On Saturday, January 24, 2004, at 10:30 AM, Jennifer Pederseb wrote:
It's not fair to compare Iowa housing costs to Minnesota housing costs because it's so hard to get a job in most of Iowa,
The job market here is almost as bad as Iowa's- most available jobs pay less than $20,000 a year before taxes.
and because transportation costs so much.
Here in North Minneapolis the bus service is useless, and those of us that still have jobs often face long commutes to the suburbs our employers fled too.
I'm from Fort Dodge (NW Iowa) and I moved up here because I could't get any sort of fulltime work with benefits unless I wanted to become a prison guard. I have friends near Mason City who commute 45 miles for sugarbeet factory work, and farm wives commute 60-90 miles into the Des Moines suburbs for pink-collar insurance work so their families can have health insurance.
Same story here in Minneapolis- the industry has largely left and even government is barely hiring if not laying off workers.
Housing is cheap, cheap, cheap in the small towns and rural areas because nobody wants to live there - there are no jobs, you *have* to have a car because there's no public transportation to speak of,
Housing is cheap also because small towns don't tear down rehabable housing and tend to build an ample supply of public housing. If you're a disabled person trying to survive on $500 a month from SSI you can't afford Minneapolis market rate housing and the waiting list for public housing runs in years. In the typical small town the same disabled person would be able to move into available public housing at about $150 a month in about the time it takes to process the paperwork. For this reason I know several folks who have left Minneapolis for small towns.
and let's not forget the Smithfield Farms sewage lagoons.
And Minneapolis' garbage burner.
(Plus, there *are* homeless people. If you really want to meet some I can show you where they congregate in Des Moines, Iowa City, Mason City & Fort Dodge.)
I have yet to see desperate homeless people camped out on a traffic island in Iowa like we see in Minneapolis.
And we're just talking about rentals so far- how about home ownership costs? I have estimates for over $30,000 in materials alone to rehab my house to Minneapolis' standards.. Today on a drive in central Minnesota I saw new single family homes with a payment of less than $600 a month and new single level townhomes for less than $100,000. And I was looking at a former bank building (all brick and concrete) of 600 square feet with air conditioning, recent electric, full basement, etc. with an asking price of $25,000... and they'll let me homestead it when I convert it to a home! Would Minneapolis ever let you have such affordable housing?
hanging on in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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