Living in a parking lot in Santa Barbara
latimes.com
latimes.com
If you are doing consulting that can be done remotely, live in Nevada and fly to California when you need. Flights are cheap and plentiful. If you're running or starting a web-based business, then you can run that from pretty much anywhere, and you'd be insane to do it in California with such a punitive tax system. There's just no point to living in California these days.
What on earth are you talking about? You live in the state that is in the top 5 for violent crime rates. California doesn't even break the top 15.
Statistically sound, factually accurate, but still Wyoming would feel safer.
You also need to factor in the type of crime. If the only people getting shot are gang members then the crime-rate won't feel as close to home.
There's an ocean, fantastic and constantly improving dining scene, beautiful people, the best national parks in the country, a gorgeous and diverse landscape, great weather that allows you to go skiing and surfing in the same day, arguably the best/tastiest crops and accompanying farmers markets in the nation, cultural attractions such as a top 5 symphony orchestra, iconic music venues, fully legalized marijuana, high quality illegal drugs from being right on the border, population diversity, high quality meetup groups (specifically thinking of BioCurious), and, most importantly, a high concentration of engineering talent.
That's not to mention the perks of living in a world class city. I get to demo things like Microsoft's HoloLens for free at a meetup at their Santa Monica campus, go to Hacker Nights at Riot Studios, attend a free presentation by Robert Sapolsky, watch SpaceX rocket launches and be a part of a very dense, helpful, and talented developer and entrepreneurial community.
The total compensation for the average engineer in LA is around $150k. I do this and work some side gigs. Maybe I can't afford private jets or a yacht, but I have very little material desires.
There is no amount of money that could convince me to spend the bulk of my time in the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Iowa, Arkansas, or any other place in the US that offers tax advantages outside of Florida. (No offense to anyone who lives there, it's just not for me).
I see and agree with your contention if you find most or all of the above meaningless. I did the whole big fish, small pond thing before in Michigan and didn't like it, but I see how others can appreciate the differences. It's downright arrogant to call anyone who chooses to live in California insane just because you're over it.
Pacifica was awesome because you're just a hill from the hustle and bustle but it felt like a detached town. So many nice people there. Hwy 1 is annoying at rush hour (or most hours) but it was a really nice community.
I don't like the term "Fake News" because journalism is alive and strong today, but the media certainly has its narratives and loves picking and choosing stories. The reality is just a lot more boring.
I suspect the person you're replying to may not have anywhere near the means you have.
Maybe the OP is only looking at the super low end of the market (will only rent a sub-$2000 per month 1-bed). No doubt those would be hard to lock down.
Note: While I am in the bay area, I am not in the SF-specific market.
I... disagree that upper middle income immigrants having a hard time says anything definitive about the situation of the local poor, at least in the bay area. There are lots of laws and rules made to benefit the poor long term residents at the expense of those upper-middle income newer immigrants.
My least-employed little brother works in a hardware store in San Francisco. He's got a beautiful rent-controlled apartment with an ocean view. Sure I have a lot more freedom than he does, in that I could get into a apartment around here, but... paying market rate for his apartment would be difficult even on my income. I mean, I could do it, but it would necessitate lifestyle changes.
California mostly charges you property tax based on what you paid originally for your house, which means that of the lower income people I know around here? more of them own or live with friends/family who own than rent.
I mean, I'm not saying that the poor don't have it hard... I am just pointing out that we have laws that help people who have been here for a long time, laws that seem to make things easier for the lower income, and laws that actively make life difficult for the new arrivals.
It’s entirely possible for someone who works in a wealthy person job (tech) to have a rent controlled apartment.
Or more likely, his anecdote is made-up because of his income. Alternatively, his income is made-up because of his anecdote.
It's not hard to find accommodation in SF (let alone the East Bay) with a $150k/yr income. Something is being exaggerated.
