[geeks] [barf-bag required] $13 an hour for Unix geeks, spit...

[Sridhar Ayengar]

Nadine Miller wrote:
>>>> And I suspect the cost of living in Houston is about 2 -2.5 
>>>> times what it is in Mechanicsburg, PA.
>>> 
>>> Houston:  2-bedroom apartments can be had for $795-895.  You can 
>>> get a nice house for between $150-200K.
>> 
>> Wow!  Two bedroom apartments in a decent neighborhood in 
>> *Poughkeepsie* (let alone NYC) are $1100+.  For $200K, your house 
>> will be about to collapse under its own weight.
> 
> Houston hasn't imploded under the weight of tech expansion.  Most of 
> Houston's "boom" happened during the oil boom in the 70's, and it's 
> grown been slow and steady since then.  Hence, housing prices are 
> still reasonable.

Poughkeepsie's tech boom really hit in the late 40s and early 50s when
IBM started bulking up large-scale computer assembly operations.  The
prices have continued to go up because of emigration from people fleeing
even *higher* prices closer tothe City.

New York City's population, of course, peaked sometime in the mid 60s, 
but is starting to climb again because people no longer see living there 
as dangerous.

> Well, and you know, Texas is just "bigger", so the growth of the city
>  outwards is not so difficult. It's not going to bump into another 
> large city until Dallas in the north, and Austin/San Antonio to the 
> west/northwest.  It's less dense, but more sprawled, which causes 
> commute headaches, but keeps RE prices down.

Yeah, I had guessed that.

The limiting factor to outward growth in the New York area has not been 
the availability of land, because there's definitely land still 
available a little further out, it's been traffic making it impossible 
to get into the city in a reasonable amount of time.  Poughkeepsie is 
the northern limit for commuter trains from Manhattan.  There's been 
talk for years about extending the line along tracks that already exist 
and are in use by Amtrak, but nothing's ever come of it.

I tell you what, if there were ever line extension plans that sounded 
serious, I would snatch land up in Hyde Park or Rhinebeck in a heartbeat.

Peace...  Sridhar