My God, property in Chicago is affordable

Girlfriend, wiki the climate, and this might clue you in.

I've been to Chicago in all four seasons, R1. I would make it work for that price.

Oh yes R1, the average temps are just unbearable. brrrrrrrrr

Month Average High / Low (°F) January 32° / 22° February 36° / 26° March 45° / 34° April 56° / 43° May 66° / 53° June 77° / 63° July 82° / 70° August 81° / 70° September 74° / 62° October 62° / 50° November 50° / 39° December 37° / 27° 7 days

Gurl, what are looking at? Links please.

OP is posting from the convention and visitors bureau.

R4, under $250k for 2 beds and 2 baths overlooking water. Fuck.

1300/mo HOA and electric heat. There’s a reason it’s cheap-ish

You can do better in that same price range. Look at the total sum of the mortgage plus HOA plus taxes and compare places using those figures.

R7

Holy shit, this seems like a steal…which usually means:

— Deferred Maintenance = a big special assessment hit. And more to come.

— Significant structural issues

— The neighborhood? I don’t know Chicago.

— Not enough homosexuals per-square-mile.

I would say the location of R7 ‘s listing is fine. It’s probably age and the HOA, along with a supply of similar units. The north side outside of a couple of less prime spots overall isn’t too bad. As you move inland, if you aren’t far north enough, it’s less gentrified going west and as you move more north it’s just more middle to upper middle class. The mirror image of this location on the lake from downtown would be Hyde Park on the south side, which is a hidden gem in its own right.

This unit would be a much better deal

r11's link is where the infamous poseur Payson "Bunky" Cushing lived. His real name was Pat and has a common Irish surname I've since forgotten. He was from Ann Arbor, but he claimed to be related to THOSE Cushings and Chicago society pretended to accept his story, along with his implausibly mundane employment ringing up schmatas at Ralph Lauren... He lived in a 1-bedroom hovel at 4250 Marine until his sudden death at age 60 in 2015, and a secret boyfriend had to empty the apartment.

I remember him. When was living in Chicago, I would see him show up on the pages of Chicago "society" parties and events. I googled and found a nod to his self invention. Can you imagine pretending to be someone?

Does Chicago have any decent nearby nature/wilderness for the outdoor-inclined?

The Montrose Bird Sanctuary is across Lake Shore Dr. from 4250 N Marine Dr. it’s very cruisy.

Forest Preserves. Some are actually in the city

Ughh, I gotta get outta here and back to Rome…!

R15, R16, I guess proximity to Wisconsin and Michigan can provide all the relief one seeks from lakes, rivers, and forests?

or even the very lake on which Chicago sits - Lake Michigan, the 5th biggest lake in the world.

or the Indiana Dunes, less than 40 miles away

R19, true. The Lake is great. But for hiking wooded, foresty paths or kayaking along rivers. Maybe WI fits that bill a little more?

Michigan and Wisconsin are great for outdoor adventures. Door County is spectacular.

I could live in Chicago easily if I were still living in the U.S,.but I've not been there in six+ years and safety and neighborhood quality issues would bear some investigation.

It's a city with fantastic housing stock, especially for apartments which are generally a good bit larger and brighter than their counterparts in DC and northeast of there. There's great variety, too. The neighborhoods from the Art Institute north, even way the fuck north to Evanston if you like, are very pleasant and day-to-day livable, with lots of neighborhoods with their own look and character. It's remarkably leafy and green, or can be, and if you don't require a view of that wretched, cold as a witch's tit, wrist-slittingly depressing lake, a big premium disappears from the cost of many fine apartments and land a city cityscape view instead.

It's an interesting city with much to do. The men are handsome and friendly and calm and, like the city, easy. And if you can swing a couple winter away months or even just one, it could be fairly ideal. Tons of snow for weeks on end would do me in, but to steal a month or two away at the worst of the winter would make all the difference. If I'm not mistaken it's been a few years at least without a really brutal winter. Of the big cities in the US, it became an unexpected favorite, but again I haven't known it for more than a few years now.

