Median Home Prices Rise in Downtown Saint Paul, MN

[MineralMan]

http://www.twincities.com/ci_11475249?nclick_check=1

It's about as close to hot as you can get in today's real estate market.

Downtown St. Paul managed a 6 percent increase in the median sale price for a home during 2008, making the district a Twin Cities oddity alongside Edina and two sleepy sections of Dakota County in posting price gains compared with 2007.

Overall, the median home price in the 13-county metro area dropped 13 percent last year, with declines being posted in the vast majority of home-selling districts as defined by Realtors.

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It looks like the movement back to the urban centers has begun. High gas prices and other factors appear to be coaxing some downtown workers into condos near where they work. I wonder if this trend is starting to show up in other cities, as measured by rising housing prices in downtown areas.

[TwilightGardener]

1. It's funny, after having grown up in a typical suburb (the kind with

no sidewalks and pointless cul-de-sacs), I absolutely refuse to live in one now. I will always live in either a rural area (where I live now, in a small town), or in a city. I can totally understand why the 'burbs are losing their charm. There's only so far you can realistically leap-frog away from urban areas and still be able to commute and shop, etc., and maybe people are tired of characterless sprawl and bedroom communities. Too bad city real estate is expensive, though.

[MineralMan]

2. When my wife and I moved to Saint Paul

to help take care of her mom and dad, we bought a house in the city. We had lived for years in a small town in California. Actually housing prices in the city were considerably lower than in the suburbs. Our home is on the edge of the city, not near the downtown, and is pure residential. Public transit goes right by, though, and our house is about 2 miles from downtown.

We're hardly inner city, but it's not the suburbs. Sidewalks, and all that stuff. It's a quiet, blue-collar, ethnically diverse neighborhood. It reminds me a lot of the neighborhood I lived in when I was a kid in the 1950s. Children outside all day in good weather, playing in the street. I know my neighbors. Very interesting.

[TwilightGardener]

3. Back in the heyday of those neighborhoods, those WERE the suburbs of their time--

all served by trolley lines and buses. I grew up near Pittsburgh, and it has lots of old working-class neighborhoods like that--street after street of simple two-stories, foursquares and bungalows, all with little patches of yard and sidewalks--not urban apartment living, not distant suburbs, but still a part of the city. A lot of those places have become run-down and victims of "white flight", but it seems like those neighborhoods (actual mixed-use neighborhoods, rather than subdivisions) will become the ideal once again.

[MineralMan]

5. Our neighborhood was one of the last built in

Saint Paul. The houses are late 1940s to mid 1950s. It's on the NE corner of the city. A survey of the neighborhood showed that over 70% of the houses were owner-occupied. There are other neighborhoods in the city that don't have those characteristics, of course, but they may get moved back into as things go along.

It's definitely part of the city. The bus stops at a corner two blocks down from my house, and runs right into downtown. I ride it from time to time, as needed, since parking downtown is abysmal. There used to be corner stores in the neighborhood, but all have been converted into houses at this point, and I think that's too bad. Economic concerns, I guess.

Since we're in Minnesota, there's a small 60-acre lake about 6 blocks from my house. It has a fishing dock, and all spring and summer, you see kids riding bicycles and carrying fishing poles. Basketball, stickball, and tag football gets played in all the streets.

It's interesting, especially considering the bad news that seems to come out of the cities most of the time.

I'll be interested to see how this all goes. A house that is a clone of ours, next-door, just sold for what we paid for our house 4.5 years ago, so that's not such a bad deal.

[CrispyQ]

4. I grew up living first in a home on street that had an alley,

then in horse property type neighborhood, & then, many years on a farm. I live on a cul-de-sac now & I dislike it. Unfortunately I don't see a chance to change anytime soon. "Characterless" - that's a good way to describe these types of neighborhoods.