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Even Apple and Google Engineers Can't Really Afford To Live Near Their Offices (fastcompany.com)
That's according to the Y Combinator-backed real-estate startup Open Listings, which looked at median home sales prices near the headquarters (meaning within a 20-minute commute) of some of the Bay Area's biggest and best-known tech companies. Fast Company: Using public salary data from Paysa, Open Listings then looked at how many software engineers from those companies could actually afford to buy a house close to their office. Here's what it found: Engineers at five major SF-based tech companies would need to spend over the 28% threshold of their income to afford a monthly mortgage near their offices. Apple engineers would have to pay an average of 33% of their monthly income for a mortgage near work. That's the highest percentage of the companies analyzed, and home prices in Cupertino continue to skyrocket. Google wasn't much better at 32%, and living near the Facebook office would cost an engineer 29% of their monthly paycheck.
So they can't survive with two thirds of a presumably good paycheck? What's the title on about?
They forgot to deduct all the California and local taxes before you ever see that amount.
California has the highest US taxes on everything.
Why do you think those campuses let you keep pets in your 'office" and have huge multi cuisine cafeteria? You are not supposed to live near the campus. You are supposed to live in the campus. And work way more than 8 hours a day. Immerse yourself with so much of company amenities, and befriend other company employees you don't think of moving to a start up. duh...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I think there is an idea for a start-up. Autonomous campers which just drive around all night or find cheap parking someplace. Your camper could drive up to 4 hours away from work while you slept and get you back in time for work.
Those cities are expensive because the tech companies are there. Mountain View, Cupertino and Sunnyvale were orchards and farms with dirt-cheap housing before the rise of Google, Apple, Facebook, Intel, etc.
Anywhere the tech moves; high prices will follow. Just look at Portland and Seattle.
>> 20-minute commute in Silicon Valley
What is that, 4-5 miles?
I can get about 15 miles away where I live, and commute even further. I like it that way, because it means that I only rarely bump into coworkers (or bosses or employees) when I'm not actually trying to work.
Redirect your anger towards the incompetent governments of the cities around the Bay Area, and the already-got-theirs citizens of these cities who choose to do nothing about the growing numbers of people who want to move here.
/rant.
It's the inability of government to handle these problems (and the lack of leadership to tell citizens they're going to have to experience change) that you're seeing companies step in to take the role of transportation, education, social welfare for their employees. Where governments let their infrastructure and civic fabric fall apart because of complacent old people, companies have taken on the responsibility.
All the people who protest these giant companies causing traffic, gentrification, etc... Companies are providing jobs and skills and livelihoods to people, things that everyone wants. You should thank them and their employees for keeping our economy going. And criticize the people who refuse to admit change in their neighborhoods, saying that "we don't want displacement" or "we need to preserve the character of our neighborhood". Well, fuck that. Things change, and no one ever promised you that the place you moved into you'd never have to move out.
Everyone reflexively jumps on the bandwagon of displaced elderly or gentrified neighborhoods, because they're easy to see. But who advocates for the thousands of young people who come here and have to pay $2000 just for a single room? Your kids, your classmates, who come here in search of having the American dream too? Sorry if I don't have sympathy for the "locals". The lives of the young professionals who come here are far more impacted by the cost of living and lack of housing than anyone who's already been here for 20 years and got theirs (and pulled up the ladder behind them).
Figure out whose side you're really on.
It seems obvious that they need to upzone all arterial blocks to 65 foot Multi Family Home zoning. This won't force any rich executives to sell their single family homes, but will allow condos to be built for families with 2 bedrooms. If they make the parking optional and not required, this will increase transit and bike use (or electric scooters) and eventually stabilize prices. I'd recommend they rezone any SFH citywide, just to be on the safe side, and not subject to design review.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I live in Silicon Valley. The nominal tax rate for the top bracket was 52% in California, not sure what it is with the new tax bill. Last year, my effective tax rate was about 38% excluding sales and property taxes, which would bump me up to an effective tax rate of about 43-45%.
The hardest part is the down payment and the lack of inventory. Every time you put in an offer, you're competing against a lot of people with fresh RSUs and no contingencies, so unless you have 25% to go down (usually 200-400K), you're not likely to get a place you want. A lot of people are paying almost 50% of their after tax income to mortgages.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
CEOs do. And they can afford to live in the swankest areas.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
In a place like California, between paying local, state and federal income taxes, plus social security and medicare taxes, the government is probably letting you have only HALF of your paycheck. Perhaps 60% of you're lucky. So of the 50-60% you're allowed to keep, spending 28-30% of it on a place to live is going to give you maybe 20-30% for ALL other expenses. I certainly wouldn't want to live that way.
