Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes a lot of us just got laid off at the major contractors this week.

Where? I know folks at Leidos, Booz et al and nobody is getting laid off…and those are massive govt contractors.

Probably folks who work with USAID.

I know many of those UDAID contractors in my neighborhood in Bethesda. They are ex fed government employees who treat their consulting as a gig. They are retirement age. They are not going anywhere. Every other house has a federal employee too. They are staying put even if they lose their jobs.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's not nearly as expensive everywhere else. Lots of mid-sized cities that are way more affordable, especially in places that people on this board would call flyover country. Those places are safe, have good schools, and don't have nightmare commutes if you have to live far from your job. Broaden your horizons -- there's more to the world than the DMV.

Nice try but most of us are from.those places and we know why we left.

OK. The ivy league colleges are filled with kids from those places. And people there in blue collar jobs can afford houses that don't have nightmare commutes. They can even run their errands without running into long lines, lack of parking, and gridlock everywhere. I like this area too, but I am always surprised when people are too closed-minded to explore alternatives.

DP. Most people on blue collar jobs don’t feel financially secure. Hence Trump.

Anonymous wrote:The contract work isn’t going anywhere longterm. Elon and Bezos make a ton of money on contracts. Part of the plan is probably to take the federal workforce down to a skeleton crew precisely so contractors like AWS and SpaceX can eat up even more of the spending.

Yes in the defense space. Obviously this is not going away. Plenty of us work in other areas of the government and those are going away.

The contract work isn’t going anywhere longterm. Elon and Bezos make a ton of money on contracts. Part of the plan is probably to take the federal workforce down to a skeleton crew precisely so contractors like AWS and SpaceX can eat up even more of the spending.

Anonymous wrote:You need new friends, OP. They're excessively dumb.

No, there won't be a recession. No, there won't be a stock market crash. No, there won't be a massive selloff of homes in the area. No, there won't be massive inflation (because Trump can't make tariffs stick).

You forget the sheer incompetency of these people. They're so aggressive that they're overshooting the mark every time into illegal or unconstitutional territory. It takes time for lawsuits to be organized and filed, and it takes time for justice to get handed down, but it WILL happen. Just like the Trump 1.0 Muslim Ban was struck down 90 days after it started.

There is and will be collateral damage, of course. People have been fired, and will continue to be fired. But not in the large numbers your friends fear. Some federal departments will be reorganized and consolidated, DEI will disappear. But in case you didn't know, this has happened multiple times in the past: federal departments come and go. We're regressing, that's for sure, but it's not the end of the world - the pendulum swings both ways and in 4 years there will be a reckoning. In 2 years the midterms will show the strength of the resistance.

I envy your optimism.

You're absolutely right that courts will strike down much of what Trump and Musk are doing. The problem is that courts rely on the Executive branch to enforce court orders. The judges will rule against Trump, and Trump will ignore them. Of course we have a system of checks and balances, and the check against a criminal Executive is impeachment by the Legislature...which is completely controlled by the Executive's criminal accomplices, the GOP.

The guardrails have collapsed, the failsafes have been sabotaged. There is absolutely nothing holding Trump and his cronies accountable except common decency and respect for the Constitution, of which Trump has none.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's not nearly as expensive everywhere else. Lots of mid-sized cities that are way more affordable, especially in places that people on this board would call flyover country. Those places are safe, have good schools, and don't have nightmare commutes if you have to live far from your job. Broaden your horizons -- there's more to the world than the DMV.

Flyover country is in fact expensive for the people having the median job in those areas. Those places don’t have much professional work, so not sure your audience.

The NYT did a whole piece about how Kalamazoo MI is now too expensive for people working the average job in that area.

Also, go search local press in places like SD and ND and the cost of housing is a big issue.

Your advice above I guess works for somebody that made a ton of $$$s in the DMV and now can semi-retire or something.

FWIW, I'm from Kalamazoo and that article didn't ring true for me. I'm sure that the couple profiled in the article were telling the truth, but it didn't ring globally true at all.

OK. It was fairly well-researched and had many statistics about median home prices, median incomes and the surge in home prices over the last 5 years.

It's kind of silly to say the article didn't ring true for you unless you are in fact in the R/E statistics industry and understand at a granular level what is happening in the Kalamazoo R/E market. Here are some quotes from the article:

Kalamazoo County’s home prices have risen around 40 percent since the pandemic, and rent prices even further.

