Friday, June 15, 2007

Housing Markets

I'm a flip flopper. With in the last few weeks, I've gone back and forth in my mind about where we should live next: Chicago or St. Louis area. Two weeks ago, I was convinced Chicago was the obvious answer. Now, I'm pro-STL. Who knows where we'll end up. But this is interesting:

Here is a typical house in O'fallon that we could afford, and there are TONS of them. This isn't even the cheapest or anything.


Now there's two ways to compare that to Chicago. The first is what we can get for the same money around the neighborhood we're in now:


That's a one bedroom, 1 bath, with no backyard, no nothin'. It doesn't list a square footage, but the apartment we have now is about 800 square feet, so that's a rough estimate.

The other way to compare it would be to find the price of a similar space in Chicago:

That's the same number of bedrooms and bathrooms, but you still don't get a backyard.


Housing isn't the only factor to consider, but I would really love to have a backyard with a reasonably sized basketball court, a grill, maybe a deck. I'd love to have a real house like I grew up in. In fact, the houses we're looking at are even bigger and better than the houses I grew up in. It's ridiculous.
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3 comments:

  1. Niraj6/15/2007 5:32 PM

    You'll get what you want in the suburbs of Chicago (and not that far out of the city). It's much more reasonably priced, you'd get a yard, etc.

    Of course you'd have to put up with a commute either by car or train, but for over a year now the price of houses has been dropping rapidly and it's definitely a buyer's market right now.

    Just saying you might find what you want unless you definitely don't want a commute. But downtown anywhere is going to be more expensive for less space.

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  2. Anonymous6/18/2007 12:12 PM

    i second the chicago suburbs comment. living in skokie, it takes me about 15 minutes on 94 to get to downtown or 20 minutes on LSD to get to Millennium Park. And I have a backyard and a grill.

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  3. Hoagie Middle East6/18/2007 4:56 PM

    a grill for his vegetables. and a basketball court for his bricks. ooooo, snap.

    i'd just like to add that tel aviv was just rated the 15th most expensive city in the world. also, my two bedroom, half living room apartment which has a great location but is nothing special goes for $270,000.

    last, one trend i hate in PTI and ATH is the idea that flip-flopping is bad. what is wrong about getting more information and changing your mind? since when is being stubborn the right thing to do, even if you think you're now wrong?

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