121–130 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.
In any place where incumbent landlords are protected from competition, rents will naturally rise to consume all available money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> From my experience
> the general population.
I've already qualified my comment, and both of us were discussing personal experiences.
If you'd prefer to discuss the general population instead of trading personal experiences, here is some historical data from pew, as well as the most recent report from the BLS:
http://www.pewresearch.org/ft_dual-income-households-1960-20...
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/famee.pdf
This shows that my experience is closer to the general population than the experience I responded to. I'd venture a guess that the distribution of that ~62% isn't uniform across the country and is likely weighted by cost of living (which is likely why our experiences differ).
Really surprised to see Detroit that high on the list. I kind of wonder what the relative availability of jobs in Detroit is vs, say, Dallas or Chicago (which offer some significant lifestyle advantages over Detroit). It would also have been a much better comparison if some approximation of state and local income taxes were factored in.
Detroit is in a hype bubble, I think (sauce: lived there for a bit). You can absolutely pay $2,000 for an apartment in a part of town with some blown-out buildings nearby and nothing much to walk to. Why you’d do that, I don’t know, but you can. There are jobs if you wanna work for GM or Quicken Loans, but that’s about it. There are affordable rents there, but what you save in rent you pay in car insurance. Michigan…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much of that is influenced by economic necessity? My wife would love nothing more than to raise the kids but making ends meet is proving a tough tradeoff
Unsure. But equality is one factor. At least where I live women outnumber men at universities - meaning that if one partner in the relation has an "important career", it's very soon going to be more often the mother. Another factor is rents and house prices. If everyone you are competing with for that house can pay the mortgage on two incomes, you aren't going to afford it on one. So that's economic necessity I guess…
You can't logically conclude that based on that one data point.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I just want to add that the rent doesn't scale proportionately to number of bedrooms. E.g. a 1BR in San Jose where I live goes for $2100/mo, a 2BR goes for $2400 (obviously, it's different everywhere - a friend of mine is renting a room in SF for $2K+). It makes sense for a couple to get a 2BR even on a single income if it's good enough (and usually, once you can afford spending $2100/mo on rent, you can afford $2400…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you "do it right?"
Make sure you already live in San Francisco and use the government to cap out your rent to the detriment of literally everyone else.
Use the laws supposedly made for poor people, and use them at your advantage (like most of the wealthy do).
Also yell and pretend high and clear that you want to help the poor.
In any place where incumbent landlords are protected from competition, rents will naturally rise to consume all available money.
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.
Absolutely this. 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 = $2…