You are not middle class if:
- you will lose home, car if you are out of job for 6-10 months;
- you don't take 30 days vacation a year;
- you cannot afford health services without going to debt;
- you cannot send your kids to university;
- your diet is mostly junk food because you can't afford fresh stuff.
If some of the above is true, you are poor.
The vast majority of people in Canada, Australia, Western Europe, etc. would be disgusted by how much "middle class" Americans work, how little vacation they get and how much they get for their tax dollars.
In the eyes of virtually every Developed Country, "middle class" Americans are poor.
Of course, Americans don't have this perspective, because they are in it, they can't see it.
Not even taking into account that a Germany resident could get public health care, lower cost for transportation, and could live and work in most areas without ever needing a car.
There is considerably less income inequality. Because your specific profession makes less isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Also, my point is exactly that many countries consider you "poor" if you have to work 70+ hours per week and get 2 weeks (or no) leave, even if you make $150k. That's why I said many OECD countries consider Americans "poor". (in quotes). Not poor in the sense of not much money, but "poor" in the broader sense.
But how much of that gap is left if you factor in things like health care, access to education and infrastructure?
Costs of living in Luxembourg are about the same as in Santa Barbara (where I currently live).
I think median salaries in Luxembourg might be skewed by the presence of a large financial market (it's kind of a Wall St of Europe).
The prevailing wage law of the H1B is only $60k, and these are for the best and brightest workers our mega corps need, due to a lack of qualified US workers.
So obviously, $50k is more than adequate. /s
> take 30 days vacation a year
There's this persistent myth of the driven executive... I mean, I guess it's possible that other fields of endeavor are different? but everywhere I've worked? the more they pay you, the better they treat you, the more vacation you get, and ultimately the less you are expected to actually work.
I worked on a trading floor with a trader, early 30s, very profitable and well respected. Took a week off to go to the Mediterranean with his girlfriend (from what I hear, he proposed to her on that trip). Had his mandatory two-week vacation the next month. While he was away on that two-week vacation, I heard several people, including the group head, criticizing him behind his back for taking so much time off -- despite every trader on that floor having four weeks of vacation, two contiguous weeks of which were mandatory.
Just because something hasn't happened in your own experience, doesn't mean that it doesn't happen in other sectors. This guy was the right-hand man to his boss and he still got criticized for taking his mandatory vacation.
I once took a single day of vacation to finish moving into my new apartment, and I was made fun of publicly and criticized for it by a number of semi-senior people who weren't even in my chain of command.
Not every company has a culture of asynchronicity, and not every career path offers a healthy balance of work and life. There is also a difference between having vacation days, and being able to take them without hurting your reputation and compensation.
If people are depending on you to be perpetually present, prepared, and profitable -- whether as a trader, an executive, or any other role -- there's social pressure to minimize vacation. And that pressure is amplified in the culturally dog-eat-dog industries, I reckon.
As far as I can tell, this holds in the middle, too; I do okay, but I don't get paid like a very profitable broker, and I don't get four weeks vacation (not usually, anyhow... it is pretty easy for me to quit and get another job, of course, but that usually results in less of a raise than going from having a job to having another job.)
My point is just that there's a pretty strong correlation between getting paid more and being treated better in other ways. It's not an absolute correlation, certainly; but the fact that the man had four weeks off and had a job to come back to, I think, supports my assertion more than the fact he got criticized for taking it all at once detracts from it.
if you're talking about actual time spent working, may be. But the output for an expensive person needs to be high. Granted, how does one measure the output of a typical multi-million dollar CEO on bottom line performance (vs just good general economic conditions)?
Don't want to? Sure. Can't? Wrong. They absolutely could.
I'd say 15 days instead of 30 seems fair number for America and probably 30 for europe
That's why they call it a LABORatory . . .
Salads are a thing.
Poor student tricks work past being a student.
Throw some veggies in with the rice and some soy or teriyaki sauce, and you've got a healthy meal that is compatible with most diets. If you're a meat eater, you can cook some chicken breast to go with it; if not, some tofu for protein will help make it more filling.
