Greetings from the Rust Belt
As you read this, I am in sunny Warren, Ohio for my wife’s 20th high school reunion.
Anyway, before I left on our ten hour drive to the heartland, I did some quick research on home prices in Warren.
Just call it an alternate universe, where a nice looking ranch might cost you a much as buying a new SUV.
OK, I am basing that on the tiny photo at the bottom of Trulia’s Warren, Ohio page, the $29,999 three bedroom, one bath ranch. With that pricing, it sure sounds like a bargain – don’t want to go past $30,000!
Seriously, the median price is $62,900, though sellers in Warren, like everywhere, are still holding out for more. The average list price is $113,289.
Some more sobering stats - there are also 561 homes in some stage of the foreclosure process.
Now I am little suspicious of these figures – while Warren is about the size of Framingham and a large town/city for the area, these seem more likely to cover the Greater Warren area – if there is such a thing – or at least Trumbull County.
Of course, there a reason for the low prices – high unemployment. Back when in the good old days when the jobless rate nationally was under 6 percent, Warren was at 9 percent.
Today, with the Great Recession still lingering, it's 15 percent. With Youngstown the biggest city nearby, Warren is firmly lodged in a rather desperate corner of the Rust Belt. Over the past decade, Warren has lost 10 percent of its population.
Still, my wife Karen has fond memories of growing up in Warren, though she has no real desire to return to her hometown, such as it is, with no family living in the area. (Her parents moved to Orlando years ago.)
She left Warren for Smith College, found a job in Boston and that was that. When we met in 1996, she was renting in Somerville and I had an apartment in Quincy.
Then we got married and she soon found out to buy any house around here with four walls and a roof, you have to pay five times to ten times what you would pay in Warren, or for that matter, in a lot of small towns across the country.
Still, as the brokers love to say, it’s all about location, location, location.
