Why do we have a system that financially discourages dense concentrations of smart, productive, inventive people?
It seems the market encourages people to avoid doing anything that would make their community attractive.
The Places in America Where Most Income Goes to Rent
71–80 of 154 posts
Re: The Places in America Where Most Income Goes to Rent
#7270% of rentable units in San Francisco are rent-controlled. I know many very high paid people who pay well below “market rate” for their apartments. If you do it right you can live in SF for less than many “cheaper” cities and yet make much more money.
Rent controlled or rent stabilized? Because those are two very different things and I can find no evidence of the former being true.
Re: The Places in America Where Most Income Goes to Rent
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capitol Hill last year I was paying $3200/mo for a mediocre 1br. These prices seem accurate. Studios downtown are pushing $2000. 2br are pushing $4000. Check Zillow. I now live 9ish miles outside of the city and pay $2000 less for a 1br rental condo with an actual yard I can garden in, and patio.
I find it highly improbable that your 1br was mediocre for $3200/month. The only place you can even find 1br rents that high is in brand-spanking-new buildings with tons of amenities and huge unit sizes. For another data point, I have rented a respectable (1985+ wood frame building) 2br for the past two years for $1595/month total in Capitol Hill. You can find many places for cheap during the December-February time p…
It was pretty mediocre for $3200. It was a newer building that had a movie room that was always broken, and a small gym, but nothing crazy; most complexes have these now. No balcony, no AC, on Broadway with all kinds of crime.
My 1br condo by the airport is larger, comes with a large storage room, built in the 60's but remodeled in 2017, yard, patio, and I'm paying only $1000.
You can probably find 1br for $2000 in Cap Hill if you want to live in an older building.
Re: The Places in America Where Most Income Goes to Rent
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the norm? Fewer, or more bedrooms than two?
If you are a family or couple renting a 2BR, you probably have more than one income earner. Exception to this case would be a single parent with children, but that rate is not especially high. And smaller households (i.e., just a couple, or a single mother and one child, etc.) are not especially likely to get a 2BR. If you are a single person with a single income, you are not renting a 2BR. You might have a roommate,…
> If you are a family or couple renting a 2BR, you probably have more than one income earner. Exception to this case would be a single parent with children
Or a married couple with children and a stay at home parent. Or a working adult and their non-SS-eligible (e.g., immigrated too late in life to get the needed work credits) elderly parent that they care for. Or...
> If you are a single person with a single income, you are not renting a 2BR.
You might for a home office, especially if you do a kind of work from home that involves substantial paperwork and reference material, not just a simple workstation.
Re: The Places in America Where Most Income Goes to Rent
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two parents, one working, seems pretty common to me.
From my experience, this is incredibly uncommon in the northeast. I only know one couple like that in NY, and she has a large enough trust fund that neither one of them really needs to work at all. Every other couple with children that I know actually living in the cities are 2 income households. The same holds for everyone I know in Boston.
> The same holds for everyone I know
It is a mistake to assume that this justifies conclusions about the general population.
Re: The Places in America Where Most Income Goes to Rent
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you are a family or couple renting a 2BR, you probably have more than one income earner. Exception to this case would be a single parent with children, but that rate is not especially high. And smaller households (i.e., just a couple, or a single mother and one child, etc.) are not especially likely to get a 2BR. If you are a single person with a single income, you are not renting a 2BR. You might have a roommate,…
If you're in a major city, this is probably a safe assumption, but there are plenty of areas where an extra bedroom is a pretty modest expense. A few years ago I had a nice 2 bedroom apartment right off the campus of a major midwest college for $900 a month - I had a nice king sized bed in the bedroom, and a man cave room with a gaming rig and music gear. It's one of the advantages of living outside of the biggest ci…
Or if you live in an outer neighborhood of a big city.
I have a 2br in Chicago and its very affordable on one income
Re: The Places in America Where Most Income Goes to Rent
#77I'm genuinely curious why they bothered publishing this in its current state. They don't make tax calculations, so they assume you're paying rent with untaxed income, which makes the comparison all but meaningless.
Absolutely. It's completely worthless in it's current state. Also, the rent jungle numbers look a bit conservative for palo alto. In PA a 220 sq ft loft costs nearly 2000$/mo to rent. I think the 3900$/mo figure they have is a bit conservative for PA. Furthermore, they compared 2BD as their normalization factor, rather than $/sq foot. I would imagine the more expensive areas get less Square footage for a given 2BD ap…
The housing numbers look poorly researched in general. Sunnyvale for example is not that hard to find a 2 bedroom apartment for under $3k - I'm paying $2700 a month myself for one with over 1k sqft and modern appliances.
Re: The Places in America Where Most Income Goes to Rent
#78I'm genuinely curious why they bothered publishing this in its current state. They don't make tax calculations, so they assume you're paying rent with untaxed income, which makes the comparison all but meaningless.
They also weirdly assume you have a 2BR on a single income, which is not the norm.
Is it not the norm? It certainly was until quite recently.
A young family with one breadwinner and a couple of small kids might reasonably want to live in a 2BR, in many countries not just USA.
Re: The Places in America Where Most Income Goes to Rent
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a better way to rend in places where that's affordable ;)
Not on a single income, though.
Definitely doable if you're not in places where real estate has gone completely bonkers. There are lots of places where it isn't unreasonable to rent an entire house on a single income, even though most incomes there are fractions of a Bay Area salary.
Re: The Places in America Where Most Income Goes to Rent
#80I'm genuinely curious why they bothered publishing this in its current state. They don't make tax calculations, so they assume you're paying rent with untaxed income, which makes the comparison all but meaningless.
While that would be much more useful, factoring in state/federal/city taxes including brackets is going to be very high effort in comparison to what was done here.