We get some interesting comments from people who don’t agree with our definition of what the Real Bay Area (RBA) is. Many seem to think that if an area is wealthier than its surrounding community, that, in and of itself, is sufficient for RBAhood.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The whole point of the RBA is that it is not only expensive, it is that you will pay a crapton of money to live there and the sellers can ask over three million yet treat you with complete and utter disdain. You will also end up with a house that isn’t even worth photographing. Today’s property illustrates this perfectly.

1801 WAVERLEY St
Palo Alto, CA 94301
$3,295,000

5 Beds
3.5 Baths
2,982 Sq. Ft.
$1,105 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1932
Lot Size: 9,000 Sq. Ft.
On Redfin: 7 days
Property Type: Detached Single Family
Stories: 2
Community: Old Palo Alto
MLS#: 81307920
Style: Colonial
View: Neighborhood
County: Santa Clara

Upcoming Open Houses

Saturday, Mar 23: 1:30-4:30 pm
Sunday, Mar 24: 1:30-4:30 pm

Prime Old Palo Alto!Old world charm meets modern amenities! Lovely 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath home. 2 master suites; one on each floor. Large family room adjacent to spacious kitchen. This home features a huge 9000 +/- sf lot. It is perfect for large gatherings & extended family visits. Updated kitchen and baths with tile counters and newer appliances.

Yes, this is a vintage home (just slipping in under our definition to earn the “old house” tag) in a desirable part of Palo Alto, but it isn’t being marketed as a teardown. It’s just that the agent obviously has better things to do than pull out the iPhone and snap a dozen listing photos.

Good thing there’s Google Streetview!  Isn’t this place just fabulous?

Guess you’ll never know unless you show up at the Open Houses this weekend.  Also, many sections of Streetview around this house have been blurred out. Perhaps this home is owned by a highly-placed Googler.  This view around the corner from Tennyson was the best we could do.

But you’ve seen plenty of properties on Burbed showcasing Palo Alto. (Heck, we’ve visited Waverley Street so often they ought to rename it Burbed Boulevard.)  We were trying to make a point about the difference between RBA and not-so-RBA.  Let’s see what you could get for pretty much the same amount of money over the Bay and through the Caldecott.

6 GREAT OAKS Cir
Orinda, CA 94563
$3,350,000

3 Beds
3.5 Baths
4,350 Sq. Ft.
$770 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1949
Lot Size: 2.32 Acres
On Redfin: 541 days
Type: Detached
Stories: 1
Community: Glorietta
MLS#: 40544806
Style: Contemporary
View: Other
County: Contra Costa

Original Frank Lloyd Wright designed home built in 1949. The stunning grounds were landscaped by Henry Matsutani who did the Japanese Tea Gardens in Golden Gate Park. Incredible opportunity to own a bit of history/ a work of art. All showings subject to screening process. Call agents for details.

That’s right.  If you’re willing to spend the same amount in Orinda, you can own a house actually designed by Frank Lloyd fucking Wright. Not only that, the landscaping is by the same master gardener behind the Japanese I-shit-you-not Tea Garden.  In Golden goddamned Gate Park. Which we think even Silicon Valley software dweebs have heard of. Plus the Orinda house is on more than two acres.

It’s also been for sale for a year and a half and has had two major price reductions.

But in Old Palo Alto, you get a house on nine thousand feet, and you will like it.  And if you don’t plenty of others will, because this house has only been on the market for a week, and after the Open House you know the sellers will be receiving all seventy-nine offers the following Tuesday, and decide which of the no-contingencies-extra-cash-please-with-homemade-brownies-and-a-Tesla-Model-S begging letters they will accept.

And THAT, my friends, is the Real difference between the Real Bay Area and the Rest.

Thanks to the fun folks at Redfin Forums for inspiring today’s article.

The median Home Value in Mountain View, according to Zillow, is $877,900.  So what could you get for that amount, if you looked for a house in some other part of the country?  If you were willing to look in Maryland, you could get this nice painting of a house.  Plus HOA fees every month!