I acknowledge that a person's time isn't always tradable for wages, and that home cooking is generally cheaper and more satisfying.
Time-wise fast food isn't as efficient as it would seem at first glance. If you go during a normal meal time (which you pretty much have to do if you have kids), between travel time and waiting at the register, it's going to end up taking as long as a home cooked meal.
You can mix all these things in endless ways with a little creativity.
I don't buy for a moment that processed food is cheaper than the raw ingredients. The processing has a significant cost. The main factor for many people is pure laziness--they can't be bothered to spend 10 minutes preparing stuff; they'd rather waste money on processed food.
When was the last time you worked multiple jobs, and had to take care for kids? That 10 minutes is not readily available.
if you have a kitchen to cook them, yes. else you probably have just a sack of vegetables that nobody could eat in his raw form. living in a box means eating pre-made food and you can buy healthy pre-made food (like the cesars salad) it's just not affordable.
I do think there's an under appreciation for how time-poor most people are (moreso the less money you have). Or how a lack of basic cooking skills or knowledge keep people buying fast food instead of buying and preparing fresh, healthier food at home. I've invested a whole lot of time choosing recipes and learning how to buy, prepare, and store food. A friend of mine complained that going to the grocery store cost him more money than eating out. Turns out, he was just buying frozen dinners. One of my recent favorite meals to make is dried black beans, rice, and a shredded rotisserie chicken. The chicken is optional, the source ingredients are dry, less than $1/lb, freeze well after preparing, and don't require any special tools or skills.
While I think food insecurity is a huge concern for kids, the cost of food and the percentage of income being spent on food has halved over the last 50 years [1]. (I wish they showed what the lowest quintile was spending over time)
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/03/02/389578089/yo...
Works fine but the burgers come out a bit dry.
The conclusion to save you a click: Food in the UK has never been more affordable and healthy food is generally cheaper than unhealthy food. A day’s diet that meets the requirements of the Eatwell Guide can be purchased for less than the price of two cheap supermarket ready-meals and for much less than a single meal at a fast food chain. Switching to healthier versions of many staple products can be achieved at no extra cost, and a wide range of fruit, vegetables and carbohydrates can be bought in supermarkets for less than £1 per kilogram. Five portions of fruit and vegetables can be purchased for as little as 30p.
Some studies that have come to the opposite conclusion have used a cost-per-calorie measure of food pricing which makes high-energy food appear expensive regardless of the cost of a meal. Others have compared a small selection of food products which are classified as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ on the basis of relatively minor differences. By looking at the cost by edible weight and studying the price of typical food portions, this report has been able to make better comparisons between the cost of healthy and unhealthy diets in Britain today.
We conclude that the real question is not why unhealthy food is so cheap but why people consume unhealthy food despite it being more expensive. The answer, we suggest, is that taste and convenience often play a larger role in people’s food choices than price or nutritional quality.
I suggest you consider the fact that many people in the US, especially in poor, urban areas live in "food deserts" where there are no supermarkets close by that sell healthy food at reasonable costs.
http://americannutritionassociation.org/newsletter/usda-defi...
If you are poor and have no vehicle you depend on mass transit. This costs both money and time. If you are poor and lucky enough to have a job, its likely to be a low-paying job with a lengthy commute (in terms of time, bus and train transfers, if not in distance). This leaves you very little free time to spend half of a day for a lengthy trip outside of your food desert to get some fresh food. There is also the issue of bringing your groceries home. Have you ever tried to ride the bus or the train while carrying a bunch of packages, especially when it is crowded? How about transferring buses and trains while trying to carrying several packages? Do you have a proper kitchen? Many poor people don't. Proper storage facilities and equipment? Most poor people have roaches.
These are just some of the collective obstacles faced by many poor people in terms of their access to fresh food.
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/food/2014/02/food_deserts...
I would guess about 80%+
it's very enlightening.
