▪️They’re resurrecting this false meme from last year, when the “10 year challenge” meme was popular. I’ll post the original bust below, but I’ll note the current Redfin estimate is $383K, which has gone up since last year, but still way below $550k (also the meme cites 2022).
▪️This meme currently has over 340K likes on Twitter & has been widely shared elsewhere. It presents this house like it was sold for these prices in 2012 & 2022, but is actually complete fiction, like someone just picked a random picture of a house and fabricated a price.
▪️This particular house was hard to find, reverse image searches brought up just a few sites, where this house was used as a generic example of modern American ranch-style architecture. Like here:
https://architecturestyles.org/post-war-modern/
▪️I nearly gave up, but in a caption one site mentioned it was in Des Peres, near St. Louis, MO. If you look closely at the original photo, you can see “eleven hundred and nine” written above the garage.
▪️It was a long shot without the street, but I tried a search for “Des Peres 1109 ranch style home” and bam, it came up on Trulia!
https://www.trulia.com/p/mo/saint-louis/1109-cameo-ct-saint-louis-mo-63131--2060091681
▪️It’s 3 bd 2 ba, 1478 sq ft. It was last sold in Aug 2008 for $220K. According to Redfin it’s estimated at $322K, Trulia & Zillow put it at $337K ($290-385K range) and it was assessed for property taxes at $296,400 in 2020.
https://www.redfin.com/MO/Des-Peres/1109-Cameo-Ct-63131/home/93514369
▪️I don’t know what is was worth in 2012, as it wasn’t for sale then, but in 14 years it went from ~$220K-330K. If it went up exactly with price inflation it would be $280K, so it certainly exceeded that, but not the more than 3X in 10 years that this meme suggests.
▪️Meanwhile, average hourly earnings were $21.70/hr in Aug 2008, $23.24/hr in 2012 and $31.31/hr today. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out no one earns the Federal min wage. Just 0.8% of full-time workers earn at or below it, and most of those are in leisure & hospitality that get tips in addition. It makes no sense to use it as a metric for any price, especially home prices.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES0500000003
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2020/home.htm
▪️To pre-empt the objections that this meme still makes a valid point housing has gone up, ok. But these numbers are pure fiction, they don’t accurately represent the change in this house, the median US price, median St. Louis price, nothing. Why not find an actual 10 yr home price instead of making it up? I guess the answer is because you can get 340K likes, so who cares?
It’s just so wild to see these movements see saw, it feels like just yesterday that conservatives were boycotting Disney and the left was gloating.
Just incredible. After posting a meme blaming Charlie Kirk for his own murder, they post another a few hours later applauding Democrats for their civility.
Also, if you look at the Occupy Democrats timeline, their posts “denouncing political violence” were variations on “no one should be shot…BUT here’s a quote from Kirk showing he’s a terrible person.” Or sometimes they’d leave the first part out altogether and just attack him. There are no posts denouncing violence without qualifiers trying to gin up their base.
