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58% of Silicon Valley Tech Workers Delayed Having Kids Because of Housing Costs (chicagotribune.com)
An anonymous reader quotes the Mercury News:
Though some residents blame the area's highly paid tech workers for driving up the cost of housing, data increasingly shows that these days, even tech workers feel squeezed by the Bay Area's scorching prices. Fifty-eight percent of tech workers surveyed recently said they have delayed starting a family due to the rising cost of living, according to a poll that included employees from Apple, Uber, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Lyft, and other Bay Area companies.
The recently released poll, was conducted by Blind, an online social network designed to let people share anonymous opinions about their workplaces. Blind surveyed 8,284 tech workers from all over the world, with a large focus on the Bay Area and Seattle. Blind spokeswoman Curie Kim said the findings were "really surprising. In the Bay Area, tech employees are known to make one of the highest salaries in the nation," she said, "but if these people also feel that they can't afford housing and they can't start a family because of the rising cost of living, who can....?"
The average base salary for a software engineer at Apple is $121,083 a year, the article notes, yet the company also had the largest percentage of surveyed tech employees who said they'd been force to delay starting their families -- 69%.
"Anywhere else in the country, we'd be successful people who owned a home and didn't worry about anything," said one 34-year-old in a two-income family. "But here, that's not the case." While her husband helps Verizon deploy smart devices with IoT technology, they're raising two daughters in a rented Palo Alto apartment, "only to experience a $500 rent increase over two years."
The recently released poll, was conducted by Blind, an online social network designed to let people share anonymous opinions about their workplaces. Blind surveyed 8,284 tech workers from all over the world, with a large focus on the Bay Area and Seattle. Blind spokeswoman Curie Kim said the findings were "really surprising. In the Bay Area, tech employees are known to make one of the highest salaries in the nation," she said, "but if these people also feel that they can't afford housing and they can't start a family because of the rising cost of living, who can....?"
The average base salary for a software engineer at Apple is $121,083 a year, the article notes, yet the company also had the largest percentage of surveyed tech employees who said they'd been force to delay starting their families -- 69%.
"Anywhere else in the country, we'd be successful people who owned a home and didn't worry about anything," said one 34-year-old in a two-income family. "But here, that's not the case." While her husband helps Verizon deploy smart devices with IoT technology, they're raising two daughters in a rented Palo Alto apartment, "only to experience a $500 rent increase over two years."
If tech companies cared about families, they would locate more jobs outside Silicon Valley.
Anywhere else in the country, we'd be successful people who owned a home and didn't worry about anything,
The solution is obvious: move somewhere else.
There are plenty of tech all across the "flyover states." Garmin is in Oklahoma, Boeing is in Kansas (along with a number of other aviation companies), Motorola and T.I. are in Austin, NASA is in Houston, 3M and Target are in Minnesota, etc.
You will probably earn a little bit less, but the cost of living will be much lower and the quality of life will almost certainly be much higher. Especially if less commuting and less traffic are appealing and if you want to be able to afford to have one parent work only part time or even not even be employed in order to parent full-time.
Cry me a river. There are decent tech jobs elsewhere.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I started working in Bay Area tech in the 70's. Most tech workers, myself and my ex-wife included delayed having kids until we had a house and established career, which was in our early-to-mid 30's.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
"Anywhere else in the country, we'd be successful people who owned a home and didn't worry about anything," said one 34-year-old in a two-income family. "But here, that's not the case." While her husband helps Verizon deploy smart devices with IoT technology, they're raising two daughters in a rented Palo Alto apartment, "only to experience a $500 rent increase over two years."
BS. Anywhere else in the country you'd make 25-40% less - you have to go to SF to get your 6 figure salary, that salary doesn't follow you to MS when you change jobs and move to MS.
Ken
Don't you guys have laws that limits the rent increase to a percentage of the current rent?
Unless the limit is around 10% and they're paying $5000 per month for a freakin' apartment... are they?
#DeleteFacebook
Well, then move. It's a free country.
And maybe if Apple values you enough, you can even continue working for them.
There are plenty of places in the country that would likely be very nice to live where the cost of living is reasonable. The company could pay employees less giving the employee more income after expenses. The company could actually make more money as a result.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Nah, just think like a recent immigrant to get ahead in NYC. Buy a house in Queens or a nicer part of the Bronx. No co-op fees, relatively low property taxes. Plan on sending your kids to SUNY or CUNY, no college slush fund needed, since it's cheap even compared to Midwestern public universities. Public schools are fine if you're not in a horrible area.
