Here's How Much Real Estate A Million Dollars Buys You In Every Major US City

[chris08876]

Here's How Much Real Estate A Million Dollars Buys You In Every Major US City

How much housing you can buy with a million dollars very much depends on what city you are looking to buy in.

According to Knight Frank data cited by CNBC's Robert Frank, a million dollars goes a lot further in Cape Town than it would in Monaco.

But what about in the U.S.?

We looked at housing list price data from real estate brokerage Movoto.com and real estate marketplace Zillow.com. The diagram below shows the number of square feet of housing that you can buy for $1,000,000, based on the median price per square foot in each city:

With a median list price of $666 per square foot, San Francisco's real estate boom limits a million dollars to buying about 1,500 square feet. On the other end of the spectrum, the median list price in beleaguered Detroit is just $12 per square foot — 55 times cheaper than in San Francisco.

Considering all five boroughs, the median price per square foot in New York City is $424. Looking just at Manhattan however, that price jumps to an astronomical $1,538 per square foot, leading to $1,000,000 buying just 650 square feet.

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ANDY KIERSZ
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-ci...#ixzz383cX2Uzl

[Centropolis]

philadelphia!

[Evergrey]

Where's Indianapolis?

[Capsule F]

Someone please tell me where this cheap property is in Philadelphia?

[10023]

Doing this by entire city is pretty useless.

[LMich]

Originally Posted by 10023

Doing this by entire city is pretty useless.

I was thinking the same thing, but it's probably the most easily available statistic. I mean, we all know that housing is dirt cheap (minus the property taxes which are actually quite high) in even stable markets in Detroit, but that would probably be a better comparison given the absolutely unreal market in bombed-out areas. While these areas are not insignificant in their size, they completely throw out of whack the numbers for the city city-wide where the market is more "normal" (i.e. homes not being sold en masse at auction).

[10023]

And similarly, looking at all of NYC (350 square miles) hugely understates the actual cost of living there for most professionals that want a decent commute. As it states, in Manhattan the average price is more than 3.5x that of the city as a whole (and prime Brooklyn is probably 2.5x as high). There are parts of the city that are quite cheap, but they're not places that people who are highly mobile would want to live, frankly.

It's also not an apples to apples comparison to look at Boston or SF (less than 50 square miles) vs. cities that are much, much larger geographically.

[dave8721]

Originally Posted by 10023

Doing this by entire city is pretty useless.

What I was thinking exactly. Basically what this list amounts to is just an average price per square foot ranking for a city. There is also the whole disconnect between condo and single family prices. Condos/Apartments will always cost more per square foot and the prices for the two should be separated.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by dave8721

What I was thinking exactly. Basically what this list amounts to is just an average price per square foot ranking for a city. There is also the whole disconnect between condo and single family prices. Condos/Apartments will always cost more per square foot and the prices for the two should be separated.

And coops will always cost less per square foot, but are not really "cheaper" than condos. So the condo/coop breakdown makes an enormous difference.

[Leo the Dog]

Originally Posted by 10023

And similarly, looking at all of NYC (350 square miles) hugely understates the actual cost of living there for most professionals that want a decent commute. As it states, in Manhattan the average price is more than 3.5x that of the city as a whole (and prime Brooklyn is probably 2.5x as high). There are parts of the city that are quite cheap, but they're not places that people who are highly mobile would want to live, frankly.

It's also not an apples to apples comparison to look at Boston or SF (less than 50 square miles) vs. cities that are much, much larger geographically.

All true, but does it not give an accurate assessment of where US cities rank. Seems like a fair list.

[simms3_redux]

Originally Posted by 10023

Doing this by entire city is pretty useless.

Every city has peaks and valleys. Depending on neighborhood, a peak PSF hood might not equal a peak $ amt hood. None of the cities on this list are all that different in this respect, and I don't think using city limits is useless.

Originally Posted by 10023

And similarly, looking at all of NYC (350 square miles) hugely understates the actual cost of living there for most professionals that want a decent commute. As it states, in Manhattan the average price is more than 3.5x that of the city as a whole (and prime Brooklyn is probably 2.5x as high). There are parts of the city that are quite cheap, but they're not places that people who are highly mobile would want to live, frankly.

It's also not an apples to apples comparison to look at Boston or SF (less than 50 square miles) vs. cities that are much, much larger geographically.

I'm tired of this argument that SF = Manhattan. Yes, you must take a bridge or tunnel to enter both. Yes, both are constrained by water and have high prices. Both have a Chinatown and a Financial District. Both have seen prices soar in the past 24 months. However, the comparison stops there. Manhattan doesn't have single-family home neighborhoods and large middle class neighborhoods. SF does. SF's 850,000 people aren't all richies or Chinatown residents, to the degree that Manhattan's 1.6 million residents are.

