In Costly Bay Area, Even Six-Figure Salaries Are Considered 'Low Income' (mercurynews.com) 366
An anonymous reader shares an article: In the high-priced Bay Area, even some households that bring in six figures a year can now be considered "low income." That's according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which recently released its 2017 income limits -- a threshold that determines who can qualify for affordable and subsidized housing programs such as Section 8 vouchers. San Francisco and San Mateo counties have the highest limits in the Bay Area -- and among the highest such numbers in the country. A family of four with an income of $105,350 per year is considered "low income." A $65,800 annual income is considered "very low" for a family the same size, and $39,500 is "extremely low." The median income for those areas is $115,300. Other Bay Area counties are not far behind. In Alameda and Contra Costa counties, $80,400 for a family of four is considered low income, while in Santa Clara County, $84,750 is the low-income threshold for a family of four.
solution (Score:5, Informative)
Re:solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Better yet - don't move to Silly Valley in the first place.
There's lots of places (Austin, Portland, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Southern Florida, Chicago, Atlanta, etc) where you can find lots of quite decent tech jobs. They don't pay a glamorous salary and don't have pre-IPO stock options per se, but the cost of living won't break your financial back. As a bonus, you don't have to put up with snobby California politics, people, etc. ;)
Also of note, many big-name corps (e.g. Intel) have offices, labs, etc in out-of-the-Valley places (Intel has fabs and sites in Chandler, AZ and Hillsboro, OR, among others.)
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Or do what I did - get a job working for a company based in San Mateo County, but work remotely from your low cost of living in the Midwest.
You can't buy a parking space in San Mateo for what I paid for a 2500 sq. ft. home.
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good advice for the millions of people born and raised in expensive places. just uproot your entire life and move to what may as well be a different country.
Re: solution (Score:2)
"On my plane trip to/from Austin, lots of younger guys checking out real estate on their laptops while waiting to board. I looked at a couple houses, $400-450K and that 2.3% property tax isn't exactly cheap."
Much more expensive than you think.
In Texas, your property tax can increase up to 10% every year with no cap. Think long and hard about buying a $500k home here.
Think carefully before moving here and
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Move, and keep the job remotely.
Then add a second one.
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And a quarter of the functionality.
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MOV dest,src
Modifies flags: none
Copies byte or word from the source operand to the destination operand. If the destination is SS interrupts are disabled except on early buggy 808x CPUs. Some CPUs disable interrupts if the destination is any of the segment registers.
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Just went to visit relatives in Dubuque over Easter. Talk about a turned around decrepit river town! What a great place!
That's funny... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That's funny... (Score:4, Insightful)
Doesn't pass the smell test... $1920/year (=$160*12) is the maximum income to be eligible for food stamps [...]
That's not what the county office told me back then after the Great Recession. Unemployment was still high (seven job applicant for every open position) and many people had filed for government aid. As a single person, I don't qualified for food stamps because I made too much money.
[...] but you somehow managed to live in SV and feed yourself rice and beans on less than $4k/year?
I was out of work for and lived on $1,600 per month unemployment benefits for two years (2009-2010). I then spent six months living off my savings while working 20 hours a month on a weekend job. When my Chapter Seven bankruptcy got finalized in July 2011, I had $25 in checking and a new fulltime job. I then spent the next two years (2011-2013) working seven days a week to stabilize my finances. Today I'm back to where I was financially ten years ago.
make the H1B minwage $150K then (Score:2, Insightful)
make the H1B minwage $150K then
What? (Score:2, Informative)
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You forgot taxes. Someone earning $100k is probably paying about $25k in federal taxes, so they're "only" left with $75k. In your example, that leaves them with $8400 after the rent.
Re:What? (Score:5, Informative)
According to http://taxformcalculator.com/tax/100000.html [taxformcalculator.com] someone making $100,000 a year in California has a take home pay of $67,818.01.
If their rent was $5500 they'd have $151 left over each month for expenses.
They'd better move, because they can't afford that place.
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They'd better move, because they can't afford that place.
They can't afford San Francisco. Rentals in Silicon Valley in general, and San Jose in particular, are much cheaper. I make $50K+ year and pay $1466 per month for a 475-sqft studio apartment. A three-bedroom apartment is $3,000+ per month.
