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Houston cost of living more than NYC?

Nice Guy Eddie

By Nice Guy Eddie
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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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12 minutes ago, next2naus said:

jacks? how poor are you?

It ain't like I bought clothes there.  Not even sure if they sell clothes.  That's what Daffy's used to be for.  Or Century 21.  Jacks is cheap for toiletries, and Jacks proves a point.  It is cheap.  You think its cheap.  Its right in the middle of Manhattan.  Just because some people like to get gouged by Duane Reade, it doesn't mean they have to be gouged by Duane Reade.

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next2naus

next2naus 439

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29 minutes ago, FondrenRoad said:

It ain't like I bought clothes there.  Not even sure if they sell clothes.  That's what Daffy's used to be for.  Or Century 21.  Jacks is cheap for toiletries, and Jacks proves a point.  It is cheap.  You think its cheap.  Its right in the middle of Manhattan.  Just because some people like to get gouged by Duane Reade, it doesn't mean they have to be gouged by Duane Reade.

it's not cheap because Jacks is nice and prefers the thin margins, it's cheap because the goods are usually not meant for this market, or are expired, or are counterfeit.

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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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1 minute ago, next2naus said:

it's not cheap because Jacks is nice and prefers the thin margins, it's cheap because the goods are usually not meant for this market, or are expired, or are counterfeit.

I haven't found that to be the case at Jack's.  At other 99 cent stores, yes, but not at Jack's.  Still, its cheaper than Target or Amazon.  Now compare the cost of Tide at Target 34th Street with Tide at Target Downtown Houston.  And then compare the cost of Tide from Amazon in both places.

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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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42 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

Jack’s is not actually cheaper than Target or Amazon.  You just pay a premium at Target for goods that were produced at the upscale Wuhan sweat shop, and not the knockoff Wuhan sweat shop where they use bat skin instead of real leather.  

And you’re also not factoring in the convenience of the Target to the subway stop, the zoning and land use restrictions on each store, Target’s and Amazon’s overhead that they have to price in, the goodwill of the brands that Target and Amazon bring to the table, the fact that you can buy a tissue at Target for the same price as Tide at Jack’s, that people who shop at Target and Amazon really just want to buy less volume of items for the same price, etc.   If anything, you could make a very compelling case that Target is cheaper.

You continue to confuse things that are non-fungible such as housing with fungible goods such as anything you would buy at Target.  Tide is Tide, wherever you buy it.

Also, Target 34th street may well have the same exact prices as Houston area Targets. The other thing you are forgetting about with Target is volume.  Amazon is certainly location agnostic, is price competitive with any brick and mortar in the USA, and is more convenient than any of them since they deliver directly to your door.  So since NYers can, and often do, buy everything for the same price you can buy in Houston, tell me again how "everything" is just so much more expensive here.

Sorry you have such an ingrained need for Houston to be cheaper.  Maybe you should have considered other value components besides price per square foot when determining where you wanted to live.  You could have afforded NYC or whatever other place truly struck your fancy.

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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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56 minutes ago, longhornmatt said:

Lol at you now suggesting I’m poor and can’t afford to live where I want.  Yes, I’m clearly the one with a weird complex coloring this topic of discussion.  

Well, you and others are the ones fighting hard against the results found in the OP.  I'm just wondering why.  The natural response would have been "who would have thunk it" rather than an insistence that your town is cheaper.  

I also didn't say you were poor.  I said you could afford NY and pay roughly the same amount you are now, but instead you value price per square foot over all else.  You've said nothing to suggest otherwise. 

The only one who has really given it an honest and indifferent assessment is Larry T Spider. 

 

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huge

huge 3795

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14 hours ago, FondrenRoad said:

Well, you and others are the ones fighting hard against the results found in the OP.  I'm just wondering why.  The natural response would have been "who would have thunk it" rather than an insistence that your town is cheaper.  

I also didn't say you were poor.  I said you could afford NY and pay roughly the same amount you are now, but instead you value price per square foot over all else.  You've said nothing to suggest otherwise. 

The only one who has really given it an honest and indifferent assessment is Larry T Spider. 

 

Would you agree that most indexes out there have NYC as the more expensive place to live?  As in almost every single one?  Outside this TM article I am hard pressed to find another anything that says Houston is the more expensive place to live.

Can you point me to another?

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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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11 minutes ago, huge said:

Would you agree that most indexes out there have NYC as the more expensive place to live?  As in almost every single one?  Outside this TM article I am hard pressed to find another anything that says Houston is the more expensive place to live.

Can you point me to another?