SF's version of Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, Bronx, etc are the Richmond, Sunset, Mission, Noe Valley, Hunters Point, Glen Park, Visitacion Valley neighborhoods, which don't have equivalents in Manhattan.

SF's version of Manhattan would be the NE Quadrant expanded to include part of Supervisor District 2 (gotta include Pac Heights to get that UES/UWS equivalent) and Supervisor District 6 (due to odd cutoff).

My problems with this argument continue as follows:

1. Metro NYC and certainly all of the Outer Boroughs have better, more accessible, and more effective transit than the City of San Francisco. That speaks volumes to NYC and is one of my harshest criticisms of SF. Effective transit can open up a whole lot more "affordable" housing options for middle class people and allow them to reach work centers quickly and conveniently without a car. Most residents of SF need a car, let alone the metro area, as the transit isn't so widespread or effective.

2. NYC city is 8.5 million people, and ~20 million+ people depending on how you look at it in the metro. Arguing that SF and Boston city limits are too small is inadvertently arguing that their scale is approaching NYC, and it's not. In SF's case, there is an ocean on 1 side, a wide bay on 2, and a mountain range immediately to the south that cut it off from the rest of the metro. It's not contiguous, so expanding the land area wouldn't be as effective as you think, nor would it really bring down the average home price or add that many people to the population.

This is why Bridge and Tunnel is a phrase also used in SF, because it's literally true.

3. Manhattan has less economic diversity and far less housing diversity than SF. That is because Manhattan is 1 central borough to one of the world's largest cities that has the world's largest economy. SF is a full city, with Manhattan like neighborhoods down to single family neighborhoods, from ghettoes and ethnic enclaves to some of the wealthiest down to middle class swaths of the city very comparable to Queens or Brooklyn or Staten Island. SF has all of this in its 47 square miles because it's a much smaller city, population wise, to begin with. Manhattan isn't a complete city without its Outer Boroughs because those Outer Boroughs comprise its middle class.

This is also why Rent Control and possibly phasing it out in the City of SF is such a contentious subject, because it's NOT all rich techies living here in expensive new apartments, and the fear is that opening up older housing stock to market rates would make them ripe for all of the rich techies still living in the burbs who would then move into the city, pushing out the city's middle class and truly creating a more Manhattanesque demographic.

If you did want to expand SF artificially to include its metro area, which also doesn't take up much land as a whole, then it would still be at the top, as unlike a New York or Boston or DC to a lesser degree, there really is no escaping insane pricing, and $1,000,000 won't get you a decent house (decent to the same standards elsewhere) anywhere in the metro area, or basically anywhere in urban CA.

Originally Posted by dave8721

What I was thinking exactly. Basically what this list amounts to is just an average price per square foot ranking for a city. There is also the whole disconnect between condo and single family prices. Condos/Apartments will always cost more per square foot and the prices for the two should be separated.

Agreed. I know here that condos now exceed $1,100psf on average, but most condos are 1/2 BRs and have lower overall price points than 3 BR single family homes, so they are more "affordable". The 3BR homes that I've seen on the market here aren't that much cheaper PSF than the 1/2BR condos (list indicates $665psf avg for all housing in city and that number seems more like either 2012 or the number for the whole metro area, as a 3BR home here averages $845psf according to Trulia, and that's a number that seems more like it).

Originally Posted by Crawford

And coops will always cost less per square foot, but are not really "cheaper" than condos. So the condo/coop breakdown makes an enormous difference.

Is a co-op similar to what we call a Tenancy in Common? (TIC)

Could the numbers in this list be old? I ask, because not that it would be a good thing to have less square footage for $1M here in SF, but in all honesty, $1M won't buy you 1,500 SF here, at least nowadays in 2014. $1M will get you a 1,500 SF shack down in Palo Alto, though. LoL

East Palo Alto search for houses for sale - $370K-$999K to live in a shack in a former Most Dangerous City in America

A quick search on Trulia reveals that All Properties average $862psf. Not sure where this report gets its numbers, though it could be from ~2012/early 2013 when that would have made more sense.

[10023]

Originally Posted by Leo the Dog

All true, but does it not give an accurate assessment of where US cities rank. Seems like a fair list.

No. That's my point. It makes (geographically) larger cities seem cheaper than they are. A comparable neighborhood in New York is more expensive than San Francisco, Boston or DC, and yet it ranks 4th.

[simms3_redux]

^^^10023, I think everyone would agree that Manhattan is by far the most expensive "area", and even within Manhattan there are neighborhoods that are just super super expensive. But the same can be said of smaller cities such as Boston and SF, to lesser degrees. You won't find 2 BR condos selling for $5,000psf en masse outside of Manhattan, but you will find extreme peaks in other smaller expensive cities with occasional Manhattan like pricing.

