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Pedantic note. You probably mean mean (or mode) vs median. They are all different types of averages (amongst others).
I'm guessing OP did in fact mean median, since the point is that outliers at the top can really skew the mean. Median gives a more realistic idea of what people are typically earning.
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Oh, 100%. We need to incentivize affordable housing. It should be in the developers interest to house as many as possible rather than as lushly as possible (until we're all comfortably housed.)
How? Why would a developer want to lose money housing as many people as possible? At the end of the day your looking to sell or rent for the highest $ per SQ FT possible in your market, with the least amount of risk. If your rent to 50 @ $500, your gross monthly rent income is 25,000. If you rent to 10 @ 2,500 you have the same totals. You are much less profitable with 50 units @ $500 because of maintenance/repairs,…
There is a pressing and urgent need for more housing, but there is also a huge eviction crisis in those same cities.
So what can we do?
Public housing/Public funding for housing -- fund both capital and operations publicly, paying developers more to incentivize building non-luxury units.
Tax empty units -- Taxing units that are empty reduces speculation in homes. It should not be financially possible to buy housing and leave it empty as a way to store value.
Rent Control -- Limiting rent increases tenant control over a neighborhood, limiting the amount of speculation and acting like a bit of a brake on market rate.
Build More -- Upzoning, especially with regulations that require more units per lot and require moving tenants to equivalent units while construction is ongoing. It's no good to tear down a bunch of townhouses and put in an apartment building with the same number of units.
Eliminate minimum parking -- Parking takes a massive amount of space. Especially in an urban core. Use that space for housing people not cars.
Decommodify Housing -- Make it less profitable to be a landlord. Give tenants right of first refusal in the sale of their buildings, form housing coops, guarantee tenants representation in legal battles, create stricter laws around evictions. If it's less appealing to treat housing like a commodity, it's easier to push for housing as a right. All of these things are about making small chips away from the power of landlords to extract rents.
Affordable Foreclosure Insurance -- Insurance helps ensure people can stay in their homes, upkeep their homes, and continue to contribute to the neighborhood. Reduces the amount of home flipping pushing prices upwards.
Community Land Trusts -- There are groups that buy land/houses and sell/rent them at below market rates (with the rider that the property must be sold later at below market rates.) In Seattle, for example: http://www.homesteadclt.org/ By putting downward pressure on market rates, you further decommodify housing and make it easier to push for reforms that make the ROI better for housing more people rather than more luxuriously.
Stiffer Penalties for failing to upkeep apartments -- When apartments fall into disrepair, whole buildings need to be taken offline or people refuse to live there. Requiring high standards in maintaining apartments ensures that the housing we do have doesn't get taken out of circulation too early.
Edit: I'm assuming you asked in good faith. I don't think we need to do all of the above. I don't think we can do all of the above right away. But combinations of the above I think are achievable and could lead to better communities. Happy to discuss any of them more, provide more resources, etc.
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Alternatively, we could push to make housing not a commodity. Build more public housing, upzone and regulate what gets rebuilt to ensure more units, put laws in place to advantage renters, make building affordable units a higher roi than building luxury units, etc.
Or make housing a commodity. >make building affordable units a higher roi than building luxury units, etc. Every luxury unit that is built lessens the pressure on housing demand. So the key is: just build more housing.
That's true. We need to build more units. But for the price of one luxury unit we could have 1.N affordable units.
Also, building luxury units often displaces existing residents and replaces them. Yes that might be necessary, but it also should be humane -- it's not acceptable to just evict everyone on a block and shrug. We need to be aware of the impact of evicting families in the name of progress.
I used to work at Gravity. Dan (owner of Gravity) is sincere and frankly the real deal. Dan Price really is like what is presented in this article. He actually cares about his employees and is being genuine here. He's a good person, making a private business decision to increase the pay of frankly his lowest paid workers. In a city where the average tech worker earns $275k a year, he believes its the right thing to d…
>average tech worker earns $275k a year I need to move to bay area this year. thats my sole mission this year.
I think I remember reading that Americans, on average, have $700k saved up for retirement. When I dug further into the data, the median was many multiples less than that.
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I don't know why there is always this nitpick. I just take it for granted that when someone talks about tech "salaries" they mean "total comp". Virtually everyone in my peer group makes more than half of their total comp from non-salary compensation. Sure that portion varies somewhat due to market forces, but there seems little point in discussing base salaries.
Because Cash is king. Everything else can be taken away or reduced or diluted or what not.
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I'm curious where this poster got that figure. I haven't found anything like it, in fact a pretty consistent 145k average salary. I would also be wary of average vs. median, as there's some real crazy outliers out there.
I have a sister-in-law that I recently learned is making $275k in a tech job in Seattle. She has no college degree or formal training. She has just learned things on the job over the years. I was frankly astonished. That is more than double what I make as a senior software engineer 3 hours away in Portland.
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I'm guessing OP did in fact mean median, since the point is that outliers at the top can really skew the mean. Median gives a more realistic idea of what people are typically earning.
My comment was about "I would also be wary of average vs. median"
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Amazon/Microsoft TC, probably. Base salary is a different story.
I don't know why there is always this nitpick. I just take it for granted that when someone talks about tech "salaries" they mean "total comp". Virtually everyone in my peer group makes more than half of their total comp from non-salary compensation. Sure that portion varies somewhat due to market forces, but there seems little point in discussing base salaries.
Also, as others have pointed out, certain components of total compensation, like various forms of 'equity' in the employer company, are not reasonably equivalent to cash, and no one could feasibly evaluate the cash value at any particular moment in time given all of the relevant variables needed to even estimate those cash values.
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Replace Berlin with Toronto and you'd be just as correct. It's a concern that spans decades. https://www.cbc.ca/archives/the-last-days-of-toronto-s-low-r... — This article dates to the 80's and its tone is the very same. (Canada's lost sweetheart PM hopeful is interviewed in one of the videos when he was a Toronto city councilor. Such a loss. He really had his finger on the pulse)
so... where are the places that are experiencing the other trend? Where are the artists going to ? Where are the places that used to be rich, but are becoming "poor but sexy"?
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>and argued that it would make them lazy, I have hard time believing this.
Yeah, if you're making $70k and you could only get $40k elsewhere, you're probably going to work really really hard to not lose your job.