There are none that I've seen that consider actual money spent other than this. That is what makes this study unique.  Most use a price per square foot comparison for housing, and a straight cost of vehicle ownership without consideration for the rate of vehicle ownership. I also haven't see any with an updated median home cost for Houston. Most seem to still have 180k listed even for 2020 which is inaccurate.  And it's Houston's recent housing increases that introduced this conversation in the first place.  And rent comparisons are typically Manhattan vs Houston rather than NYC vs Houston. 

Manhattan is the most expensive place in the US except maybe San Francisco. That was never in dispute. Even grocery stores are nearly twice as expensive as places only 3 miles away. But 3 miles away, you remain in NYC.

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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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1 hour ago, huge said:

I think a more accurate number for Houston would be $250k.  What does $250k get me in NYC?  Honestly I don't know.

 

I'm seeing 280k for Houston, but in NYC, 250k will get you a 2-1 co-op in a safe middle class, but distant and not hip, neighborhood like Marine Park, Howard Beach, and similar historically middle class neighborhoods in the Bronx and Queens, some of which are closer to center and have decent subway or train access. It will get you a fixer upper house in Staten Island.  It will get you a 1 bedroom co-op in safe unhip areas close in and near transit. It will also get you a 1 bdrm in newly gentrifying hip areas which aren't comparatively safe or middle class.  It can also get you a house or 3 bdrm in relatively unsafe and unhip neighborhoods like East New York, Canarsie, or parts of Jamaica.

At 300k, there are much better listings in both stock quality, location, and variety  than at 250k or 280k, but that may just be the nature of asking for a round number. Much of NYC has become a buyer's market for the last half year.

A unique thing about NYC is that school quality is barely a factor in housing prices. Hip neighborhoods have their market made primarily by single people and most have terrible schools. Family neighborhoods have better schools and have been relatively stable and affordable over the years.  You do have to be either wealthy or poor to raise a family somewhere hip like Williamsburg.  And there is a real issue with gentrification pushing poor people out of historically poor neighborhoods, but middle class people are mostly in the same places they have always been even though rezoning causes them to move from house to condo in some places.  The only place I can think of off the top of my head that falls outside of this trend is the Park Slope/Gowanus/Carroll Gardens area which was middle class family and is now upper class family. 

185k will get you this houseboat in Howard Beach.  Not that there is a comparable thing in Houston. I just thought it was a cool listing. 

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/16345-Crossbay-Blvd-Howard-Beach-NY-11414/2093713723_zpid/?

One question regarding Houston. When you a buy in a new development, do you even get to negotiate purchase price or is it take it or leave it?  New luxury buildings in NYC will sit vacant and let the market come to them rather than dropping prices to match the market. They also keep high end rent prices artificially high at times with rent concessions. Right now is one of those times. 

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We’reTexas

We’reTexas 1473

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I think a more accurate number for Houston would be $250k.  What does $250k get me in NYC?  Honestly I don't know.
 


I think his point is, that’s not the point - it’s about housing costs, which factor in homeowners and renters with rent control.

So I actually read the study, and it’s not concerned with housing costs so much as it is with making the point that in housing policy discussions we discount the impact of transportation costs in costs of living. The thesis of the article is basically, “Hey, New Yorkers currently face a burden of housing and transportation that compares quite favorably to other major cities, but if we don’t focus on containing transportation costs, then the cost of living in NYC will rise relative to other cities.” That’s a valid argument even if you disagree with the conclusion.

My problem is the use of the word affordability. The broad range of housing costs of course factors into whether one considers their current living situation affordable. But I think most think of affordability as prospective, as defining my range of options for any given choice. In the case of housing, we think of housing prices. But housing costs aren’t necessarily market prices, and pulling the percentage of household income spent on housing doesn’t necessarily tell me about affordability - I’m not sure that without any other context, the number tells me anything at all. The study implies that DC, San Jose and San Francisco are some of the most affordable cities. That’s absurd.

In the case of SF, I’d say that if people really are only spending 40% of their income on housing and transportation (and 30% for professional families), it’s just because they can, either because they are rent controlled from before the boom or that 400k job at Google allows them. A recent CA Association of Realtors study found that only something like 15% of the city could afford the $1.7M median home price. The $3,600 median rent would take over half of the median income. If that doesn’t work, you just don’t do it. But I don’t think anyone would call the current situation, regardless of what the study implies, “affordable.”
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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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28 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

How big of a pain in the dick is it to buy groceries and schlep them back to the 800 sf pad with no car?  Especially when you have small kids with you.

Fuck all that.  

I don't know what people do in Manhattan.  It is better than it used to be, but it is still pretty inconvenient for someone that wants to grocery shop and cook at home.  There is an expectation of eating out or ordering in there still.  Grocery stores are both expensive and scarce.  The outer boroughs are more geared toward home cooking.

