San Francisco has more than twice the area of Manhattan, with half the population.
The San Francisco Bay Area CSA has about the same population as Switzerland, with 2/3 of the area of Switzerland.
Both have similar GDPs.
If someone wanted to live in Germany, and commute to work in Zurich, with Swiss salaries and German cost-of-living, their commute would be about 1h15min.
The housing and infrastructure problems in the SFBA are purely political, and self-inflicted.
San Francisco is surrounded by cities which are not San Francisco. Manhattan is part of New York City, and is surrounded by more of New York City.
If someone lived 80 miles away from Zurich, in a German town such as Sankt Märgen, Google is telling me that it would take 2h 51m [1]. This tells me that if the woman in the Article made that same distance commute in German/Switzerland with, say, 30 minutes of slack, she would have to leave her house at 3:40am to arrive at work at 7am.
Let me now quote the article:
When the second alarm goes off at 3:45 — a reminder to leave
for the train in 15 minutes — her morning shifts from
leisure to precision.
I feel that it's misleading to say that the problems are self-inflicted. People who work in SFBA or rent there are suffering from the housing and infrastructure problems that are (to certain extent) caused by residents and homeowners in SFBA - these are two different populations with only a partial overlap, so the problems aren't self-inflicted, they're inflicted by one group onto the other.
Been doing that for a couple of years. Works well. No need to switch the train between Waldshut/Koblenz and Zurich.
Allows me 2h of coding each day during the train ride.
> The housing and infrastructure problems in the SFBA are purely political, and self-inflicted.
That's true, but the implication that these decisions are inarguably stupid ("self-inflicted") is unfair. It's a conscious and IMHO defensible choice by the people who already live here: we would prefer to deal with the problems caused by insufficient housing than by the problems caused by overly dense population.
But a non-political solution to affordable housing could be coming soon in the form of rapid transit via Hyperloop. Hyperloop could put deflationary pressure on housing prices.
If Hyperloop actually materializes, and their route transit times are anywhere near what they say they will be, then real estate prices should decline in the bay area, or at the worst level out.
I doubt people will continue to pay crazy prices in SF when you can commute from almost anywhere on the west coast to SF within an hour on Hyperloop.
It's basically impossible to get a job in Zurich though. In San Fransisco, a coding bootcamp grad can get 140K out the door. This is how capitalism works. We take the bad with the good. Politics reflect the will of the people and the people in San Fransisco on both sides of the aisle want to make as much money as they can, any way they can.
While the rising cost of housing is an easy target, why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living?
If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Encourage more remote work or move their headquarters out of the city centers? It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages.
This example is a bit on the fringe, but it does illustrate the daily struggle of many normal people. 2+ hour commute is insane. And before someone comes in with the "why doesn't she get a new job closer to home?", you know it's not that easy - not to mention unfair to suggest that someone should change their entire life because their profession isn't flavor of the month.
This isn't an issue of tech companies forcing anyone out. Bay area municipalities and NIMBY property owners have created a hostile regulatory environment for property developers, leading to a lack of new housing coming onto the market and driving rents upward.
On the other hand, I feel that she's over-compensating a little.
No-one's saying the $1600/month that she was paying for a 1br in Alameda is "cheap" in any way...
But at $81K salary, her $1000/mo rent is only just touching 20% of her take home, which is in the "very comfortable" range (for reference, most property management companies want you to be "not exceeding 35% of take home income").
> why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living?
What do you hope to accomplish with this "pressure"? That these companies hire fewer people?
> Lower income housing?
Housing costs are one of those nasty problems where throwing money at it just doesn't work (and I'm saying this as a democratic socialist whose proposed solution to most problems is "tax the rich in order to throw money at it"). Imagine if big tech companies pledged a billion dollars or whatever to build a bunch of housing units. What would happen? This: other developers would pull back on new construction, because the pledge would throw a wrench in the supply/demand, and you'd be right back where you started.
The correct solution is upzoning and, to be blunt, disenfranchisement of NIMBYs.
> If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation?
Most of the big ones do: they offer a lot of incentives to not drive, including paying for employees to take public transport or offering shuttle buses (which at least keep them out of cars).
> move their headquarters out of the city centers?
