7 Comments Add your own

• 1. Jules Cooper  |  May 23rd, 2006 at 4:27 pm

  Yea, but being someone from the OC area I can tell you this, one can get along with a lot less when it is warm and sunny than when you have 7 months of continual cold and rain. A comparison between depression rates between the two cities would also be interesting.

• 2. Ron  |  May 23rd, 2006 at 4:35 pm

  I touched on the rain situation back in November during a particularly oppressive stretch.

  But don’t you think a savings of $20,000 per year would buy a lot of therapy and sun-lights?

• 3. ron thomas  |  May 23rd, 2006 at 9:23 pm

  Nice find. Thank you for finding it I will send my readers a link to your story.

• 4. kim  |  May 23rd, 2006 at 10:58 pm

  Yeah, please stay in the OC, I moved to Portland to get away from snobbish, over indulgent people. Another thing, living in the OC is like watching re-runs everyday: blue sky, smog, superficial people and so on. Works both ways people. People in Portland rarely think of California and people from California just talk shit about everyone that isn’t there. Hmmm. . .Kinda like high school.

• 5. ellen Shoshkes  |  June 1st, 2006 at 11:52 pm

  I think the reason why Portland is relatively cheap compared to other metro areas is because of the rainy climate as well as its relative isolation, which makes it a relatively less desirable place to live, and hence, due to less demand, relatively less costly. If Portland weren’t so rainy you’d see a lot more people interested in moving here. The price increases of the past year only seem steep since housing had been SO cheap compared to everywhere else. As a transplant I can’t see why anyone would CHOOSE to retire, for example, to such a rainy place. The only benefit is that it is relatively cheap.

• 6. Mi Tu  |  June 10th, 2006 at 3:23 am

  I’m not exactly sure how you got your monthly housing costs to be $1650-ish (ARM ?), but with a current interest rate of 6.67% on a 30 yrfixed loan that would put the payment at $2,402 a month! With a 20% down payment of $74,703.00, the monthly would be $1,922! You may need to revise your figures to reflect current interest rates.

• 7. Ron  |  June 10th, 2006 at 11:52 am

  Mi Tu -

  It’s not clear how Bankrate calculates the housing averages, but it is clear that they are not computing it based on real-time interest rates, nor do they document the terms (down payment, etc). They do cite ACCRA (American Chamber of Commerce Researchers Association) as the source for cost-of-living information (www.costofliving.org).

  In this example, the interest rate would be less than 5.5% with a 20% down payment. Perhaps they assume buyers from California will be packing significantly more equity along with them .

Leave a Comment

Name Required

Email Required, hidden

Url

Comment

Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

Trackback this post  |  Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed

This blog is protected by dr Dave's Spam Karma 2: 104155 Spams eaten and counting...