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If you making 50K a year and paying $1466 for a studio then your basically putting half of your take home pay towards rent. That is not affordable.
I've been paying 50% in rent since the 1990's, as my late parents have before me since the 1970's. The trick is to save as much of the other 50% as possible.
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If you making 50K a year and paying $1466 for a studio then your basically putting half of your take home pay towards rent. That is not affordable.
I've been paying 50% in rent since the 1990's, as my late parents have before me since the 1970's. The trick is to save as much of the other 50% as possible.
That's stupid - if you'd put 50% towards buying a house you'd have spent the last few years living 'rent' free.
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$100,000 a year does not equal $8333 a month after taxes.
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Do you actually work for a living? $100,000 a year doesn't equate to $8,333 a month in take-home pay. Try deducting FICA, Social Security, Medicare, and local taxes. That gives you about $4,600 take-home per month. Oh, don't forget insurance premiums and 401(k)/IRA contributions so you can one day afford one day in the far future to retire, so say $4,000 / month take-home.
Rent is more like $3,000 / month, then add electricity, water, trash, insurance, telephone, and Internet.
The rest, if you can find it, c
Forgive me... (Score:2)
...if I say, I do't give a fuck about San Francisco or the people that can' t make it on $100k salaries.
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As someone else, I don't give a fuck whether or not you give a fuck.
Sure you do. Otherwise, you wouldn't have wasted a fuck by commenting. ;)
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There sure are a lot of fucks not being given here.
The number is of little consequence to most (Score:5, Informative)
The actual number is of little consequence most.
In most bay area locales, Section 8 housing is basically unavailable for new applicants. Wait lists are estimated to be greater than 8-10 years or simply closed to new applicants [hacsc.org] until further notice because of essentially unbounded wait times and basically zero new section 8 housing inventory.
AFAIKT, the increases of these income threshold numbers only serve to keep a small amount of existing people (the vanishingly small fraction of the 17,000 total served by section 8 with reasonable jobs near the limit) from being kicked out of Section 8 housing simply by getting cost of living raises at work and forced to fend on their own...
Basically, section 8 is totally broken in the bay area and is a non-factor in housing. This adjustment doesn't really do anything either way to change this...
Section 8 is a scam (Score:2)
http://www.mercurynews.com/201... [mercurynews.com]
Remote will destroy the area? (Score:3)
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Poster does not understand Algebra (Score:4, Interesting)
Look, 100k/4 = 25k = low salary. Not unusual at all. Similarly if you have 10 children, but only make 200k, your freakin' POOR.
The basic problem is our culture tries to measures wealth by income rather than net worth.
You can not compare the salary of a young, healthy, single orphan with a married couples supporting two sets of sick parents and multiple kids.
We need to reset our definition of wealth to be based on cash, stocks, mutual funds and real estate in the bank. This means the IRS should ignore your salary and base your taxes on what you own. Ignore the stuff in your IRA and give a set amount to ignore (just as we don't take the first 10k of income for a single person). Start it at 1% and gradually raise it to a max of 5% if you have more than a couple million in the bank.
If we did this, we could get rid of most of the complexity of the tax code, because it is all based on not overcharging the poor, which this system does automatically.
Re:Poster does not understand Algebra (Score:5, Insightful)
I know I've seen the idea of taxing wealth commonly derided in the past seemingly with mountains of evidence of why it's worse than taxing income. That said I'm not an economist and can't remember much about why so I'll just point out what I can think of off the cuff.
1. Taxing wealth directly makes it much harder for people to actually build wealth over time as eventually significant portions of your income will be eaten up by it if you're trying to build enough wealth for retirement.
2. Such a policy might encourage people to save even less than they do now and instead fritter away income on intangibles resulting in more rapid accumulation of wealth in the pockets of fewer individuals who can afford to buy their way around the wealth taxes and or have the income to support just paying it.
We do actually already have some wealth taxes implemented, property and estate taxes come to mind. I'd rather see the tax code simplified by just eliminating the special treatment for edge cases, and treat all income as income regardless of its source. Rebalance the tax brackets accordingly and move on. The income tax code that most people actually deal with isn't that bad. I file an itemized return every year and it only takes about two hours to sort out when I actually sit down to do it. I'd prefer a system that just presents me with the pre-filled forms and asks for me to file an objection or sign off on it, but what we've got is tolerable for individuals.
