All dwarfed in comparison to the mortgage. All except income taxes do not scale. It doesn’t matter whether you make a thousand dollars a month or ten thousand, you’re still going to be paying the same amount for heat, electricity, gas, insurance, etc. And the corner store will still charge the same amount for a loaf of bread. Even after taxes, they’re still swimming in dough - maybe $6,000 a month after tax & mortgage. They have no grounds to complain, nor any grounds to pretend they are “lower middle class”.
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Yeah, that’s completely nuts. The combination of huge income inequality and monstrous housing costs in the Bay Area have totally destroyed any ability to define “middle class.” (Palo Alto, doubly so - that’s a very high income/hugely expensive housing market area, so just living there means you’re rich these days, except for older generations who bought their houses many decades back.) That 1/3 income rule isn’t true for most people here. A few years back at work, my co-workers were musing about what class they were. Anywhere else they were solidly middle class, but they were completely unable to buy a home, and too much of their income went to rent. (Renting even a modest apartment was out of reach for some of us, even in the cheapest parts of the Bay Area.) Some pointed out that although a definition of “middle class” traditionally involved being able to buy a home, in the Bay Area at this point, doing so meant one was “rich.”
Even if that’s not the case, if the definition of “middle class” does involve being able to buy a home, as you say, some of those people aren’t remotely “middle class,” much less “lower middle class.”
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yeah man - I think we need to define middle class in a way other than income. it probably means decent school district 4 bedroom house w/ two cars and a garage, 1 vaca a year, perhaps including dual income in their…300k or 400k is great but it isn’t getting you to the bentley/ferrari dealer every other weekend.
This is rich. A group of people who get paid quite a lot, use that money to bid-up the price of housing assets, and in turn, make decisions to preserve the value of those housing assets (like, not building anything that would affect commute times or house poors). All of a sudden, nobody can figure out why $400K doesn’t go as far as it used to… why, that must mean we all slid into the middle class overnight!
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yeah but what is the alternative? living on a farm making minimum wage?
As with most California problems, Prop 13 bears some amount of blame. I can’t wait until we repeal that bish.
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repeal Prop 13., which incentivises certain kinds of housing choices
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build more housing
There’s a lot of other marginal fixes, like the proposal to exchange Level of Service with Vehicle Miles Traveled in the CEQA that are steps toward #2.
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Oh, that’s it?
or we do like the prez says and grow the economy so we’re all winning until we’re sick of winning!
let’s be cereal for a min. life sucks. working harder (maybe w/ luck added) and getting a higher salary and ergo higher expectations etc…does not guarantee you an unhappy life. and working at a less demanding less lucrative profession and living with less constraints financially doesn’t guarantee you a happy life. that’s why their are so many millionaires and poor people self medicating.
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Of course, in terms of economic class, they might be correct, but they’re more probably working class.
Oh, sure, they’re well paid working people, but unless they have an ownership stake - unless they derive their income from their ownership of the company, then they’re still just workers like the rest of us. They’re still at risk of losing their income as soon as they are no longer useful to the company, they still have to get up every morning and spend their lives generating profit for the owners, and what they have still has to be worked for.
At a push, some of the wealthiest could actually be middle class. The private contractors with their own businesses, the top managers who get paid to do the “power” bit that our diffuse owners now delegate, but that’s still just petty bourgeoisie. The ownership class doesn’t even start until you can live off of other people’s work, when interest and dividends give you an income that’s enough to live on without working.
So sure, people on $400k wages are well-off. They’ve got longer chains and big McMansion cages. But that’s still nothing compared to the extreme concentrated intergenerational wealth at the top. That’s where the real concentrations of power and actual privilege are. And it’s so extreme that it’s difficult to comprehend. The example person earning $400k puts them at the bottom of the top 1% in income. But income is really unequally distributed within that 1%, and wealth (especially income-bearing wealth) is even more unequal. These people think they’re part of the middle , because the top is just so far off the scale it distorts everyone’s perceptions.
Or to paraphrase Chris Rock- Sure, these people on $400k are rich. But the guys who are hiring them- the ones who can employ rich people and sign their cheques every month. They’re wealthy.
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The first item is incredibly hard, particularly because Prop 13 was motivated by racial animus. I’m not making any claims otherwise. This is why people distort reality to fit themselves into the middle class, rather than acknowledge their agency as upper class people who could be working to repeal Prop 13.
You do know that your average $1M dwelling in Palo Alto has less than 1000 sq ft, right?
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Income inequality has really ended up fucking everyone over. There was a case a while back where Palo Alto’s planning commissioner, who had a day job as a corporate senior legal council and was married to an engineer, publicly talked about moving because they were unable to live in the area affordably. Their point was that if even they couldn’t afford to live there, everyone else was fucked.
People do have a perverse tendency to judge their class by those around them, regardless of how wealthy they are. I’ve read about people living elsewhere making $500k+ who thought of themselves as “poor” because the people around them were bringing in millions a year. Plus, it seems like everyone in America likes to think of themselves as “middle class” - from multi-millionaires to those below the poverty line. Poverty is seen as a failure (that can’t be acknowledged) but Americans are also oddly reluctant to admit to wealth - in part because there are those with more, but also, I suspect, because then they’d have to admit their privilege and obligations to others.
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Fair point. I was neglecting exactly how crazy house prices are there.
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Yeah, I’ve got to concur with the “people are talking about social class, not economic class” point. Middle class and upper class are cultures at least as much as income brackets. A master plumber or electrician or contractor with enough employees might be making many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year but justly consider themselves working class, while a teach making <$30k might justly consider themselves middle class.
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This was the comment I was hoping to see and agree with. Why is everyone around here talking about being able to afford whatever kind of house. I wouldn’t consider someone “middle class” unless they owned several properties around the world and maybe a private jet. These are the people who, like purplecat states, actually have some power. Think you’re upper class? Better have a few judges or even a senator in your pocket.
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Property tax scales with the cost of housing, which is probably the most ridiculously inflated part of the high cost of living in the Bay Area. (Unless you’ve been living here since before the boom and locked into paying property taxes on a much lower valuation thanks to Prop 13…)
That is, if you can afford to own your home. I bet many, if not most, of the people in question are renting.
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