“The shrinking middle class” is a phrase that is part of common discourse here for a reason - I wouldn’t be surprised if 80% of Americans fit the parent comment’s definition.
More like 15%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/203247/shares-of-househo...
Reference?
This recent study[1] suggests the bottom 50% income represents 12.5% pre-tax, 19.3% post-tax based on 2014 data.
[1] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/PSZ2018QJE.pdf see p. 39, Table I
Every other part of that entire list is, sadly enough, "normal middle class" in the US.
I'd like to agree with the vacation value, but I don't know any Americans other than myself taking 30 days of vacation a year. The very idea of 30 days vacation makes my friends panic, what would they do?!
Also, poor diet is related to poverty due mainly to bad nutritional education and bad habits learned at home, not affordability. Processed foods with a lot of sugar, salt, MSG added, manipulate the brain into wanting disproportionately more of these foods, which are primarily empty calories.
That's insane.
(It’s common in Norway to take any day that is between two off days off. So May 1st is a national holiday, next year it falls on a Tuesday, so that means many will take the Monday off, a so called innneklemt day. There’s a lot of holidays in May, and next year all of them creates inneklemt days.)
I'm sure most people would rather not do this on a sidewalk or under an overpass, but if they have no other option it's hard to blame them. To add insult to injury, city has proven uninterested in increasing sanitation work to at least clean this up. Now LA and San Diego are facing diseases most developed countries only read about.
I'm sure the city could organize a service to place mobile restrooms at a reasonable cost. I'd be more than willing to pay extra sales tax for this and it would generate jobs for companies that maintain them.
EDIT: It's worse than I thought - in skid row (granted this might be an extreme) 9 toilets for roughly 1800 people!
Source: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-bathroom-protest...
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/health/sd-me-hepati...
I looked into the safe parking initiatives a bit. I've noticed more folks living in RVs around town in various parking lots or on quiet side streets. It seems a bit like a no-brainer that if you have some extra land that isn't doing anything you should be able to just let people park on it without the fear of being hassled by the police or community members. But when you look at it closely what you are talking about are re-inventing the trailer park. Try to get a permit to build one of those in the bay area, not easy.
I really feel it's a shame that this isn't more accepted. What is a trailer park but cheap high-density housing? We have people living in tents under bridges. Surely cheap temporary housing with proper sanitation would be a major improvement.
http://www.politifact.com/california/statements/2017/jan/20/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_poverty...
Due to family issues, I also wasn't getting support from my parents that year.
AS CAB (the Associated Students Community Affairs Board) gave out free hot dogs on Tuesday nights to people who attended a lecture. The Engineering department had companies coming to give careers talks, where they gave out free pizza. There were free concerts by Storke Tower on Thursday lunchtime where free ice cream was provided. CAB also organised a breakfast for homeless people (including the legendary Pirate) in the park on Wednesday mornings. KGCC is a Korean Christian group that has food at every event. The ISA International Student Association has cookies on Friday afternoon every week, and ISI (International Students Inc, a Christian group) has a proper meal once a month.
Two other people (one from Europe, one from Asia) were attending all these activities, so we soon became friends.
One of them heard about free pizza being given away at the store at Buchanan when it's closing time. So we went down there, and sure enough, there was food. Every day!
This went on for weeks. But one time, we came too late. All the pizza and daily sandwiches, each wrapped in plastic, were already put inside a black trash bag.
That was my introduction to dumpster diving, which continued for the rest of that year.
The weird thing was that because my rent was pre-paid, I wasn't homeless - just completely broke. Transport wasn't too much issue because hitchhiking up and down the coast was quite easy.
I slept outside in LA during one of those travels, but after that, my dumpster diving friend told me about CouchSurfing. I now host the weekly CouchSurfing meetup, and have a guest staying today. So short-term accommodation was free too.
Meeting people at the homeless breakfast made me realise how was to their situation, though. There's nothing like praying "Give us today our daily pizza" and "Thank you for this food", when God is really the only one taking care of you.