SF as a city isn't comparable to Manhattan no matter what you want to say. SF has large swaths of basically single family homes and middle class incomes. Comparable to NYC's Outer Boroughs. That is because NYC is a rounded city only with its Outer Boroughs and SF, likewise, is an entire city, no matter how geographically small it is. You're also comparing an 8 million person city to an 8 million person CSA. SF is a center of a much smaller polycentric metro area, but if you wanted to artificially pick and choose 350 square miles of Bay Area real estate, you would find that on average it would still be more pricey than NYC as a whole. Within SF city limits you have the Tenderloin, Hunters Point, Bayview, Visitacion Valley, and Exelsior. There aren't equivalents in Manhattan, but there are equivalents in Bronx/Brooklyn. Also within SF city limits you have Richmond, Sunset, Park Merced, Noe Valley, Glen Park, Bernal Heights, etc. There aren't equivalents in Manhattan, but there are equivalents in Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn. My point is that SF is a city. Manhattan is a Borough. Quit making the comparison unless you only want to only compare to SF's expanded NE Quadrant (expanded to include Pac Heights and South Beach).

And FTR, I can't speak to other cities, but $665psf is not realistic pricing for the City of SF. Like Manhattan, parts of SF are $1500psf+, and other parts are down to $700-900psf, and the average is around $850psf for the entire city.

What's great about NYC is that while Manhattan is completely unaffordable and just absolutely ridiculous from a pricing perspective, the Outer Boroughs offer great value, and are very well connected to Manhattan by rapid transit. It is likely easier and more cost effective for middle/lower middle class to live car free and commute to Manhattan from outer Queens than it is for a similar economic demographic to do the same from the outer reaches of SF city limits, which while closer in to the city have ineffective transportation options. That can make a big difference and means that NYC is more easily affordable than not only SF, but really the Bay Area metro.

The disparity between housing prices in Manhattan and elsewhere in NYC (obvi parts of Brooklyn/NJ and Westchester are extreme) is A LOT more than the disparity between housing prices in parts of the Bay Area, where SF actually isn't the most expensive housing market, depending on what you want. The hinterlands here will still require insane prices per square foot and will offer no transit connectivity. That's a pretty big plus for New York, imo.

[llamaorama]

I think it's interesting how it's a tidy looking distribution, with the exception of Detroit coming off as a outlier.

I would have guessed without knowing that maybe there'd be a big gulf, or appear on a sort of bimodal distribution if you used a different style of graph: The elite cities(NYC, SF) and growth-constrained(Seattle, etc) would exist at the front, and the wide open sprawlers(Houston, Dallas) would be at the back.

Also that Fresno has more expensive real estate than those places behind it is a shocker. Might I ask, how? I thought Fresno was super poor.

[Tom Servo]

Silly. Median values are such a useless measurement.

[DenverInfill]

Median is generally the better measure of central tendency when the data is bounded on only one end.

Mean is generally the better measure of central tendency when the data is bounded on both ends and is relatively normally distributed.

In this case, median is the preferred measure since price per square foot is bounded only on the low end.

[Tom Servo]

That's fine.

But if you have two number sets like say...

13, 16, 18, 20, 549, 757, 1006

30, 32, 44, 51, 53, 67, 79

You can't seriously tell me the bottom represent a greater value simply because its median value is higher; the average value of the top is nearly seven times greater than the bottom.

Sorry, but I just don't understand why the median is used the analyze city data.

...

And how are real estate values bounded on the bottom end but not the top end? Both ends fluctuate.

[hudkina]

According to Zillow, the 6 houses for sale in Detroit's most expensive neighborhood have an average price of 12,181 sq. ft. per $1,000,000. Basically, you could buy two houses in the neighborhood with $1,000,000. The largest home in the city (which is in the neighborhood) is currently on the market for $1.6 million. The house is 15,116 sq. ft. Most of the rest of the homes in the neighborhood are in the $350,000 - $750,000 value range with square footage roughly in the 5,000 sq. ft. range.

While obviously this study is flawed in major ways, it is true that even in the premier Detroit neighborhoods, housing values are probably about 1/2 to 1/10 what they'd be in other cities.

[MolsonExport]

Never heard of an 83,333sq ft mansion. Sounds like the friggen Biltmore.

[llamaorama]

Never heard of an 83,333sq ft mansion. Sounds like the friggen Biltmore.

I wonder how much it costs to buy a vacant walmart? Then I'd put a little bit of furniture in one corner.

Now I have one of the world's largest private residences! In your face, rich assholes!