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5A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2016 Out of the norm: Big cities where homes remain affordable This part of a series of Asso- ciated Press stories about how the U.S. housing market has evolved in the 10 years since the market peaked. By JIM SALTER Associated Press ST. LOUIS — Until recently, Christina Brouk was living with her parents. Now, still in her early 20s, she’s liv- ing the American dream of home ownership — the same dream that’s grown elusive for many young adults since the housing bubble peaked 10 years ago. Homes in many areas of the United States have become so costly that few but high-earn- ers can afford them. Rising rents have made it hard to save enough to buy. Cities that offer plentiful jobs for educated young adults — New York, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington — have become prohibitively expensive home markets. Then there are the exceptions. St. Louis, near where Brouk lives, is one. So are Minneapo- lis, Pittsburgh and Kansas City, Missouri. In those areas, homes remain comparatively afford- able relative to local incomes. An improved U.S. economy has fueled job and pay growth. Throw in historically low mort- gage rates, and ownership is still within reach — even for those just entering their careers at modest salaries. “You really live to do this,” Brouk, a 24-year-old medi- cal secretary who, along with her iancé, Derek Schmittgens, bought a three-bedroom ranch home in the St. Louis suburb of Imperial, Missouri, in Decem- ber. “It’s what you work for.” The St. Louis metro area, situated squarely in the Rust Belt, might seem an improba- ble place for a stable housing market. The local economy is far diminished from its peak decades ago as a hub of mus- cular industrial giants. Many corporations like brewing giant Anheuser-Busch that once were based here closed, moved or merged. This year, the NFL’s Rams cited rosier economic opportunities in Los Angeles as a reason for their decision to return to the West Coast. Yet having never experi- enced the heights of the hous- ing bubble, St. Louis never AP Photo/Steven Senne Fisherman Carl Berg unloads containers of whelks from a fishing vessel at a dock in Little Compton, R.I., in May. ‘Ugly’ snails, once ignored by ishermen, now a prize By MATT O’BRIEN Associated Press AP Photo/Jeff Roberson Kelsey Funk poses outside her home in St. Charles, Mo. Funk paid $113,000 for her three-bed- room home in suburban St. Louis about a year ago. “I think what surprised me was how af- fordable it is,” Funk said. “My monthly payment is way cheaper than rent. The cost to rent was generally $900 to $1,000. My mortgage is now $690. And it’s something I own.” absorbed the full brunt of the bust, either. Its economy has remained reasonably steady compared with turmoil else- where in the country where foreclosures caused demand for rentals to surge. A tech corridor in the city’s Central West End is attract- ing some higher-paying jobs at companies like Square, a mobile payment company founded by Jack Dorsey, a St. Louis native who co-founded Twitter. Jobs in health care and inance continue to grow, economists say. The metro area’s unemployment rate is just below the national level of 4.9 percent. And home prices remain roughly in line with area incomes. A new low Nationally, home ownership is near a 48-year low. A key reason is that surging rents and home prices have made it next to impossible for many peo- ple to save enough to buy — even though today’s ultra-low mortgage rates have the effect of lightening housing bills. An analysis by The Associated Press found that monthly hous- ing payments have dropped in the past decade while rents have climbed. Yet in the St. Louis area, buyers in the 25-34 age group are having a comparatively easy time, data tracked by Realtor.com shows: Those young buyers make up 40 per- cent of purchase mortgages in the metro area, compared with an average of 35 percent nationally. The median home value in the St. Louis metro area is $152,000, $24,000 less than the national average and far below many other big cities, especially on the coasts, said Charles Gascon, an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. And, the median household income of $56,041 is about $2,700 above the national average, Gascon said. “You really didn’t see the big boom or the big bust” in St. Louis through the economic downturn, Gascon said. “But you can go even beyond that. Delinquency rates didn’t spike as high in the St. Louis area, and our economy as a whole didn’t contract as much as the rest of the country.” Brouk and Schmittgens lived separately with their parents as they spent months searching for just the right home. They found it in Impe- rial, a town of 5,000 a half-hour south of St. Louis. They agreed to the $140,000 asking price the day the home hit the mar- ket, grabbing it before other buyers could make an offer. The brick home, on two- thirds of an acre, lies on a quiet cul-de-sac adjoining a wooded area. It needed some work. The young couple replaced the carpets and painted the walls. Next up, they’ll redo the kitchen cabinets and inish the basement. W EDNESDAY E VENING (2) (-) (-) (6) (-) (8) (9) (10) (12) (13) (-) (20) (-) (29) (30) (31) (32) (34) (35) (36) (38) (39) (43) (44) (45) (46) (47) (48) (49) (50) (51) (52) (53) (54) (56) (57) (58) (61) (63) (64) (65) (162) L KATU KOMO KING KOIN KIRO KGW KRCW KOPB