An article on Yahoo! Finance cites Asheville as number 8 on a list titled “10 cities where ordinary people can no longer afford homes.”
Yahoo! Finance
By Rick Newman:
We used data from research firm RealtyTrac to determine where housing affordability is deteriorating the most. At the top of the list is Salinas, Calif., where a median-priced home rose 40% from the end of 2012 to the end of 2013, to $388,000. When rising interest rates are factored in, the income required to purchase a typical home rose by a whopping 58%.
This can’t be right. Just can’t be. Councilman Smith said he helped make things more affordable since being elected to City Council. How could housing possibly be getting more expensive?
Four years from now, it will be much worse, and to be fair, there’s nothing city council can do to make any difference in the market except encouraging higher property values. So, perhaps Council members could stop promising to solve problems they can’t, and focus on the attainable rather than the aspirational.
As we all know, Rep. Tim Moffitt never misses a chance to attack the City of Asheville. So what do you suppose he did in reaction to this story? If you guessed: misrepresent it, use it to attack the City unfairly, self-promote, take that hostility to his home City on the road and attempt to weaken NC municipalities’ ability to regulate development across the board… you guessed right:
http://tinyurl.com/okzh238
Who wants ordinary people to live here anyway? Otherwise we’d be just like Greenville or (gasp!) Spartanburg.
6:39pm, March 6, 2014, AD.
Gosh, I could have sworn that there were numerous letters to the editor about affordable housing in the letters to the editor section recently.
Funny how these statistics were not previously published in order to ‘sow controversy’ aka readership and comments. Maybe travelah is a paid shill for someone? Ooooooh, and a nasty anonymous poster too?
Microbreweries, restaurants, singer-songwriters.
Repeat the mantra.
we all know this is not an ordinary town. this town is for people who want to work 3 jobs, retirees that want a 2nd home or trust funders. the rest of us are trying to make it. blaming this on whomever must go back to the 80’s when everyone came in and started buying up property to turn it and it just kept turning. anyone who says the pay scale is good here does not work a real job. Hey..lets not forget the Russians buying up property all over downtown. They have a ton of money to blow.