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In Costly Bay Area, Even Six-Figure Salaries Are Considered 'Low Income' (mercurynews.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: In the high-priced Bay Area, even some households that bring in six figures a year can now be considered "low income." That's according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which recently released its 2017 income limits -- a threshold that determines who can qualify for affordable and subsidized housing programs such as Section 8 vouchers. San Francisco and San Mateo counties have the highest limits in the Bay Area -- and among the highest such numbers in the country. A family of four with an income of $105,350 per year is considered "low income." A $65,800 annual income is considered "very low" for a family the same size, and $39,500 is "extremely low." The median income for those areas is $115,300. Other Bay Area counties are not far behind. In Alameda and Contra Costa counties, $80,400 for a family of four is considered low income, while in Santa Clara County, $84,750 is the low-income threshold for a family of four.
If you make $100,000+ and cant make it.
I flick my finger out of my mouth at you fools. *pop*
This is the future big business wants for us all.
Of when you should ot accept a job, just becuase the salary is x. Smart people also look at cost of living, y, in the area. Idiots...
move
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
All those hedonistic godless people are showered with such high incomes, while the God fearing folks in the fly over country are getting very low wages. Why, God! Why are you testing your faithful believers so much?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When I was out of work for two years (2009-2010) and underemployed for six months (working 20 hours per month) in Silicon Valley, I couldn't qualify for food stamps because I made too much money (20 x $16 = $320) as a single adult. After I filed for Chapter Seven bankruptcy in 2011, I still didn't qualify for food stamps. You have to work 20 hours per month at minimum wage (~$160) to qualify for food stamps. I ate a lot of rice and beans during that time.
You're out of touch, SF
Anyone have a link to HUD's raw data so we can see what it's like in other parts of the US?
The incomes don't matter if you are not allowed to keep them after paying your costs of living. We got people paying rent for cockroach infested apartments and driving old used cars.
They're not living richly!
Don't look at income, look at what's left over after you pay your necessities. In the Bay area, the necessities are horrifically expensive!
$75/hr minimum wage. Problem solved.
make the H1B minwage $150K then
To at least $30 an hour!
$100,000/yr = $8333/mo. Lets say your rent is up there at $5500/mo, that still leaves you with $2833/mo to feed yourself, your spouse and your 2 children. The remainder of what you have to spend nearly $34,000 for the year to pay your bills, buy food and buy whatever other crap you need. A helleva lot of people don't even make that much and support a family of 4 on a single income and their salary hasn't yet even covered their housing expenses. The lower amounts they mention, I can agree with, considering current rent prices in SF. But $100,000+ per year? National prices aren't SF prices. Your money goes a helleva lot further on the internet than nearly everyone living outside of places like SF.
Here's an idea. Tell the NIMBYs to go suck a fat one and start building appropriate housing for the demand. Or people could wise up and stop giving a shit about living anywhere near SF.
...if I say, I do't give a fuck about San Francisco or the people that can' t make it on $100k salaries.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Six figures covers a lot of numbers.
Someone 'breaking in' at $101,000 is a far cry from $800,000+
So I don't want to hear just barely sub-millionaires whining...
The actual number is of little consequence most.
In most bay area locales, Section 8 housing is basically unavailable for new applicants. Wait lists are estimated to be greater than 8-10 years or simply closed to new applicants until further notice because of essentially unbounded wait times and basically zero new section 8 housing inventory.
AFAIKT, the increases of these income threshold numbers only serve to keep a small amount of existing people (the vanishingly small fraction of the 17,000 total served by section 8 with reasonable jobs near the limit) from being kicked out of Section 8 housing simply by getting cost of living raises at work and forced to fend on their own...
Basically, section 8 is totally broken in the bay area and is a non-factor in housing. This adjustment doesn't really do anything either way to change this...
I know many of you think the year of remote work will coincide with the year of the Linux desktop, but I am getting the sense that companies are tired of paying for office space. When remote really does go mainstream what will happen to jobs and real estate in these areas?
love is just extroverted narcissism
California is one of those states that send more money to the Feds then they get back SOOOOO Tennessee dollars aren't going to California to subsidize those California people getting section 8 vouchers other Californians are doing the subsidizing.
