Honestly I see this conversation, like many modern online conversations, going nowhere.
Real estate is a super dynamic sector with many variables and all of them revolve around, “just do this and it’ll fix it.” No, you won’t, nobody will.
Even in China, there’s a paradox of “housing is too expensive” for the working/middle class/youth, while simultaneously possessing many abandoned units that people can’t and won’t sell.
You can fix housing by 1. Introducing more supply or 2. Reducing demand. There’s lots of levers to pull to do so - build multi family housing, build on national park lands on the supply side, ban investors, ban immigrants on the demand side, but ultimately none of them are easy or politically viable or even feasible options.
Best to start by tackling a small problem and fixing small things, making the overall issue less complex and easier to manage.
And in places like the Bay Area, for a family of 4, the poverty line is around 150. Arguing CA is affordable to buy housing in is sorta like arguing that there are lizard people; you can go on believing what you believe but the world wouldn’t agree with you.
Lots of people in the bay area make a lot of money. They buy houses. No lizard people as far as I know. I worked for a couple of Bay Area startups although I never lived there. I would estimate 2/3 of my colleagues owned their homes. It was the norm. Because the combined income for a family both in tech is easily $300k and $400k or $500k is common as well. A decent coder with 5 years experience is making $175k.
Seriously who do you think owns all these houses in San Jose or Cupertino? It’s regular people who have regular jobs in the area.
And if $150k is “poverty” the definition has lost all meaning.
I wasn’t arguing California is affordable (I live here). If you read my post right below where I quoted you, I’m saying it’s not affordable. I was saying your tax calculation is wrong.
And buying a 3mm house in Cupertino requires more than 200k income. And no you don’t need 5 years experience to make the income you listed; kids out of school make that much in big tech and 150 at least for a startup if we are only looking at tech.
Housing affordability is well studied and not subjective. And the earth is round and lizard people have yet to walk the earth.
Yes Tax burden is income dependent sure so in that sense not everyone is at 50. I am guessing at the 200k level the burden is lower and closer to 30% for a W2.
Unless it’s a Stanford or MIT grad 150
Isn’t a starting salary. Not even in the Bay Area.
I don’t care who defined it, $150k isn’t poverty. HUD like all govt agencies has a vested interest to grow. The more “poverty” there is the more anti-poverty bureaucracies there are. Neat how it works huh?
And who does all the affordability studies? Organizations with a vested interested in extracting more govt money for housing. Oh dear housing is too expensive says a study, let’s give people money to buy houses says the government. Who does that benefit? The real estate industry. Which coincidentally pays for the studies. The NAR has umpteen studies and indexes and all sorts of “affordability” issues. I wonder if the organization that makes money by selling houses is in any way biased with these studies? Nah. Can’t be.
At the end of the day every time someone says housing isn’t affordable what they’re really saying is give me money so I can afford it.
I see more evidence of lizard people these days than affordable Bay Area housing.
Housing was attainable there at 2-3% rates. At 6-8% impossible mathematically even for household incomes in the 400s
150k for a fam of 4 at current interest rates is borderline poverty in most American cities and metro areas now. They all have cell phones etc but the family certainly isn’t saving that’s for sure…something like 70% if working Americans are paycheck to paycheck. That’s scary
Oakland incomes and high population will skew things a bit. The bigger issue with Cali middle class is high state income tax taking a good chunk of peoples money.
Oaklands median income is around 50k with home prices averaging 900k. That has to be one of the highest COL in the continental USA…gentrification will slowly increase income and home pricing and there’s no land ti build more housing
What does this even mean? You can’t even begin to shut up about how everyone should be living in a converted shipping container so I’m very interested in hearing an explanation for this statement.
In my area there has been a building boom for the last 3/4 years. Prices have still increased tremendously in that time as population growth has outpaced building. But at some point it will get too expensive to attract so many new people and things will balance.
The population growth has been in part the relative affordability of the area. By relative I mean to coastal cities. But what was once a “holy shit these houses are practically free” reaction by coastal residents has now turned into “hmmm it’s sort of cheap here”. So the magnet of cheap housing isn’t there anymore.
And like builders always do, they will eventually overshoot. And we’ll end up with more supply than demand at some point.
