CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about the cost of living in different cities, and how one of the challenges for intercity comparisons is that the basket of goods the typical consumer buys varies from place to place. Tastes differ greatly by geography and by socioeconomic class, and often those two forces interact in ways that are not captured by cost-of-living indexes.

Trulia, a real estate Web site, illustrated that nicely in a recent semantic analysis of housing ads from the start of 2012 through late November. The company’s chief economist, Jed Kolko, looked at the phrases associated with particular markets to find features that were at least 10 times more likely to appear in listings in a particular metro area than they were nationally:

These are not the kind of things items that are likely to show up in a traditional cost-of-living index, but they do say a lot about what residents in different areas value and are likely to spend money on.

I love, for example, that “mirrored closet doors” are so attractive to homeowners in Southern California (and am admittedly confused about the “Roman tub” preference in my birthplace of West Palm Beach). But perhaps one of the most telling items on the list is “Whole Foods” in San Francisco. As Mr. Kulko writes:

Some hyperlocal phrases appear in a particular metro not because it’s unique to that metro – San Francisco is hardly the only place in the country with a Whole Foods – but because that feature appears to be especially important to house hunters there. Southern Californians might like to admire themselves in their mirrored closet doors, but many San Franciscans would be happier living next to – or even directly above – Whole Foods.

San Francisco is undoubtedly expensive if you’re poor. But maybe it’s not so expensive if you’re rich and have standard rich-person tastes for high-end products like organic food, given how many Whole Foods and related competitors are nearby and willing to compete for your business.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/a-taste-for-whole-foods-or-roman-tubs/?partner=rss&emc=rss