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I'm genuinely curious why they bothered publishing this in its current state. They don't make tax calculations, so they assume you're paying rent with untaxed i
by Jormundir 8y ago
I'm genuinely curious why they bothered publishing this in its current state. They don't make tax calculations, so they assume you're paying rent with untaxed income, which makes the comparison all but meaningless.
- pascalxus 8y agoAbsolutely. It's completely worthless in it's current state. Also, the rent jungle numbers look a bit conservative for palo alto. In PA a 220 sq ft loft costs nearly 2000$/mo to rent. I think the 3900$/mo figure they have is a bit conservative for PA. Furthermore, they compared 2BD as their normalization factor, rather than $/sq foot. I would imagine the more expensive areas get less Square footage for a given 2BD apartment. And, notice how they conveniently didn't even mention any comparisons of salary to housing Buy costs.
- Bahamut 8y agoThe housing numbers look poorly researched in general. Sunnyvale for example is not that hard to find a 2 bedroom apartment for under $3k - I'm paying $2700 a month myself for one with over 1k sqft and modern appliances.
- closeparen 8y ago“You can find one for less” isn’t a counterargument when shown an aggregate.
- drngdds 8y agoThey also weirdly assume you have a 2BR on a single income, which is not the norm.
- MrLeap 8y agoIt's a better way to rend in places where that's affordable ;)
- bobthepanda 8y agoNot on a single income, though.
- TaylorAlexander 8y agoI think the person above you is literally saying that in places where it’s cheap enough a single income earner can easily get a 2br. I don’t know how true that is but I believe that’s what they were saying.
- megaman22 8y agoDefinitely doable if you're not in places where real estate has gone completely bonkers. There are lots of places where it isn't unreasonable to rent an entire house on a single income, even though most incomes there are fractions of a Bay Area salary.
- MrLeap 8y agoI live 10 minutes from downtown Kansas City. I rent an entire house with an acre backyard for 700$ a month. I could have got more for less if I wanted to live slightly further away from family.
- Broken_Hippo 8y agoI'm from Indiana. The price difference between a 1br and 2br is sometimes small. Sometimes you can get a 2br cheaper than a 1br, and sometimes both of these options run the same as a small studio in an apartment complex. There are slightly fewer 3br apartments there, so sometimes those prices are higher. Of course, in many small-to-midsize towns there was the options of renting a trailer for the same price as the 1-2 bedroom apartments. One city was an exception: A college town I lived in. It was fairly common for rent to go up with each inhabitant because they were accustomed to making separate leases for each student. Mighty expensive when renting to a family, but made sense for their normal renters.
- daxorid 8y agoWhat is the norm? Fewer, or more bedrooms than two?
- bobthepanda 8y agoIf you are a family or couple renting a 2BR, you probably have more than one income earner. Exception to this case would be a single parent with children, but that rate is not especially high. And smaller households (i.e., just a couple, or a single mother and one child, etc.) are not especially likely to get a 2BR. If you are a single person with a single income, you are not renting a 2BR. You might have a roommate, but in that case you are a two income household splitting the rent on a 2BR. Single income for 2BR is such an odd case to base an entire statistic around.
- j88439h84 8y agoTwo parents, one working, seems pretty common to me.
- lloyd-christmas 8y agoFrom my experience, this is incredibly uncommon in the northeast. I only know one couple like that in NY, and she has a large enough trust fund that neither one of them really needs to work at all. Every other couple with children that I know actually living in the cities are 2 income households. The same holds for everyone I know in Boston.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> The same holds for everyone I know It is a mistake to assume that this justifies conclusions about the general population.
- lloyd-christmas 8y ago> seems pretty common to me. > From my experience > the general population. I've already qualified my comment, and both of us were discussing personal experiences. If you'd prefer to discuss the general population instead of trading personal experiences, here is some historical data from pew, as well as the most recent report from the BLS: http://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-2012-2/ http://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-20... https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf This shows that my experience is closer to the general population than the experience I responded to. I'd venture a guess that the distribution of that ~62% isn't uniform across the country and is likely weighted by cost of living (which is likely why our experiences differ).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- gumby 8y agoIs it not the norm? It certainly was until quite recently. A young family with one breadwinner and a couple of small kids might reasonably want to live in a 2BR, in many countries not just USA.
- alkonaut 8y ago> A young family with one breadwinner That norm is quickly going out of style at least
- yomly 8y agoHow much of that is influenced by economic necessity? My wife would love nothing more than to raise the kids but making ends meet is proving a tough tradeoff
- alkonaut 8y agoUnsure. But equality is one factor. At least where I live women outnumber men at universities - meaning that if one partner in the relation has an "important career", it's very soon going to be more often the mother. Another factor is rents and house prices. If everyone you are competing with for that house can pay the mortgage on two incomes, you aren't going to afford it on one. So that's economic necessity I guess.
- rhapsodic 8y ago> At least where I live women outnumber men at universities - meaning that if one partner in the relation has an "important career", it's very soon going to be more often the mother. You can't logically conclude that based on that one data point.
- alkonaut 8y agoI’m an anecdata scientist... Jokes aside, it was a data point to illustrate a change that I know takes place also in other countries; that women account for an ever larger fraction of people with higher education. The number of families where the mother makes more money than the man is slowly increasing.
- shmerl 8y agoIt's quite the norm.
- Taylor_OD 8y agoI've got a 2BR in Chicago on a single income and I am certainly the outlier in my friend group. TBH most of my friends have roommates.
- meej 8y ago2BR units are used for rent price comparisons in the US because they are the most common size unit nationwide, and are the easiest to collect data on. They're what HUD uses in their Fair Market Rent analyses and many organizations follow their lead.
- totalrobe 8y agoWhile that would be much more useful, factoring in state/federal/city taxes including brackets is going to be very high effort in comparison to what was done here.
- pmiller2 8y agoEven factoring in an approximation of federal tax would have made the comparison much better. Adding in an approximation of state tax would give a pretty decent boost to cities in states with no income tax (although you have to watch out for sales taxes in that case).