LOT 10, STURBRIDGE
Brookville, MD 20833
$852,900

Ownership Type : Fee Simple
Bedrooms : 4
Type : Detached
Full Bathrooms : 3
Status : Active
Half Bathrooms : 1
List Date : 09/25/2011
Square feet : 4500
Days on Market : 468
Price per sq. ft : $189
Status Date : 09/25/2011
Approx Lot Size (Acres) : 1.0
Price : $852,900
Approx Lot Size (Sq.Ft.) : 43560
Location : BROOKEVILLE MD 20833
Year Built : 2012

HOA Fee : $500.00 Annually
Elementary School : BUSHY PARK
ADC map : 8J12
Middle School : GLENWOOD
Advertised Subdivision : RIVERCREST IN HOWARD COUNTY
High School : GLENELG
DESCRIPTION
Short Sale : No

Remarks : ASK ABOUT OUR SPECIAL INCENTIVES! MASTER LISTING – “STURBRIDGE” LOT 10, OTHER LOTS AVAIL FROM $892,900. SCENIC, 1 ACRE WOODED HOMESITES OVERLOOKING CATTAIL CREEK! CUSTOMIZATION & STATE OF THE ART ENERGY EFFICIENCY INCL IN EVERY HOME! OTHER HOME DESIGNS AVAIL OR CUSTOM BUILD. MODEL OPEN DAILY 10AM-5PM @ 2836 MILLERS WAY DRIVE, ELLICOTT CITY, MD 21043.

Internet Remarks : ASK ABOUT OUR SPECIAL INCENTIVES! MASTER LISTING – “STURBRIDGE” LOT 10, OTHER LOTS AVAIL FROM $892,900. SCENIC, 1 ACRE WOODED HOMESITES OVERLOOKING CATTAIL CREEK! CUSTOMIZATION & STATE OF THE ART ENERGY EFFICIENCY INCL IN EVERY HOME! OTHER HOME DESIGNS AVAIL OR CUSTOM BUILD. MODEL OPEN DAILY 10AM-5PM @ 2836 MILLERS WAY DRIVE, ELLICOTT CITY, MD 21043.

Holy crap, that’s a lot of CAPITAL LETTERS for the same price you’d pay in Mountain View.  Plus you get a house that hasn’t even been built yet, so you have no idea of the build quality or the feng shui.  And just think of how much work it’s going to be mowing an entire acre or dusting 4500 sf of house.

For this much money in Mountain View, you’d be looking at a vintage one bedroom from 1948,on a 6969 sf foot lot (we’re just reporting the listing, we’re not making innuendos). It boasts a spacious 914 foot floor plan.  Plus the comparable Maryland place, while near such cosmopolitan confluences like Laytonsville,is 2831 miles from Google (we checked).  In current traffic that’s a whizzy 41 hour commute.  One way.

Also, no HOA fees for vintage homes in Mountain View.

Bunus: The home in Maryland was never featured on Burbed, either.  And homes in Maryland, whether or not they’re built, don’t go up $125K in just five months.  Or down $50K at the exact same time. 

CNN/Money has another one of their Most/Least/Best/Worst/Good/Evil slideshows that could have been presented as a table, but then they'd get ten fewer click-throughs. This time it's one of our favorite regional competitions, for 10 Least Affordable Cities for buying. Actually it's Least Affordable Metros, but it sounds better if they call them cities, even if a couple of them are known locales for multiple Portals to Hell and very few yachts or polo ponies.

10 least affordable cities to buy a home

BY LES CHRISTIE @CNNMONEY – LAST UPDATED NOVEMBER 29 2012 02:02 PM ET

Looking to buy a home? You may want to skip these places. Prices are either so high or incomes so low that many families can't afford to buy homes here, according to the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Opportunity Index.

Anyway, we lost to New York City again, which is just so unfair. This isn't even an SF to Manhattan comparison, so we should have kicked serious butt here. However, California totally owns the Least Coast as far as leaderboard spots, and Washington DC didn't even qualify. We present the results in one easy list, so you don't have to click through their annoying one-city-at-a-time-gee-who-could-be-next-and-if-this-was-so-exciting-why-didn't-they-put-it-in-reverse-order-Top-Ten-List-style?