They aren't in city centers: 4 of the Big 5 (Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook) are all headquartered in suburbs. Only Amazon is headquartered in a city center.
> It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages.
Why does that seem crazy? It's just supply-and-demand.
You assume that everyone working for a tech company is a 6 figure programmer. There are plenty of secretaries, social media coordinators, sales people etc. That likely make less than what a sanitation worker, cop firefighter, etc. make. It isn't so clear cut.
Would that be the purpose of property tax and state corporate taxes? Genuine question.
I have always imagined the benefit to a city of having big businesses move in was to bring in more tax through boosted economic activity that would allow them to improve the city overall. Perhaps I played too much Sim City.
Why should taxpayers subsidize unsustainable prices for the restaurants/shops/services?
If it's just left alone, the market will react to this. If a 1BR apt costs $2500/mo, then the price of a sandwich might go to $25 to be able to pay that sandwich-makers $75k/yr wage. And if SFers don't like paying $25 for a sandwich then they can vote for more density.
Why punish companies for being successful enough to create attractive, high-paying jobs? The consequences of doing that won't be very good for anyone. A slower economy will hurt the low-income workers a bit more than the high-income workers.
What we need is a solution that encourages and accommodates success, not one that punishes it.
I think there's a problem of congregation. i.e. Real network effects reinforcing labor concentration - to the exclusion of support business. Companies want their employees close at hand. Those same employees attract further, similar businesses nearby. I don't know how to change that. Tele-presence doesn't seem as in demand.
If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing?
Don't you think people are already trying to do this? There is resistance from many sides, which is, you know, the story here in general.
>why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living?
You're going to need some extremely powerful public policy interventions to push back on a force as powerful in human civilization as urbanization.
It's so much better for society and for the individuals who currently don't live in major cities to centralize into them. You're going to need some extreme regulation to reverse the incentives that have driven the push towards cities worldwide and for thousands of years.
And for what? To protect a relatively tiny constituency of people who currently live in cities and want them to stay small, against the giant national/worldwide population that wants economic opportunity, and to use its resources for something other than cars?
Just yesterday I was commenting here on this very situation, but she has already moved her home out of the city in search of less expensive rent. She really should find a job out of the city as well. If the highly paid workers in the city want to buy coffee or sandwiches or whatever, they can pay prices that reflect the true cost of living in the city and not some indirect subsidized price.
The same thing is happening in most other cities albeit perhaps more slowly, most of which have no particular industry to blame it on. It's a shortage caused by zoning.
...because these companies can just go somewhere else that won't pressure them, so when cities are faced with a billion dollar tech campus or none at all they often feel like they have to bend. Cities often even cut taxes to see big companies come into town. Capitalism will always win against public infrastructure.
Reporters keep trying to find profiles of the housing crisis but this seems disingenuous. A lot of what this woman is doing is a choice; waking up hours before the train, huge house in Stockton vs condo/apartment closer. She makes $80k/year meaning post-tax $4600/month. She could easily afford a nice 1 or 2 bedroom in Pittsburg or Pleasanton for ~$2k a month, and her door-to-door commute would be well under 80 minutes.
I was going to come in here and talk about how this strikes me more as a personal choice than a symptom of a systemic problem (i lived well in SF on $60k, and I mean for fucks sake Stockton? that is aggressively far. There are many great closer options.), but who cares.
This woman seems to have a really peaceful existence. It would be nice to have such relaxing routines in my own life, especially in the face of stressful realities like a long commute on public transit. It makes me want to develop the fortitude that this woman exercises every single day.
One way to make this better is to support the plan to inline the Capitol Corridor and ACE trains with Caltrain via the unused and abandoned Dumbarton rail bridge [0]. Make sure to tell your elected officials you support this.
It appears that when local cities have control over housing, they make decisions that are good for them, but bad for the state that needs higher paying jobs that generate tax revenue. Plus low density housing is bad for the environment when compared to high density: http://news.colgate.edu/scene/2014/11/urban-legends.html
Other places would move heaven and earth to have a place like Silicon Valley and it seems like California is shooting itself in the foot with this self inflicted housing shortage.
