5 ms·

I don't know much about SF salaries, but in NYC, 100K is really middle class. With enrage rent at 2k/mo, salaries have to be high in order to keep up with cost

I don't know much about SF salaries, but in NYC, 100K is really middle class. With enrage rent at 2k/mo, salaries have to be high in order to keep up with cost of living. Everyone makes a huge deal about the number but shouldn't it be more of a ratio? Like the cost of living to base salary? That should be a better statistic to judge quality of life.

cm2012 10y ago
The median annual family income (for a whole family including all earners) is 50k. 100k for a family is in the top 20% of NYC.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  Well to really answer the question we have to define what we mean by "middle-class," which is often deliberately left so nebulous that it covers practically everyone besides the homeless and the stratospherically wealthy.
  - eigenvalue 10y ago
    You also have to define "NYC"; this includes outer boroughs like the Bronx where incomes and rents are MUCH lower. If you restrict yourself to Manhattan or a couple outlying areas in Brooklyn/Queens that are considered desirable, the numbers change quite dramatically.
    - bardworx 10y ago
      I used NYC as the 5 boroughs. I also used working class neighborhood rent as comparison instead of manahattan, which would be a bit more
- bardworx 10y ago
  I live in Brooklyn, by Verrazano bridge which is an hour away from Manahattan by train. I don't know how a family can servive on 50k in a working class neighborhood like mine. I believe there is a great disparity in NYC between Section 8 housing and regular, rent stabilized, apartments. Section 8 brings down family income median as the housing is very affordable but cannot be classified as desirable by most standards.
  - cm2012 10y ago
    Section 8 is only 8% of people in nyc.
error54 10y ago
NYC != Manhattan. Yes, 100K is middle class in lower Manhattan but in the outer boroughs, you could live quite well on 100K.
- ng12 10y ago
  NYC is still smaller than the Bay Area. And if you're comparing it to the Bay you need to include Jersey/CT/LI -- where $100k will go a long way along a train line.
dllthomas 10y ago
Ratio is probably better, but also misleads if my income isn't close to the cost of maintaining my lifestyle. If I am able to save, and I move to make 2x in a place that costs 2x, I am saving 2x as much! If I am stuck drawing down savings, and I make the opposite move, I have doubled my runway.
- spoonie 10y ago
  Yeah what's probably best is some number closer to "monthly net after taxes, rent, insurance".
  - closeparen 10y ago
    If I take home $2500/mo and pay $1000/mo rent and $500/mo expenses, it takes 9 months to save a six month emergency fund. If I take home $5000, pay $3500/mo in rent, and spend $500 on everything else, it takes 24 months to save a six month emergency fund. Yet my monthly net is the same. Ratio matters a great deal. Maybe less so after you've established savings.
    - dllthomas 10y ago
      True that ratio is more relevant to savings where your target scales with local COL. That's true for some things, not for others. Though I might argue, regarding an emergency fund in particular, that establishing and maintaining such would be something that should be accounted as an expense rather than savings.
rodionos 10y ago
What you're describing is close to disposable income. For most people a ratio of compensation to disposable income would be of little use. Personal P/E?
sotojuan 10y ago
I live more than comfortable with 100K in NYC. Sure, no kids, but money is not something I think about. It's enough for a 23 year old like me.
amyjess 10y ago
Not too long ago, I built a tool that aggregates various information form the US Census, American Community Survey, and a few other sources. At one point, I decided that I wanted to track the cost of living of every place, so I started delving into American Community Survey data to find what I needed. I wound up picking three variables to display: median annual income, median monthly housing cost, and median housing cost as a percentage of income. I had to aggregate a bunch of stuff together for this, as the data was divided up between renters, owners with a mortgage, and owners without a mortgage. Here's the query I made against the ACS API to pull the data I needed: http://api.census.gov/data/2015/acs5?get=NAME%2CB25106_001E%2CB25106_024E%2CB25081_001E%2CB25081_002E%2CB25081_008E%2CB25064_001E%2CB25088_002E%2CB25088_003E%2CB19013_001E&for=place http://api.census.gov/data/2015/acs5?get=NAME%2CB25106_001E%... For the purposes of this post, I'll call the pieces of data this gives me by the following names (I don't remember if this is in the same order the API call returns... I'm copying and pasting this from notes I took when I was coming up with my calculations): housingunits renters owners ownersmortgage ownersnomortgage grent smocmortgage smocnomortgage annualincome First five variables are totals, the next four are all median values. SMOC stands for "selected monthly ownership costs", which is basically mortgage (if applicable) + property taxes + average utility payment. Grent stands for "gross rent" and is rent + average utility payment. I then can do the following intermediate calculations: rentpct = renters / housingunits ownerpct = owners / housingunits mortgagepct = ownersmortgage / owners nomortgagepct = ownersnomortgage / owners monthlyincome = annualincome / 12 And get the data points that will be displayed on the model's UI: housingcost = grent * rentpct + (smocmortgage * mortgagepct + smocnomortgage * nomortgagepct) * ownerpct housingcostapi = housingcost / monthlyincome ("api" here stands for "as percentage of income", and the acronym is used heavily within the American Community Survey's documentation of their income data, so I picked it up as wlel) (and I'm displaying annualincome as well, which is just raw data from the ACS and not a calculation) I've found that nicer places tend to have a lower housingcostapi, but within a narrow range. A wealthy suburb might be around 20%, while the ghetto might be around 30%. But there are tons of exceptions... middle-class suburbs tend to run a really wide gamut all over the 20s, so I wouldn't consider things like "20% housingcostapi = filthy rich people" to be gospel. I'm not comfortable linking my census tool here because I've yet to set up safeguards to prevent my server from getting hammered by crawlers (my tool has a very large amount of dynamically-generated graphics that are CPU intensive to generate and are then cached... and there are so many possible permutations that a crawler could easily exhaust my disk space), but I might consider sending the link privately to people if I think they won't share it publicly.

