In Santa Cruz, California, an exceptionally nice place on the coast, with a beach, 25 miles south of Silicon Valley, if you look _real_ hard you might find a 50-year-old, run-down ranch house, 1200 square feet maybe, 3 BR if you're lucky, for $600K.
Ten years ago, this wasn't a real expensive town. Lot of counterculture and such here. But it got bad at the dot-com boom, and kept getting worse afterwards. A lot of people pulled their money out of stocks and put it into property. And lower interest rates helped.
Thing is, the actual _wages_ here in town aren't that high, unless you're working over the hill. So they have a hard time recruiting new cops, new teachers, new civil servants, everything. And families that didn't already own homes are moving out because they can't afford to buy. So there are fewer and fewer kids in town. Because of the gap between home prices and wages, Santa Cruz is regularly rated as one of the three least affordable housing markets in the nation. It's ugly.
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