Look, 100k/4 = 25k = low salary. Not unusual at all. Similarly if you have 10 children, but only make 200k, your freakin' POOR.
The basic problem is our culture tries to measures wealth by income rather than net worth.
You can not compare the salary of a young, healthy, single orphan with a married couples supporting two sets of sick parents and multiple kids.
We need to reset our definition of wealth to be based on cash, stocks, mutual funds and real estate in the bank. This means the IRS should ignore your salary and base your taxes on what you own. Ignore the stuff in your IRA and give a set amount to ignore (just as we don't take the first 10k of income for a single person). Start it at 1% and gradually raise it to a max of 5% if you have more than a couple million in the bank.
If we did this, we could get rid of most of the complexity of the tax code, because it is all based on not overcharging the poor, which this system does automatically.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Salaries in general are too low. If you're an engineer in the Bay area, with at least 10 years of experience, in 2017 dollars you should be paid at least $500k.
Didn't work there. And there is enough desperate people in the country that are willing to ferry over everyday.
As for me, $500k to work in SF. And when the recruiter snickers, I tell it is non-negotiable. For startups it's a 5 year contract. Company closes its doors on the first day, that'll be 2.5 million paid from the escrow they'll keep for me.
They won't do it because they got plenty of American rubes and Indians to go there.
Come to Illinois, but the rural areas.
Your neighbors will be Republican but the state votes to the Democrat side because of Chicago.
But don't move to Chicago, it's expensive there.
BlameBillCosby.com
A family of four with an income of $105,350 per year is considered "low income." A $65,800 annual income is considered "very low" for a family the same size, and $39,500 is "extremely low."
Making only $27,400 is considered "incredibly low". Whereas an income of $16,900 is "impossibly low". And for those making $8,500, their income is "super-duper low". $0 is right out.
If my post were a car, this sig would be its bumper-sticker.
Has there always been a large difference in salaries and cost of living in SF?
This gentrification map shows the underlying cause to rising prices:
http://www.urbandisplacement.o...
I live in the purple strip between San Jose/Sunnyvale. In the last 5 years, house prices (in that area) have gone up 30-50%. In my own neighborhood, 4 houses were demolished to the ground and completely new homes were built in their place (in the last 12 months). Most of these 'modest' homes sold for 1.5 million+. My guess is they would sell for 200-300k in less-demand-areas.
So in your misguided worldview, people who scrimp and save, research, and invest their earnings wisely should have to pay more taxes and be excluded from government assistance. While someone who earned exactly as much money but blew their income on parties, concerts, eating out, hookers, and blow should have to pay lower taxes and qualify more easily for government aid?
Net worth (wealth) is just the integral of income minus expenses (or if you prefer, income minus expenses is the first derivative of wealth). Income is the correct basis for determining taxation and qualification for government aid. How much wealth you accumulate depends not just on how much income you make, but also how much money you spend. As a result, any form of taxation based on wealth unfairly penalizes people who save their money instead of spending it unnecessarily. OTOH, taxation based on income treats everyone the same regardless of whether they spend their money wisely or foolishly.
Also, since wealth is the integral of income minus expenses, wealth is the accumulation of past income. So any attempt to tax wealth is an attempt to retroactively tax past income. Ex post facto laws are illegal under our Constitution.
If you want to tax rich people more, increase the tax rates on higher income. It's as simple as that.
This is what doesn't seem to enter into the discussions about basic income and national minimum wage laws. Perhaps I'm just reading the stoopid versions in the popular press, but it seems clear that proposals like a national (US) $15 minimum wage simply can't fly with cost of living disparities like this, without significant tailoring. A 'basic' income of $17K doesn't take you very far in Si Valley (or my adopted homeland of Portland, for that matter). At the very least, you'd need some kind of market basket tables similar to this, and even then note the terrific disparity between the two neighboring counties, with the obvious gaming of that system that the differences might promote.
A firefighter engineer makes about $110k-$140k base salary in Santa Clara County. With overtime and benefits, cities are reporting $220K for total compensation.