If a municipality decides to open 100 seats of office space, they should be required to zone and approve 100 beds for said workers to sleep in. Otherwise you have the situation where towns like Brisbane can build office complexes for the tax revenue and entirely pass the buck to their neighbors for the cost of housing the new workers.
>Ms. James pays $1,000 a month in rent for her three-bedroom house, compared with $1,600 for the one-bedroom apartment she had in Alameda.
She was forced out of her original apartment but unless she had a new situation that required her to have more bedrooms with a lower budget, some part of this extremity was her choice. I think NYT should've chosen a better example if the point they were trying to get across is "tech boom forcing workers out".
This is a pretty amazing example. It raises more questions than it answers however. The big one is "Why continue working in SF with this horrible commute?"
Market dynamics suggest that in a 'free' market, on an individual basis, a person seeks to maximize their value received. So in this case, if this was an open market, the (commute + $81K/year) > any other option that she might choose.
So what are we missing that there isn't at least an equal paying job available in the Central Valley that would cut her commute by 80 - 90% ? I can imagine lots of things that might contribute like pension eligibility, or specialization. But "Public Health Advisor for DHHS" seems to be a position that is available in many cities in the state. I would have liked to read what about this job in this city was so important.
And all of that is to the meta question of salary growth has been flat for a long time, but for a long time people felt they had to keep their job at all costs. A what point does the advantage change? 3% unemployment? 2%? What needs to happen so that people are confident enough to say "pay me more or I'll work somewhere else." ?
As a result of the stuff I wonder about, I feel like there might a tremendous amount of tension in the economy that isn't as visible as one might hope. And I wonder what happens when it snaps. Do we get the 10 - 15% stag-flation of the 70s?
I paid about 30% of my salary in 2014 for a SRO [0] in San Francisco with a 10 minute commute. I decided that the quality of living was not worth the potential future earnings for staying in the bay area. In Tulsa I pay about 14% of my salary to rent a large apartment with a 4 minute commute.
But you make a lot less in the absolute terms. So you save less, you can afford less of cool stuff. Most people in the world want to move in the opposite direction.
But is 70% of SF salary < 86% of Tulsa salary ? Even after we account for other expenditures (travel and food), it looks like a net benefit in SF (compared to Atlanta).
The only down side would be buying an actual house. A house in Atlanta would be 3-5x my yearly Atlanta salary. A similar house in SF would cost 7-8x my yearly SF salary.
What's to stop San Francisco from creating a lot more high-density housing? Doesn't that solve many issues with housing supply? Looking at wikipedia, the density is crazy low even compared to other major cities in the US.
Why isn't there a good, inexpensive bus? You can fit almost one hundred passengers on a single bus. Buses are pretty fuel-efficient per passenger, easy to reroute if you have more/less demand, and you can go directly to where you need to go. They scale very well - if there are only 20 people or so you can send a small bus, if there are thousands you can send multiple large buses.
Sure, traffic can be an issue, but I'd imagine train delays are roughly as big of a problem.
In this case, it looks like her 3hr 20min commute could become 1hr 30min with a bus that goes from Stockton.
You're vastly underestimating how bad rush hour traffic is. Also, the longer the bus is on the road the more likely it will be to be in it. Then you run into the same problem where you're getting a 5am bus for a 9am job even though it's only a 1hr drive on paper
So why do we keep commuting for jobs that don't really require our physical presence?
It was a long hard battle for me to be able to work from home, and yes, I sometimes do miss out on face-to-face interaction, but going to the office 2 instead of 5 days a week is still a huge win - I'm not in a car out there, making traffic worse for you. You're welcome.
Can we please solve the supposed "interaction" problem with some nice digital pens and white-boards and web cams and just .... work from anywhere?
As the article says, she could sleep 90 minutes longer. And if she drove to work, she does have a car, she could easily leave at five.
She could also get a 3200 dollar apartment where she used to live, have at least two rooms, sleep late and still have 3550 left every month.
Maybe medical insurance and such things that we europeans don't need to buy are very expensive, but apart from that it doesn't seem very difficult to live on 3500 after rent for a single person. My whole family spends less than that after rent, four people in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Copenhagen.
Take-home salary after taxes could be a lot less than $6,750 per month. Health insurance is probably reasonably priced given that she seems to have a government job.
