Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/07/24/silicon-valley-families-making.html
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My prediction for SF sidewalks in the future: Feces. Human feces everywhere.
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Trillionaires in Zimbabwe used to be considered low income, too.
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I would like to see the standard of living and build quality of those homes. My impression of architecture in the US is that it’s mostly facade.
BTW, trailer parks full of people earning more than 100k - do they already exist? Something like a gated community trailer park?
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Drive down the main streets of Burlingame or Mountain View and you see the streets lined with RVs like this:
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Not sure if you’re serious, but here goes.
This data includes all kinds of homes. New build, old build, detached, attached, single-family, condo. Any home at all.
If there were enough open space for a trailer park in one of these cities, it would be hard to convince the landowner not to “develop” the land into the densest quote-luxury-unquote housing allowed by local ordinance.
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I’m not surprised, but still…
I’ve got a friend in the bay area, and I think I need to ask what they are paying for their home. This all feels really ridiculous, given the fact that many of those tech companies work on methods which make physical appearance at a certain locations at least not obligatory…
@Neovison.vison, I was serious. Giving the median is already a bit better than just the mean, but a bit more information would be needed to understand what is happening. Got some boxplots? 
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Demand by high income earners is only half of the story. Low supply at the same time is a recipe for bidding wars.
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The article blames the rise in housing costs on Silicon Valley tech employees, which is certainly a contributing factor. But it leaves out the main driving force. Foreign investors either looking to hide money from their home government and/or seeking citizenship through the US Citizenship Investment Program.
A solution might be instituting a program similar to the one in Vancouver BC. They put a 15% tax on all sales to foreign home buyers and within a few months prices dropped by over 20%.
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The CBS story cited is from June 26th, and says “A report out this week from the Department of Housing and Urban Development finds …” So I looked at the HUD press releases from that time frame and couldn’t tell what report they were talking about. So I’m basing my assertions on CBS’s source for their infographic, ATTOM Data’s Q2 2018 US Home Affordability Report, which has a whole methodology section, including definitions of terms. They do make you dig for these things, don’t they?
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House prices in Vancouver are up 16% this year alone. The mean sale price is just over CAD 1 million CAD and expected to get much higher now that Amazon are coming to town.
Though how much of the new build is actually occupied is a good question - entire blocks of flats that are apparently sold seem to have no one living in them. And the supply of 18 year old Chinese students with a couple of million dollars to invest in a property appears to be bottomless.
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Supply of housing is very constrained (intentionally it seems). And it is a unique problem to have WAY TOO MANY high tech/high pay jobs and more being made every day. The pay scales and options make for a very high income per capita.
It was like that when I moved in the mid 80s and even more so now. We bought in Bernal when there was still a dirt road (SFFD made me pave it over since the trucks couldn’t reach everywhere). We put a ton of sweat equity and real $ into improving the place (it had just the right amount of ‘cat pee’ my measure of ‘fixitup-ness’). I moved out to be at the epicenter of the tech wave. Worked for me! Didn’t hurt that I met a lovely lady and settled down ASAP. =`M
I’d love to make a few tiny homes and retire up in the Russian River area.
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Not just Burlingame or MV; I’ve seen it happening in the East Bay, along with the ever growing ‘tent cities.’
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Maybe I’ve been here too long, but $935,000 average doesn’t sound right- there are too many places going for over $2M around me. $935k median, maybe.
Re: mobile home parks. I guess they’re still affordable- there was an article a number of months (years?) ago that pointed out the incongruity of seeing luxury cars at trailer parks, but it was people making the decision to spend their money on the car, not the home.
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Me, too. I’m under the impression that prices are going up there, too, though. Maybe we’re looking at further North; Cloverdale?
Still a dirt road! I seem to recall learning that the last reported horse theft in San Francisco was in 1977 or so. San Francisco used to have a little bit of a play in the joints. No longer.
There’s dormitory living for middle class+ people in San Francisco. They’ve literally renovated old single-occupancy hotels in the city that used to be filled with guys on welfare with mental health and substance dependency issues, turning them into affordable housing for people making 100k.
Outside San Francisco and high income cities like Palo Alto, it’s not quite so bad, yet still completely unaffordable. In my neighborhood in the South Bay, which has traditionally been a low income, high-crime, “gang neighborhood,” a one-story house on a modest lot around the corner sold for a million dollars. A tiny one bedroom across the street sold for something in excess of $600K to a woman and her sister, but it’s an old house and pretty much a tear-down. They paid that largely for the (small) lot, because they’re both planning to live there with the woman’s two children, and there’s no way they could all fit in the existing structure.
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Yes. There’s one in Malibu, CA I know about. Caitlyn Jenner (formerly Bruce) lived there.
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