81–90 of 154 posts
I'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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A booster's 2 cents: Yes, Texas's lack of income tax (and Detroit's city income tax) would certainly catapult Dallas ahead of Detroit on this list if taxes were properly factored in. Detroit is sort of a well-known "sleeper" city that "might be nice to live in someday", but I think word will get out sooner than later that it's got a lot of livability advantages right now. Great arts/food/drink scenes, 4 major sports…
I used to live pretty near Detroit, and, honestly, most of those things don't ring true to me. As far as housing goes, if you work in Detroit, you can easily live in between Detroit and Ann Arbor and get a much better deal on housing. Speaking of Ann Arbor, why not just live there, if proximity to the university is important? And I'm not sure how you can count the Lions as a "major sports team." ;) (kidding on that o…
The winters are rather cold, with quite a lot of snow and gray skies for months. Winter bleeds so far into spring. I remember years as a kid, where we'd get a foot of snow in Mid April. We lived just outside Metro Detroit, and I grew up there in the 90's/Early 00's...
Earlier 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,…
Two parents, one working, seems pretty common to me.
The analysis comparing cities is just (mean salary - mean rent), which is going to make places with high income inequality look better than they are for most people. I'd like to see the 10%, 50% (median), and 90% quantiles for (after-tax salary - housing cost). I bet the rankings would be quite different depending on which of these you chose.
We know that income is generally power-law distributed, so we also know that the majority of incomes will be below the mean. An analysis like this is bordering on nonsensical. It's too sensitive to outliers to be useful, in my opinion.
A worked example: the median income per capita in Boston is $37,288[1] and there are 685,094 residents. The total income of people in Boston is then 685094*$37288 = $25,545,785,072. According to [2], Tim Cook's total compensation was $377 million in 2013. If Tim Cook moved to Boston, the mean per capita income would rise from $37,288 to ((25545785072+377000000)/(685094+1)) = $37,838. One person moving can make a 2% difference in mean income by moving to a top 25 city in the US, nevermind any of the smaller cities on that list.
1 = https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/bostoncitymassa...
2 = https://www.therichest.com/rich-list/world/top-10-people-wit...
70% 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.
How do you "do it right?"
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I used to live pretty near Detroit, and, honestly, most of those things don't ring true to me. As far as housing goes, if you work in Detroit, you can easily live in between Detroit and Ann Arbor and get a much better deal on housing. Speaking of Ann Arbor, why not just live there, if proximity to the university is important? And I'm not sure how you can count the Lions as a "major sports team." ;) (kidding on that o…
As someone who grew up in Michigan, left, and visits familiy regularly throughout the year...I can't imagine anyone thinking the weather is desirable. Like pmiller2 said, summers are humid af, 80-90%, on a regular basis with 80-95 temps just isn't enjoyable. The winters are rather cold, with quite a lot of snow and gray skies for months. Winter bleeds so far into spring. I remember years as a kid, where we'd get a fo…
I'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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
70% 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.
How do you "do it right?"
Detroit has a bad reputation because their economy failed. But put 50,000 high paying tech jobs there, that problem would look very different.