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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)
There are plenty of good paying tech jobs outside of SV.
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.
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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
Not really a big deal unless the only reason you need a " six figure salary " is for bragging rights.
Lemme break it down..
You need to make $160k in San Francisco to enjoy the same purchasing power as you would have in Houston, TX at only ~$80k
( Pick any Salary Calculator online to see the results for yourself )
Here are a few reasons why:
Groceries 31% less
Housing 71% less
Utilities 4% less
Transportation 28% less
Health Care 27% less
If someone is truly concerned about raising a family, why would they choose to live in one of THE most expensive places in the US ? :| )
( We can't have a child darling ! We pay $5k a month in rent !
Basically, one needs to choose between their ego and their family.
The fact this article even exists tells me all I need to know about what choice they've made.
Protip - You can't have your cake and eat it too. With the exception of the extremely wealthy, most folks will need to choose one or the other.
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.
That fact is caused by society and it's unhealthy biologically..
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.
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?
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.