1. New York, where 28.5% of homes are affordible. They seemed impressed by $1100 a square foot, too. But they didn't define the boundaries of any of these metro areas, so of course we can (and will) complain we were cheated on geographical grounds. We doubt this was an apples-to-Big-Apples comparison.
2. San Francisco, 31.4%. The piece laments it's unaffordable all over, because nearby communities are also expensive. Nearby high-priced places such as Sausalito, Berkeley, and… wait for it… Daly City. We swear we are not making this up.
3. Santa Ana, 43.5%. I kid you not. Perhaps the nearby beach towns are pulling up its results. And Disneyland. Because Santa Ana is not what comes to mind when we think “delightful but so unaffordable California real estate.”
4. Los Angeles, 44.1%. Because “bunus” hydrocarbons and ozone raise home prices. Seriously, when did LA rediscover the bubbly?
5. Bridgeport, Connecticut, 44.2%. Look, if you have to tell us what state the metro is in, maybe it isn't really worth mentioning. Just sayin'.
6. San Jose, 46.2%. Above is the lovely photo they used to feature the Capital of Silicon Valley, probably because the Quetzlcoatl statue made the photog drop a perfectly good camera. Not one other metro had a freeway interchange featured. Not even Los Angeles, which loves its freeways so much they get definite articles. We suspect they're also putting their thumb on the scale by adding in San Benito County.
7. Honolulu, 48.8%. Houses cost more because of good weather, expensive shipping, and hotel jobs pay squat. But they get a photo with palm trees.
8. San Diego, 54.6%. Here the filler text spends more time lamenting the glory days of 6% affordability during the last bubble. Well screw you, because we're already on our next one.
9. Newark, 55.3%. No, not that one, in New Jersey. Although Newark itself is cheap. It's la-di-da luxury locales like Hoboken and Jersey City that cost the big bucks. We're sure it's a complete coincidence that NJ made the list even though the feature author's surname is Christie.
10. El Paso, 61.7%.This is an honest case of low overall incomes ($41.7K) as opposed to expensive housing ($141K).

Let us know if you find any of these results surprising, or what you plan to do to ensure we never lose to New York or LA or The OC ever again.. Or mention anything you want, because this is Your Weekend Open Thread.

We’re always interested in ways to measure how Special a place is.  A website called areavibes.com has a Livability Index that has some interesting assumptions.

First, let’s see what it makes of some places most of us agree are Not Particularly Special (by which we mean we wouldn’t live there for free and we also wouldn’t live there unless we were paid Larry Ellison’s stock options).

Here’s areavibes on Detroit.

Detroit, MI is “Somewhat Livable.”  The only “A” grade it received was in cost of living, and that’s because the city will pay you to take one of their excess houses so they don’t have to pay to tear it down.  We can’t imagine what kind of city would merit a “Completely Out of the Question.”  Let’s move another to another Perennial of Pwnage: Stockton.

I can see the new Civic Motto over City Hall (if they have any staff capable of hanging banners): Stockton! Four Points More Livable Than Detroit!  But they are an important four points, as Stockton is considered “Very Livable.”

We now move on toward the Bay Area, but not the Good Part.

When Stockton has finer amenities than you do, and their weather is better too, plus your housing costs are unacceptably high to anyone outside the Bay Area, what’s the point of even entering the race?  Let’s try a better zip code.

Ooooo!  Exceptionally Livable!  And what’s really exceptional is that if we type in an actual zip code, the score went down.

Good luck figuring out why.  Finally, we arrive at the pinnacle of Real Bay Area Living.

We invite you to try to score higher than that, either in the Bay Area, or anywhere else.  And we don’t want you to think these “grades” are completely pulled out of Mitt Romney’s car elevator.  Here, for example, is what the housing grade is based on:

Cupertino scores higher than average in every category.  Why would they be marked down for better numbers?

This is also your Weekend Open Thread, so go crazy.

