Interresting, most expensive cities by state from that report.

1. La Jolla, CA
2. Grenwich, CT
3. Boston, MA
4. Key West, FL
5. Ridgewood, NJ
6. Queens, NY
7. Bellevue, WA

Keep in mind the statistics for a house in detroit includes MANY houses that aren’t livable. They’re tear-downs listed for a couple grand that no one is going to buy. Rent however is a habitable apartment. Take out the bottom end of the Detroit market and you’ll probably get a bit closer.

Apartment in Detroit $704/mo.
Apartment in Seattle $881/mo.

704/881 = 80%

House in Detroit $51,600
House in Seattle $386,500

51,600/386,500 = 13%

So rent in Detroit is 80% of that in Seattle, but a home in Detroit costs less than a downpayment?

Seattle is mostly middle class; the upper middle and rich mostly live in Bellevue and its suburbs (Medina, etc).

Queen Anne, Capitol Hill, Wallingford, North Admiral, Madrona, downtown, and all along Lake Washington are mostly upper class when it comes to housing prices. A decent house in any of those areas starts at $650K.

I don’t think Tim’s data is at all misleading; it just isn’t precise with the data he has at his disposal. But I don’t think being precise was the point. Seattle is, compared to other major cities in the country, exceedingly expensive and has become more so over the past couple of years as many other areas like San Diego have seen their housing prices drop much more than Seattle’s.

If there is some fundamental relationship between housing prices in various cities (such as Seattle 1.2x Minneapolis, .75x San Francisco), then that is currently out of whack. Either those cities are currently underpriced, Seattle is overpriced, or some combination of the two.

I remember in the 1980s and 1990s there was all this talk around here about Californians coming to Seattle with bags of money from their home sales back in California. Those days are over and that should impact prices here.

But while this is interesting, it’s ultimately misleading without being familiar with all the cities. (These are really broad generalizations!) Seattle is mostly middle class; the upper middle and rich mostly live in Bellevue and its suburbs (Medina, etc). Chicago is upper middle class and poor; the middle class and working class live in suburbs, the rich tend to either life in a couple neighborhoods downtown or in distant suburbs. NYC encompasses the rich (central Manhatten) and much of the working poor. Large portions of the middle class live in Jersey and other suburbs. San Antonio and El Paso have annexed everything around them and encompass the full range of incomes. Indianapolis and Milwaukee have annexed everything except the wealthy suburbs around them, skewing their numbers down. So on and so forth…

Detroit is a strange puppy. I know it’s in tragically bad shape, but the data seem distorted. This is why Case-Shiler stopped including Detroit and Cleveland in their tiered reports – too much chaos lately.

Median $704 rent is close to Denver. Really? For two years worth of median rent payments I can own the median house? That’s like a 50% interest rate on capital expenditures if you become a landlord investor.

One thing that could distort these numbers is the local neighborhood demographics. In some cities like, like San Francisco and even Seattle, there are lots of affluent areas within the city limits. In others, and I’m guessing this describes Detroit, people with money buy outside of the city in the suburbs. I think looking at the housing prices of the larger metro area might be less prone to the wide swings we see in this data.

By Aubrey Cohen @ 8:

This validates my thought that looking at $ per square foot makes more sense. Do that sort, and Seattle’s cheaper than San Francisco, Boston, New York, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego, although it’s still pricier than Chicago.

As I said yesterday, the city limits of Chicago include a lot of very unseemly areas where typical sales prices are very low (not quite Detroit low, though).

The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics omits this data [I wonder why....LOL], but it is at least partially available in sites.NPPD.com. In fact, here’s some states job loss/gain data in the NPPD 9/21/09 news article in part:

“….Forty-two states reported job losses in August, with 14 states reporting unemployment rates of 10 percent or above, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, The heaviest losses came in Texas, which lost 62,200 jobs in August, with the manufacturing, construction, and leisure industries combined reaching 35,500 losses. In Michigan, 42,900 jobs were lost, with 25,000 of them in manufacturing; the state’s unemployment rate rose to 15.2 percent, the highest in the United States. Georgia and Ohio had the third- and fourth-highest losses in August, with 35,000 and 30,100 jobs lost, respectively. Nevada had the second-highest unemployment rate at 13.2 percent, with Rhode Island third at 12.8 percent and California and Oregon tied for fourth with 12.2 percent. Six states had increases in employment in August: North Carolina saw the biggest gains with 7,000, followed by Montana with 5,100 and West Virginia with 2,800. North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska had the lowest unemployment rates in August, at 4.3 percent, 4.9 percent, and 5.0 percent, respectively….”

The rest of the URL:

http://www.areadevelopment.com/newsitems/9-21-2009/state-unemployment-statistics-august-2009.shtml

BTW, I went ahead and used this news article for Dr. Roubini’s bunch and gave my technical estimate for August 2009 job losses in America. States 5-47 were not in the data above, so I estimated an average for the missing states; based on the top 4 states with job losses and the bottom 3 states with job gains.

I came up with 742,000 estimated job losses in America for Aug 2009….makes that 216,000 wild guess [IMO] BLS number that mainstream news is using look like a complete joke, especially since BLS state to state job loss/gain data is conveniently omitted, not allowing an accuracy check.

I hear from Numbersusa sources that Wash St had a 92,000 monthly job loss in Aug 2009….Hades, that’s not even in the NPPD data, let alone the omitted BLS wild guess. Wowza.

Anytime you have a different mix of sold versus available for sale, there will be problems with analyzing the data.

Median $704 rent is close to Denver. Really? For two years worth of median rent payments I can own the median house? That’s like a 50% interest rate on capital expenditures if you become a landlord investor.