are very high. Nice suburbs, with good schools, are not cheap, unless you're coming from NYC or CA.

[subterranean]

Don’t act like all of Detroit’s suburbs are Bloomfield Hills. There are plenty of Livonias and Westlands with decent schools where you can still get a reasonably nice house for $150k.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by subterranean

Don’t act like all of Detroit’s suburbs are Bloomfield Hills. There are plenty of Livonias and Westlands with decent schools where you can still get a reasonably nice house for $150k.

In Westland, yeah, but Westland is a near-slum, with high crime and terrible schools.

In Livonia you aren't getting a move-in-ready home for anything close to 150k, and Livonia is a very average suburb. Professionals moving from the coasts probably aren't ending up in Livonia.

In upper middle class places like Northville, Novi, Plymouth, Rochester, Troy, you're gonna pay at least 400k for something decent, and it will probably be an older home that needs work. That's not insanely expensive, but not exactly cheap either, especially when you factor in high taxes and high energy costs.

[subterranean]

Originally Posted by Crawford

In Westland, yeah, but Westland is a near-slum, with high crime and terrible schools.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by subterranean

Not sure why this is controversial.

https://www.schooldigger.com/go/MI/d...15/search.aspx

Westland's school district is in the bottom 20% of state rankings, and Michigan, overall, has terrible school performance, in the bottom ten states.

So if you think the bottom 20% of schools in the bottom 20% of states is a decent school, not sure what to say. Westland schools objectively suck, in which case educated parents probably aren't putting their kids in school there if the homes were free.

And, if you look at the year-over-year data, you see Westland school performance is showing considerable long-term decline. The whole community went from sold working class to near-slum over the last 20 years.

[subterranean]

It’s controversial because you called Westland a slum. I think you forget (or plain don’t know) that the vast majority of Detroit’s suburbs are exactly representative of blue collar cities like Westland, Livonia, Southfield, most of Down River, Macomb County, etc.

[Steely Dan]

Originally Posted by subterranean

I was going to say pretty much any anywhere urban in Texas. For what I could sell my 1300 sq. ft. 3/2 in metro Portland, I could get a McMansion in Dallas.

Why move all the way to Texas just to double your square footage? Aren't there options to do that within metro Portland itself?

I ask because my cousin has a 4,500 SF 5 bed/4 bath mcmansion way the fuck out on the exurban fringe of Chicagoland that is basically twice the size of our home in the city for the same home value according to Zillow.

He chose size, we chose location.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by subterranean

It’s controversial because you called Westland a slum.

I called it a borderline slum. A sprawly area in the bottom 20% of school performance, and with said performance plummeting, in a region with crappy overall performance, is extremely undesirable. It also has a giant empty mall, and a rundown commercial spine (Ford Rd.) filled with rent-a-centers, dollar stores, cash-for-gold and other less desirable businesses. And the housing is mostly aging bungalows for Southern migrants.

If you want to call it something else, fine, but Westland is not on the radar for anyone with options, so relative affordability is irrelevent.

Originally Posted by subterranean

I think you forget (or plain don’t know) that the vast majority of Detroit’s suburbs are exactly representative of blue collar cities like Westland, Livonia, Southfield, most of Down River, Macomb County, etc.

Livonia and Southfield are middle class. Livonia has decent schools, amenities and good services. Southfield has poor schools (basically entirely AA) but still has decent incomes, services, location and home values.

Macomb County and Downriver are highly variable. And, yeah, there are "Westlands" in these areas. Taylor, Roseville, Lincoln Park, Romulus are largely the same; cheap but plummeting in desirability and near-slums. Areas increasingly kept alive by Section 8 and govt. checks, dependent on outflow from Detroit. A generation ago these were UAW towns with a Southern twinge.

[DCReid]

Back to cheapest/liberal cities - a better consideration would be to look at incomes and jobs prospects for a city in addition to cheapest/liberal. A friend of mine told me of another friend who lived in Columbus, Ohio (cheap) and then moved to Seattle, Washington (expensive). He did not seem to have much luck getting promotions in Columbus but in Seattle he got a much better and higher paying job. Sometimes the bigger more expensive cities offer better opportunities which can partly offset the higher costs. I've been told that Florida cities like Orlando and Tampa are cheaper, but the jobs don't pay that well. DC is certainly not a cheap city by any means, but it not uncommon for young professionals to make over $100K and couples to make $200-300K per year.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by subterranean

Don’t act like all of Detroit’s suburbs are Bloomfield Hills.

That was hilarious.

But yeah, even the high-end suburbs in Detroit are super cheap. There probably isn't a single suburb in Metro Detroit that you can't buy into with $400K. And $1M will get you the equivalent of Spelling Manor. Most of the mansions in the Detroit area aren't worth their cost of construction.