I honestly won’t be too upset if that happens especially if it means people aren’t treating housing as high return investment vehicles. Hopefully that means house prices will be more reasonable.
Reasonable prices for you now, sure. But your house is an asset. If you choose to move to Texas, let's say, and the housing asset prices outpaces that of Chicago, you're not going to be happy.
Note - there is a reason housing prices in Chicago are stagnant...people are leaving.
Yeah, commenter definitely conflated Illinois with Chicago.
I would not classify Chicago as anything close to an "affordable" housing market. Probably a toss up whether the least affordable area in the midwest to median income earners is Chicago or Minneapolis? Either area, you will be paying through the nose compared to, say, here in Wisconsin.
Overall, the city’s population grew nearly 2% from 2010 to 2020 — from 2.6 million residents to 2.7 million, according to data released from the 2020 census. That’s a change from the population decline the city had experienced from 2000 to 2010, when the city lost nearly 7% of its population.
But I think its fair to say that growth is generally pretty stagnant especially when you consider there are places across the country that aren't name NY or LA, that are absolutely booming (Denver, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Portland, Miami, Seattle, etc.)
> Probably a toss up whether the least affordable area in the midwest to median income earners is Chicago or Minneapolis? Either area, you will be paying through the nose compared to, say, here in Wisconsin.
This is true, but purchasing property in Chicago is relatively affordable if you compare against other major metros.
The point is this - housing prices in Chicago are somewhat stagnant by simple supply and demand laws, where the demand is not nearly what other major metros are experiencing in the country. This is good for buyers and bad for sellers. If chi/IL gov't stays the same, I don't expect anyone buying now will be in a sellers market anytime soon.
Buying and selling real estate involves high transaction costs - there are closing costs and transfer taxes on the buy side, and 6% commissions and transfer taxes on the sell side - which means in order to break even, you need to have some amount of appreciation.
Then there's the opportunity cost of living in a home that doesn't appreciate while literally everyone else in the country is getting rich merely by owning homes in states that have increasing populations.
And to top it all off, Chicago homes are not cheap and the property taxes are astronomical, so it's not like you're getting an amazing deal to make up for it.
First, you would lose money anyway, because most places have property tax.
Secondly, only the people who can afford to live in those high cost of living areas would get rich off of these increasing property values you're talking about. The worst thing a person can do is move somewhere to live beyond their means because "when I sell I'll be making a killing!" Out here in flyover country, unless you live in Chicago or Minneapolis, you're probably not seeing 30% per annum increases in your property values.
Finally, yeah, we in the midwest already know Chicago is not cheap. You buy there because you're well off, and you're going to make those ridiculous returns you were talking about. But the rest of us just deal with the areas we can afford. Which is probably not Tribune Tower.
