This article blows my mind due to this single sentence:
The couple found a sprawling five-bedroom house next to a horse farm for $782,000, half the cost they would have paid in the Seattle suburb they left behind.
This implies that the family in the article was shopping for a $1.5M home in a "Seattle suburb" that is most likely in the Bellevue/Redmond area in the year 2015. In that year, the average sale price in the region was between $855K (Bellevue, WA) and $598K (Redmond, WA), implying that they were aspiring to live well above the median lifestyle in two of the richer suburbs in the Seattle area. [1]
I don't know how to square this family's story with the surrounding narrative in the article. This family could afford to live almost anywhere. They could afford to pay taxes to fund schools and other municipal services. They could choose to live somewhere that has none of the problems the article decries, simply by buying in.
Methinks this is a story about false advertising on the part of "Millennial Mayberry", rather than suburban flight.
That's not what it implies. The article is just talking about the price of housing in Seattle. The journalist was comparing the cost of the home the family bought, with a theoretical similar house in the city.
Moreover, almost everyone is highly leveraged when "buying" a home. Hell, I my wife and I could swing a 1.5m mortgage if we really wanted to. According to mortgage calculator, a 1.5m house would take 60k down-payment and 1.5k/month[1]. That's very reasonable for a large portion of the population.
I've paid triple that amount in rent for apartments.
>According to mortgage calculator, a 1.5m house would take 60k down-payment and 1.5k/month[1].
Did you miss a zero somewhere or did the calculator have a bug? There's no way 60K down and 1.5k/month is correct. It's much higher than that for a $1.5M home.
I was about to say the same thing. I put $33k down and financed $208k at around 3.5% (in the Upper Midwest). Three years on my payments are about $1280, after increased taxes YOY.
Fannie Mae's "jumbo loan" policy means you have to pay huge money down and also prove that you have enough in the bank to fund like 6 months of payments.
The couple found a sprawling five-bedroom house next to a horse farm for $782,000, half the cost they would have paid in the Seattle suburb they left behind.
This implies that the family in the article was shopping for a $1.5M home in a "Seattle suburb" that is most likely in the Bellevue/Redmond area in the year 2015. In that year, the average sale price in the region was between $855K (Bellevue, WA) and $598K (Redmond, WA), implying that they were aspiring to live well above the median lifestyle in two of the richer suburbs in the Seattle area. [1]
I don't know how to square this family's story with the surrounding narrative in the article. This family could afford to live almost anywhere. They could afford to pay taxes to fund schools and other municipal services. They could choose to live somewhere that has none of the problems the article decries, simply by buying in.
Methinks this is a story about false advertising on the part of "Millennial Mayberry", rather than suburban flight.
[1] https://public.tableau.com/shared/9P33834MX?:display_count=y...