We lost out to both New York City and Washington DC, this time in the contest for the town with the highest earnings.  Here are the Top Ten, courtesy of CNN/Money, of the places with the highest median family incomes.

People, this is not good. Not only did High Tech lose out to High Finance and High Crimes and Misdemeanors, but there’s Highly-wood right behind us. Also this list is disturbingly full of Least Coasters.

Here’s what they thought of The Specialest Place of Them All (Not Including Mountain View, because for Pete’s Sake, Palo Alto may be Special but it does Not Have Google Anymore).

3. Palo Alto, CA          3 of 25

Population: 65,260
Median family income: $163,661
Median home price: $1,225,000

Nestled in California’s Silicon Valley, Palo Alto has attracted a pile of tech companies — and their CEOs. Not only does tech granddaddy HP have its headquarters here, but so do newbies like Pinterest and Ning. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has a house in Palo Alto, as did Steve Jobs. Stanford University, which falls within its boundaries, adds to the city’s prestige.

Palo Alto nurtures startups and the money that results from their successes. Its residents reap the rewards. Area schools are exceptional, while the city has 35 parks and a Mediterranean climate that varies by only 20 degrees year-round.

See complete data and interactive map for Palo Alto

Did you know that Palo Alto’s climate was More Special than that of any of the surrounding Not As Special cities?  Perhaps Redwood City (Motto: Climate Best by Government Test) is going to have to come over and punch them out for getting airs.

Oh yeah, and Mark Zuckerberg is mostly hanging out in San Francisco these days.  Could he have picked up this little pied-a-terre?  Just kidding, that place was sold to a school, which is now awash in neighborhood NIMBY lawsuits.  But have a look at this SocketSite discussion and see if you can figure out where Mark bought.  Two possibilities: 366 Liberty or 376 Hill.

It’s that time of year, where we watch a couple of politicians make a series of speeches talking past each other, trying to convince you to vote against the other guy. In honor of last night’s Presidential debate, we have two homes for your consideration.  Let us know which one you think is the “winner.”

Wearing the green trim, this house from the powerhouse of Palo Alto is either rolling out the red carpet or sticking its tongue out at you.  It confidently flies the Redfin flag.

253 ADDISON Ave
Palo Alto, CA 94301
$889,000

2 Beds 
1 Baths 
1,164 Sq. Ft.
$764 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 1933 
Lot Size: 6,272 Sq. Ft. 
On Redfin: 147 days
Property Type: Detached Single Family
Stories: 1
Community: Downtown
MLS#: 81217474
Style: Cottage/Bungalow
View: Neighborhood
County: Santa Clara

TFT. Leasehold. $100,000 Reduction. Charming 2 Cottages on Beautiful Roses Garden. Walk to Downtown Palo Alto. Hardwood Floor. Double Paned Windows. French Doors in Living Room Open to Dinning Room. Sun Room with Custom Built-In Bench. Remodeled Kit & Bath with Stone Slab Counters. Fruit Trees. Mo/Mo Rental for Back Cottage. Leased Land w/ 54+yrs left. Downtown Living at a DISCOUNT!Better Alternative than Condo.

And built like a brick… um, chimney, this entry in hot, hot, HOT Mountain View won’t pull out of the debate just because the agent pullled its listing.  We found photos on Zillow, so all is fair.  And it also welcomes you to the debate, giving you two different welcome walkways!

60 Starr Way
Mountain View, CA 94040
Not for Sale

Zestimate $905,916
Rent Zestimate $2,581/mo

Beds: 2
Baths: 1
Sqft: 1,049
Lot: 6,875 sq ft / 0.16 acres
Type: Single Family
Year built: 1949
Construction quality: 6.0
County: Santa Clara
Garage sqft: 360 
Last remodel year: 1949 
Legal description: TRACT 261 BROOKDALE BOOK 13 PAGE1 10 PAGE2 11 LOT 51
Lot depth: 125 
Lot width: 55 
Parcel #: 18904021 
Per floor sqft: 1,049 
Total rooms: 4 
# Stories: 1 
Structure type: Other 
Unit cnt: 1 
Zillow Home ID: 19529422 

Developers Dream! This 2 bedroom 1 bath, home sits on a6,800sqft lot with plenty of potential. Located in a prime location of MountainView with nearby shopping on Castro Street. Looking for a fixer upper Location,Location, Location! Bring your hammer, nails and imagination!

