Linda Gasparello: Millennials can be pioneers in cities with cheap houses

In Danville, Va., home of tobacco entrepreneur William T. Sutherlin, called by locals the "Last Capitol of the Confederacy.’’ But most houses there don’t look like this!

WEST WARWICK

Millennials are supercharging the U.S. housing market. They have lots of cash, and they’re making a dash for cities like Boise, Idaho, Raleigh, North Carolina, Tampa, Florida, and Austin, Texas.

As home-mortgage rates rise and inventory shrinks in those and other A-list cities, Millennials, particularly those who can work remotely, might want to consider C-list – C for cheap -- cities.

Hey, Millennial. Don’t be bummed about being outbid for that pricey “adorable vintage house within walking distance to entertainment” in Austin (actually, a teardown with a honky-tonk a few yards from the back porch). Be cheered that Wall Street 24/7, a news and financial site, has just released a special report entitled “The Cheapest City to Buy a Home in Every State.”

If you’re a pioneering Millennial, here are a few cities in the report:

Gary, Ind., could be “your home sweet home” -- just like the line from the song in The Music Man, which was a hit on stage and screen long before you were born. The median home value is $66,000. Cheap homes abound in this not-so-cheerful city.

Flint, Mich., The fact that you can’t drink the water is no problem for you because you’ve only ever drunk bottled water. The median home value is $29,000. If you decide to buy a home there, keep buying bottled water from fresh municipal springs -- in other states.

Camden, N.J. There is great news for home buyers. Trenton has taken the “Murder Capital of New Jersey” title away from Camden, a perennial titleholder. The median home value in Camden is a bargain $84,000 versus $335,600 for New Jersey as a whole. Camden is downriver from Trenton, so mind the floating corpse risk.

Minot, N.D. It’s a hot market: the median home value is $208,700 versus $193,900 for the state. As for temperature, it’s not. I had a school friend from Minot who told me the saying there was, “Why not Minot? Because freezing is the reason.” Look at those months of frigid temperatures as being the reason to get more wear out of your chichi Canada Goose Expedition Parka.

East St. Louis, Mo. One resident, in a review on the Niche site, wrote, “I didn't like all of the abandoned homes and buildings. It looked like the area isn't livable and then two houses down, it is livable.” The Niche reviewers give the city bad marks for violence, but great ones for the high school football team and the diners. The median house value is $54,000.

The city that really caught my eye in the report was Danville, Va. – in a state where I lived for most of my life.

For years, because I’m interested in architecture, I’ve pored through listings on historic house sites. Recently on one site, there were many dilapidated Victorian houses listed in Danville’s Old West End, priced from $15,000 to $55,000.

For much of its history, Danville was a D-list city – D for disreputable. This tobacco-processing and textile-manufacturing city’s reputation rolled downhill for a century, from the Civil War (where it was major center of Confederate activity and was the “Last Capital of the Confederacy” from April 3-7, 1865) to “Bloody Monday,” the name given to a series of arrests and brutal attacks that took place during a nonviolent protest by Blacks against segregation laws and racial inequality on June 10, 1963. Of the protests, leading up to the March on Washington on Aug. 28, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, “As long as the Negro is not free in Danville, Virginia, the Negro is not free anywhere in the United States of America.”

Danville’s work in recent decades to create a new identity is paying off. The median home value is $90,500. The city is attracting high-tech companies and Millennial workers – new residents who will continue its transformation from disreputable to desirable.

Linda Gasparello is co-host and producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Her email is lgasparello@kingpublishing.com, and she’s hased in West Warwick, R.I. and Washington, D.C.

Chris Powell: Of Flint, Hartford and a stadium

With the city’s water system contaminated by lead, this was the headline last week on a news story from Flint, Mich.: "Mothers of Flint Very Frightened for Their Kids."   

The story lacked even one reference to the fathers of Flint, presumably because there are few if any fathers there, the city of 100,000 being, like so many other U.S. cities, more or less a concentration camp for the poor, hapless and fatherless.  

As a result since 2011 Flint has been operating in administrative receivership by Michigan state government. The city was also in state receivership from 2002 to 2004 but it did little lasting good.     

The catastrophe resulted from the current state receiver’s decision to save money by switching the city’s water supply from the metropolitan Detroit system to the Flint River, whose water leached lead from the city water system’s old pipes. As signs of trouble grew, Flint lacked the competent political class needed to take care of itself or evoke the concern of state officials.

So now many children in Flint are at risk of irreversible lead poisoning, a national scandal.   

But Flint’s circumstances, political incompetence arising from comprehensive and perpetual poverty, are common in many cities, including cities in Connecticut,  as indicated by the latest incompetence in Hartford, the $10 million cost overrun in the minor-league baseball stadium the city is building to steal New Britain’s team.  

Nearly everyone outside Hartford knew that the lack of minor-league baseball was not among the city’s problems and that city government would botch the project.  For like Flint, Hartford lacks the independent and engaged middle class necessary to make government work in the public interest. Instead, most ofHartford’s politically involved people are members of the government and welfareclasses -- the dependent classes.

While some Hartford residents have complained about the decision to build the stadium and the cost overrun, there are not enough to make a difference politically.  

Hartford’s new mayor, Luke Bronin, who had nothing to do with the stadium decision, has made what he says is the best settlement available for the cost overrun. The city will split the expense with the minor-league team and the mayor will pursue more financial aid from the state and federal governments to compensate for the city’s unplanned extra contribution.  

Thus Bronin, until recently an aide to Gov. Dan Malloy, inadvertently has exposed the dodge that his former boss hid behind when Hartford began contemplating  the stadium -- a statement that state government would not help fund it.

But like Connecticut’s other impoverished cities, Hartford long has drawn half its budget from state government reimbursement, far more than most municipal governments get, and thus for many years whenever Hartford has wasted money,  half the waste has been state government money.

With the stadium Hartford already has wasted a lot of state money, and if Mayor Bronin obtains more aid from the state and federal governments to reimburse the cost overrun, the city  will be wasting still more.   

The disaster might have been prevented if, instead of purporting to be indifferent to Hartford’s stadium plan, the governor had candidly acknowledged the city’s disproportionate financial dependence on state government, declared the stadium a luxury, and announced that every dollar the city spent on the stadium would be matched by a reduction in state aid to the city.

That instantly would have scuttled the stadium and brought much-needed clarity to Connecticut’s dysfunctional political economy.    Instead, exploding the governor’s pose of neutrality, state government now will be subsidizing not only Hartford’s theft of New Britain’s team but still more ofHartford city government’s incompetence, thus giving all municipalities more incentive for their own incompetence.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.