Re:Poster does not understand Algebra (Score:4, Insightful)
What we need to do is somewhere in between: tax income from wealth, minus expenses on lack of wealth. That is to say, tax based on your borrower/lender (including renter/landlord) status. If you're getting free money just from already having money, you get taxed for that; meanwhile if you're paying money just because you lack money (like because you don't own a home, and you can't exist nowhere, and wherever you do exist someone is going to charge you for that privilege), that counts against your taxable income. You're free to make whatever money you can make from your own labor and to save as much of that as is personally useful to you but as soon as you start turning your accrued wealth toward generating an unearned income they you get hit with taxes.
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That is another reason why my tax on rent and interest is good: it discourages accumulating wealth beyond the point that it's directly useful to you (i.e. buying stuff for its use value, not as an investment), so if you still have income and nothing more you need to save up for, instead of hanging onto that money so that it will make you even more money for nothing, there's no point but to spend it, on paying people to do things you want since you've got all of the stuff that you want already, which increas
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But won't your take-home pay be greater when you no longer have to pay income taxes?
Those with the most wealth benefit the most from national defense to protect their wealth. Is it fair that those people should be subsidized by the poor?
If national defense were constitutionally required to be funded entirely with wealth taxes, would the rich and powerful support invading other countries, or would they insert pacifis
And you apparently do not understand calculus (Score:4, Informative)
Net worth (wealth) is just the integral of income minus expenses (or if you prefer, income minus expenses is the first derivative of wealth). Income is the correct basis for determining taxation and qualification for government aid. How much wealth you accumulate depends not just on how much income you make, but also how much money you spend. As a result, any form of taxation based on wealth unfairly penalizes people who save their money instead of spending it unnecessarily. OTOH, taxation based on income treats everyone the same regardless of whether they spend their money wisely or foolishly.
Also, since wealth is the integral of income minus expenses, wealth is the accumulation of past income. So any attempt to tax wealth is an attempt to retroactively tax past income. Ex post facto laws are illegal under our Constitution.
If you want to tax rich people more, increase the tax rates on higher income. It's as simple as that.
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OTOH, taxation based on income treats everyone the same regardless of whether they spend their money wisely or foolishly.
So people who took advantage of the opportunities available to them should have to pay more taxes, while others who had exactly the same opportunities but choose not to exploit them should have to pay lower taxes and qualify more easily for government aid?
Taxation based on income does not treat everyone the same. Those who take better advantage of the opportunities that come their way are penalized compared to others who let those same opportunities pass by but were equally wise or foolish in spending what
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Also consider what a small business is and how it's "wealth" is created (and what its wealth is).
Yes, income is meaningless for everything but cash flow...
Gentrification Map (Score:4, Informative)
This gentrification map shows the underlying cause to rising prices:
http://www.urbandisplacement.o... [urbandisplacement.org]
I live in the purple strip between San Jose/Sunnyvale. In the last 5 years, house prices (in that area) have gone up 30-50%. In my own neighborhood, 4 houses were demolished to the ground and completely new homes were built in their place (in the last 12 months). Most of these 'modest' homes sold for 1.5 million+. My guess is they would sell for 200-300k in less-demand-areas.
Basic/Minimum considerations (Score:2)
And that's why (Score:2)
"In Costly Bay Area, Even Six-Figure Salaries Are Considered 'Low Income' "
And that's one key reason why I won't live there (among many, many other reasons).
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Which decision is that? Living in San Francisco? Having a low end job?
I'm all for personal responsibility, but do you have any idea what a simple 1200 SqFt home goes for in this place? If you make 100K you are not going to be making the mortgage payments on that small single family residence...
Personally, I'd move (and I did just that because used to live there), but I get that some folks don't feel as free to flee California and the liberal wasteland of absolutely Democratic controlled governments.
Re:Poor life decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really need to turn this into a rant about a 'liberal wasteland...'. San Francisco is expensive because people want to live there. Period. Democratic controlled governments have nothing to do with it other than either
1. contributing to the desirability of the places - whether you care to believe that or not.
or
2. being elected by the people who chose to live there for some other reason - which is more or less the same thing.