Starr starts out with a trash bin.  That’s going to be tough for Addison to counter with just a rented cottage in the back “yard.”

But wait, Addison’s on leased land!  Try finding any of that in Mountain View! Even Google hasn’t dared that trick to sneak employee housing by the City Council!

What’s Starr going to do now?  Oh, oh, speaking of Google, it’s reaching for teh interwebz, and… here’s the Redfin page!

That one’s going to leave a mark.  Streetview trashbins, plus it’s not for sale at any price. And when it was for sale, the asking price was $800,000.  That means $762 a square foot, or essentially the same as Addison.

And the winner is… which listing copy interrupted more?

Yesterday, Our Fearless Leader came out of retirement and shared a really Special House in Millbrae.  It was soooo Special that burbed asked me to follow up with this possibly related listing.  So, thanks for sending this one in, Burbed reader burbed.  To, um, the blog you started.  Right.

821 MORNINGSIDE Dr
Millbrae, CA 94030
$1,258,000

4 Beds 
4 Baths 
2,140 Sq. Ft.
$588 / Sq. Ft.
Built: 2002 
Lot Size: 5,100 Sq. Ft. 
On Redfin: 36 days
Property Type: Detached Single Family
View: Bay
County: San Mateo
Stories: 3
Community: Telescope Hills/Silva Ranch
MLS#: 81231418

4 Bedroom/4 Bath, only 10 years new home with marble and wood flooring, cherry cabinets, granite countertops throughout located in a great school district.

Did you like yesterday’s house?  Well, you’ll just love today’s, because it is right next door and it also new while having the advantage of being time-tested.  This house is even more awesome than yesterday’s, because all you can do is longingly look at the front facade.  There’s not a single shot of the marble and wood flooring, cherry cabinets, granite countertops throughout, let alone the great school district.

That must mean the staging is so amazing, you’ll need to wait in line for hours just to buy tickets to see it.  And if they hired ILM to stage yesterday’s house, who could be the artiste for this one?  Maybe it’s Peter Bohlin?  Could the landscaping be the work of Lawrence Halprin?  Or is the entire project the genius of Denis Weil?

One thing is for sure: no matter how many computers and servers you have, you should plenty of power to run all of them.

Here’s both homes for you to admire.  Let us know which one you’d rather be trapped in by a million dollar mortgage for the next 30 years.

“Bunus:“ Same agent representing both houses!  Can you say Buy Two Get Two?

Travel & Leisure magazine really enjoys making all kinds of lists of cities, and their newest one is a doody.  Whoops, we mean a doozy, sorry.  They’ve just released a list of America’s Dirtiest Cities, which is merely a reverse ranking of the Cleanliness category on their Quality of Life index. They do love making lists.

T&L offers lists of the best city for singles, or for culture, or fine dining on their website, and they do an annual America’s Favorite Cities ranking that adds up a number of those qualities.  But one thing you won’t find is any mention of America’s tenth largest city, San Jose.

There are only 35 cities on T&L’s lists, and as far as they’re concerned, San Jose is merely a very remote suburb of smaller but way more famous San Francisco.  (San Francisco ranks 14th in population and is a quarter the physical size of San Jose.)  The only other California cities on T&L’s rankings are Los Angeles and San Diego, both of which are larger than either Northern California nexus.  Cities they deem more worth your notice than San Jose include Baltimore, Portland (Maine), Savannah, Providence, and Kansas City.

Here’s the SF entry on the dirtiest cities list, and we’ve got the entire list for you as well.  (Spoiler: NYC wins again.)

No. 11 San Francisco

The foodie capital of the nation ranks near the top of the AFC for its fine dining, ethnic cuisine, and cafés. But all that takeout can pile up. A recent study found that one of the biggest culprits for pollution in the San Francisco Bay is food containers—though ironically, they may be floating in from neighboring cities. Voters also commended the locals for being brainy and diverse.