I never had a problem schlepping things on foot with my daughter in tow, but the grocery store is only one block from me.  One thing you're also missing is that when kids are young, they are in the stroller for the whole process, whereas you've had to fuck with car seats four times, sometimes probably waking them up in the process which, as you know, can suck.  At 4 to 6 years old, it sucks to take them to the store, but most of the problems arise inside the store.  The answer to those problems is to not to take them to the store at all and just stop by the store on the way home from work.  For larger "stock up" purchases, Amazon or Target.com has always been the answer.  Really, I can't understand how anyone can stand to shop at a Walmart or a Target in any location.  When I visit relatives in the South, that Saturday Walmart trip can take upwards of 3 hours door to door, and every worker and customer inside move at a snail's pace.  Screw that.

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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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44 minutes ago, We’reTexas said:

 


I think his point is, that’s not the point - it’s about housing costs, which factor in homeowners and renters with rent control.

So I actually read the study, and it’s not concerned with housing costs so much as it is with making the point that in housing policy discussions we discount the impact of transportation costs in costs of living. The thesis of the article is basically, “Hey, New Yorkers currently face a burden of housing and transportation that compares quite favorably to other major cities, but if we don’t focus on containing transportation costs, then the cost of living in NYC will rise relative to other cities.” That’s a valid argument even if you disagree with the conclusion.

My problem is the use of the word affordability. The broad range of housing costs of course factors into whether one considers their current living situation affordable. But I think most think of affordability as prospective, as defining my range of options for any given choice. In the case of housing, we think of housing prices. But housing costs aren’t necessarily market prices, and pulling the percentage of household income spent on housing doesn’t necessarily tell me about affordability - I’m not sure that without any other context, the number tells me anything at all. The study implies that DC, San Jose and San Francisco are some of the most affordable cities. That’s absurd.

In the case of SF, I’d say that if people really are only spending 40% of their income on housing and transportation (and 30% for professional families), it’s just because they can, either because they are rent controlled from before the boom or that 400k job at Google allows them. A recent CA Association of Realtors study found that only something like 15% of the city could afford the $1.7M median home price. The $3,600 median rent would take over half of the median income. If that doesn’t work, you just don’t do it. But I don’t think anyone would call the current situation, regardless of what the study implies, “affordable.”

 

I think SF presents a different issue.  Part of that is the fact that the city of SF itself has only 47 square miles of land and 800,000 people in a metro area that has 2500 square miles and 4.7 million people.  It isn't really accurate to compare it to the whole of Houston or NYC.  It would be more accurate to compare it to only Manhattan.  There is also a geographic structural issue unique to the SF metro area where all the job centers have super expensive housing, are west of the bay, and are difficult to reach from places in the metro area that are more affordable.  But even so, the entire metro area is significantly more expensive than NYC and Houston.  And this corresponds with a significantly higher GDP per capita than the NY or Houston metro areas.  Silicon Valley is double NYC metro's GDP per capita, and SF-Oakland is 50% more than NYC metro.  In comparison, NYC metro's GDP per capita is 20% higher than Houston's.  Wages for working poor people aren't keeping pace in any of the three, but in the Bay Area, you can't even see the working poor in the rearview mirror anymore.

You are correct that those who have lived in either place for decades are paying lower than current market rates and are still included in the calculations.  The primary driver in lowering the totals for NYC are homeowners who have owned their home since before the 90s.  There are only 22,000 rent controlled units, and rent stabilized units, while there are many, aren't significantly lower than market rate except in booming neighborhoods.  Even there, a new rent stabilized lease happens at the current market rate.  The gov't also almost never fails to allow the max rent increase.  Sometimes even when the market rate itself is flat.  Their effect is negligible.  It isn't clear whether NYCHA housing is included either, but transfer payments such as Section 8 are specifically excluded.  It may be a wash.

But plenty of housing entry points for middle or upper class people in Houston and NYC have been posted here including current rents/home values.  We haven't really focused on entry points for the working poor.  Long time resident working poor have a fairly extensive subsidy system in NYC.  I imagine Houston has only federal guarantees, but there is still something.  But can someone with a full time minimum wage job offer move to either one?  In Houston, this would be $1,160 a month.  In NYC, this would be $2,400.  In NYC that is actually doable, even before you establish yourself, qualify for subsidies, and waitlist for NYCHA housing.  You can get a room or even a studio for less than $1,000 in some neighborhoods.  And if you really wanted to, you could come to NYC with $0 and get a bed under NY's right to shelter law.

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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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Posted (edited)
17 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

Dont forget that the "poors" have to often take them up their 3-4 story walk up. 

