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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?
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.
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."
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.
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
Except property taxes!
The reason California taxes everything else so high is partly because of its social and environmental protections, partly because it has such a low property tax and must make up the difference, and partly because it and other blue states subsidize most of the red states.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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.
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
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
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
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?