apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

You had me at $99k. When I moved to Austin the housing costs were outrageous. I bought my home four years ago and the prices in the "bad" part of town blew up.
I'd like a slightly bigger home, but being single the current prices are still insane.
Please keep us posted.

We just built a new house in New Hampshire (housing in our area is high, too, because of the Boston bedroom community effect.

We wanted to build green, but we bought into a new existing development and had to work with the developers and their contractors, no options there. It was really hard and quite expensive to go as green as we did, since there are seemingly no specialists in green building around here and the guys who worked on the project were reluctant at best to comply.

For instance, in true green building, all scrap lumber and materials should be recycled as much as possible. Instead of that, they brought in an enormous dumpster which eveyone on the street added their trash to -- it was out of our control. (We contracted with the developers to customize their last lot from one of their existing plans.)

However, we did invest in Toto dual flush toilets, low E windows, extra cellulose insulation, recycled fiber carpeting, compact flourescent lighting throughout, programmable thermostats, natural gas heat, and some other features I am blanking on right now. We did NOT get (although we hoped to) cementboard siding instead of vinyl (additional $10,000), on-demand water heaters (an additional $4000 each for 2), real linoleum flooring instead of vinyl (more expensive plus nobody local sells or installs it, Forestry Department certified hardwood flooring (not available at the dealer we were required to choose from) etc. We had to make a lot of compromises because of local availability (or lack thereof). I presume it will get better in time.

I moved to Austin from L.A. four years ago as well, but maybe the fact that the prices were so much lower and bought so much more is the reason I didn't get sticker shock. My house (in the northern part of the "bad" part of town) was $110K at this time in 2005. I'd like a smaller home (mine is a 3/2 with 1,275 sq ft), but as creolesugar said the prices haven't gone down to where a single person can afford them again.

wow...those roofs don't look like they're designed to accommodate snowfalls. Maybe not a concern in some areas, but that's the first thing that came to mind when seeing the images.

Grumpy - well...this is in Austin, so it would have been kind of wasteful for the designers to show homes that had roofs to withstand snowfall. We get almost no snow here at all.

Why isn't there an Apartment Therapy Austin yet?

I second Emilymbd! I'm currently completing the loan process to see what I qualify for buying a house/condo in Austin. I'm one income (the bf is in school right now), so I'm not expecting too much. It would take something really worth it to lure me away from my rental.

Most of these entries didn't seem to have a prayer of being built for 99k. The guidelines developed for this competition were far to vague to produce anything that could, with confidence, be built within the prescribed budget.

I think it can certainly be done, just under other circumstances than I saw presented in this particular competition. I thought the competition was a disappointment.

The March issue of Met Home has a great article on $20K homes.