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If you measure Silicon Valley salaries in houses/year instead of dollars/year, they are quite low.
by johnrob 11y ago
If you measure Silicon Valley salaries in houses/year instead of dollars/year, they are quite low.
- rectang 11y agoThat's brilliant. Does anybody publish such stats? Seeing salaries measured in houses-per-year for different areas would communicate cost-of-living viscerally.
- geebee 11y agoSome sort of housing adjusted salary would be valuable. But simply as a percentage type thing might miss the way people experience expenses. Think about it this way. Suppose you make $30,000 a year, and your housing costs are $10,000 a year. Now suppose you make $200,000 a year, and your housing cost are $100,000 a year. Aside from that, prices in the higher cost area are maybe 10-20% higher. You might actually have more disposable income in the second scenario, along with more opportunities to enjoy it. This is why I think SF is still a pleasurable place to live for people who substantially exceed a certain threshold. That threshold is very high, though.
- kqr2 11y agoAnother tongue-in-cheek metric we like to joke about is Nobel prizes/house, i.e. how many Nobel prizes you would have to win to afford a home. Recent Nobel prize award was about $1.2 million. Median prices in Palo Alto is about $2.4 million so the affordability is 2.0 Nobel prizes / house in Palo Alto. The caveat is that you have to be a solo prize winner, otherwise the award amount will be split. http://www.zillow.com/palo-alto-ca/home-values/ http://www.zillow.com/palo-alto-ca/home-values/