In a place like England too. I am certainly happy to live this way and I even advocte for people of my income level paying more tax.
Civilisation is paid for with taxes.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Maybe you've heard of taxes? In a place like California, between paying local, state and federal income taxes, plus social security and medicare taxes, the government is probably letting you have only HALF of your paycheck. Perhaps 60% of you're lucky. So of the 50-60% you're allowed to keep, spending 28-30% of it on a place to live is going to give you maybe 20-30% for ALL other expenses. I certainly wouldn't want to live that way.
I'm in CA and I lose nearly half of my paycheck before it gets to me due to federal taxes, state taxes, health insurance, etc.
If I want to spend any of my money, the sales tax takes it over the 50% mark.
This state is broken.
From what I've heard, it's more the CEO's and other rich executives that want to live out there, so they make everyone follow them.
And yet, people don't see the problem.
That's because they're not hallucinating.
Once I decide that civilisation is not prefereable compared to paying more taxes, I'l move to the Libertarian Paradise of the Congo. Until that time, I'll enjoy a stable civilisation and be happy to pay for it.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If I had a penny for every fool who confused Libertarianism with Anarchy, I would have already bought myself a private island.
Move to North Korea, I hear they like government regulations and taxes over there.
Well, you are also a two income household where the study is indicating a single income household. So, given a spouse that makes as much money, they'd be looking at 11-16%. Your 6% is good. I doubt others near you have an equally great deal as that is typically far below the historical average, and I'm guessing you got a really good deal or are living below your means (lower than other people of similar pay anyway). Actually, the deals for the high tech workers isn't bad and is near past historical (middle class) averages where housing now (and has been for decades) the largest household expense as the past largest (33-50%), food, has dropped drastically along with clothing.
Yeah - I was going to mention the whole two vs one income thing. And you're right. And yes, she makes basically the same money I do. So even as SINGLE people, either one of us would basically be paying only 11% or so on our house. Of course, as single people, we would buy less house and be paying even less. Probably more in the 9-10% range. But you hit on another point. The real key is living below your means. We didn't get any great deal on our house (we probably paid a little too much), but we did buy MUCH (MUCH MUCH!) less house than we could have. We also drive old and/or crappy cars. The people in our neighborhood would be totally shocked if they knew how much money we make. Food and clothing...our food budget is about the same as our house payment (we're a family of 3). Clothing? Shit. Not even a blip on the radar. At the end of the day, the key to having money to buy shit is to STOP BUYING SHIT - including houses you can't afford.
But they want that CA lifestyle I guess.
What is this CA lifestyle thing? Got to love living in poverty making $100+K/year. But hey, the sunset ocean view from the refrigerator box is stunning every evening it's not raining and the neighborhood isn't on fire...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
To some extent, it's a fire that feeds itself. A company starts doing well, starts attracting more and more talent. The talent wants a decent life, so they buy up houses close to work. Company continues to do well, more talent wants to live there. Nobody is building new houses, and no way in hell the people already there want more traffic, denser housing, etc. So the cost of living goes up. But also, the area starts going upscale since you have all this well paid talent in the area. After some time, you end up with this vast concentration of built up talent that has zero interest in moving because they like their life. So if you want to start a new venture, it makes a lot of sense to locate it where the talent is, as you can hire the people you want and they don't need to relocate.
Case in point: me. I started with the company I work with a long time ago. I bought a house in the area. Had kids. Kids are now in local schools. Company still doing well. I like my job. My job has a lot of in demand skills. When recruiters call if they can match my pay rate, the next question is about the commute length, third is amount of vacation time, then it's to the actual job description and duties. If I'm not going to make more, there's little point. If I have to double my commute, why bother? If I lose vacation time, why bother? The area I'm in has appreciated in real estate value to the point that moving to certain locations is just out of the question, even if housing were available -- and it's generally not, we are in the "10 offers accepted above asking, 5 are cash with no inspection" part of the stupid real estate market.
In a place like England too. I am certainly happy to live this way and I even advocte for people of my income level paying more tax.
Civilisation is paid for with taxes.
You have a somewhat sane healthcare system, so you don't have to spend yet another 10-20% on healthcare for your family.