More middle class people are doing that than poor people. It isn't like the standard 2 or 3 story Houston apartment complex has elevators either though. 

Edited by FondrenRoad
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We’reTexas

We’reTexas 1473

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22 minutes ago, FondrenRoad said:

I think SF presents a different issue.  Part of that is the fact that the city of SF itself has only 47 square miles of land and 800,000 people in a metro area that has 2500 square miles and 4.7 million people.  It isn't really accurate to compare it to the whole of Houston or NYC.  It would be more accurate to compare it to only Manhattan. 

I think we’re in agreement. It’s just that the study itself compares all of NYC to San Francisco (and DC, for that matter). The data analyzed by the study may be helpful in a discussion on housing affordability, but it certainly alone doesn’t tell the whole story. It also has San Jose as one of the most affordable cities - have you seen the Wall Street Journal today?

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hayden_horn

hayden_horn 11365

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i ain't gonna read any more of this thread aside from the first page that i read, but i cannot fucking believe that this has gone on 7 fucking pages. the premise that houston costs more than NYC is fucking preposterous, and this thread is evidence that surly posters will argue about fucking anything

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SydneyCarton

SydneyCarton 48170

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38 minutes ago, hayden_horn said:

i ain't gonna read any more of this thread aside from the first page that i read, but i cannot fucking believe that this has gone on 7 fucking pages. the premise that houston costs more than NYC is fucking preposterous, and this thread is evidence that surly posters will argue about fucking anything

To be fair, it's basically one dude going insane and a legion of Surls who can't help by try and correct the thought process. 

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clapclapclap

clapclapclap 9000

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, FondrenRoad said:

Fourscore and seven years ago, our baseball fathers brought forth on this continent, a 6 man pitching rotation.  Henceforth hurlers would have 5 days rest, 5 days rest they would have.  Thus it has been and continues to remain.  

I think SF presents a different issue.  Part of that is the fact that the city of SF itself has only 47 square miles of land and 800,000 people in a metro area that has 2500 square miles and 4.7 million people.  It isn't really accurate to compare it to the whole of Houston or NYC.  It would be more accurate to compare it to only Manhattan.  There is also a geographic structural issue unique to the SF metro area where all the job centers have super expensive housing, are west of the bay, and are difficult to reach from places in the metro area that are more affordable.  But even so, the entire metro area is significantly more expensive than NYC and Houston.  And this corresponds with a significantly higher GDP per capita than the NY or Houston metro areas.  Silicon Valley is double NYC metro's GDP per capita, and SF-Oakland is 50% more than NYC metro.  In comparison, NYC metro's GDP per capita is 20% higher than Houston's.  Wages for working poor people aren't keeping pace in any of the three, but in the Bay Area, you can't even see the working poor in the rearview mirror anymore.

You are correct that those who have lived in either place for decades are paying lower than current market rates and are still included in the calculations.  The primary driver in lowering the totals for NYC are homeowners who have owned their home since before the 90s.  There are only 22,000 rent controlled units, and rent stabilized units, while there are many, aren't significantly lower than market rate except in booming neighborhoods.  Even there, a new rent stabilized lease happens at the current market rate.  The gov't also almost never fails to allow the max rent increase.  Sometimes even when the market rate itself is flat.  Their effect is negligible.  It isn't clear whether NYCHA housing is included either, but transfer payments such as Section 8 are specifically excluded.  It may be a wash.

But plenty of housing entry points for middle or upper class people in Houston and NYC have been posted here including current rents/home values.  We haven't really focused on entry points for the working poor.  Long time resident working poor have a fairly extensive subsidy system in NYC.  I imagine Houston has only federal guarantees, but there is still something.  But can someone with a full time minimum wage job offer move to either one?  In Houston, this would be $1,160 a month.  In NYC, this would be $2,400.  In NYC that is actually doable, even before you establish yourself, qualify for subsidies, and waitlist for NYCHA housing.  You can get a room or even a studio for less than $1,000 in some neighborhoods.  And if you really wanted to, you could come to NYC with $0 and get a bed under NY's right to shelter law.

 

Edited by clapclapclap
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FondrenRoad

FondrenRoad 4378

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Posted (edited)
41 minutes ago, SydneyCarton said:

To be fair, it's basically one dude going insane and a legion of Surls who can't help by try and correct the thought process. 

Fine.  You're right. All of NYC is as expensive as Tribeca and we only eat at 3 Michelin star restaurants while driving McLarens everywhere.

But what do I know.  I only live there and have provided plenty of evidence of affordable housing to y'all and your 2 or 3 car families. 

And y'all are also free to bow out of the convo at any time. 

Edited by FondrenRoad
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