Housing costs in your area

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caseydog

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[EDIT This post copied from Caregivers thread.]

Just talked to my sister. She is going over tomorrow to get dad's laundry, and put mom's pills for the week in the plastic pill thing. Then she'll go back on Sunday to take Dad's laundry to his room, and get my mom in the shower. The Village will do laundry for my dad for a modest fee, but the lose things, so my sister does it.

My sister does a lot more for my parents than I do, but she lives 15 miles from them, and I live 230 miles away. I hate that she has that extra burden, but I made it clear many times over the years that I was not moving to Houston EVER**, but they were welcome to move close to me, which they did not want to do.

I will go down there when my sister goes on one of her two cruises a year next month. I'll do everything she does, except put mom in the shower. The village has a salon, and she'll get her hair washed there. She can handle other personal hygiene just fine herself. She just can't get herself safely into and out of the shower -- my sister needs to be there. I'll cook a few meals for my mom, and maybe bake something sweet for my dad (he has a giant sweet tooth), and cook some other things to put in containers, and freeze for my mom. She likes my cooking.

CD

** Houston is the forth largest city in the US. It has practically no zoning, few regulations, and the police department can't keep up with the crime rate, which is high. The good suburbs are not a lot better, are very expensive, and are an hour or more from Downtown Houston. I live in a city (Frisco) with good zoning and building codes, well enforced. The police and fire departments are excellent, and even with a population of 220,000, the violent crime rate is one-quarter of the national average. We have 0.02 murders per 1,000 people. The property crime rate is one-third the national average. What would you chose?
 
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caseydog said:
Just talked to my sister. She is going over tomorrow to get dad's laundry, and put mom's pills for the week in the plastic pill thing. Then she'll go back on Sunday to take Dad's laundry to his room, and get my mom in the shower. The Village will do laundry for my dad for a modest fee, but the lose things, so my sister does it.

My sister does a lot more for my parents than I do, but she lives 15 miles from them, and I live 230 miles away. I hate that she has that extra burden, but I made it clear many times over the years that I was not moving to Houston EVER**, but they were welcome to move close to me, which they did not want to do.

I will go down there when my sister goes on one of her two cruises a year next month. I'll do everything she does, except put mom in the shower. The village has a salon, and she'll get her hair washed there. She can handle other personal hygiene just fine herself. She just can't get herself safely into and out of the shower -- my sister needs to be there. I'll cook a few meals for my mom, and maybe bake something sweet for my dad (he has a giant sweet tooth), and cook some other things to put in containers, and freeze for my mom. She likes my cooking.

CD

** Houston is the forth largest city in the US. It has practically no zoning, few regulations, and the police department can't keep up with the crime rate, which is high. The good suburbs are not a lot better, are very expensive, and are an hour or more from Downtown Houston. I live in a city (Frisco) with good zoning and building codes, well enforced. The police and fire departments are excellent, and even with a population of 220,000, the violent crime rate is one-quarter of the national average. We have 0.02 murders per 1,000 people. The property crime rate is one-third the national average. What would you chose?
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I have a friend in Houston, I'm posting home something next week.
I know hes heavily armed. Ex nam vet.

Russ
 
rascal said:
I have a friend in Houston, I'm posting home something next week.
I know hes heavily armed. Ex nam vet.

Russ
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He actually lives in Houston or on the outskirts? Lots of people who say they live in Houston really live in the burbs outside of Houston, like Sugarland, Pearland, etc.

My brother's house is in Missouri City, which is just south of Houston. Nice area, takes about 25 minutes to get to downtown Houston. The trick with traffic there is to stay off the highways/expressways during early morning weekdays, lunchtime, and anytime between 3-7 p.m. The only time I ever want to go to Houston is to get to and from the airport. I love Missouri City. Low crime rate, good shopping, and my brother and SIL have a beautiful house in a great neighborhood. The property values are great there, a lot of bang for the buck really and not much different from here in Ohio. I was raised in Florida and lived in a beach resort town, so a 3500 sqft house with 5 bedrooms, 2.5 baths and a huge backyard for $250k in 2013, wow. It's worth $380k now, but that still seems incredibly inexpensive to me.
 