What's the big deal? To quallify for a loan, lenders generally won't quallify you if you're going to be spending more than about 38 - 40% of you're income on housing. people push right against that limit all the time. It seems like when people get to where they are spending less than 30% of their income on housing, they're looking to upgrade.
Civilisation is paid for with taxes.
That's possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard. No, government is paid for with taxes. To confuse government with civilization is sad. really sad.
Civilization happens in spite of government, not because of it.
Good government is the result of civilization, not the cause.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Before Google and Facebook, there was Ebay, Oracle, HP, Cisco, Sun, AOL, nVidia etc. (90's tech boom). Before them there was Intel, Fairchild, TI, Maxim, Analog Devices, etc.
Apple has always been there. Along with a bunch of others that are still around.
This area has had behemoth tech companies for a good 40 years now and each decade grows even more.
As to why they don't spread out? That's like asking why Wall Street traders don't spread out. Because information sharing and collaboration leads to much better results. And that is far more important than cost of real estate.
Everything from VC capital to talent hunting to investor meetings to office spaces where you can poach employees from the building next door happens in that 10 mile radius.
Civilization happens in spite of government
Not to any significant extent. Otherwise I would just kill you and take all your stuff.
It's a positive feedback loop. A small amount of civilization comes together, and it starts to grow. At a certain size, a small amount of government is needed to organize the civilization. The small government allows the civilization to grow a bit more, which requires a bit more organization and thus a slightly larger government. The feedback loop continues for as long as the value of being organized is greater than the cost of the government.
You sir are part of the problem. You displaced a middle income family from living at that house and it's happening more and more across the country.
You sir, are insane. I didn't buy the only shitty house in this city. There are plenty of other shitty houses for people to choose from. There's certainly no shortage. This PARTICULAR shitty house was for sale for six months before we bought it. If someone else wanted it, they had ample opportunity to buy it before we did.
Aside from that - I'm supposed to buy as much house as I can possibly afford, so that I TOO can be only one job loss or other bad break away from losing my house and/or going into bankruptcy? What the fuck kind of logic is that? It's the very same logic that puts many people in the exact shitty situation that they find themselves in.
Maybe I could stretch myself even more buy hiring a lawn guy, a house cleaner and a home repair guy - since that would provide jobs for people! Fuck - I didn't realize I am so evil until now. Thanks for helping clue me in!
Civilization happens in spite of government, not because of it. Good government is the result of civilization, not the cause.
What are you talking about? There has never been a civilization in history without some form of governance. Property rights, dispute resolution, mutual defense, etc. are but a few of the many things which are universally necessary for anything that resembles civilization. All are functions of government, no matter what each civilization calls it.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
You know it's possible to have government regulations and taxes, and not be a globally shunned despotic autocratic wasteland, right?
See: Europe
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
What is this CA lifestyle thing?
How many Californians does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Californians don't screw in light bulbs; they screw in hot tubs.
Long-distance view from Maryland. Some artistic license applied.
Got to love living in poverty making $100+K/year
Eh, there are plenty of places you can live in California for less; they're just not places you'd want to live. From what I've been able to determine, all slums across the continental United States reflect about the same standard-of-living at the same income level. I've lived in the lowest income areas around Baltimore for nearly a decade now, and I've prodded at data around the country to see if I could live on the same minimum budget. I found several neighborhoods outside Seattle and down in California with comparable rent (about $1/sqft in 2014 for an apartment) and food prices (pretty much identical, sometimes a few pennies off).
I imagine such places are drug- and crime-ridden ganglands filled with rats and broken-down housing. That's okay: the majority of people in this rotting ghetto are good people, and the high crime rate is perpetrated by a few individuals who of course are constantly active and so cause a lot of trouble. It's probably the same out there.
I should get out more and see the city for what it is. These may very well be the last few years we get to see classic American poverty. I wonder what the next generation will think when we try to explain it to them...
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Oh, this really isn't poverty... I've seen poverty, this isn't it.
You want to see poverty? Try some of the third world countries I've been to... It makes "poverty" here in the USA look like a walk in the park..
I've also seen some of the poorest people in the USA too, it's just not as bad here. Take a trip on the back roads in and around the poor parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and surrounding areas. There are some seriously poor (for the USA) people living there.
I don't consider having to spend 30% of your income on housing to be poor, especially when someone is making more than $100K/year.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The governments valuation has nothing at all to do with house value on the market. That's just government greed.
The price of real estate is determined by what someone is willing to pay for it. Period.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
There are a lot of places on Earth that have no functioning government (and therefore have no taxes). One would think that the the "taxation is theft" crowd would be flocking to these places en masse, but for some reason they are not. Interesting, that.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
The government organizes your sewage.
