Reply to A massive income required to live the idealized american dream around here?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Middle class 50 years ago was a small ugly house with road trips to the beach as a summer vacation and sending the kids to public school. [/quote]

Except even a small ugly house in a good public school district here costs over a million bucks. Closer to 2 million to get the same commute time someone 50 years ago had. [/quote]

My 1600 sq ft house in a middle to high school pyramid in FCPS that people are happy with is less than 1 million and DH and I each have less than a 30 minute commute.

Granted it took us 2 years of looking to find this house when it was merely 500K in 2011, but your definition of "good public school district" must be McLean schools, a W school, or Yorktown or the like. There are ways.

And if you don't live in the DC metro you can fix your commute problems really fast.[/quote]

A quick Redfin search shows the cheapest under contract SFHs in Fairfax right now at $795,000. Most comps are in the $850-9 range. To afford a $795,000 house you'd need a HHI of $186,000, which is unaffordable to a household earning the county's median income. Google maps shows the average commute from Fairfax to DC as 80 minutes, so you're clearly misrepresenting that. And for your last point, you do realize we're on "DC urban moms and dads," right? Yes, if you go live in the middle of nowhere you can have a great commute to your job at Walmart, and if my grandma had wheels she'd be a bicycle. [/quote]

There are condos and TH in Fairfax county for less than that.  So you have some choices to make if you don't want to/can't afford to pay $800K+ for a place to live.

And MoCo MD has many choices in the 300-500 range for TH and a few SFHs.  So you get to decide where you live, how long your commute is, and what you spend your money on.  But there are still places you can live in the DCUM area that are "affordable"  [/quote]

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