Quote:
Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary
Why are houses in Michagan so cheap, other than needing to be fixed up?
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The general disrepair is a symptom not the cause. In Michigan you had two major causes.
1. White flight to the suburbs. When school were forced to integrate in the 70's and 80's white families moved out of the cities and to suburbs. Plenty of retailers and other companies followed.
2. In the 80's, 90's, and 00's manufacturing moved out of Michigan to the US South and Mexico chasing cheap labor. This loss of manufacturing and jobs meant that my generation (I graduated high school in the mid-1990's) left the state looking for work leaving behind an aged population.
Combine the two and most major cities in Southeast Michigan have roughly 1/2 the population that they used to have at their peak. That lack of population means a surplus of homes and many were abandoned and left to rot. You have entire city blocks that are abandoned and city run programs to do house swaps to move remaining residents out of mostly empty blocks and consolidate them so the city can shrink the area requiring services.
As Piotrsko said, many of those old houses are also contaminated with asbestos and lead paint which makes fixing them or even knocking them down very expensive.
That doesn't mean the entire city is a dump. There are well cared for areas and ones that are a complete wreck. There are areas that developers are aggressively buying houses to fix up nice and flip and areas that are either abandoned or run by slum lords. You can buy a nice 3 bed / 2 bath house in my hometown for $100K +/-.
The house I rented in Flint, Michigan had the front porch falling off, animals living in the attic, leaks in the roof "fixed" by hanging a blue tarp in the attic and having it collect water that ran off to the eaves that were kicked out. It likely should have been condemned.