Take off every 'sig' !!
At least slow wage growth drops that % down a smidgeon each year.
Taxation is systemic theft
FFS, this is even worse than the copyright=theft meme. Taxation is a levy. It's a portion of personal (household/business) wealth paid to a governing body to fund public works. It's no more 'theft' than membership fees that cover costs of an organisation.
an institutional framework of extracting wealth from people
That's better, even with your use of scare-word 'extracting'
through the threat of violence
... and then you're back to ranting
a perfect example of terrorism
Hot tip; in english, words have meanings and 'terrorism' doesn't mean 'bad thing I don't like'.
A society that admits the practice is, by definition, uncivilised.
Only if we use the ... irregular definitions that you've used.
I presume you favour a low-to-zero tax system. You'll happily ignore the enormous benefits that come from living in a country and civilisation that's been built from the wealth that so many other citizens, past and present, have pooled and concentrate on the limitations that expecting you to make a similar contribution places on you, and/or the inefficiencies (and even corruption) of those we've arranged to spend this wealth.
While I'm sure that you're quite capable of re-inventing civilisation on your own with nothing more than a small set of nail clippers, most of the rest of humanity have consistently, across history and culture, seen the benefit of pooling resources and co-operating. So would you mind very much setting aside the keyboard that taxes have helped build and stop posting on the internet that exists only because of taxation and find some lonely place to beat your manly chest and declare loudly about how much of a rugged individualist you are? Or is Poe's Law biting me in the ass?
Companies go where the talent is. Companies choose in Silicon Valley, Boston, Austin, etc. because those areas have large populations of potential employees. Why do those areas have large tech populations? Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, UT Austin, etc., etc.
California isn't simply broken, it's beyond hope at this point.
Why do you stay?
I may not stay much longer.
Applying for jobs there, I have to offset my requested salary by at least $40k just to account for the astronomical rent. I'm not sure how anybody could afford to live there or how any business could afford to employ there. Every other major metro area on the west coast is significantly cheaper. I only apply to places in Silicon Valley or SF if they offer 100% remote anymore, with the added advantage that they don't have to pay me as much since I don't need $1000 extra every month to pay for my housing.
Real estate is driven a lot by government policy. Zoning laws establish how likely the neighborhood is to change. The Fed setting interest rates drives prices pretty directly. Property tax rules encourage or discourage turnover. Tax incentives drive how likely people are to buy a house. etc. etc. etc.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
So is waste, fraud, and abuse
All systems have inefficiencies and in human systems, waste, fraud and abuse are just that. You cannot eliminate them, although they can be reduced. So long as the benefit of co-operation outweigh the costs of organising same, including inefficiencies, then societies will keep forming and some kind of pooling of resources will happen.
Using the existence of waste, fraud or abuse as the (only) reasons for abandoning a system is simplistic. Can the system be improved? Is the cost of trying to improve the system likely to return more than is spent?
Perfection is a direction, not a destination.
If you want to give the government all of your money and have "smarter" people than you decide how to waste it
It has nothing to do with 'smarter' people spending 'your money'. If you want to participate in and benefit from the advantages of society and civilisation, you need to contribute. If you want to be the one with your hand on the wheel and more control over the purse strings, stand for office. Personally, I don't. This argument is a straw man.
Or maybe move someplace with a communist system and not have any money of your own to begin with.
Believe it or not, there are political and economic systems that lie between the extremes you offer. Some of them have considerably higher standards of living for more people than either 'pure' communist or 'pure' libertarianism (or whatever tax-free system you seem enamoured of).
But you're probably not interested. You've used the word 'communist' as an epithet while using a service and system made possible only because of the taxes paid by generations before you. You live in a place and period of peace unknown in history due in no small part because of the sacrifices made by people who were paid by taxes. The life you lead and the wonderfully narcissistic position you are allowed to hold is all because better people than you have realised that co-operation works and who have been (relatively) happy to keep their end of the bargain.
And you are aware, that it requires either:
a) constantly balancing on the verge of collapse (Greece, Spain, Italy)
b) massive influx of money from outside (Norway thanks to oil and gas reserves, Germany thanks to banks, manufacturing, and retail giants such as Lidl)
There is no one true and perfect solution, no matter what system you choose, a lot of effort is needed to make things work. I live in Europe and from across the pond I don't see USA as a better or worse option. Just different.
What is best in life? Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.