But I do see your point - she could (and many do) live closer, pay more, and sleep more.
I don't dispute that Bay Area housing is very expensive, and there are plenty of issue it needs to address, but this person seems so have made a personal choice to have that commute, which I commend if thats the lifestyle she wants.
Perhaps her personal circumstances didn't allow for it (Or she chose not to, which is fine too), but a home can be purchased for as little as 3.5% down (FHA) + closing costs. For someone with an 81K salary, their borrowing limit is around ~460k (@43% FHA DTI Limit [1]), and in 2014 (When the person in the article was evicted) there were plenty of homes in that price range in the East Bay. That DTI won't be easy, but neither is a 6-8hr daily commute.
In fact, there are homes/condos right now [2] still in that price range. The crisis is for those making the median household income of say, 52.9K in Oakland, thats the income where one is basically shut out of the housing market.
It's odd this article doesn't mention what time she goes to bed or how much sleep she gets. I found that was all I wanted to know first reading the headline to the end of the article. It mentions people sleep on the train but never really confirms if she does (the one photo of her in the train she is looking at her phone so I assume not).
Just playing the devils advocate by posting some themes discussed on the article's comment section.
- She apparently can't relocate as she makes $81K as a federal employee. Most commenters seem to point out they make far less for equally brutal commute, and don't even complain.
- She also works from home every now and then. Something which most other people like Chefs, Janitors, Barbers who are paid way less, don't even have an option to do by very occupational design.
- She qualifies for pension after some time. There fore it's not too much to expect somebody to make a little sacrifice for a few decades worth of getting paid without doing anything at all.
- Most other commenters seem to point out that they would love to have a job which pays $81K, with benefits and a pension even at that commute time. Therefore this is not a problem, this is actually an opportunity.
Most comments seem to have a 'Cry me a river' kind of a sentiment.
[+] [-] ucaetano|8 years ago|reply
The San Francisco Bay Area CSA has about the same population as Switzerland, with 2/3 of the area of Switzerland.
Both have similar GDPs.
If someone wanted to live in Germany, and commute to work in Zurich, with Swiss salaries and German cost-of-living, their commute would be about 1h15min.
The housing and infrastructure problems in the SFBA are purely political, and self-inflicted.
[+] [-] mmanfrin|8 years ago|reply
If someone lived 80 miles away from Zurich, in a German town such as Sankt Märgen, Google is telling me that it would take 2h 51m [1]. This tells me that if the woman in the Article made that same distance commute in German/Switzerland with, say, 30 minutes of slack, she would have to leave her house at 3:40am to arrive at work at 7am.
Let me now quote the article:
Hm.[1] https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Sankt+M%C3%A4rgen,+Germany/Z...
[+] [-] PeterisP|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cyri|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lisper|8 years ago|reply
That's true, but the implication that these decisions are inarguably stupid ("self-inflicted") is unfair. It's a conscious and IMHO defensible choice by the people who already live here: we would prefer to deal with the problems caused by insufficient housing than by the problems caused by overly dense population.
[+] [-] acerock|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lex_luthor|8 years ago|reply
But a non-political solution to affordable housing could be coming soon in the form of rapid transit via Hyperloop. Hyperloop could put deflationary pressure on housing prices.
If Hyperloop actually materializes, and their route transit times are anywhere near what they say they will be, then real estate prices should decline in the bay area, or at the worst level out.
I doubt people will continue to pay crazy prices in SF when you can commute from almost anywhere on the west coast to SF within an hour on Hyperloop.
http://hyperloop-one.com/routes/
[+] [-] JustAnotherPat|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nxsynonym|8 years ago|reply
If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation? Lower income housing? Encourage more remote work or move their headquarters out of the city centers? It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages.
This example is a bit on the fringe, but it does illustrate the daily struggle of many normal people. 2+ hour commute is insane. And before someone comes in with the "why doesn't she get a new job closer to home?", you know it's not that easy - not to mention unfair to suggest that someone should change their entire life because their profession isn't flavor of the month.
[+] [-] andrewjl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FireBeyond|8 years ago|reply
No-one's saying the $1600/month that she was paying for a 1br in Alameda is "cheap" in any way...