Move to San Diego. $300k gets you a nice 2-bedroom or 2.5 bedroom condo. Not a palace, but enough to raise a family comfortably. Low energy (HVAC) costs due to favorable climate. Good cultural diversity, nice beaches, well-paying biotech, tech, and engineering jobs. And it's amazing that you can be in another country in an hour or two, depending where in SD Co you live.
That's what group living/co-family/poly-family situations are for. Spend your 70s and 80s in a commune... :D
There are plenty of good paying tech jobs outside of SV.
Third option: become a miser in things that you don't enjoy, and splurge on things you do. e.g. 10 year old car, modest home in a working-class area, laptop bought off of EBay ... but ... enough money saved to take a nice backpacking trip somewhere interesting every year.
Well, this explains why he thinks an iPad is a computer.
And I really wish that was sarcasm.
#DeleteFacebook
And it really shows -- he's gutting everything that's good and customer-friendly about Apple's personal computing line. (i.e. MacOS hardware, not iOS hardware)
The islamic version of the movie idiocracy?
#DeleteFacebook
Ah, San Francisco, how I long to be there: the smell of human excrement everywhere, used needles and condoms, campers in the great outdoors all across the city, and the smug feeling of superiority any techie gets when stepping over passed out drug addicts!
I plan to die like my grandpa, on a road trip across the US, and peacefully in his sleep.
Not screaming in terror like the people in his car.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
especially if you're going to up and move to a 'flyover' state you've never been to. Plus living in a big city isn't just about the amenities, it's about having ready access to work when you're job goes away (which they seem to do a lot these days). Buddy of mine moved to a small city for a nice job, worked it for a few years, bought a house, put down roots and then the whole thing got shipped overseas. He got trapped. He couldn't make enough money to get out, nobody would buy his home (thanks, housing bubble burst) and he ended up in a succession of dead end jobs.
I lost track of him when I did the opposite and moved to a bigger city for the more stable working conditions. If I hadn't I couldn't afford my kid's college expenses. I'd prefer to go back to the small city I came from but there's no work there to speak of. At the end of the day workers go where the jobs are. And one or two employers isn't enough.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I wansn't going to mention it, but I live in Colorado Springs and I wouldn't describe it the way you do as a red state. There are some high tech companies here and more are moving or developing in the region. Right now, we have an eight year Democratic governor, though a new one will be elected this November, and was blue in the last election. There are many other great places along the Front Range that are just as nice including Fort Collins, metro Denver and any place in between. If one is interested in outdoor activities this would be the place for you. Our state income tax rate is a fixed 4.63% rate on taxable income. We own a 3-bed house (unfinished basement), 2,800 sq. feet, with an estimated value of ~$400k and property taxes are ~$1,500. Schools are quite good, but depend a bit an where you live. The climate is that of a high desert (air conditioning useful in the summer) which means low humidity, cool nights, some snow in the winter. I could go on, but it's a great place to live. Transportation with traffic is becoming a problem as the Front Range grows; the powers that be know this but are finding solutions difficult to come up with.
My city has a vacant piece of land, ~25,000 acres, that's ready for mixed development that could be quite attractive for placing a high tech operation. Energy is fairly cheap and solar is being developed because we have 320 days of sunshine.
I'm not too interested in getting too many new folks to move here, so was reluctant in touting our advantages and creating more congestion. I'm sure other folks could chime in about the advantages their location has.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Same but 42 and 40, plus weâ(TM)re millionaires a couple times over with all the money we saved not having kids, and our lives are a hell of a lot more fun than our friends with kids.
Fun is quite subjective. Your life is probably more fun to you than theirs would be. But fun isn't the same to everyone. I for instance don't like vacations, so I would never trade places with a childless couple constantly taking vacations around the world.
Fun is also a very shallow way to measure a life. I prefer to strive for meaningful and purposeful experiences, rather than simply pursuing happiness. Having kids is certainly not the only way to find purpose, building your own company or becoming a top performer in your chosen profession are other great ways to lead a meaningful life. Having kids is one of the easiest way for your life to have meaning, though, which is one reason it is so common. That and the fact sex is so much fun.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Well that is dumb ... if everyone delayed having kids till they had better financial situation then we would have a near zero birthrate
Considering how expensive having kids is today, it's borderline insane to not delay having kids until your financial situation is in order. In my mid-20's I was making about a third of what I was making in my mid-30's when I had my first child. Not only that, but my wife and I were able to get youthful things like partying and traveling out of our system before settling down.