This apartment for instance: 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, 1400sf, fantastic 1916 building: $500,000, with 1500 monthly condo fee; 900 monthly taxes and insurance. A quality not easily found in the NE US for anything near that orice

Several of the so called cheap places listed in this thread are along Lake Shore Drive - anything from North Avenue all the way up to basically Evanston is going to be an old building that's anywhere from 40 to 100 years old. Many of those buildings have high HOA assessments as stated above, because of maintenance issues, and also are ripe for special assessments - which means owners could be asked to cough up additional money for urgent repairs.

Sorry to be the turd in the punchbowl, but proceed with caution.

The first apartment is adjacent to the Loyola campus and a block from the el. The second is near Montrose Beach, probably the best bird watching sites in Chicago. Midway between the two are blocks filled with Asian restaurants and markets. You can also get goat birria and sicilian pizza to go. Not a novelty in NYC but this area is filled with delicious, inexpensive ethnic eats with no waiting time or preciousness--alt hough Chicago has plenty of those. In the intervening two miles from the second building are Morse Ave. and Howad St at the city limits. Both have had shootings in recent months. Illinois has a state park, Starved Rock, and Indiana has the dunes. Both are reachable by public transportation and the Sierra Club has frequent trips. Many are not fans of high-rise living and these are old buildings, hence the price. Living on a tree-lined street with a garden and neighbors you can socialize with is not cheap but cannot be beat.

Property usually is cheap where no one in his right mind would want to live.

Of course, R23, HOA fees should be seen as part of the picture. If you seen a fantastic building in the zone you describe with what looks like a great bargain apartment, look first ti to HOA fees. Buildings if similar quality, style, age, and location, with about 1500sf can have monthly fees from under 1000 to over 4000, and I saw one with monthly fees of 7000 in that same price/size/age/location/quality range.

Buying new offers some security in that the life expectancy of it's parts can be predicted and there may be some legal recourse if there was a developer or builder fuckup. But aside from my aesthetic preference for old buildings like the1916 one I linked at R22, newer buildings have more maintenance issues than older buildings. 1970s isn't necessarily more trouble free than 1917; generally speaking, the opposite is true. When modern buildings reach structural problems of age related failures, they go ass over teacups wrong in a chain reaction if expensive repairs. Much older buildings also have expensive problems though I'd argue much less pervasive within a building. In NYC, it's the post-War buildings that often have the horrific special assessments for curtain wall and brick veneer and balcony failures, always at about the same time elevators and windows are due for replacement.

Chicago is fantastic. I loved living there because I had access to anything I'd want from a big city but it didn't feel overwhelming and truly some of the nicest people I've ever met. It's almost very easy to get out of the city and into nature without too far a trek. I'm hoping to move back there in the next few years.

OP, it’s a place to be murdered and have your shit stolen. Of course the property values are low.

Not true. I woud not wander down the main drag at 2 am. If this is a dealbreaker, look elsewhere.

Friends of mine bought in two buildings along N Sheridan and have taken a huge bath on both because of deferred maintenance.

Does Cabrini Green have any openings?

It closed 14 years ago and the area has been completely gentrified.

R29 What exactly is "the main drag" in Chicago?

I meant it with respect to each building, not in a unitary sense. One is near Devon and Sheridan.. Is the other on Marine Drive? Walking alone down either of these streets n the middle of the nighti not advisable.

I am shocked that my blue collar neighborhood in Wrigleyville/Lakeview have 3 million dollar houses now. Granted it was 50 years ago, but still crazy. Glad that the Music Box theatre is still around.

R22 We actually get next to no snow in Chicago anymore, much to my chagrin (I love snow). Each winter is getting milder than the last due to climate change. What is getting worse, like many cities, is our summers.

Unlike seemingly every Chicagoan, I do not go apeshit for summers (seriously, Chicago loses it's MIND for summer), and I actually love winter. It was one of the things I liked best about the city until around 2016 or so when it started to slowly dwindle. Plus, the misconception many people have that Chicago winters are like some kind of Siberian hellscape seemed to keep too many people from moving here, which I also liked.

r36, I left Chicago in '83 (so I got to experience some blizzards), and I loved the winters, and hated the summers. I cannot even imagine it being even hotter and more humid that it was back then. I now live in L.A., and miss Autumn and Winter so badly.

