I think there are people that simply cannot afford to go lower than 400k if you’re looking in the Bay Area. Or it’d take a relatively big hit in lifestyle.
Mortgages are really expensive, kids in school or day care, payment to the new Rivian, etc. Just offering perspective of the other side for the forum.
35k per year doesn't cover the difference when I can live in a "lcol" city and buy a house for 400k that's probable 2M+ in the Bay. Mostly talking about people interested in raising a family in a home and not renters.
250k in the bay area with family is ok but it isn't great. You can live on it but people want nice houses and schools for their kids,etc... so I get where they're coming from. Even for the single people they wanna retire early or whatever. Everyone has different goals I guess
This poll isn't very useful. Given that you can't even get a cheap apartment for much less than $2,000 per month in SF I don't see how anyone could live on less than 36k per year in the bay area before taxes. There has to be more to these numbers perhaps they have a large stash of personal savings they are living off or a significant other with a good paying job.
The average cost of a home in the Bay Area is also somewhere between ~1.5 million dollars as well. So it’s effectively impossible to reasonably buy a home unless you have a salary >300k without going into massive debt.
You can absolutely raise a family in the SFBA on less than $300k of household income. (Source: me). You think everyone with kids in this region of 3.6m people is pulling down that kind of money?
There’s plenty of 3BR houses in the east bay for less than a million, which puts your mortgage+property taxes at around $60k, which is totally doable at even half the salary you’re talking about.
People are just spending too much of their money and lack fiscal disaplin. 250k/year is more than enough for the bay area. But you'll not be able to live like a king.
Financial security in the Bay Area requires a house there ($2-3M, nowadays) plus $COST_OF_LIVING/4%. This is easily $5M net worth. It's in "two Googlers and a successful exit at some point earlier" territory.
Granted, this threshold is less than $10M, but it isn't orders of magnitude less
All of which is to say that it is basically impossible to stay in the Bay long-term unless you make an absolute fuckton of money.
Well, you do have two other options.
One is to commute in 2hr or more every day. Which a lot of service workers have to do.
The other is to share a house or apartment with roommates (if you're single) or with another family (surprisingly common, because what else can you do?).
These are both lifestyle decisions that differ substantially from what most people think of as "normal", past your 20s.
What I'm saying is, merely living a "normal middle class" lifestyle in the Bay requires absurd money. So I can understand why people act like absurd money is normal.
I can assure you that's not everywhere the case. In the bay are, $40k/year will barely make up for your rent/house payment - especially if you have a family to support. And then there's also a student loan payments, health insurance...
One problem is that quite a few people (myself included) have entirely written off the idea of "actively searching to purchase a new home" in the Bay Area because the prices are so insanely high even for the "affordable" properties.
A lot of these people got into the housing market before the explosion in prices over the last 15 years. Also, that stat also doesn't tell you if people on those incomes can afford their houses or how soon they can retire.
It sounds like you either don't live in the Bay Area or you make about what I make and haven't realized if you don't make $300k and your options aren't very pleasant.
sure 1M is OK in SF Bay area (you need to plan for retirement too). But even based on your calculations suddenly 500K is not enough to allow a middle class lifestyle.
The median Bay Area household cannot afford to buy a house, yes, but that does not mean that those buying houses are significantly wealthier. The Bay is far, far richer than you can imagine.
Buying a house for $1M is firmly middle class status. True lower class people simply cannot afford to live in the Bay at all.
To be in the top 1% in the Bay Area you have to make close $1M per year.
They're willing to pay that much because there isn't enough housing in the bay. If the neighborhood was denser prices would be lower. There aren't an unlimited number of people looking to buy multi million dollar homes in silicon valley.
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