Accidents happen, but choosing to have kids in your 20's is a lifestyle choice I would never recommend.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Have them while you still live in a crappy apartment. If you wait until you can afford that 2 million dollar home with nice furniture they're just going to ruin it anyway. Kids are messy and break things.
Who want their kid to grow up in the middle of a race war? (Yeah, I am Swedish) Maybe in fifteen years when the dust settles.
If you are Swedish you are on the winning side of any race wars I know of. Unless perhaps you are a Laplander, but considering you are worried about an Islamic takeover I doubt that is what you were referring to.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Typical flawed reasoning of someone who doesn't have kids. Delaying having children is a major fuck up. The last thing you want to be doing at 50 is dealing with serious family issues. If you are going to have kids just kick em out and get it started. Dragging ass because of the world shows the flawed reasoning of someone who feels they can control the world and thier child's fate. Lmao. Nurture can be good but nature always wins. Your kids are going to be who they are going to be regardless of anything you do. Keep them alive and set a good example...the only thing that works.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
The other few billion people who don't feel the need to live in Palo Alto or anywhere nearby?
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
The information stated is no surprise at all. We all know the cost of living out on the west coast has gotten insane. Tech companies desperately want to hold onto that clout of having an HQ in the heart of Silicon Valley, but it's only doable as long as young, singles want to work there so badly, they'll take what amounts to these massive pay cuts due to high housing costs and more.
Even on the other side of the country, you deal with the same struggle to some extent in the DC metro area and anyplace around NYC.
These may be places where you can find employment with high profile companies -- but they're poor choices for raising families. You have to figure out what you want and live in a sensible area to suit you.
I was born and raised in the midwest, in St. Louis, Missouri -- and although I left for a DC area tech job, that was only doable for us because we found a small town with much more "down to earth" housing prices. It means I have an hour or so commute to and from work, but it's also a job where I can work from home some days. As the job has evolved with time, they opened a couple of additional offices in this area and another one changed location in DC a couple of times. So trying to strategically rent or buy property "close to work" would have been a mistake anyway. I do know that St. Louis has recently made some real effort towards creating new tech jobs -- so that might be a really good place for someone to consider, if they want to work in tech but raise a family too. It's very much a family-friendly city, with so many things to do that have no admission cost (a world class zoo and many great museums, for example).
The people who are going to be responsible parents look at their lives, their jobs, their finances and they thoughtfully consider whether or not they can afford to have children, and whether or not they can provide that child a good life.
On the other hand, all too many people 'accidently' have kids and don't seem to care about the consequences because they know that the social services safety net is there for them. And at the extreme end of the spectrum, you have mothers living in poverty who are literally using additional children as a way to 'earn' more income in the form of welfare payments. Thankfully, those situations are the exception to the rule, but they do happen.
Tech companies are driving unmeetable (for now) demand for new office space. As a result, lease rates are about 56% higher (last time I checked) per sq ft for offices than for Peninsula-area rental housing. You can see why financiers and developers prefer to build offices rather than housing.
It's fashionable in some circles to blame the jobs/housing imbalance on zoning restrictions, but that doesn't seem to be consistent with the ground truth. There are many millions of square feet of new development going on right now, and in many cases these are mixed-use projects with the freedom to build lots more housing, but the mix is overwhelmingly dominated by offices because of the difference in rates of return.
Construction costs are also a factor. Land is expensive and in short supply, of course, but high-rise construction is also expensive. High-rise flats are about 2.8 times as expensive as row houses for equivalent units, and therefore likely to be expensive to lease and not as likely to be profitable for the developers. They're surprisingly candid about this problem; for example, see https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/05/01/construction-costs-could-limit-where-san-jose-homes-are-built-google-adobe-diridon/ "Construction expenses have pressured developers severely enough that new market-rate apartments are profitable in no more than two districts in San Jose... Even worse, downtown San Jose — seen as a cornerstone of the city’s economy — is one of the sections where development of new housing is unlikely to produce profits for developers..."
Transportation is arguably more important than housing, but it's received little attention so far. The road network is saturated now at enough times and places that additional housing wouldn't always be viable in those places. The population distribution makes rail systems unusable in much of the Peninsula.
If the occasional Marxist analysis doesn't bother you, or if you can put it aside temporarily, chapters 5 through 7 of Richard Walker's "Pictures of a Gone City" offer a tremendous amount of useful data on the situation.
Silicon Valley arose in part because of conscious decisions to distribute strategic industries geographically. (See Margaret O'Mara's "Cities of Knowledge" for a good synopsis.) Silicon Valley is hyper-expensive, earthquake-prone, water-poor, transportation-poor, and at risk from sea-level rise. Learning from past experience and distributing some of the growth elsewhere might be a smart move.