America is a land of extremes. There are some incredibly wealthy people, but there's also poverty right next door. I think that situation breeds crime. My situation now is much more comfortable - I earn much less, but I feel totally safe not locking my bike when I go into a convenience store.
I'm now 28, and I've still never had that much money. America is only interested in welcoming rich people.
My main subject had a masters degree in psychology.
> Why does her PhD make her more deserving that a welfare queen? Because to The Chronicle, the PhD has value. It doesn't. I'm not saying she isn't smart, I'm saying the PhD in no way communicates to me she knows medieval history better than any D&D player. She may know more, but how do I know? I don't even find "MD" particularly valid, but at least you can sue a doctor.
> But my reason for showing you her is to highlight the perverse logic of the university which will doom us all: since the only maniacs who would ever hire these PhDs are universities, then the solution to their unemployment is more money for universities:
the fact is, there are lots of stories like this. maybe you're immune because you live in a more reasonable place or your strong technical skills or whatever. then again, 30 years ago being a paralegal was a good job and working people could afford to live in places like Santa Barbara.
it's a fact that you could be next. we can't predict the future, there will only be more and more upheavals and disruption in the economy, unless things change drastically. employers and investors are working very, very hard all the time to devalue and deskill engineering. maybe your RV will be self-driving though.
Again, this just boggles my mind.
I understand there are people who are on bad terms with their family, but sans that, I cannot imagine a situation where my 60+ year old parents living alone in a van is in any way better than all of us sharing a studio apartment, even if we were sleeping on the floor.
It gets worse when they start stealing, destroying property and procuring drugs, and you find it's too late to get rid of them thanks to eviction/tenancy laws.
Not everybody's families are Rockwell portraits.
It seems a significant number of the people featured in these articles fall into that category.
The real issue, as always, is the absurdly inflated real estate market.
This is a very small minority. Even 10 years ago this was a hot topic in the communities concerned. I lived in Venice Beach at that time: People being force out of their homes into their cars or RVs, police harassing them and finally even suicides were a daily topic within the local community.
This is the the real cost of allowing (particularly foreign) capital to be parked in real estate in the developed world. In NYC for example most new developments are ultra-luxury not because building affordable apartments is uneconomic, it’s just that the ultra-luxury end is way more profitable.
But sure let’s just pass a massive tax cut for the wealthy instead at a time when corporations are making record profits.
The people buying these houses are just leaving them empty. There has been some private investigation of some of the homes being bought and built in BelAir right now. One home was found to be owned by a Nigerian politician through multiple layers of shell companies.
This politician has no business owning an $80 million home.
If we simply cut out the corrupt and stolen money flooding into these markets I think we would find it is making for a large chunk of it.
- 157 West 57th St #77, asking $49m, paying $4,200 in monthly taxes [1]
- 301 West 53rd St #3E, asking $1.85m, paying $1,681 in monthly taxes [2]
Why is an apartment asking 25 Times as much only paying 2.5x the property taxes?
You can largely blame Bloomberg and Andrew Cuomo for this.
[1] https://www.elliman.com/new-york-city/one57-157-west-57-stre...
[2] https://www.elliman.com/new-york-city/fifty-third-and-eighth...
I pay over $3500 to rent a house in Santa Cruz while my landlord only pays $2700 per year in property tax. The place is worth $1-2M depending on what website I'm checking.
NYC can’t fix this and the state won’t because it’s beholden to SFH owners upstate who (now) don’t pay their fair share and don’t want to start now.
Additionally NYS doesn’t have Prop 13 but it has lots of things that look like it. Reduced increases, caps on rates, etc that greatly benefit incumbents.
Same as in California people raise the specter of evicting or bankrupting the elderly from their ancestral home if this was changed. It’s a false dilemma. You could easily relieve taxes because of hardship (or simply being over 65 for a principal residence) on a case by case basis.