For all its housing price inflation, Kalamazoo is still so much cheaper than other parts of the country that it was recently named one of America’s most affordable cities for professionals. A darker way of putting it is that Kalamazoo is the final stop in the housing crisis. And that’s the problem with being a place where people move to feel richer: Those who get priced out have no place left to go.

What has happened in Kalamazoo and elsewhere is that many of these older, cheaper units have either fallen into uninhabitable disrepair or been sold to investors who rehab them and raise the rents. Rehabs like that are necessary — even Ms. Tackett-Denney will tell you that her place was a dump — especially in Michigan, where close to half the housing stock was built before 1970. But because so little has been built since 2009, there is less “new” old housing to replace places that are naturally affordable, and the market pushes renters into much more expensive homes.

The McGowens’ house is in White Cloud, a rural city of 1,500 about an hour north of Grand Rapids, where the few local businesses include a funeral home and a fireworks depot. There are no Starbucks or condominium towers. The housing crisis is here all the same.

Kalamazoo is a very affordable place to live. The NYT focusing on the anecdote of this one family that seemed to have financial issues aside from finding a house was misleading.

That was just a further example from the story...that even outlying towns from Kalamazoo are seeing prices increase and affordability plummet.

Kalamazoo is affordable if you have one of the few professional jobs or you moved their with a remote professional job. Clearly, on a median level, it's not particularly affordable.

Feel free to read the entire article if you want to be informed on it.

I read the entire article the day it came out.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's not nearly as expensive everywhere else. Lots of mid-sized cities that are way more affordable, especially in places that people on this board would call flyover country. Those places are safe, have good schools, and don't have nightmare commutes if you have to live far from your job. Broaden your horizons -- there's more to the world than the DMV.

Flyover country is in fact expensive for the people having the median job in those areas. Those places don’t have much professional work, so not sure your audience.

The NYT did a whole piece about how Kalamazoo MI is now too expensive for people working the average job in that area.

Also, go search local press in places like SD and ND and the cost of housing is a big issue.

Your advice above I guess works for somebody that made a ton of $$$s in the DMV and now can semi-retire or something.

FWIW, I'm from Kalamazoo and that article didn't ring true for me. I'm sure that the couple profiled in the article were telling the truth, but it didn't ring globally true at all.

OK. It was fairly well-researched and had many statistics about median home prices, median incomes and the surge in home prices over the last 5 years.

It's kind of silly to say the article didn't ring true for you unless you are in fact in the R/E statistics industry and understand at a granular level what is happening in the Kalamazoo R/E market. Here are some quotes from the article:

Kalamazoo County’s home prices have risen around 40 percent since the pandemic, and rent prices even further.

For all its housing price inflation, Kalamazoo is still so much cheaper than other parts of the country that it was recently named one of America’s most affordable cities for professionals. A darker way of putting it is that Kalamazoo is the final stop in the housing crisis. And that’s the problem with being a place where people move to feel richer: Those who get priced out have no place left to go.

What has happened in Kalamazoo and elsewhere is that many of these older, cheaper units have either fallen into uninhabitable disrepair or been sold to investors who rehab them and raise the rents. Rehabs like that are necessary — even Ms. Tackett-Denney will tell you that her place was a dump — especially in Michigan, where close to half the housing stock was built before 1970. But because so little has been built since 2009, there is less “new” old housing to replace places that are naturally affordable, and the market pushes renters into much more expensive homes.

The McGowens’ house is in White Cloud, a rural city of 1,500 about an hour north of Grand Rapids, where the few local businesses include a funeral home and a fireworks depot. There are no Starbucks or condominium towers. The housing crisis is here all the same.

Kalamazoo is a very affordable place to live. The NYT focusing on the anecdote of this one family that seemed to have financial issues aside from finding a house was misleading.

The point the article and the poster are making is that it's very affordable to people coming from elsewhere. It is not affordable to people who live there.

Also no one on this board who spends hours discussing the best exact zip code in McLean is moving to Kalamazoo. It's all downstream as people move to places like Austin and Nashville and Boise and then folks there get priced out and move to smaller cities to feel wealthy. Everyone wants to feel like a king and eventually you run out of places to go downstream.

