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> Eventually the only people left in the Bay Area will be executives and really high-paid lawyers Yesterday's headline: "Alphabet median pay close to $200k" ht
by TomVDB 8y ago
> Eventually the only people left in the Bay Area will be executives and really high-paid lawyers
Yesterday's headline: "Alphabet median pay close to $200k"
https://www.investopedia.com/news/googles-alphabet-median-pay-close-200k/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/googles-alphabet-median-pa...
Those are not all executives and high-paid lawyers.
One of the biggest reasons why a 1300 sq.ft. house in Sunnyvale now sells for $2M is because a lot of engineers are perfectly capable of paying for it.
In my tract, 5 houses out of 35 have changed owners in the past years (it's a neighborhood with lots of first owners who are now in their eighties). I've talked to all the newcomers.
Without exception, they are dual income engineering families who work for Google, Facebook, Apple and some other tech giants.
That's $400k income per year and plenty to cover a $1.725M 30 year 4.1% mortgage payment of $8500 per month.
- kelnos 8y agoRight, and the parent was specifically pointing out that it's unsustainable to pay that median (the parent used $500k as a made-up but plausible future value). I'm pretty happy with the salary that I make as a SF-dwelling/working software developer, but I recognize that it's absolutely insane when compared to same-industry salaries in locations with less ridiculous housing markets. At some point, companies are going to throw in the towel and decide it just doesn't make financial sense to pay their employees that much just for the privilege of being located in the bay area. Then the jobs move away and you end up with a local recession. This will be hard to do initially for companies sized like Google or Facebook, but a ton of smaller companies can open offices elsewhere and slowly transition staff away. They're already doing it, even.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]