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.
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.
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 too). For 15% increase in rent, one gets the ability to e.g. comfortably invite friends/parents from out of state for a couple of days.
Of course, single-income no-kids couple does not look immediately look like the norm these days; but once you think of it, there are plenty of situations other than children that make sense for such a scenario: one of the partners might be in school / looking for a job / changing fields / being involved in something that doesn't provide a stable salary (arts, entrepreneurship) / did I mention start-ups? / etc
That norm is quickly going out of style at least
Not convinced: "Among married-couple families with children, 96.8 percent had at least one employed parent, and 61.1 percent had both parents employed" -- https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2017/employment-in-families-wit...
My wife would love nothing more than to raise the kids but making ends meet is proving a tough tradeoff
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.
Jokes aside, it was a data point to illustrate a change that I know takes place also in other countries; that women account for an ever larger fraction of people with higher education. The number of families where the mother makes more money than the man is slowly increasing.
I think if you dig into the data for US universities, you'll find that women are underrepresented in high-paying STEM majors and over-represented in low-paying majors like Dance or Early Childhood Development or Pre-1860 Russian Literature. Until that changes, I don't think your prediction is likely to come to pass.
That sounds like a value judgement. What difference does it make?
There are slightly fewer 3br apartments there, so sometimes those prices are higher. Of course, in many small-to-midsize towns there was the options of renting a trailer for the same price as the 1-2 bedroom apartments.
One city was an exception: A college town I lived in. It was fairly common for rent to go up with each inhabitant because they were accustomed to making separate leases for each student. Mighty expensive when renting to a family, but made sense for their normal renters.
If you are a single person with a single income, you are not renting a 2BR. You might have a roommate, but in that case you are a two income household splitting the rent on a 2BR.
Single income for 2BR is such an odd case to base an entire statistic around.
I have a 2br in Chicago and its very affordable on one income
It may be the wrong choice for this analysis but it's not some weird outlier in many places in the country. Over the years, I've known many single people renting 2BR apartments and even buying houses.
Hi, I'm a single person on a single income renting a 2BR townhouse.
I've lived in my current home for just over a decade (since November 2007), and during this time I've only had roommates for two very short periods. Both of those times were when I temporarily took in friends who were suffering from long-term unemployment and had nowhere else to go. One of them, in 2008, got a new job and moved out a few months after he moved in with me, and the other, in 2011, lived with me for two weeks before he mended fences with his parents and decided to move back to his hometown.
I think I might have had a roommate for a grand total of six months in the nearly 11 years I've lived here.
I like my space.
(edit: Oh, and my best friend just bought a huge house in an exurb. He's single and has no roommates.)
We live in a 4BR with a basement, with two roommates who will be (slowly) transitioning out of the house over the next couple years. And with two dogs. It's literally basically Just Enough House to feel comfortable for us.
Or a married couple with children and a stay at home parent. Or a working adult and their non-SS-eligible (e.g., immigrated too late in life to get the needed work credits) elderly parent that they care for. Or...
> If you are a single person with a single income, you are not renting a 2BR.
You might for a home office, especially if you do a kind of work from home that involves substantial paperwork and reference material, not just a simple workstation.
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).
Also, the rent jungle numbers look a bit conservative for palo alto. In PA a 220 sq ft loft costs nearly 2000$/mo to rent. I think the 3900$/mo figure they have is a bit conservative for PA.
Furthermore, they compared 2BD as their normalization factor, rather than $/sq foot. I would imagine the more expensive areas get less Square footage for a given 2BD apartment.
And, notice how they conveniently didn't even mention any comparisons of salary to housing Buy costs.