Now it's quite possible that the residents of San Francisco and New York are deluded about how desirable those cities are. And maybe they'd all be happier in the sun belt - though I doubt it.
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To be fair though, san fran could do some things to lower the cost of housing, like allowing for larger apartment building to be built and such. I'm not a fan of this "democratic cities" bullshit either but in this case they are making some decisions that are in some ways making the situation worse. Not like it would be cheep overnight if they did things differently, but it might slow the growth rate of the average persons rent.
Re:Poor life decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
Liberal or Conservative doesn't matter, many places put up barriers to more affordable housing, high rises and the like. The affluent like their views and large estates and will put up regulatory barriers to prevent the hoi pollio from moving into "their" neighborhoods. See Cape Cod residents fighting off shore wind generation because it will mess with their precious view or Gated Communities etc.
The Hamptons make it almost impossible for new construction due to minimum lot sizes and other methods to keep out affordable housing.
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NYC only became desirable after Giuliani cracked down on crime, littering, squeegee guys, and got rid of the red light district around times square. After that people started to move back into the city and rents soared even higher.
https://www.brickunderground.c... [brickunderground.com]
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Don't forget Cali is about to go bankrupt,
Lol? And I thought SFers smoked a lot of weed.
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Don't forget Cali is about to go bankrupt, as is San Francisco. Just wait and see how "desirable" it is when it's in receivership. (Have a look at Detroit and how it died for how this goes down). It's going to get a lot worse and a lot more expensive before it gets better there. Was I the only one who saw the mass robbery on BART the last few days? Desirable? Not on your life. I'll visit and see the sights, but I'm not staying there.
Pretty clear you *want* this to be the case, but you couldn't be more wrong. CA is one of the largest economies in the *world*. Detroit died because the one and only industry behind it went in the crapper. The tech industry isn't quite in the same boat.
Was I the only one who saw the mass robbery on BART the last few days? Desirable? Not on your life. I'll visit and see the sights, but I'm not staying there.
OMFG you saw a news story about CRIME in San Francisco? Say it isn't so!
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CA is in debt up to it's eyeballs, beyond it's ability to tax enough to stay solvent. It may be a big economic engine, but the state and local governments are running on fumes. Eventually bankruptcy will happen, and a whole bunch of folks in Cali will be left paying the price by loosing their retirements, government services and welfare programs they depend on..
I've seen the tax rates... I know why companies are leaving the state in droves, many heading to places like Texas (where I live). t may take awhil
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I'm all for personal responsibility, but do you have any idea what a simple 1200 SqFt home goes for in this place?
In this overcrowded space, 1200 SqFt dedicated to your use is NOT simple, that is a Luxurious home that only the rich can afford. The price is high BECAUSE the demand is high. The simple answer is: Eventually the cost will be so high that you're financially justified in spending more $$$ on commuting, telecommuting, or working someplace else.
High demand and low available space EQUALS
PSA (Score:2)
Come to Illinois, but the rural areas.
Your neighbors will be Republican but the state votes to the Democrat side because of Chicago.
But don't move to Chicago, it's expensive there.
Re:Poor life decisions (Score:5, Informative)
If I were to buy a home here, I'd probably put about 65% of my take home income towards it each month. I could afford it and pay for all my other expenses, but there'd be nothing left to put into savings, so the only 'saving' I'm doing is building home equity. That's not 'poor' but not normally a financial situation associated with people making six digit salaries.
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Half the homes in Santa Clara County are above $1m (and half are below that). If you are a single income household making around $100K, you will find it increasingly difficult to purchase an average home in Silicon Valley. The rents and home values in the rest of the Bay Area tend to follow along with the South Bay's increases.
For me, my below average home in Silicon Valley is preferable to a bigger home elsewhere. Weather is nice, lots of things I like to do nearby, and good job prospects.
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I guess we'll just not have anyone serving us in any of our supermarkets or restaurants then.
Re:Poor life decisions (Score:4, Insightful)
which will drive more people out and will make the housing market more affordable
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SF? Restaurants staffed by robot waiters and groceries delivered by Amazon drones. Gourmet, of course.
Re:Poor life decisions (Score:5, Informative)
For the same reason as the SanFranciscans on high wages are subsidizing Tennessee's shitty economy. Remember - CA is a net contributor to the US economy, it takes out less from the tax pool than it puts in.
