Would that I could get a $9,000 COLA.

[icepixie]

So apparently the cost of living in Nashville rose by $9,000 in the last year.

That is not a typo. There is not an extra zero added on to the end there.

It's been real, transplants, but y'all can go home now.

Comments

[calliopes_pen]

I knew it was probably bad. I didn't realize it was quite that awful, though. Wow.

[icepixie]

Yeah, the next-highest on that list is Seattle at a mere $3,000 increase. It's driven almost entirely by housing prices. The article says the median house price went from $260,000 in 2015 to $340,000 this year. WTF.

[castalia]

Holy shitballs. That sounds even worse than I thought it was. I really fear for what sort of rent increase I'm in for next year.

[icepixie]

Yeah, I don't even want to think about a rent increase--hence why I'm trying to buy this year, before I can't afford anything. Wish I'd been able to buy about five years ago. :( (I was wondering if I should wait for the bubble to burst, but rent is killing me and that strategy hasn't worked out for a slew of cities on the coasts...)

[castalia]

Same, as much as I didn't want to make that commitment, now I'm sorry I wasn't in the financial position to buy a few years ago. Now I'm seeing houses in my tiny Donelson neighborhood going for waaaaaay more than they're even worth. At this rate, I'll be pushed out to Hermitage if it continues, unless my landlord decides I'm worth keeping at a lower rate.

I so, so hope this bubble bursts. It's insane.

[icepixie]

Seriously. There is NO FREAKING WAY an unaltered 1950s ranch is worth a quarter of a million dollars. Just, no. No.

I wish the commute to West End wasn't so deadly from Hermitage. I'd move there in a heartbeat.

I fear it's not actually a bubble, just supply and demand. It might reset slightly, but I think we're stuck with these prices, like LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston...

[castalia]

Ikr? Some of these houses need a ton of work. My only saving grace is no way is anyone gonna buy my tiny rental house with its 10x10 bedrooms for anything near that much, so maybe other little homes will make it, too. But if I see one more ugly shotgun house crammed with five others on one small lot I will lose it.

*nod* It's really nice out here, very quiet in general, but people have discovered that now. Commutes everywhere will suck if they don't do something soon. And damn, I really do not want to be the next San Fran or anything like it. Jobs here don't seem to pay like that, so I'm confused about where all these rich people are coming from.

[graycardinal]

I don't think it's a bubble, either. But I also don't think it's a straight supply-and-demand problem.

I think the essential trouble is that the 2008 mortgage meltdown happened as the result of lenders pumping lots of imaginary money into the system (in the form of debt that realistically wasn't ever going to be payable)...and none of the "solutions" implemented since then have dealt effectively with the essential unreality of that money. Result: the increasingly wide belief in the existence of vast pools of liquid cash *somewhere* in the economy that can be tapped to pay the tide of new $15/hour minimum wage salaries and/or allow workers in the shallow end of the labor pool to pay for housing built on the premise that all that phantom money was real.

But the reality is that it *isn't* real...thus, no $9K cost-of-living raises, and no way for (for example) a burger chain at the very top end of the local fast food niche to pay its workers $5/hour more across the board without entirely pricing itself out of its chosen market. (Yes, there's a group of local unionizers out here in Oregon trying to do just this.) And mid-to-high-level union shop earners who made (for example) 180% of min wage under the old order? Will never see that percentage again under the new one; 130%, maybe 140%, will be the new top of the scale.

The proper fix at the time would have been for someone -- probably the federal government -- to pull all those imaginary $$ *out* of the economy by simply and formally forgiving all that unpayable debt. Now? Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's a straightforward way to untangle things without actively breaking some part of the economy.