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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.
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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.
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