One of my friends on Facebook is an architect. In fact, my uncle is a semi-retired architect and real estate developer of sorts, so I've always had a bit of a preoccupation with houses. I love houses. I love my house. But I still constantly comb the real estate sites online, out of sheer curiosity. I just like to see the insides.

So my architect friend recently shared a real estate listing from San Francisco. The listing was for just under $1.2 million. And it looks like a house you'd rent for about $650 a month out in Alton or something like that. It's tiny, cramped, and suffocated on every side by other property. Heck, the "lawn" is simply concrete.

For the same price in Maine, you could buy a 5600+ square foot house pretty close to the water down in Cape Neddick. The San Fran house is barely over 1000 square feet, with a view of a brick wall, plus 2 small bedrooms and one bath. As opposed to the Cape Neddick home where there are 4 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms.

Here was the interesting part, to me anyway. The property tax on the Maine house is likely pretty steep. A quick search suggests that the taxes are likely in the neighborhood of $8000-$10,000 a year. Yikes!!! But the taxes on this ersatz tiny house in S.F. are only about $3600 a year. That's less than I pay here in Hampden.

Granted, I have a little bit of land, and a house nearly three times as big, but still... I was surprised to see that at least the taxes are ok. But if you take all that, and throw it in the old adding machine, you have a monthly payment in S.F. of potentially $5000 a month. But the Maine house will set you back closer to $6000 a month.

What's scary, is that houses in Maine the last year, are becoming frighteningly competitive as far as price. There's a lot more multi-million dollar homes in Maine than you might think. In more places than you might think. That must mean more people are headed here with out of state money.

I wonder how long it'll take before none of us can afford to live here either?

$1.2 Million In Maine Vs. San Francisco

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LOOK: Here are the 50 best beach towns in America

Every beach town has its share of pluses and minuses, which got us thinking about what makes a beach town the best one to live in. To find out, Stacker consulted data from WalletHub, released June 17, 2020, that compares U.S. beach towns. Ratings are based on six categories: affordability, weather, safety, economy, education and health, and quality of life. The cities ranged in population from 10,000 to 150,000, but they had to have at least one local beach listed on TripAdvisor. Read the full methodology here. From those rankings, we selected the top 50. Readers who live in California and Florida will be unsurprised to learn that many of towns featured here are in one of those two states.

Keep reading to see if your favorite beach town made the cut.

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