Chicago winters may not be bitterly cold for months at a time but my last Chi winter was 2019, when the polar vortex had windchill temps of minus 40 degrees.

R38 One of the things I miss most about the NE is blizzards and big snow dumps. We pretty much just get flurries in the city now, with suburbs and exurbs getting the really exciting winter weather.

Yes, the summers are getting pretty brutal. Not only the heat and humidity, but the severe storms. With tornado alley shifting east from the plains to the Midwest, regular tornado sirens are becoming commonplace now. We had something like 5 tornadoes touch down in the city in a 2-day period recently. One that went from my neighborhood Pilsen and into the West Loop. I've developed major summer storm anxiety in the last couple of years because of it. Tornadoes TERRIFY me, and were not something I thought I'd be signing up for when I moved here in 2010.

R39 I remember that polar vortex, but it only lasted like 36 hours before the temps returned to normal. Nothing like the 2014 one that lasted nearly a month.

[quote]and if you don't require a view of that wretched, cold as a witch's tit, wrist-slittingly depressing lake

Yes, it's just AWFUL...

If you can freely pick any place to live (and your post sounds like you're seriously considering moving there) - why Chicago?

Chicago's a fantastic place except for the cold. No one who's been there would question it as a place to live.

One thing I don’t like about Chicago is how they’re still building apartment and condo towers on parking podiums. It’s very Sunbelty and hurts urbanity. There are areas with sky high density but empty streets and blank walls because of all the podiums.

Sounds dangerously affordable-bring your own guns

Affordable and available-previous owners were shot dead over the weekend.

HOAs are the collective antichrist of homeownership, OP.

I'm so sick of these comments about the guns and shootings. You all realize 99% of those are in areas 10-35 miles away and you would only go there if you're lost? It's become this right-wing go-to in order to shit on Obama.

It's like saying - Don't go to West Hollywood because there have been some shootings in San Bernardino. Or don't go to West Village because there's a LOT of crime in the Bronx.

Chicago's housing IS affordable for a big city. The first listing on this thread is a hard pass. Most of those high-rises (right up the street from the building where the Bob Newhart show exteriors were filmed) are old and needing a lot of renovations. Plus that area is rather blah.

But home ownership is MUCH easier there. Yep - there are a few weeks of just shit weather, but you have extra money to get away somewhere sunny during the winter.

I love the older condos, some of them are beautiful BUT you have 'laundry facilities" in the basement.

NO, HOMEY don't play that...Phillywhore gets a W/D in the condo unit; not paying 1500 HOA fees to do laundry in the basement

Those cheap high rises in the Uptown, Edgewater and Rogers Park neighborhoods are for the poors! And be sure to check out all the homeless people camping in the park along the lake and Lake Shore Drive. "Top drawer. Really top drawer!"

Liar. I see you washing your cum and poop stained streets ALL THE TIME at the laundromat on South Street.

thefuckouttahere with that “in the unit”

Get an in unit W/D or pass it up, Take reasonable precautions. Each police district has an interactive map of crimes, broken down by category. Know where the problem spots and times are. Chicago is not the s-show MAGAs want you to think it is but it's no a place to wander around drunk at 4 am. .

I'd never heard of this Bunky Cushing queen but she needs her own thread!

R53 done!

[quote] Does Chicago have any decent nearby nature/wilderness for the outdoor-inclined?

There's actually a surprising amount of wooded area in the city proper, as well as parks and forest preserves in adjacent areas easy to get to by CTA or Metra.

Personally, I enjoyed going out to the suburbs on the weekends or making trips to WI or western MI for some more rural adventures. One park near Naperville in particular (Greene Valley preserve, I think) was my favorite.

Affordable? It should be free it’s worthless. Chicago-what a joke

R56 - and where do YOU live?