Here's a listing for "Affordable housing" in San Diego -

[haele]

http://prudentialcaliforniarealtyonline.com/details/start.aspx?propid=0090130018020&puid=dc57b034-1549-41b5-8fb8-8391a27218af

Only $160K; with $33K down, you would be paying $750 or so a month total in mortgage for the next 30 years. If you can get someone to carry a note on it.

Thirteen years ago, before the bubble, this property would have gone for a little over $25K - the value of the land it was built on at the time. Now-a-days, if the same determination of value holds, the property should be going for around $52K - to $60K.

Now, it's more than just a bit too pricey for the median wage household to purchase the property and rehabilitate the house on the property to make it a home again. I've seen this lot and have frankly lusted after it, fingers itching to fix it up to a green deam home.
It's a good size in a halfway decent location (great for solar) in an iffy neighborhood that's starting to recover economically. With some rehab, it would be a pretty nice family house with a good yard for gardening and fruit trees, storage area for canning, and maybe even yard chickens. At the price it's currently listed at, it will cost the buyer a total of around $250K to $300K just to bring it up to code - and that's before looking at the landscaping, solar and grey-water irrigation that the home owner might add to make it green.

If it were priced at $52K, the extra $75K - $130K of work it will need would keep it in the "affordable housing" range to the median household that's not afraid to live in that area of town and is able to wait the 6 months or so before moving in as it gets fixed up. I could probably get family to help me come up with the $52K outright to purchase the property cash, and then worry about finding a reputable contractor that my Credit Union would be willing carry the paper for to help me fix it up.

But at this price range, it's only affordable to a developer who will level everything and quickly stuff a cheaply built 8-unit 2bd/2ba apartment "condo complex" on the land to rent out for $1200 a month per unit or - sell for $160K per unit, making at least 400% profit for the developer as he unloads them as "affordable housing" to lower income buyers who don't realize they're going to be hit with Mello-Roos fees that almost double their property taxes. And concentrating even more people into a stressed infrastructure (roads need fixing, 100-year old water mains) situation is not going to help the neighborhood improve any.
Let's face it - the household that can afford the downpayment to keep the two loan payments (primary for the house and second for the fixing of it) at under $3K a month for the next twenty/thirty years does not want to live in the 'hood, no matter how close to downtown and the freeway it is, or how much the neighborhood is gentrifying.

F***you, house flippers...and F-you skeevy mortgage bankers for the housing bubble that keeps decent family housing out of the reach of the majority of working families.

Haele

[Egalitarian Thug]

1. What the people that both pay attention and understand how things work have been saying

since at least 2006. The housing market valuations were manipulated to serve as refuge for the Big Money that escaped the stock market crashes. The entire real estate industry, from the banks down to the appraisers, knew full well all along that it was a scam. The entire bailout, both the $700B distraction and the $12T real bill, was done for one purpose only, to prop up the Big Money long enough to get out.

They can't let house valuations drop to fair market values because the entire facade of solvency is built on those valuations.

[pediatricmedic]

2. Lot is tiny, overpriced to the max

Lot size is 1999 sq ft, footprint of structure is over 1200 sq ft. The other land you see around does not come with the lot. Your only open ground is from the front of the house to the street and walkway along west side. The lot to the west is separate along with the land to the north.