Well, I'm from there, as are the many many people I know -- none of the people I know there were "coming from elsewhere."

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Yes a lot of us just got laid off at the major contractors this week.

Where? I know folks at Leidos, Booz et al and nobody is getting laid off…and those are massive govt contractors.

Accenture and Guidehouse. My partner is at a defense contractor, and they aren't going to get laid off. But those not in those spaces absolutely will. I know everyone isn't in this space but it's not just USAID.

Anonymous wrote:You need new friends, OP. They're excessively dumb.

No, there won't be a recession. No, there won't be a stock market crash. No, there won't be a massive selloff of homes in the area. No, there won't be massive inflation (because Trump can't make tariffs stick).

You forget the sheer incompetency of these people. They're so aggressive that they're overshooting the mark every time into illegal or unconstitutional territory. It takes time for lawsuits to be organized and filed, and it takes time for justice to get handed down, but it WILL happen. Just like the Trump 1.0 Muslim Ban was struck down 90 days after it started.

There is and will be collateral damage, of course. People have been fired, and will continue to be fired. But not in the large numbers your friends fear. Some federal departments will be reorganized and consolidated, DEI will disappear. But in case you didn't know, this has happened multiple times in the past: federal departments come and go. We're regressing, that's for sure, but it's not the end of the world - the pendulum swings both ways and in 4 years there will be a reckoning. In 2 years the midterms will show the strength of the resistance.

Do you work in federal contracting? I work at a major firm and right now everyone is getting laid off. We are in a time we've never seen before. My peers make north of $200k. We are not okay. We are not going to meet our sales targets.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's not nearly as expensive everywhere else. Lots of mid-sized cities that are way more affordable, especially in places that people on this board would call flyover country. Those places are safe, have good schools, and don't have nightmare commutes if you have to live far from your job. Broaden your horizons -- there's more to the world than the DMV.

Flyover country is in fact expensive for the people having the median job in those areas. Those places don’t have much professional work, so not sure your audience.

The NYT did a whole piece about how Kalamazoo MI is now too expensive for people working the average job in that area.

Also, go search local press in places like SD and ND and the cost of housing is a big issue.

Your advice above I guess works for somebody that made a ton of $$$s in the DMV and now can semi-retire or something.

FWIW, I'm from Kalamazoo and that article didn't ring true for me. I'm sure that the couple profiled in the article were telling the truth, but it didn't ring globally true at all.

OK. It was fairly well-researched and had many statistics about median home prices, median incomes and the surge in home prices over the last 5 years.

It's kind of silly to say the article didn't ring true for you unless you are in fact in the R/E statistics industry and understand at a granular level what is happening in the Kalamazoo R/E market. Here are some quotes from the article:

Kalamazoo County’s home prices have risen around 40 percent since the pandemic, and rent prices even further.

For all its housing price inflation, Kalamazoo is still so much cheaper than other parts of the country that it was recently named one of America’s most affordable cities for professionals. A darker way of putting it is that Kalamazoo is the final stop in the housing crisis. And that’s the problem with being a place where people move to feel richer: Those who get priced out have no place left to go.

What has happened in Kalamazoo and elsewhere is that many of these older, cheaper units have either fallen into uninhabitable disrepair or been sold to investors who rehab them and raise the rents. Rehabs like that are necessary — even Ms. Tackett-Denney will tell you that her place was a dump — especially in Michigan, where close to half the housing stock was built before 1970. But because so little has been built since 2009, there is less “new” old housing to replace places that are naturally affordable, and the market pushes renters into much more expensive homes.

The McGowens’ house is in White Cloud, a rural city of 1,500 about an hour north of Grand Rapids, where the few local businesses include a funeral home and a fireworks depot. There are no Starbucks or condominium towers. The housing crisis is here all the same.

Kalamazoo is a very affordable place to live. The NYT focusing on the anecdote of this one family that seemed to have financial issues aside from finding a house was misleading.

That was just a further example from the story...that even outlying towns from Kalamazoo are seeing prices increase and affordability plummet.

Kalamazoo is affordable if you have one of the few professional jobs or you moved their with a remote professional job. Clearly, on a median level, it's not particularly affordable.

Feel free to read the entire article if you want to be informed on it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's not nearly as expensive everywhere else. Lots of mid-sized cities that are way more affordable, especially in places that people on this board would call flyover country. Those places are safe, have good schools, and don't have nightmare commutes if you have to live far from your job. Broaden your horizons -- there's more to the world than the DMV.