Re:Poor life decisions (Score:4)
For the same reason as the SanFranciscans on high wages are subsidizing Tennessee's shitty economy. Remember - CA is a net contributor to the US economy, it takes out less from the tax pool than it puts in.
Consider how totally jacked up government is when you take that statement and combine it with California's state and local governments being heavily in debt.
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Remember - CA is a net contributor to the US economy, it takes out less from the tax pool than it puts in.
A nit but "the economy" is not the same as "the federal government."
(Yet.)
Every state contributes to the economy. I'm pretty sure it's mathematically impossible for every state to receive more federal outlays than they contribute, even using Political Fuzzy Math.
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Let me google that for you
https://wallethub.com/edu/stat... [wallethub.com]
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Did you even try to look before your insane babbling? It was literally on the first link from the first search I tried.
Re:Poor life decisions (Score:5, Informative)
you realize Tennessee takes in way more federal money than it pays out, and that California does exactly the opposite right? Like it or not these economic centers are the engine that keeps this country running. The tax dollars they pay go to supporting the people of Tennessee and other states.
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For instance the coast guard isn't protecting Tennessee
I'm usually polite on Facebook, but this comment is inane.
If CA were a separate country and had to support their own Coast Guard, there would just be another national border along the California border with the US, and you'd be patrolling that instead. It is indeed in Tennessee's best interests to help pay for the cost of patrolling national borders.
But the main reason this comment is so stupid is that Tennessee also depends on the Coast Guard, as they operate on the Mississippi River and other large bodies
Re:Poor life decisions (Score:5, Insightful)
yeah, it really sucks the way people want to live in the places where their employment options are the greatest. What a bunch of entitled assholes
Except (Score:5, Informative)
California is one of those states that send more money to the Feds then they get back SOOOOO Tennessee dollars aren't going to California to subsidize those California people getting section 8 vouchers other Californians are doing the subsidizing.
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Oak Ridge National Laboratory in TN receives federal money for an employee working offsite CA. TN gets dinged for the receiving tax dollars. CA gets to claim the employees federal taxes as paid to the government.
You have no idea how things work.
No ORNL employee would be working off-site in CA. They might go to a conference for a few days each year, but that's about it. ORNL has facilities, and ORNL staff use and maintain them. In Tennessee.
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Why on earth should the federal taxes of someone making $80k in Tennessee subsidize the housing of someone making $80k in SF?
They shouldn't. The net flow of funding is from CA to TN, not the other way around. Nit picking the details is political, not economic.
Re:Poor life decisions (Score:5, Interesting)
Or you know, people were born and raised and schooled and have all their family and friends and careers in a place and just would like to not be forced out of it. Like the 30 million or so people, 10% of Americans, who were born in California where the average income may be 20% higher but the average home price is 200% higher. Those tens of millions of people should all just move so far away it may as well be another country -- just like all the poor in the UK should all move to Russia where they can afford to live, right? Population sizes, areas, and distances there are all comparable to California vs midwest.
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In my experience, God's faithful believers are happy in flyover country, and their primary political concerns are that they don't want their nice little corner of the world to turn into San Francisco or Detroit, and that they don't want to be taxed in order to pay for the lifestyles of the "hedon
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If that were true, then the coastal states would be conservative and lobby for lower federal taxes and spending while fly over country would be liberal and lobby for higher federal taxes and spending. But it isn't true, which is also why you see the opposite ideological distribution.
You're welcome to try to scare up some data to support tha
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Well, it could. I mean, the three letters agencies have spy planes don't they?
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Hey its cheap though you could buy a damn nice house here for what you pay in rent in the SF bay area.
Living in "Fly over country" does have its advantages.
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yeah, but if you believe some of these idiots then renting and always moving is the way to go because you can put money away in retirement funds and be a gazillonaire when you retire
of course it will all be spent on rent in retirement, but that's cause these people are idiots
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I live in Kansas too I've seen some real nice houses in the $250k-$500k range with all sorts of things though my favorite had a private lake.
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What if its deserved condescension?
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You're right. While people do live in "flyover country", it pales in comparison to where the majority of Americans live.
http://www.citylab.com/design/... [citylab.com]
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Because of our federal system, they have an outsized per person vote. Thus they cry a lot.
