Quote:
Originally Posted by twister244
I'm going to repeat what I said earlier.... Don't just assume the grass is greener on the other side. I feel like a lot of people in Chicago are still stuck in this 2010 attitude that it's way more expensive compared to these "hot" cities, even after taxes. What's happened over the last five years is for many of these cities (Denver, Austin, etc), their real estate has gone through the roof. Yes, taxes are much lower, but at some point, you have to look at what you get for $400/$500/$600k and say - Nope. When I was still in Denver, I had thought about maybe getting a second place there, but prices just blew past my range I could afford for what I wanted.
If the city/state can offer some stability on the tax front (as TUP stated), I could see the tide turning back towards gains here in the next decade. These cities just can't keep going up forever without some sort of tipping point for folks.
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I agree with everything here and (I think) your previous message. In my original response on this topic I talked about housing prices, what your standards are, etc. We moved from NYC back to Chicago because we wanted to live somewhere nice and not have to go above $1M (or barely above it) for that nice 3+ bedroom and nor have to go to the suburbs (my wife doesn't drive). Pretty much impossible in NYC nowadays and an awesome opportunity opened up in my org in Chicago that would allow me to possibly get promoted faster than staying in my role in NYC. So in our case, the reduction in income tax and housing prices vastly outweighed the property tax reality for our particular situation. I could have maybe had an opportunity in Dallas, but it doesn't align with the lifestyle that we want (more urban, walkable, public transit, etc).
I do agree about the mentality. Interestingly in NYC, when they were telling people that the city was losing people now, all the online comments seemed to shift literally overnight from positive to negative about the city. People seemed to be really swayed by this stuff even though the situation was way more complex than that. It reminded me of Chicago in 2010 or 2011 and going forward. Then last summer we found out Chicago actually gained population and some people started to shift their opinions magically while others kind of doubled down or just disregarded the news entirely. These cities have so much to offer and a lot of people fail to see almost any positives.
There's no such thing as a perfect city and really the more people you have the more issues there's going to be. Some cities like Chicago have some serious issues (crime, property tax issues, etc) but it's still beneficial for many to move here.
With that being said, each situation is different. I don't think that every situation warrants a blanket statement. It may be good or beneficial for.some people to move to/live here while it may not be for others. You can apply this to any place. Just as an example, maybe someone who is car free lives here but moving to Texas may require them to purchase a car or 2. Perhaps the increase in that cost alone offsets the income tax difference and perhaps the price of housing they're looking at is similar to here (yes, that is more than possible believe it or not in some areas). But maybe some other household in a similar situation has those cars already and maybe owns them outright. Perhaps they can get a cheaper home there and thus maybe for them it doesn't really offset anything like the other household's situation and it makes sense to move. It's just an example but there's so many factors into how much money you spend per month/year and in many years cases it even goes beyond taxes (like the example above).
What's happening in some other cities isn't necessarily healthy. Especially the small ones like Boise. It's just pricing out the residents faster from getting into the market or people who were almost ready to buy. It reminds me a little of what my wife described in China like 15 years ago in the big cities. Her parents had bought 2 condos for maybe $200K cash there total - one was way on the outskirts of Shanghai (that's super far away) and one was 10 minutes away from the end of a city train line. Neither were the BEST locations but feasible. Their parents' friends though didn't want to pull the trigger and kept saying they were saving so they could afford something in an even better area location wise. Well, the prices went up there so fast that they were priced out in the matter of just a few months. Some of them took a decade to even be able to save money to afford that. Some of them have not even been able to purchase it to this day because that's how drastically fast things increased.