See all the America’s Favorite Cities survey results!

The ten cities with even less civic hygiene than San Francisco are:

1. New York City –  If you can make a mess here, you can make it anywhere.
2. New Orleans –  The Simpsons defamed them far better than we could.
3. Baltimore –  Quoth the raven, “Close the compactor door!”
4. Los Angeles –  You’ll never get out of your car, so you’ll never know.
5. Atlanta –  The litter gets moved around rather than be Gone With the Wind.
6. Philthydelphia –  Sorry, couldn’t resist.
7. Dallas/Fort Worth –  Everything’s bigger in Texas.
8. Miami –  Why clean up? Another hurricane’s just around the corner.
9. Memphis –  Elvis has left the building, but his trash hasn’t.
10. Houston – See Dallas.  Then note they rank #7 and #10, showing that everything’s merely said to be bigger in Texas.

If you’re interested, this T&L link covers how SF has fared on all their lists.  The City by the Bay earns plenty of Top Ten rankings, and only hit bottom on Affordability, Filth, and (you didn’t see this one coming, did you?) Barbecue and Hamburgers (the latter only according to residents; we prefer the travelers’ rankings).  Worst city for barbeque: Anchorage, Alaska.

And bad news, New York City beat us again on Least Affordable.  We really have to work on that.  How about raising the price of cable car tickets to thirty bucks?  The only #1 ranking San Francisco got on anything was its residents’ vote for Ethnic Food.  Otherwise, there was plenty of Number Two all over SF.  And that brings us back to today’s topic.

See the trash in that photo on the left?  That’s Coyote Creek earlier this month (the WINNER!!! in an SF Chronicle piece on dirtiest Bay Area waterways), so San Francisco’s got nothing on us!

You can discuss the relative filth of any city you wish, including the one you live in.  Or anything at all, because this is Your Weekend Open Thread.  How filthy were the Open Houses you visited today?

As regular readers of this site already know, homes in the Real Bay Area don’t need to convince buyers of their value.  No matter how inept the Realtard representing it, even a turkey of a home within RBA limits will go pending quickly.

This isn’t the case for homes far, far away from the RBA. Thanks to Burbed reader Michael Boltonestater for this example of how to sell a house that has the misfortune of not being anywhere near Google or Facebook.

1501 GUTHRIE Dr
INVERNESS, IL 60010
$1,149,000 (Reduced from $1,490,000)

BEDS: 4
BATHS: 5
SQ. FT.: 6,757
$/SQ. FT.: $170
HOA DUES: $17/month
LOT SIZE: 1.03 Acres
PROPERTY TYPE: Detached Single Family, 2 Stories
STYLE: Traditional
EXPOSURE: East, West
YEAR BUILT: 2001
COMMUNITY: Inverness
COUNTY: Cook
MLS#: 08047047
SOURCE: MRED
STATUS: Active
ON REDFIN: 46 days

Wide open floor plan with granite, stainless, and maple kitchen w/ viking range and commercial hood. Hardwood floors throughout much of the home. !st flr. Theater, office, and sun room! Dining room is perfect for large dinner parties. All bedrooms with private baths and walk-in’s. luxurious master suite with sitting room, and high end master bath with vaulted ceilings, cherry cabinets, and marble. Huge deck.

What can you do if you own a ginormous housing tumor in flyover country and no longer wish to have it sap your precious bodily fluids?  You list it for sale and more than 30 days go by, which means, according to Jim the Realtor, that the price is more than 10% too high.  In this case, probably way more than 10%, as you’ve already cut it 23% without any takers.  It could mean that nobody wants your expensive mistake.

Clearly, more drastic marketing measures are needed.  Have a look at them by clicking on through.

(more…)

Many thanks to Burbed reader Michael Boltonestater for passing along this article, which was summarized on Yahoo Real Estate.