But at $81K salary, her $1000/mo rent is only just touching 20% of her take home, which is in the "very comfortable" range (for reference, most property management companies want you to be "not exceeding 35% of take home income").
[+] [-] Analemma_|8 years ago|reply
> why not put the pressure on the companies that are driving the influx of workers and out of control cost of living?
What do you hope to accomplish with this "pressure"? That these companies hire fewer people?
> Lower income housing?
Housing costs are one of those nasty problems where throwing money at it just doesn't work (and I'm saying this as a democratic socialist whose proposed solution to most problems is "tax the rich in order to throw money at it"). Imagine if big tech companies pledged a billion dollars or whatever to build a bunch of housing units. What would happen? This: other developers would pull back on new construction, because the pledge would throw a wrench in the supply/demand, and you'd be right back where you started.
The correct solution is upzoning and, to be blunt, disenfranchisement of NIMBYs.
> If tech companies are drawing people into cities and forcing out those who keep the city itself operating, why not have them subsidize and improve public transportation?
Most of the big ones do: they offer a lot of incentives to not drive, including paying for employees to take public transport or offering shuttle buses (which at least keep them out of cars).
> move their headquarters out of the city centers?
They aren't in city centers: 4 of the Big 5 (Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook) are all headquartered in suburbs. Only Amazon is headquartered in a city center.
> It seems crazy to me that people get driven out of their homes by real estate developers who re-develop due to tech-wages.
Why does that seem crazy? It's just supply-and-demand.
[+] [-] jsonne|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehnto|8 years ago|reply
I have always imagined the benefit to a city of having big businesses move in was to bring in more tax through boosted economic activity that would allow them to improve the city overall. Perhaps I played too much Sim City.
[+] [-] ethanhunt_|8 years ago|reply
If it's just left alone, the market will react to this. If a 1BR apt costs $2500/mo, then the price of a sandwich might go to $25 to be able to pay that sandwich-makers $75k/yr wage. And if SFers don't like paying $25 for a sandwich then they can vote for more density.
[+] [-] twblalock|8 years ago|reply
What we need is a solution that encourages and accommodates success, not one that punishes it.
[+] [-] ianai|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhizome|8 years ago|reply
Don't you think people are already trying to do this? There is resistance from many sides, which is, you know, the story here in general.
[+] [-] closeparen|8 years ago|reply
You're going to need some extremely powerful public policy interventions to push back on a force as powerful in human civilization as urbanization.
It's so much better for society and for the individuals who currently don't live in major cities to centralize into them. You're going to need some extreme regulation to reverse the incentives that have driven the push towards cities worldwide and for thousands of years.
And for what? To protect a relatively tiny constituency of people who currently live in cities and want them to stay small, against the giant national/worldwide population that wants economic opportunity, and to use its resources for something other than cars?
[+] [-] wvenable|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colek42|8 years ago|reply
Don't they do this already with property and state income taxes?
[+] [-] wang_li|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nerfhammer|8 years ago|reply
https://www.axios.com/sky-high-home-prices-are-thwarting-thw...
[+] [-] ahhhhhhhhhh|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stillhere|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] davidf18|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jakelarkin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] __sha3d2|8 years ago|reply
This woman seems to have a really peaceful existence. It would be nice to have such relaxing routines in my own life, especially in the face of stressful realities like a long commute on public transit. It makes me want to develop the fortitude that this woman exercises every single day.
[+] [-] edward|8 years ago|reply
http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c...
[+] [-] jdavis703|8 years ago|reply
[0]: http://www.greencaltrain.com/2017/08/dumbarton-corridor-stud...
[+] [-] bartart|8 years ago|reply
Other places would move heaven and earth to have a place like Silicon Valley and it seems like California is shooting itself in the foot with this self inflicted housing shortage.
[+] [-] twobyfour|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] santaclaus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterjlee|8 years ago|reply
She was forced out of her original apartment but unless she had a new situation that required her to have more bedrooms with a lower budget, some part of this extremity was her choice. I think NYT should've chosen a better example if the point they were trying to get across is "tech boom forcing workers out".
[+] [-] turtlebits|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|8 years ago|reply
Market dynamics suggest that in a 'free' market, on an individual basis, a person seeks to maximize their value received. So in this case, if this was an open market, the (commute + $81K/year) > any other option that she might choose.
