Posted by:
Tevai
(
)
Date: April 29, 2022 11:36PM
You and I live at opposite ends of the same valley, and like most valleyites, I have been intensely interested in this general question for many years.
The house I grew up in, in Woodland Hills, began as a vacant hilltop lot (at that time, our nearest neighbor on our hill lived a generous block downhill from us).
I was either three or four years old at that time, and my parents were able to purchase both the lot our house was built on, plus the construction materials for the house (my Dad did most of the construction work himself, with a whole LOT of work from my Mom!), using the GI Bill, for the sum of $6,000. (This is not a typo: the sum necessary to purchase both the lot and the building materials was six thousand dollars, and this was done in around 1946.)
I just Googled our address (no one in my family lives there anymore), and the estimated cost today of our house is $1,627,668 (they say three bedrooms; it was two bedrooms when I was growing up there, but I think the last owners constructed another bedroom in the space over the garage), for 2,501 square feet of housing (includes two floors plus a semi-underground basement).
Inflation is definitely a part of the value of Valley property rising so radically, but I also think two other factors are extremely important: the Valley used to be mostly agricultural land (orange groves, grazing land for cattle and horses, etc.), and today there is very little "empty space" left, PLUS: all those kids who were born right around the time I was born eventually married and had kids, who then married and had kids, and there is (often) a very strong preference among those particular kids and grandkids to live in the Valley. Forget the people moving in from wherever, just consider the numbers of Valley kids who have now grown up, and you've got very strongly rising costs in the local housing market.
I love this Valley. I am very deeply a Valley girl in every single atom in my body.
It just (now) costs a whole heck of a lot more than it used to to live here!