Towers of Secrecy Stream of Foreign Wealth Flows to Elite New York Real Estate By LOUISE STORY and STEPHANIE SAULFEB. 7, 2015 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/stream-of-foreig...
But this is a function of too low taxes at the top end, and cheap borrowing costs. There's a glut of money that has to go somewhere. So it's getting stuffed into the stock, bond, and real estate markets, rather than into businesses and workers.
[1] Graham: 'Financial contributions will stop' if GOP doesn't pass tax reform http://thehill.com/policy/finance/359606-graham-financial-co...
It's all about financial contributions, and ensuring there isn't a level playing field with the competition in particular in primaries. Just imagine how difficult it would be to convince them to get money out of politics entirely.
It's amazing to me that people don't recognize this as xenophobia when other forms ("Mexicans are taking our jobs!", "Migrants don't have the same values!") are so readily called out.
High housing prices are a self inflicted problem. When you mix supply restrictions with tax breaks explicitly designed to keep people from moving, you end up pricing people out. Not surprising.
I believe todays homelessness is surely in part being caused by this untouchable stick-in-the-mud legislation.
Property tax appraisals for neighboring houses are wildly variant, some times by a factor of 20x (eg, home market value of two million or more, but taxed on a state appraised value of 100-200k). So a young person buying their first home seemingly must always pay a significantly higher annual property tax when compared with the family next-door who've kept the property family owned for a generation.
And I would even question that. If your house has appreciated so much that you can't afford the property taxes, so you're "forced" to sell it for a huge profit...maybe in an ideal world that wouldn't happen, but it's nowhere near the top of my list of injustices that need to be fixed.
Quantifying the scale of the problem is another issue, but I certainly think that if people are buying houses for purposes other than living in, allowing that is the, or a, "self-inflicted problem".
If someone wants to invest and grow the supply of something, they should be welcome, but bidding up a resource that cannot be increased is not something people have to accept merely because of some misguided slogans or epithets.
seems like a poor investment to me. You're just pissing it away on property taxes. So why not let the rich do this and basically redistribute their wealth?
Weirdly, many of the foreign moneyed people know that they and/or their family may have to drop everything and leave their country of origin at any point to flee a purge, and the property is a bolthole for that possibility and a financial reserve that is hard for China to seize.
The other tower was owned by Bruce Willis and Demi Moore bought in 1990.im not sure they ever lived there either. Eventually Demi Moore got it 8n the divorce and sold it recently.
And this is in a coop, which tend to be far more owner-occupied. Luckily for Manhattan the vast majority of hous8ng stock is coops. If it were nothing but the luxury piggy banks being built on 57th street the city would be a ghost town.
Just because the outside investment is Chinese doesn’t make someone xenophobic.
It is xenophobia and that's bad because it trains the reflex to waste time on stupid, lazy, self-satisfying thought blaming greedy, scheming outsiders instead of trying to think of any sane practicable solution.
What can be done about regional inequality? Because such economic trends will do nothing but continue to destabilize our country in the future.
Edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain? I don't understand.
EDIT: by “financially precarious” I mean that above you said you were a new grad having difficulty finding work. I assume it is your intent to work after the baby is born (rather than being the primary caregiver) or it wouldn’t matter so much about finding work.
If your wife returns to work and you work you’ll need to pay for care and/or rely on family support. If she doesn’t return to work and she’s the one with steady employment then that’s a problem (financially).
Hence my question.
It's still too risky and difficult for us to relocate, though. Our family all lives nearby, so we have a support structure here. My wife has an established career in a low cost of living area. Housing is incredibly cheap. We mesh with the culture here. When I get a job, we'll be able to buy a house pretty easily. It's just tough for me to get an IT job, because most low level positions have been outsourced in my area.
And generalizing the Bay Area to all other higher salary + higher CoL places is also going to yield no useful insight. Or in other words - your parent comment about how articles like this are why you don't consider relocating neglects the fact that there are likely middle ground locations where you could be paid a higher wage while still paying a lower rent.