cm2012 10y ago

The median annual family income (for a whole family including all earners) is 50k. 100k for a family is in the top 20% of NYC.

emodendroket 10y ago
Well to really answer the question we have to define what we mean by "middle-class," which is often deliberately left so nebulous that it covers practically everyone besides the homeless and the stratospherically wealthy.
- eigenvalue 10y ago
  You also have to define "NYC"; this includes outer boroughs like the Bronx where incomes and rents are MUCH lower. If you restrict yourself to Manhattan or a couple outlying areas in Brooklyn/Queens that are considered desirable, the numbers change quite dramatically.
  - bardworx 10y ago
    I used NYC as the 5 boroughs. I also used working class neighborhood rent as comparison instead of manahattan, which would be a bit more
bardworx 10y ago
I live in Brooklyn, by Verrazano bridge which is an hour away from Manahattan by train. I don't know how a family can servive on 50k in a working class neighborhood like mine. I believe there is a great disparity in NYC between Section 8 housing and regular, rent stabilized, apartments. Section 8 brings down family income median as the housing is very affordable but cannot be classified as desirable by most standards.
- cm2012 10y ago
  Section 8 is only 8% of people in nyc.

error54 10y ago

NYC != Manhattan. Yes, 100K is middle class in lower Manhattan but in the outer boroughs, you could live quite well on 100K.

ng12 10y ago
NYC is still smaller than the Bay Area. And if you're comparing it to the Bay you need to include Jersey/CT/LI -- where $100k will go a long way along a train line.

dllthomas 10y ago

Ratio is probably better, but also misleads if my income isn't close to the cost of maintaining my lifestyle. If I am able to save, and I move to make 2x in a place that costs 2x, I am saving 2x as much! If I am stuck drawing down savings, and I make the opposite move, I have doubled my runway.

spoonie 10y ago
Yeah what's probably best is some number closer to "monthly net after taxes, rent, insurance".
- closeparen 10y ago
  If I take home $2500/mo and pay $1000/mo rent and $500/mo expenses, it takes 9 months to save a six month emergency fund. If I take home $5000, pay $3500/mo in rent, and spend $500 on everything else, it takes 24 months to save a six month emergency fund. Yet my monthly net is the same. Ratio matters a great deal. Maybe less so after you've established savings.
  - dllthomas 10y ago
    True that ratio is more relevant to savings where your target scales with local COL. That's true for some things, not for others. Though I might argue, regarding an emergency fund in particular, that establishing and maintaining such would be something that should be accounted as an expense rather than savings.

rodionos 10y ago

What you're describing is close to disposable income. For most people a ratio of compensation to disposable income would be of little use. Personal P/E?

sotojuan 10y ago

I live more than comfortable with 100K in NYC. Sure, no kids, but money is not something I think about. It's enough for a 23 year old like me.

amyjess 10y ago

Not too long ago, I built a tool that aggregates various information form the US Census, American Community Survey, and a few other sources. At one point, I decided that I wanted to track the cost of living of every place, so I started delving into American Community Survey data to find what I needed. I wound up picking three variables to display: median annual income, median monthly housing cost, and median housing cost as a percentage of income. I had to aggregate a bunch of stuff together for this, as the data was divided up between renters, owners with a mortgage, and owners without a mortgage. Here's the query I made against the ACS API to pull the data I needed: http://api.census.gov/data/2015/acs5?get=NAME%2CB25106_001E%2CB25106_024E%2CB25081_001E%2CB25081_002E%2CB25081_008E%2CB25064_001E%2CB25088_002E%2CB25088_003E%2CB19013_001E&for=place http://api.census.gov/data/2015/acs5?get=NAME%2CB25106_001E%... For the purposes of this post, I'll call the pieces of data this gives me by the following names (I don't remember if this is in the same order the API call returns... I'm copying and pasting this from notes I took when I was coming up with my calculations): housingunits renters owners ownersmortgage ownersnomortgage grent smocmortgage smocnomortgage annualincome First five variables are totals, the next four are all median values. SMOC stands for "selected monthly ownership costs", which is basically mortgage (if applicable) + property taxes + average utility payment. Grent stands for "gross rent" and is rent + average utility payment. I then can do the following intermediate calculations: rentpct = renters / housingunits ownerpct = owners / housingunits mortgagepct = ownersmortgage / owners nomortgagepct = ownersnomortgage / owners monthlyincome = annualincome / 12 And get the data points that will be displayed on the model's UI: housingcost = grent * rentpct + (smocmortgage * mortgagepct + smocnomortgage * nomortgagepct) * ownerpct housingcostapi = housingcost / monthlyincome ("api" here stands for "as percentage of income", and the acronym is used heavily within the American Community Survey's documentation of their income data, so I picked it up as wlel) (and I'm displaying annualincome as well, which is just raw data from the ACS and not a calculation) I've found that nicer places tend to have a lower housingcostapi, but within a narrow range. A wealthy suburb might be around 20%, while the ghetto might be around 30%. But there are tons of exceptions... middle-class suburbs tend to run a really wide gamut all over the 20s, so I wouldn't consider things like "20% housingcostapi = filthy rich people" to be gospel. I'm not comfortable linking my census tool here because I've yet to set up safeguards to prevent my server from getting hammered by crawlers (my tool has a very large amount of dynamically-generated graphics that are CPU intensive to generate and are then cached... and there are so many possible permutations that a crawler could easily exhaust my disk space), but I might consider sending the link privately to people if I think they won't share it publicly.