So what are we missing that there isn't at least an equal paying job available in the Central Valley that would cut her commute by 80 - 90% ? I can imagine lots of things that might contribute like pension eligibility, or specialization. But "Public Health Advisor for DHHS" seems to be a position that is available in many cities in the state. I would have liked to read what about this job in this city was so important.
And all of that is to the meta question of salary growth has been flat for a long time, but for a long time people felt they had to keep their job at all costs. A what point does the advantage change? 3% unemployment? 2%? What needs to happen so that people are confident enough to say "pay me more or I'll work somewhere else." ?
As a result of the stuff I wonder about, I feel like there might a tremendous amount of tension in the economy that isn't as visible as one might hope. And I wonder what happens when it snaps. Do we get the 10 - 15% stag-flation of the 70s?
[+] [-] deckar01|8 years ago|reply
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_room_occupancy
[+] [-] olegkikin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavanky|8 years ago|reply
The only down side would be buying an actual house. A house in Atlanta would be 3-5x my yearly Atlanta salary. A similar house in SF would cost 7-8x my yearly SF salary.
[+] [-] ghomrassen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] owenversteeg|8 years ago|reply
Sure, traffic can be an issue, but I'd imagine train delays are roughly as big of a problem.
In this case, it looks like her 3hr 20min commute could become 1hr 30min with a bus that goes from Stockton.
Why has nobody done this?
[+] [-] dsfyu404ed|8 years ago|reply
You're vastly underestimating how bad rush hour traffic is. Also, the longer the bus is on the road the more likely it will be to be in it. Then you run into the same problem where you're getting a 5am bus for a 9am job even though it's only a 1hr drive on paper
[+] [-] PopsiclePete|8 years ago|reply
It was a long hard battle for me to be able to work from home, and yes, I sometimes do miss out on face-to-face interaction, but going to the office 2 instead of 5 days a week is still a huge win - I'm not in a car out there, making traffic worse for you. You're welcome.
Can we please solve the supposed "interaction" problem with some nice digital pens and white-boards and web cams and just .... work from anywhere?
[+] [-] Grustaf|8 years ago|reply
She could also get a 3200 dollar apartment where she used to live, have at least two rooms, sleep late and still have 3550 left every month.
Maybe medical insurance and such things that we europeans don't need to buy are very expensive, but apart from that it doesn't seem very difficult to live on 3500 after rent for a single person. My whole family spends less than that after rent, four people in one of the most expensive cities in the world, Copenhagen.
I must be missing part of the equation here.
[+] [-] got2surf|8 years ago|reply
But I do see your point - she could (and many do) live closer, pay more, and sleep more.
[+] [-] ProfessorLayton|8 years ago|reply
Perhaps her personal circumstances didn't allow for it (Or she chose not to, which is fine too), but a home can be purchased for as little as 3.5% down (FHA) + closing costs. For someone with an 81K salary, their borrowing limit is around ~460k (@43% FHA DTI Limit [1]), and in 2014 (When the person in the article was evicted) there were plenty of homes in that price range in the East Bay. That DTI won't be easy, but neither is a 6-8hr daily commute.
In fact, there are homes/condos right now [2] still in that price range. The crisis is for those making the median household income of say, 52.9K in Oakland, thats the income where one is basically shut out of the housing market.
[1] https://www.fha.com/fha_requirements_debt [2] https://www.redfin.com/city/13654/CA/Oakland/filter/property...
[+] [-] sodapopcan|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterSear|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kamaal|8 years ago|reply
- She apparently can't relocate as she makes $81K as a federal employee. Most commenters seem to point out they make far less for equally brutal commute, and don't even complain.
- She also works from home every now and then. Something which most other people like Chefs, Janitors, Barbers who are paid way less, don't even have an option to do by very occupational design.
- She qualifies for pension after some time. There fore it's not too much to expect somebody to make a little sacrifice for a few decades worth of getting paid without doing anything at all.
- Most other commenters seem to point out that they would love to have a job which pays $81K, with benefits and a pension even at that commute time. Therefore this is not a problem, this is actually an opportunity.
Most comments seem to have a 'Cry me a river' kind of a sentiment.