Flyover country is in fact expensive for the people having the median job in those areas. Those places don’t have much professional work, so not sure your audience.

The NYT did a whole piece about how Kalamazoo MI is now too expensive for people working the average job in that area.

Also, go search local press in places like SD and ND and the cost of housing is a big issue.

Your advice above I guess works for somebody that made a ton of $$$s in the DMV and now can semi-retire or something.

FWIW, I'm from Kalamazoo and that article didn't ring true for me. I'm sure that the couple profiled in the article were telling the truth, but it didn't ring globally true at all.

OK. It was fairly well-researched and had many statistics about median home prices, median incomes and the surge in home prices over the last 5 years.

It's kind of silly to say the article didn't ring true for you unless you are in fact in the R/E statistics industry and understand at a granular level what is happening in the Kalamazoo R/E market. Here are some quotes from the article:

Kalamazoo County’s home prices have risen around 40 percent since the pandemic, and rent prices even further.

For all its housing price inflation, Kalamazoo is still so much cheaper than other parts of the country that it was recently named one of America’s most affordable cities for professionals. A darker way of putting it is that Kalamazoo is the final stop in the housing crisis. And that’s the problem with being a place where people move to feel richer: Those who get priced out have no place left to go.

What has happened in Kalamazoo and elsewhere is that many of these older, cheaper units have either fallen into uninhabitable disrepair or been sold to investors who rehab them and raise the rents. Rehabs like that are necessary — even Ms. Tackett-Denney will tell you that her place was a dump — especially in Michigan, where close to half the housing stock was built before 1970. But because so little has been built since 2009, there is less “new” old housing to replace places that are naturally affordable, and the market pushes renters into much more expensive homes.

The McGowens’ house is in White Cloud, a rural city of 1,500 about an hour north of Grand Rapids, where the few local businesses include a funeral home and a fireworks depot. There are no Starbucks or condominium towers. The housing crisis is here all the same.

Kalamazoo is a very affordable place to live. The NYT focusing on the anecdote of this one family that seemed to have financial issues aside from finding a house was misleading.

The point the article and the poster are making is that it's very affordable to people coming from elsewhere. It is not affordable to people who live there.

Also no one on this board who spends hours discussing the best exact zip code in McLean is moving to Kalamazoo. It's all downstream as people move to places like Austin and Nashville and Boise and then folks there get priced out and move to smaller cities to feel wealthy. Everyone wants to feel like a king and eventually you run out of places to go downstream.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's not nearly as expensive everywhere else. Lots of mid-sized cities that are way more affordable, especially in places that people on this board would call flyover country. Those places are safe, have good schools, and don't have nightmare commutes if you have to live far from your job. Broaden your horizons -- there's more to the world than the DMV.

Flyover country is in fact expensive for the people having the median job in those areas. Those places don’t have much professional work, so not sure your audience.

The NYT did a whole piece about how Kalamazoo MI is now too expensive for people working the average job in that area.

Also, go search local press in places like SD and ND and the cost of housing is a big issue.

Your advice above I guess works for somebody that made a ton of $$$s in the DMV and now can semi-retire or something.

FWIW, I'm from Kalamazoo and that article didn't ring true for me. I'm sure that the couple profiled in the article were telling the truth, but it didn't ring globally true at all.

OK. It was fairly well-researched and had many statistics about median home prices, median incomes and the surge in home prices over the last 5 years.

It's kind of silly to say the article didn't ring true for you unless you are in fact in the R/E statistics industry and understand at a granular level what is happening in the Kalamazoo R/E market. Here are some quotes from the article:

Kalamazoo County’s home prices have risen around 40 percent since the pandemic, and rent prices even further.

For all its housing price inflation, Kalamazoo is still so much cheaper than other parts of the country that it was recently named one of America’s most affordable cities for professionals. A darker way of putting it is that Kalamazoo is the final stop in the housing crisis. And that’s the problem with being a place where people move to feel richer: Those who get priced out have no place left to go.

