This is healthy: real estate edition
Our broken housing market in one silly listing (and a few gut-wrenching stats)
Real estate reporting isn't my biggest interest, and it's definitely not RANGE's beat, but the Inland Northwest is in the midst of an extreme housing crunch that's beginning to affect people's ability to even survive — and that is definitely our beat.
It's not breaking news that the Spokane and Coeur d'Alene housing markets are absurdly hot. Hotter than any time in our young lives (40 is young, shut up), and at the very top of emerging markets in America (read about the the methodology here), but many Spokies are still coming to terms with what it means for those of us who have lived here our whole lives (and who have jobs that pay Spokane market rates).
We have lots of friends who wonder if they'll ever be able to buy a new house. Some younger folks have given up on ever being able to buy at all. It's like, what is this, Seattle?
A lot of our Seattle friends don't get that part. Houses aren't that expensive. Well, depends on the lens.
Given the top-level housing prices, Spokane is still lower than almost any market on either coast, and not hugely out of step with national averages, so it's sometimes hard for people from those markets — like, ahem, many of the folks who might be moving here — to understand just how disruptive the market is for people who have lived in the Inland Northwest their whole lives.
While it's true that Spokane's $325,000 median home price is only about 7% above the national average of $304,000, $325k is 20% higher than it was last year. That's a difference of over $50,000. In one year.
And as the Spokesman-Review noted in March, that money ain't exactly buying cute bungalos on the South Hill: "for $329,900, homebuyers can purchase a three-bedroom, two-bath home with a two-car garage in Airway Heights."
If you don't understand the joke here, you're probably one of the people driving up housing prices (let's just say don't drink the water).
And plus, Spokane is a relatively low-wage market, so these prices are felt exponentially by citizens of a city making, on average, barely half of Seattle and with a median household income $10,000 below the national average. So that's the disconnect.
But then comes a story so patently absurd that everyone can understand. The story of the Stair House. We almost missed it when the headlines looked like this:
Again: Real Estate isn't RANGE's beat. Neither is ugly architecture.
We only noticed it today, when the Stair House came back on our radar, this time with a headline that doesn't completely bury the lede:
God bless you, Idaho Statesman, for drawing my attention to the perfect dumpster fire to symbolize our overheated housing market.
The property doesn’t even have running water.
And while this is all hilarious, and ridiculous, it’s having real world consequences up and down the housing market that — as this week’s guest on the podcast told us — is literally pushing people into homelessness and endangering their lives.
So yeah, whether it’s $329k for a home with poisoned ground water or three-quarters-of-a-million for a house with plenty of lake but zero bathrooms:
I totally get your frustration here, but you’re yelling at the inevitable in a capitalist economic system. More people will move here (because, let’s be real, it’s awesome here and why wouldn’t they?) and housing prices will go up. When Seattle or Portland was becoming what they are today, I’m sure there were a lot of individuals and investment firms buying up the real estate and contributing to the rising prices, but only because they could see the inevitable: a major US city. They didn’t drive the market though, they just piggybacked off of it. Doing something to help people that can’t afford a house though, is a completely different topic. Spokane is becoming a major US city and hosing prices will inevitably continue to rise—even without excessive speculation—now what do we do about helping people that can’t afford a house? That’s the conversation that really matters. The only thing to blame for frustration (and I’m sure lots of others too) is capitalism.
My girlfriend really wants to buy a house but these increased prices do make it a lot harder because it needs to be wheelchair accessible for me. Almost nothing we've looked at could be converted without a lot of extra cost after buying the house, which would probably need to be bid on at $30k over asking price in this market. That prices her right out of the market for what she really wants in a home. A new build would probably be the best way to get a truly accessible home from the planning stages, but it's hard to find a developer who's willing to make the changes to their prefab designs. That leaves the option of finding land to buy on the outskirts and having a custom builder construct a home on it. With building costs so high, even that idea seams impossible. It's so frustrating.