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Have you ever thought how terrible of a statement "fly over country" is? Seriously stop and think for a minute about what that actually means, and what a really condescending statement it is.
Maybe the precious snowflakes in flyover country should learn that whole sticks and stones game.
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It means that it's a place that I usually fly over to get to one of the two more civilized places in the US. There's really nothing in the middle of the US except for Chicago and a few sized-cities. There's little culture, economy, or population to speak of.
I grew up in flyover territory, but have lived on both coasts, as well as in Chicago.
The poster is correct. The mid-west is a barren landscape as far as culture goes. Even in the cities.
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Wonderful national and state parks to spend the weekend
But do you have a wonderful telephone system? ;)
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It will be good to buy when the bubble pops. Assuming it is a bubble and not your own wishful thinking.
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It will be good to buy when the bubble pops. Assuming it is a bubble and not your own wishful thinking.
I'm waiting for rental prices to pop downward in Silicon Valley. My 50-year-old apartment complex is half-empty. The last time that happened was after the dot com bust (2001) and great recession (2009). A new apartment complex down the street opened Phase III of their development that isn't filling up and Phase II is schedule to open soon. New apartment buildings up and down the light rail lines are being built.
Re:Did someone say bubble!? (Score:4, Interesting)
If there is an offer to purchase the complex, then perhaps they are aiming to empty it out to some threshold (50%?) in order to evict the remaining tenants and renovate or demolish the building. You might be able to make an inquiry to see if anything has passed through planning, you might be looking at yet another mixed use upscale apartment-retail center like Santana Row, Rivermark, Homewood, Meridian at Midtown, etc.
I suspect a lot are condos being snatched up by foreign investors, yet are unoccupied. Which does smell of a bubble. My hope is that it's foreign investors that get soaked this time and not Bay Area locals.
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If there is an offer to purchase the complex, then perhaps they are aiming to empty it out to some threshold (50%?) in order to evict the remaining tenants and renovate or demolish the building.
My 50-year-old apartment complex had three or four corporate owners in the last five or six years. Each one came in with the brilliant idea to redo the landscaping, slap a new coat of exterior paint, and charge "luxury" rental rate. The current corporate owner is actually renovating the apartments, as repeated landscaping and painting didn't work for the previous corporate owners. New residents are paying the same "luxury" rental rate that the brand new apartment complex down the street is charging. Accordi
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According to economic theory, an older apartment complex should be charging less rent to compete with a new apartment complex. That's not happening.
Sometimes greedy investors are stupid, buy a complex for way too much, and eventually lose a lot of money. Their only way out is to find someone who has the same grand ideas, and pass the property off at cost and write the improvements off as a loss. Improvements cost them very little in the long run as they are depreciated on taxes, and can be written off as a loss at sale.
My apartment complex is down the street from but not directly on the light rail line. Old warehouses up and down the light rail lines are being torn down for mixed developments. Many of them already under construction.
That kind of mixed development has gotten really popular with city planners, so they are approved right away. We'll see more and more o
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It isn't a bubble. it is the full extent of the Reality Distortion Field. This is why people in Bay Area have a very distorted view of the rest of the country, you know, people in "fly over country" who are nothing but rubes and hicks. They won't move, because they can't fathom living on 75K a year, when they are virtually poor making $150K. They think 4000-5000 mo House Payments is "normal".
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As a Michigander who moved to the Bay Area, I have to say it's all relative. And the Bay Area has multiple urban centers that I find way more pleasant than the ones I had access to in Michigan. And for living in the country, I would much rather have a small hillside vineyard or a forested mountain cabin here in California than most of the boggy swampland turned into farmland that I grew up with in Michigan.
That said, the fishing and hunting is way better in Michigan than California and I do miss it.
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Rent isn't the only thing that's inflated.
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The math is a little off...
In California you have:
$150k - (28% fed avg taxes, 9% state avg taxes) = 94,500 - (5000*12) = $34,500
In Oregon you have:
$75k - (25% fed avg taxes, 0% state tax) = 56,250 - (1000*12) = 44,250
The argument could very well be made that neither $34k in California or $44k in Oregon is "poor", but the point is that $75k in Oregon nets you more disposable income after tax then $150k does in California.
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It's always a bubble.