6 ms·

250k of household income puts you at the 98.3 percentile, so any two married valley engineers probably qualify, and they probably can't afford a house. http://

250k of household income puts you at the 98.3 percentile, so any two married valley engineers probably qualify, and they probably can't afford a house. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...

Anechoic 16y ago
Those figures are from 2005. Does anyone have more recent numbers? (a quick Google search doesn't turn up anything in the same format. Going to bed now, I'll search again in the morning).
alnayyir 16y ago
>, and they probably can't afford a house. I moved to the bay area recently, and I'm an engineer. I was kind of wondering how people actually live out here. I came here from New York, so I get how people can rent for their whole lives, but I had thought that there'd be more reasonable home ownership in the bay area. Not so. :\
- tesseract 16y ago
  I'm a recent (last few months) migrant to the bay area. I have to say, for a city that hates capitalists, San Francisco sure is expensive. (hmm, maybe there's some causation there?)
  - alnayyir 16y ago
    Stow the politics, this is NOT the place
  - stellar678 16y ago
    Hates capitalists? This city was built on gold and the resulting necessary banking infrastructure. It's the financial center of the west coast!
    - tesseract 16y ago
      I'm thinking of the rent control, the seemingly extreme (compared to anywhere else I've experienced) adversity toward any kind of building or redevelopment, the ongoing Twitter dustup, and so forth.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
gaius 16y ago
Same situation here in the UK - you become one of the hated "rich" at about GBP 37k where income tax goes up to 40%. Nowhere in the Home Counties is that enough to get a mortgage even on a 1-bedroom flat, let alone a house. A super-tax of 50% kicks in at GBP 150k - but an ordinary family home costs around GBP 500k. As normal in politics, the middle classes are being raped for the benefit of those at the top and at the bottom.
- tesseract 16y ago
  > GBP 37k What is that percentile wise? As an American, I am perpetually shocked at how low UK salaries sound when I hear them, especially given that I know consumer goods are more expensive on your side of the pond. Is it made up for by comparatively lower cost of housing or other essential items or what? Or is there a huge transatlantic income gap that I never really hear about (mostly it's cost of living differences that seem to draw attention)?
  - hnhg 16y ago
    I don't know for sure but I suspect that people in the UK paid more attention to total personal wealth including property asset values, which were rising at a pretty ridiculous rate. To put this into perspective with an anecdote, I know a family who bought a house about 10 years ago to rent out in an up and coming area for £60k. Two years later they bought the house next door for 220k. Now each house is worth around £400-500k. This isn't even in London/the South where the rises were even greater. So property assets perhaps made up for relatively low income, and I feel that the government at the time played up to this. I also know a lot of people who took debts against their homes to increase their cash flow and buy cars, kitchens, etc with it. EDIT: Of course, now the situation is different, with the property market being flat. Who knows what will happen from now on, but our new government has made noises about making sure the property market less important to the economy.
  - ladon86 16y ago
    Well it's definitely not cost of housing, which is very expensive here. For the most part you can expect to pay a lot more for a much smaller house in the UK compared to the US. I'm not sure where it is that we make up the difference in costs, or if indeed we do.

Anechoic 16y ago

Those figures are from 2005. Does anyone have more recent numbers? (a quick Google search doesn't turn up anything in the same format. Going to bed now, I'll search again in the morning).

alnayyir 16y ago

>, and they probably can't afford a house. I moved to the bay area recently, and I'm an engineer. I was kind of wondering how people actually live out here. I came here from New York, so I get how people can rent for their whole lives, but I had thought that there'd be more reasonable home ownership in the bay area. Not so. :\

tesseract 16y ago
I'm a recent (last few months) migrant to the bay area. I have to say, for a city that hates capitalists, San Francisco sure is expensive. (hmm, maybe there's some causation there?)
- alnayyir 16y ago
  Stow the politics, this is NOT the place
- stellar678 16y ago
  Hates capitalists? This city was built on gold and the resulting necessary banking infrastructure. It's the financial center of the west coast!
  - tesseract 16y ago
    I'm thinking of the rent control, the seemingly extreme (compared to anywhere else I've experienced) adversity toward any kind of building or redevelopment, the ongoing Twitter dustup, and so forth.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]

gaius 16y ago

Same situation here in the UK - you become one of the hated "rich" at about GBP 37k where income tax goes up to 40%. Nowhere in the Home Counties is that enough to get a mortgage even on a 1-bedroom flat, let alone a house. A super-tax of 50% kicks in at GBP 150k - but an ordinary family home costs around GBP 500k. As normal in politics, the middle classes are being raped for the benefit of those at the top and at the bottom.

tesseract 16y ago
> GBP 37k What is that percentile wise? As an American, I am perpetually shocked at how low UK salaries sound when I hear them, especially given that I know consumer goods are more expensive on your side of the pond. Is it made up for by comparatively lower cost of housing or other essential items or what? Or is there a huge transatlantic income gap that I never really hear about (mostly it's cost of living differences that seem to draw attention)?
- hnhg 16y ago
  I don't know for sure but I suspect that people in the UK paid more attention to total personal wealth including property asset values, which were rising at a pretty ridiculous rate. To put this into perspective with an anecdote, I know a family who bought a house about 10 years ago to rent out in an up and coming area for £60k. Two years later they bought the house next door for 220k. Now each house is worth around £400-500k. This isn't even in London/the South where the rises were even greater. So property assets perhaps made up for relatively low income, and I feel that the government at the time played up to this. I also know a lot of people who took debts against their homes to increase their cash flow and buy cars, kitchens, etc with it. EDIT: Of course, now the situation is different, with the property market being flat. Who knows what will happen from now on, but our new government has made noises about making sure the property market less important to the economy.
- ladon86 16y ago
  Well it's definitely not cost of housing, which is very expensive here. For the most part you can expect to pay a lot more for a much smaller house in the UK compared to the US. I'm not sure where it is that we make up the difference in costs, or if indeed we do.