One simply can't extrapolate that much when looking at CoL or salary.
You say it's risky and difficult to chase jobs elsewhere. Yet you claim to be better off than the average American while chasing entry level jobs.
If anything this makes you more mobile than the average American.
Use this to your advantage instead of holding out for one of a dwindling number of jobs in some rural town. Because even if you get one, what's your exit strategy if you lose it? By your own account your position seems to be ripe for elimination.
Holding out seems more risky than moving on. Don't move to the Bay area or manhattan. The rest of the country is not representative of this article.
But that's just my take on it. Best of luck to you.
If for no other reason having children is our biological raison d’être. Go tell a squirell it’s not rich enough to procreate!
Children are brought up with very little means everyday; they don’t need rich parents.
Children are seen by our rich society as a luxury good that only the well off are worthy of buying.
Instead what children need are strong loving parents. (I’m so anoyed at the parents of my kid’s spoiled friends, and she not even three)
I lived for three months in Cali (Santa Barbara) and it is one of the last places in N. America I would raise my daughter. Only the despair from the poorest, heroin addicted, countries in WV would rank lower.
A well employed parent, a well educated spouse and grandparents to help. We should all be so lucky!
Do you generally find that being insulting without providing evidence for, or even explaining, your position usually brings people around to your point of view?
That being said his point is true. They printed money and that money had to increase the price of something.
If you give printed money to state employees consumer goods go up.
If you give it to banks (QE) the price of financial assets goes up. The financial bubble we’re in is huge (pray, what great increase in productivity has occurred in the last ten years that the stock market has gone up so much).
If the CPI included financial instruments (ie my retirement) this inflation would be easily spotted.
QE is maybe the most pernicious inflationary policy yet since at least the previous inflationary spending gave money to normal people but now financial oligarchs are the only ones who make money!
In London home prices (average) increases every year by more than average salary. If you've not bought in, you're being better off somewhere else. No point in earning $200k (gross) if $50k (net) is hoovered up by someone in rent.
I hear a lot of people talking in raw dollars about what they make, or what someone else makes, or what differences are in what people make etc. and the arguments miss a lot of important context and the important motivators.
Most important is not what you make, but are you producing enough to be happy? And more important to that question is what purchasing power do you have on any given salary/location. If you make 6 figures, which I'm pretty sure still today is, on a U.S. national level, still making decent money... but can't afford even to rent your own apartment... then so what? If your low six figure income gives you a lesser standard of living in a #1 city than a mediocre five figure income in a lower tier city... to me the lower income city is more appealing.
What a #1 city can do for you is give you a much higher chance of a very, very good income: those #1 cities are where the movers and shakers and related money are.... but the number of people that will ultimately reap those benefits are small and the competition is very stiff because of the point you've made. I'd also wager that if you aren't already very clearly/obviously on the path to a mover and shaker role by the time you're getting out of college (because of who is in your sphere of solid relationships or what you've already accomplished, or both) you're very unlikely to ever get there even if you go to a #1 city. Or as they taught me in music school... if you ain't made it by thirty, you ain't gonna.
Me, I'd take the lesser city and work towards being the big fish in a little pond. I've done this with choice of companies to work for over my career and probably have done well because of it; more varied and interesting work for me individually, as well as more influence over what actually gets done... and not bad pay by any means. Just not prestigious. You still have to have something to offer even then, though, but the competition is much less stiff and so the odds for achieving happiness, the real goal vs. money, can be much better.
Merely having liquid capital to begin with (i.e. not tied up in your primary residence or retirement vehicles) almost certainly puts you on the higher end of the middle class.
I don't think re-defining "middle class" to mean the top 10% (or less) of earners is helpful.
Further, most people who have adequate capital to sustain them are basically financially independent and could effectively retire, unless they are 60-70 and have been saving for years this isn't an accurate representation of the middle class, upper middle class, possibly.