The whole Pacific coast of North America is becoming a gated region, closed off from those without at least quarter of a million dollars saved up. Unfortunately I think the mild weather and beauty of that area mean prices will never go down. Middle class people are seemingly bound to live in places that are too hot, too cold, or too flat.
In Vancouver, $500k is more plausible. The minimum downpayment for >$1M properties is 20%, and the average selling price for a detached house in Metro Vancouver last month was $1.8M; in the City of Vancouver proper, it was well over $2M.
Hang on, I thought we were discussing whether the area is "closed off from those without at least quarter of a million dollars saved up". Isn't that the topic of this thread?
First of all, someone buys the below-average homes, right? So it's hardly "closed off" just because someone can't afford the mean (or median?) detached home value. What's the twentieth-percentile home value?
Second of all, what do detached home prices have to do with this? Live in a condo, like reasonable people do.
The minimum down payment for a 2 bedroom 2 bath condo in my East Van building would be around $40k.
It is interesting to look at the map of California and wonder at that huge gap between Carmel and Santa Barbara. No development, no population, its even hard for tourists to find a place to stay, or even a campsite.
The tech industry pays all the state's bills, mostly captured by tenured public sector workers, in true socialist fashion. If there's a tech crash, and a few years pass without IPOs, the state will collapse into bankruptcy, and the impoverished residents will start to eye that empty coastline as their most valuable asset. When the tree-hugging hippies die off, 350km of the world's most valuable real estate will come onto the market.
There's a reason that part of the state is sparsely developed. There's nothing but the mountains and the sea, and constant rockslides make building any transportation infrastructure hellishly expensive. Unlike Norway, there are no fjords to provide easy sea access, and there is no oil. It's a beautiful place to visit, but good luck building anything denser than small towns there.
What exactly do you think climate change is going to do to Highway 1? Caltrans is already mulling writing it off after a certain amount of sea level rise...