Now the other thing to remember is that the Bay Area has been a two income area for quite a long time, even in the 1980's many households were two income and nearly all younger households. And this trend goes back to the 1960's. It's nothing new that houses are more expensive here, but lately multiplication factor has gone up. It's not really a simple linear relationship, but as more people move here and more investment occurs here, the competition for homes becomes more heated and there is a bit of a feedback effect.
In contrast, middle America has been primarily single income households. And the market sets the price to what it can bear, it amuses me that it is mostly conservatives shaking their finger at the Bay Area when the situation we have here is created by the mostly unregulated free market for real-estate in California.
No matter what part of the country you buy your home in, the banks always come out on top. Don't own a home, own a bank.
"In Costly Bay Area, Even Six-Figure Salaries Are Considered 'Low Income' "
And that's one key reason why I won't live there (among many, many other reasons).
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
http://www.mercurynews.com/201...
... cuz unless they pay cops, firemen, nurses, EMT's, teachers, ... rather amazing salaries, they will be unable to live in or either near Silicon Valley. Which means it will be rather risky vs. injuries or accident, and rather sh*tty to raise a family.
but you don't want to pay them enough to live where you do? You don't get to.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
this site. California's below $1 on the chart, meaning they pay more than they get back. That makes sense. Not a lot of natural disasters, not a lot of military bases, lots and lots of productive industries.
I rate your post 4 Pinocchios. Fake News.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If you're poor you live and work where you're born. Moving is _expensive_ and risky. Unless you get a lucky break you're stuck and even then you better pray that job doesn't go away because you probably don't have the education & credentials to get another one like it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
a retirement savings account & a college savings plan for their kids. It's trivial to exclude those things. In face we don't. We tax homes to pay for schools so the wealthy don't have to pay for poor kid's schools. Meanwhile we have "State Trust" lands where the state holds land "in trust" so that wealthy land owners don't have to pay property taxes while they're waiting for land to become valuable.
When people say "Tax Wealth" they mean rental properties. Nobody likes rent seekers. Other rent seekers don't like rent seekers. We're trying to figure out how to reign them in.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Instead of saddling students with debt why doesn't the government void the debt the same way that it was done for the banks in the global financial crisis?
Seems to me crippling people with debt before they even start in life is a good way to really destroy the economic wealth of an entire generation.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Got a job offer out there back in the late 90's for roughly triple what I was earning at the time.
But they I did a cost-of-living analysis.
After taxes and expenses I'd have been making more, but I'd have just about broken dead-even with ZERO savings.
Living paycheck to paycheck in the Bay Area? FUCK THAT!
Not to mention the fact that a million bucks can't even buy you a port-a-potty in the Bay Area today...
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Caused by printing trillions of Dollars. What did you expect - a free lunch?
the thing that stinks the most is that the AMT is absolute, not relative to cost-of-living.
They must be crying all the way to the bank.
I have a hard time figuring out why companies insist on having their office in a place that requires them to pay salaries 4x the national average.
The wealthy want to live and work where there is nice real estate. In planning headquarters and million plus homes in nice locations, they continue to dictate what the market will bear. The poor will be more and more often priced out of locations with a good view, water front property, or anywhere centrally located. Washington DC is a perfect example of this type of gentrification. Some of the worst parts of the city were Potomac-side property and had easy access to downtown. It was only a matter of time before the poor got priced out of the same convenience that allowed them to work all the service and labor jobs downtown without a costly commute. This trend will continue until most places look like Silicon Valley, with low income service providers living in work colonies outside of the city.
Sin has a price - Death
Yea, rental costs are pretty insane in SF bay area, but you can get around it fairly easily if you are single. Just get a room in house with bunch of other people. If you really want a apartment of your own, you will have to move out to Tracy or Stockton where rent is more reasonable (but commute is long). Or maybe even buy a small piece of land in north bay and just buy an old mobile home to park on it. (land taxes are a lot less than a fully developed property). Food and other costs are pretty much same as any other part of country, so it's only rental costs that need to be evaded.
and people call bernie sanders a socialist. fucking satanic asshats. clearly society has a shitbar for living. the french, be-it their bread-jokes, and white flags waving from asses (murica) etc: they could teach YOU (us) a thing or two(even): Kill the aristocrats. lol, jk dont kill anything, but really- capital gains tax? wtf