A $1 million starter home is now the norm in more than 200 US cities | CNN Business
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The number of US cities where first-time homebuyers are faced with at least a $1 million price tag on the average entry-level home has nearly tripled in the past five years, according to new research.

The number of US cities where first-time homebuyers are faced with at least a $1 million price tag on the average entry-level home has nearly tripled in the past five years, according to new research.

A Thursday report from Zillow indicates that a typical starter home is now worth $1 million or more in 237 cities, up from 84 cities in 2019, underscoring America’s ongoing home affordability crisis.

“Affordability has been strained across the board,” Orphe Divounguy, a senior economist at Zillow, said. “We see the largest number of million-dollar starter homes in expensive coastal markets. We see them in markets with very low homeownership rates and we see them in markets with more building regulations.”

  • ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    3 months ago

    don’t your taxes go up if you valuation goes up?

    Not really where I live, anyway. Here, the total tax burden is determined and then the relative burdens are apportioned to individual homes based on their relative values. My home’s value went up because everything in this township went up by about that percentage. It is an incentive against improving your property, though, since if your house’s valuation increases relative to other homes, you will get hit with a bigger share of the total tax burden.

    My township has an additional issue: the local school district is allowed to collect whatever total amount of money they want each year, not subject to approval by the council (and the school tax by far makes up most of the total tax burden). The only thing preventing them from raising the school tax to absurd amounts is that the school board is re-elected every year and too much school tax would get them voted out (most of them get voted out every year anyway, largely because of the school tax as it already stands). I’m not bothered by it because our schools are among the best in the state, and are the primary reason houses here are in such great demand. As a school bus driver, it’s also what pays my own salary.