Wife watches a murican program on buying houses. The prices are amazing even converted to nz $. The lake side property amaze me. I know texas is HUGE.

Russ
 
rascal said:
Wife watches a murican program on buying houses. The prices are amazing even converted to nz $. The lake side property amaze me. I know texas is HUGE.

Russ
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Yeah, Texas is quite large, but so is California...and the property values there are incredibly expensive. Given the dry conditions, the traffic, smog, wildfires, and chance of earthquakes, it's not on my radar of places to live. My oldest sister lives in NCali in Palo Alto and has a vacation home in Tahoe, so I go visit her occasionally, and I have friends in San Diego. I really like visiting sometimes but def would not want to live there. We live near some gorgeous lakes here, I am about 4 blocks from one of them. Our house would be worth double if we had lakefront property.

Now we have completely gotten off track of the thread subject, sorry about that everyone!

Edit: I am going to report my post and see if TR can move it, maybe there is another thread on housing costs or a new one can be started...
 
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I've just spent 20k on ours a year ago. It put about 100k on the value. Prolly worth 800k atm, maybe more, it's big for 2 of us. I wont downsize. I love it here. I'm in upper riccarton.

Russ
 
rascal said:
I've just spent 20k on ours a year ago. It put about 100k on the value. Prolly worth 800k atm, maybe more, it's big for 2 of us. I wont downsize. I love it here. I'm in upper riccarton.

Russ
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You've got a lot of land too right?
 
rascal said:
No an average size here. The sections used to be 1/4 acre. Ours is a bit under that. Compared to your country its prolly small.

Russ
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It depends on where you live. We own 3/4 acre but our neighbors have smaller lots.

Where I had my horses growing up in Florida we had 4 acres but some of our neighbors had 30 or more.
 
I started a new thread, it seems. I could have sworn I posted the OP somewhere else. Maybe I need to move to a memory care facility.

Since I had no intention of staring this thread, perhaps some mod would like to replace the OP with one of their own???

CD
 
caseydog said:
I started a new thread, it seems. I could have sworn I posted the OP somewhere else. Maybe I need to move to a memory care facility.

Since I had no intention of staring this thread, perhaps some mod would like to replace the OP with one of their own???

CD
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I copied your post instead of moving it, so it’s in two places now (here and the caregiver’s chat).

We do that sometimes when a single post contains both the original topic and the transition to the new topic. If it makes sense, we’ll occasionally edit the two posts, removing the unrelated content from each one, but in this case, it was just easier to leave things as-is, as the original post has been quoted (which would otherwise necessitate editing that one as well).
 
kaneohegirlinaz said:
The cost of single family homes in our area was going through the roof, until the interest rates also went through the roof.
Homes have been on the market for several months, where as a previously, homes were sold before they were even listed.
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It's going to stay that way for awhile. The fed can't get a handle on inflation so rates will go up .25% more probably this year and we likely won't get rate cuts until 2024.
 
TastyReuben said:
I copied your post instead of moving it, so it’s in two places now (here and the caregiver’s chat).

We do that sometimes when a single post contains both the original topic and the transition to the new topic. If it makes sense, we’ll occasionally edit the two posts, removing the unrelated content from each one, but in this case, it was just easier to leave things as-is, as the original post has been quoted (which would otherwise necessitate editing that one as well).
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No problem. I was able to edit the OP to indicate that it was copied from the caregiver's thread, so the OP will make more sense.

CD
 
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One of the big reasons we moved here was housing costs. Phoenix went crazy with escaping Californians skyrocketing the cost of a house past what we could comfortably afford (and with a massive risk of future price crashes). Western New York is remarkably cheap, and we got a house with a decent size yard in a gorgeous and safe area for about what a down payment would have been in PHX.
 
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