KPTV KPDX KCPQ TBS KZJO ESPN ESPN2 NICK DISN FAM FMC LIFE ROOT FS1 SPIKE COM HIST A&E TLC DISC NGEO TNT AMC USA FOOD HGTV FX CNN FNC CNBC BRAV TCM SYFY RFD (2) (4) (5) (-) (7) (-) (3) (10) (12) (-) (13) (20) (22) (29) (30) (31) (32) (34) (35) (36) (38) (39) (43) (44) (45) (46) (47) (48) (49) (50) (51) (52) (53) (54) (56) (57) (58) (61) (63) (64) (65) (162) 6 PM Big shell bucks It’s an increasingly lucra- tive hunk of meat: A large whelk can be sold for as much LISTINGS THE DAILY ASTORIAN A Still, Brouk said,” it kind of ended up being everything we wanted.” Another millennial, Kelsey Funk, paid $113,000 last year for a three-bedroom home that sits near the historic Main Street in St. Charles, Missouri, another suburb. “What surprised me was how affordable it is,” said Funk, a 26-year-old real estate agent. “My monthly payment is way cheaper than rent. The cost to rent was generally $900 to $1,000. My mortgage is now $690. And it’s something I own.” “Millennials in many mar- kets are just locked out,” said Jim Dohr, president of Cold- well Banker Gundaker, the largest real estate irm in St. Louis. “We’re bucking the trend. It all comes back to affordability.” Low prices have beneited housing markets throughout the Midwest, said Jonathan Smoke, chief economist for Realtor.com. “I think affordability turns into a major selling point for the market — not just for indi- viduals who stay there and put down roots, but also to attract other people, including attract- ing businesses,” Smoke said. For Funk, there’s nothing like the pride and contentment of having her own home. “Once you own, it’s a totally different feeling,” she said. “You actually feel like a grown-up.” LITTLE COMPTON, R.I. — Cooking a channeled whelk is not for the squeamish. But sliced and sprinkled over a bed of linguine, it’s a chewy deli- cacy in old-fashioned Italian eateries along the East Coast. The sea snails known by Italian-Americans as scungilli used to be such a niche market that ishermen ignored them when they turned up in lobster traps or oyster dredges. Now they’re a prized com- modity. Because of growing demand in Asia and the col- lapse of other industries, such as lobster, ishermen search- ing for something else to catch are keeping and selling the big marine snails. “There’s an international market for the product, primar- ily in Hong Kong and South China,” said Rick Robins, who owns Bernie’s Conchs in Virginia and manages export sales for Chesapeake Bay Packing. “It’s a popular item in Cantonese cooking.” Most people who order a plate of scungilli probably haven’t seen one of the hairy- shelled gastropods in the wild. A voracious predator, it crawls along the bottom of Atlan- tic coastal inlets from Nan- tucket Sound to North Caro- lina’s Outer Banks, piercing its razor-edged proboscis into clams and other prey. “They’re not like their Caribbean cousin,” said Rhode Island isherman Greg Mataronas, comparing it to the tropical, vegetarian conch. “They’re the Northern, ugly version. Their faces are a hunk of meat.” as $7 in a live market. The annual dockside value of the whelk catch now tops $1 million in Virginia and Rhode Island, $1.4 mil- lion in New Jersey and $5.7 million in Massachusetts, according to marine ishery agencies in those states. In Delaware, knobbed and chan- neled whelks are now the third most valuable ishery behind blue crabs and striped bass. In the colder waters of Maine, a smaller waved whelk served up as a “pickled wrin- kle” is seeing a resurgence in popularity. The same whelk is also ished in Canada and favored in Korean cuisine, Robins said. In southern New England, as the lobster industry declined from Cape Cod to Long Island Sound, the market for chan- neled whelks grew so quickly that states have scrambled to establish rules to let the snails grow big enough to breed. “As lobster ishing has declined, whelk ishing has increased,” said Scott Morello, a researcher at Maine’s Downeast Institute for Applied Marine Research & Educa- tion. “Even so, it’s still not as proitable for a year-round ishery that you’d want to base an entire economy off of it.” Mataronas identiies him- self as a lobsterman, just as his father and grandfather did in the Rhode Island seaside town of Little Compton. “Lobstering was so good in the ’90s” that he paid no attention to snails, he said. But since 2000, he’s devoted much of his spring and fall to trap- ping whelks in the calm waters of the Sakonnet River, a tidal strait that lows into Rhode Island Sound. Baited by dog- ish meat and horseshoe crabs, the snails crawl into traps left about 10-feet deep on the muddy sea loor. Evening listings WEDNESDAY A - Charter Astoria/ Seaside - L - Charter Long Beach 6:30 7 PM 7:30 8 PM 8:30 9 PM 9:30 10 PM 10:30 11 PM J ULY 13 11:30 KATU News Jeopardy! Wheel of Fortune ESPY Awards Celebrate major sports achievements. (N) KATU News at 11 (:35) Jimmy Kimmel KOMO 4 News Wheel of Fortune Jeopardy! ESPY Awards Celebrate major sports achievements. (N) KOMO 4 News (:35) Jimmy Kimmel NBC Nightly News KING 5 News KING 5 News Evening America-Talent "The Judge Cuts 2" Reba McEntire joins the panel tonight. (N) The Night Shift "All In" (N) KING 5 News (:35) Tonight Show KOIN 6 News at 6 CBS Evening News Extra Ent. Tonight Big Brother (N) Criminal Minds "The Sandman" Gothic "Christina's World" (N) KOIN 6 News @ 11 (:35) S. Colbert (N) KIRO 7 News CBS Evening News The Insider Ent. 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