Reply to So tired of the crappy housing stock in the DMV combined with skyrocketing prices

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[quote=Anonymous]OP here. I take the point about Monrovia being a suburb. I wasn't trying to compared Capitol Hill to Monrovia -- I actually live on the Hill. But we'd move to a suburb happily. It's just that the housing stock there sucks too.

Someone said it would be more apt to compare Monrovia to Laurel, maybe even Columbia. Totally fair! No go find me a house in Laurel or even Columbia that has the charm of the one I linked to. You can't. You can find plenty of cheaper homes that are ugly, and you can find plenty for the same price that are ugly, and you can even find homes for more $$ that are somehow EVEN UGLIER.

My point is that in many parts of the country, you will find lots of ugly housing stock, but there's a discount because it's ugly or cheaply built. I just don't see the discount around here. I see many, many flipped houses or recent developer builds that are objectively unattractive -- weird proportions, no attention to scale, bad layouts, etc. -- and they still cost a premium. Even the ugly 90s McMansions with the weird foyers and ill-conceived kitchens, and cheap construction that you can already see needs major overhauls. Ugly, ugly, ugly.

And if you don't like the California comparison because it's too apples to oranges, then fine: look at houses off the Main Line outside Philly. You can find incredibly charming homes, some renovated and costing more, some unrenovated and with a discount to match, all along those commuter lines. You pay a premium for the better schools and proximity to Philadelphia, of course. But you can find attractive houses with good construction all over that area. Similar things in the New Jersey suburbs, outside Boston, in the Connecticut suburbs north of NYC. And you can find it in and around Chicago too, with more modern housing styles.

The DMV has uniquely ugly housing. Even row houses, which can be pretty on the outside, are often really ugly inside due to decades of weird, cheap updates where they've destroyed the original character of the home while adding nothing of value. When you find a row house in DC that isn't like this, it inevitably costs $2m+ even if it's small.

I stand by my assessment. I agree with the PP that the problem is that a lot of the houses in the 800k-150k range in this area were built cheaply for working class families and are now being sold to lawyers and doctors for 10x what they sold for in the 70s or 80s. Other cities built much more attractive or better quality housing for middle and working class people, so gentrification reveals lots of gems. This area did not.[/quote]

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