The Richest Cities Where No One Wants to Move

24/7 Wall Street
By Charles B. Stockdale, Michael B. Sauter; Posted: February 3, 2012 at 7:01 am

Many Americans still are holding off on buying homes in some of the country’s most expensive cities. While home prices fell 23% on average in the largest cities since the housing crisis began, for many home buyers the drop was not enough. Based on a new report released by Trulia, 24/7 Wall St. identified the 10 metropolitan areas to which no one wants to move.

Trulia ranked the 100 largest metropolitan areas by their Metro Movers ratio, which measures homebuyer activity and interest metropolitan areas. The ratio compares the number of online searches of local residents looking to buy elsewhere to the number of out-of-town homebuyers looking for real estate in the area. According to the report, a ratio of two means that there are twice as many home searches by people looking to leave the area as to move in. All of the cites no one wants to move to have a ratio higher than two.

The cities that attract few buyers experienced modest home price declines since the recession began, especially relative to their high home value. As a result, home prices in these areas are forecast to decline further, and homebuyers are waiting until they do. All of the 10 cities no one wants to move to have among the most expensive homes in the country. Newark and Bethesda, two cities with twice as many people looking to leave as looking to move in, have among the top 10 highest median home values in the country. Home prices in these cities declined at just the national average, and next year, they are projected to decline more.

I think this 24/7 Wall Street site has forgotten how the real estate market works.  Expensive markets do not stop being expensive because other markets are not expensive.  Expensive markets are Special, and the decline of other markets makes Special markets More Special.

On the other hand, the list of the Top Ten Places Where More People Want to Move Out Of Than Move To is not as full of Specialness as you might expect.  Consider this conclusion:

People do not want to move to cities that are largely older and more densely populated. Regions in the northeast that are of little interest to out-of-town buyers include Philly, Newark and New Haven. Other older metropolitan areas include San Jose and Seattle. Kolko suggests the move away from urban areas has a lot to do with expense. “Even though people often say they want to live in urban neighborhoods where they can walk more and drive less, they get more for their buck where the car is king. Most long-distance searches are toward smaller, suburban, more sprawling areas, not toward the older, dense cities of the northeast.”

Yes, that explains completely why exurban areas are increasing in value compared to close-in neighborhoods near major employers.  Just look at the price increases in a community of newer homes in Danville, compared to a worn-out community full of tired, old houses in Palo Alto.  And the price of gasoline going up shouldn’t have any effect on communities further from high-paying jobs, either.  After all, the car is king, and if you’re going to sit in traffic for an hour and half, your reign will last longer.

Ah well.  On to the list of places people can’t wait to leave.  Have you made any predictions which metro areas will qualify?

For the chart below, the Metro Movers Ratio is the above mentioned proportion of residents looking at homes outside the region versus other people looking at homes in the region, per Trulia.  The home value decline is from peak pricing, and the forecasted percent change in home price is through third quarter of 2012.  For comparison, the national unemployment rate was 8.7%, while the typical home declined 23% from the peak nationwide.

Curses!  Losing out the #1 spot is bad enough, but losing to NEWARK?  This is a grave insult.  People may want to move out of Newark, but I assure you, it isn’t because it’s too expensive.  It’s because it isn’t Special, and no doubt residents aspire to relocated to Places of More Specialness.

I mean, can you really take this analysis seriously, when this is what they have to say about our being #2 on the list?

Image of San Jose from Yahoo News Story; Sean O’Flaherty / Wikimedia Commons

The median home price in the metropolitan region of San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara is $546,000, the third highest in the country. The median family income is the fourth highest in the country. Home prices may simply too high for many people. The median mortgage payment at the peak of home prices as a percentage of median monthly family income was 46%. This is one of the highest rates in the country, reflecting the exceptionally large burden home prices place on residents in the area.

There is no price that is too high for the Real Bay Area.  These writers are clearly spending too much time in those tired and broken down urban hellholes of the Northeast, and couldn’t recognize Specialness if it bit them on the ass.

Look at this kitchen.  Now this is the kind of Specialness you can only get in San Jose for half a million dollars!

High home mortgages are not a burden, they’re a reward for getting to live here!  Plus, they’re tax deductible!