Uh, Linux geek since 1999.
That fact is caused by society and it's unhealthy biologically..
Backpacking is not exactly a splurging kind of hobby though. I spent maybe $500 on my last trip, most of it on gas and a nice pair of boots.
With how overpopulated the earth is becoming, isn't fewer people having children a good thing?
And isn't people waiting until they are more financial stable to have children also a good thing for society?
You will have no body to take care of you when you're old and infirm, and without grandkids your golden years will be empty and pointless. Especially if/when one of you dies.
We are unlikely to be short of labour in that time scale as many do want to have children, and the dependency ratio in many western nations is expected to start declining from about 15 years hence. Even then, there are robots and digital assistants being developed to help with life in later years. In terms of grandchildren being required to make life fulfilled in later years, these days families are often spread so the contact time between grandparent and grandchild is often not that great anyway, so it's probably better to keep active, and seek other arrangements (such as the elderly commune concept, although something more mixed might make sense).
I am not a big vacation taker, and don't have children, but I find plenty to keep myself busy, so not having kids is not a problem. I have dogs, which are very much like children, but without the expense of school uniforms. I was about to say "and without the expense of ballet classes, etc" but the dogs get agility classes, but that's a form of exercise for me too, whereas a child would not want their parents jogging around the dance studio.
Seen the film Idiocracy? Thing is, when you're smart you start to look at implications of decisions. By any measure, having kids is not a solid investment and will likely impact your career and life choices considerably... if you're going to do it you may as well wait until career is off the ground and enjoyed some travelling, partying, multiple partners... If you're not smart you have kids in your teens and let someone else pay for it.
First, I am not saying you are wrong in not having kids. If you don't want them, you should definitely not have them. And second, you are right: you probably have a lot more fun than my and my wife. And probably have more sex as well. You probably eat out more, travel more, see movies more, and generally do more of the things typically classified as fun.
But when my youngest daughter brings a pile of her favorite stuffed animals down and snuggles up to me with them, to watch terminator 2 together, or when my oldest daughter comes into my workshop because she wants to forge a firepoker with me (I am a part time smith)... those moments are better than anything I ever did that would be considered classical fun. Those moments are why I love my kids more than anything in the world. That feeling is better than anything I ever experienced as fun before I had kids.
When Silicon Valley got its start, the high developer/engineer salaries it created allowed nerds to mate and marry for the first time. With the bidding up of California housing, the same forces are now preventing them from having children.
Enjoy your future of lawyers and politicians.
Afford can be time and/or money.. Children require both.
Some days I think the movie Idiocracy was a documentary. Then people, like you, come along and prove it.
You're pretty much proving the right's view that welfare/social services encourages people to have children they cannot afford.. I mean, why fucking wait if you can force someone else to pay for your spawn, right?
He stated that he and his wife are multi-millionaires, asshole... You don't think the rich can afford to have caretakers?
I am of the personal opinion that having kids is life enriching, but also realize that might not be true for everyone. Your statement borders on religious.. Everyone must feel the way you do, etc..
I'd like to know how you think socialism can succeed without the rich to fund it... Ahh.. there's the problem.. Socialism only works until you bleed everyone dry.. Venezuela is what happens when you have socialism..
In other older societies (especially hunter/gatherers), raising children is more a responsibility of the extended family, village, and tribe. Expectations for what people need to provide a child also differ. Also, increasingly workers in US society don't get a fair share of their contribution to production (compared to other societies). So, this notion of "cant afford children" is culturally relative.
See also the book "Our Babies, Ourselves" by an anthropologist.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This is pretty much what you have in Europe for the same reasons.
It's that "utopian socialism" that leftists in America pine for so much.
The difference between communism and democratic socialism is the size of the dinky apartment you get to share with your parents.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Having kids in your 30's is highly dangerous for the mother and dramatically increases the odds of birth defects.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
> GOP backwoods faggots deserve their coal mine lifestyle,
Sure. Anyone that doesn't buy into the California Kool-Aid is a Republican. The only alternatives are "Carbon Creek" and San Jose.
It's this kind of deranged nonsense that gets you Trump.
Keep on stumping hard for the stupid Cheeto.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Since between 20 and 30% of people will never have children, that means that only 1-2% of "Silicon Valley Tech Workers" have such high incomes, or such lack of consideration of realities that they don't consider housing costs before disabling their contraception devices.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
So, for you:
Blue State= enlightened cultured citizens
Red State= bumbling morons
I didn't' even vote for the that chump in the last election, but I can clearly see why he got elected.