What has happened in Kalamazoo and elsewhere is that many of these older, cheaper units have either fallen into uninhabitable disrepair or been sold to investors who rehab them and raise the rents. Rehabs like that are necessary — even Ms. Tackett-Denney will tell you that her place was a dump — especially in Michigan, where close to half the housing stock was built before 1970. But because so little has been built since 2009, there is less “new” old housing to replace places that are naturally affordable, and the market pushes renters into much more expensive homes.

The McGowens’ house is in White Cloud, a rural city of 1,500 about an hour north of Grand Rapids, where the few local businesses include a funeral home and a fireworks depot. There are no Starbucks or condominium towers. The housing crisis is here all the same.

Kalamazoo is a very affordable place to live. The NYT focusing on the anecdote of this one family that seemed to have financial issues aside from finding a house was misleading.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's not nearly as expensive everywhere else. Lots of mid-sized cities that are way more affordable, especially in places that people on this board would call flyover country. Those places are safe, have good schools, and don't have nightmare commutes if you have to live far from your job. Broaden your horizons -- there's more to the world than the DMV.

Flyover country is in fact expensive for the people having the median job in those areas. Those places don’t have much professional work, so not sure your audience.

The NYT did a whole piece about how Kalamazoo MI is now too expensive for people working the average job in that area.

Also, go search local press in places like SD and ND and the cost of housing is a big issue.

Your advice above I guess works for somebody that made a ton of $$$s in the DMV and now can semi-retire or something.

FWIW, I'm from Kalamazoo and that article didn't ring true for me. I'm sure that the couple profiled in the article were telling the truth, but it didn't ring globally true at all.

OK. It was fairly well-researched and had many statistics about median home prices, median incomes and the surge in home prices over the last 5 years.

It's kind of silly to say the article didn't ring true for you unless you are in fact in the R/E statistics industry and understand at a granular level what is happening in the Kalamazoo R/E market. Here are some quotes from the article:

Kalamazoo County’s home prices have risen around 40 percent since the pandemic, and rent prices even further.

For all its housing price inflation, Kalamazoo is still so much cheaper than other parts of the country that it was recently named one of America’s most affordable cities for professionals. A darker way of putting it is that Kalamazoo is the final stop in the housing crisis. And that’s the problem with being a place where people move to feel richer: Those who get priced out have no place left to go.

What has happened in Kalamazoo and elsewhere is that many of these older, cheaper units have either fallen into uninhabitable disrepair or been sold to investors who rehab them and raise the rents. Rehabs like that are necessary — even Ms. Tackett-Denney will tell you that her place was a dump — especially in Michigan, where close to half the housing stock was built before 1970. But because so little has been built since 2009, there is less “new” old housing to replace places that are naturally affordable, and the market pushes renters into much more expensive homes.

The McGowens’ house is in White Cloud, a rural city of 1,500 about an hour north of Grand Rapids, where the few local businesses include a funeral home and a fireworks depot. There are no Starbucks or condominium towers. The housing crisis is here all the same.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's not nearly as expensive everywhere else. Lots of mid-sized cities that are way more affordable, especially in places that people on this board would call flyover country. Those places are safe, have good schools, and don't have nightmare commutes if you have to live far from your job. Broaden your horizons -- there's more to the world than the DMV.

Flyover country is in fact expensive for the people having the median job in those areas. Those places don’t have much professional work, so not sure your audience.

The NYT did a whole piece about how Kalamazoo MI is now too expensive for people working the average job in that area.

Also, go search local press in places like SD and ND and the cost of housing is a big issue.

Your advice above I guess works for somebody that made a ton of $$$s in the DMV and now can semi-retire or something.

FWIW, I'm from Kalamazoo and that article didn't ring true for me. I'm sure that the couple profiled in the article were telling the truth, but it didn't ring globally true at all.

Anonymous wrote:Wouldn’t the RTO counter this trend a bit in DC proper? I know of many businesses that closed downtown during Covid. Hopefully those restaurants, bars, businesses will reopen now that most people need to be in the office 5 days a week. Also, with the RTO in place so see more people wanting to live in DC and move closer if they had previously prioritized larger homes in quieter areas because they only needed to commute a couple of days a week.
We also own and react out a few homes in DC and I am worried about people leaving the city.

Yes. Houses for rent are getting a LOT of interest and renting right away -- which is very recent, the last few weeks recent. Houses for sale are getting multiple offers and going under contract right away, but that isn't new and could change. We'll see. My knowledge is NoVa only though.