The Way We Live
The most popular type of housing in various American cities.
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Go out to Long Island. That’s interesting. Not a townhouse or condo to be found as everyone wanted their postage stamp single family house. When I was considering moving out there, the choice was renting a full house or living in someone’s grandmother apt. Couldn’t afford the first, couldn’t stand the idea of the second.Report
We grew up on Long Island, so we are quite aware of the housing situation. There are actually apartment buildings throughout Nassau County. They tend to be located in the commercial parts of town around the LIRR stations and are not common but they do exist.Report
Interesting. I could find anything but I was looking east of there. Out near HauppaugeReport
Interesting. BosWash is its own thing, with differences in the split between rowhouse versus condo/apartment. Detroit’s probably its own thing right now — pretty much anyone with a job can find a single detached house if that’s what they want (and as I usually say, there’s reasonable evidence that two-thirds or so of the population globally prefers that if price isn’t a problem). The interesting thing in the western cities (my West, represented by LA and Seattle) to me is the near-disappearance of the non-detached but less than ten units range. Adding something from the Southeast — Atlanta or Miami — would have been useful.
When the cities had their big population booms is clearly important — which reflects not just the auto, but also how rich we were.Report
There do seem to be a lot of condo units in SF in the 3-10 range but it requires being a condo more than anything else.Report
They do have a listing of many places later in the article.
Not sure how you can list Tucson and not Pittsburgh, mind.
Pittsburgh has an absolute ton of single-resident detached for how old it is.Report
Depending on what you’ll tolerate in a neighborhood and your capacity for renovation, there is property in Detroit that can be had for free, essentially ($1 + minimal property taxes). There is fully functioning property that will cost less than the vehicle you park its garage. (I know people who bought a house in Ecorse for $30,000. Ecorse being one of those places that some people wouldn’t live if you paid them to, since, among other things, one of your neighbors is a steel mill.)Report
One weakness of this analysis as pointed out by (iirc) BeyondDC on twitter is that city political boundaries are hella arbitrary.Report
Truth. Where I live used to be a streetcar suburb.
And pittsburgh is a very small city for it’s metro size.
(That’s more a reflection on pittsburgh being in the middle of nowhere. our metro includes parts of three states, for god’s sake)Report
In many states, statutory or constitutional changes were made around 1970 that restricted the ability of the biggest cities in those states to annex. Here in Colorado, the Poundstone Amendment confined Denver. In Nebraska, state law was changed to block Omaha from annexing the attractive suburbs on its south side. As Jaybird would be quick to point out, yes, these changes coincided with white flight out of the urban cores.Report
This. Jacksonville is the largest city in the lower 48. It is almost twice the size of New York City. But you could drop a New Yorker into the vast majority of Jacksonville and they’d fight to the death that they were not ‘in the city’.Report
Every time I call Austin a city, R. rolls her eyes at me.Report