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Another (minor) nit, in my experience you have always needed to be a dual tech income to afford a house in the cities near the bay. My wife and I bought our fir

Another (minor) nit, in my experience you have always needed to be a dual tech income to afford a house in the cities near the bay. My wife and I bought our first house in 1984 for $153,000 and it required us to both be working well paid tech jobs. You can also buy a house usually if you have a lucky equity break and can use that to pay big chunk down so the mortgage is affordable on a single income but as far as I can tell buying a house on a single engineer's income, that is near the center of activity, hasn't been true since the early 70's or so.

nostrademons 8y ago
I dunno - my in-laws bought their house in 1986 on a single engineer's salary (then renovated it into a bigger one when my mother-in-law went back to work). I also had a number of coworkers at Google who bought houses in 2009/2010 as single tech workers. Heck, I could've done so myself (2BR condos in MTV were going for $400K at the time), and am kicking myself for not doing it. Perhaps 09-10 was a bit of an aberration because it was the middle of the foreclosure crisis and housing prices bottomed out then. I guess another big "thing" is parents (particularly Asian ones) paying the down payment for their kids - 2 of the 4 coworkers I'm thinking of had that help, and one had a minor stock-option windfall from joining a company right before Intuit bought it.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  Fair enough, but where? Back in the 80's when we bought our house in Sunnyvale, we could have bought one for much less either Livermore, Fremont/Milpitas, or South San Jose for much less but the commute would be high. Pretty consistently the outlying areas are about half the cost of the cities actually by the bay. Would love to hear more data points.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    Cupertino, Cambrian Park, Sunnyvale, downtown San Jose, and Los Altos.
    - ChuckMcM 8y ago
      Cool, well those would be the neighborhoods of choice. I guess I was just underpaid :-).

nostrademons 8y ago

I dunno - my in-laws bought their house in 1986 on a single engineer's salary (then renovated it into a bigger one when my mother-in-law went back to work). I also had a number of coworkers at Google who bought houses in 2009/2010 as single tech workers. Heck, I could've done so myself (2BR condos in MTV were going for $400K at the time), and am kicking myself for not doing it. Perhaps 09-10 was a bit of an aberration because it was the middle of the foreclosure crisis and housing prices bottomed out then. I guess another big "thing" is parents (particularly Asian ones) paying the down payment for their kids - 2 of the 4 coworkers I'm thinking of had that help, and one had a minor stock-option windfall from joining a company right before Intuit bought it.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
Fair enough, but where? Back in the 80's when we bought our house in Sunnyvale, we could have bought one for much less either Livermore, Fremont/Milpitas, or South San Jose for much less but the commute would be high. Pretty consistently the outlying areas are about half the cost of the cities actually by the bay. Would love to hear more data points.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  Cupertino, Cambrian Park, Sunnyvale, downtown San Jose, and Los Altos.
  - ChuckMcM 8y ago
    Cool, well those would be the neighborhoods of choice. I guess I was just underpaid :-).