Hacker News Reader

Comment by grammarxcore | Hacker News Reader

I feel like this list is skewed by cost of living. The top four cities are also very expensive cities to live in and around. 200k in the bay area is scraping by whereas 100k in the Austin area gets you a house in a reasonable amount of time.

Are there any plans to provide adjustments like that?

View on HN

Can we please stop with the hyperbole? $200k in the bay area is emphatically not scraping by. You can live on your own, without roommates, save money and have a social life if you have a $200k income in SFBA.

What people (especially on HN) think "scraping by" looks like is getting a little nuts. Just because you can't have an opulent lifestyle and a cheap five bedroom house doesn't mean you're struggling. $200k in SFBA is well beyond the point where all your basic needs are met.

it all depends on your situation. Sure, as a single person 200K is doing well. But, 200K with a family of 4 (2 kids and a wife) is definately scraping by on the penninsula or SF. The only way that's not scraping by is if you bought your house over 20 years ago (or during 2010-2012 housing slump) OR you got yourself a Rent controlled apartment. Other than that, You ARE scraping by.

In SF, day care is almost 3K per month per child! On the penninsula/SF, if you rent a 3 bedroom apartment, it'll cost 4k-6K or so per month or more, that's 60K of your 130K take home pay.

>But, 200K with a family of 4 (2 kids and a wife) is definately scraping by on the penninsula or SF.

Lol. No, it isn't. It is absolutely mind blowing what the general tech industry thinks "scraping by" means. The median household income in SF is less than 100k. At 200k, you make more than twice that. If you're just "scraping by" with 200k, then I can't even imagine what people making less than the median are doing.

Child care in San Francisco, the kind that goes from 8am to 6pm, runs over $2500 a month. That's not ultraluxe, that's pretty standard fare, and my estimate is probably on the low side. A 3br house in an unfashionable but largely safe part of town is probably well over $4000 in rent. Again, that's not a high estimate. If you have 2 kids in daycare and are paying a mortgage or even just renting, you're looking at $9,000 a month in these expenses alone.

Wealth in San Francisco is more measured by when you got into the housing market than what you make, salary-wise, unless you're quite a ways up.

Now, a two income family with tech jobs is likely going to have at least 300k in family income (though even with the expensive 8am to 6pm day care, expect lots of phone calls coordinating who will scramble over to day care before 6). These families are not "scraping by", and I agree we need to be careful with hyperbole. But the median household income may not reflect the cost structure for new arrivals to the housing market who lack the family structure that would cushion the blow of daycare costs.

Being able to afford 8 hours of child care for multiple kids every weekday, and a mortgage/rent on a 3br house, is way above what most Americans consider scraping by. Americans who are scraping by use family, friends, and spouses for child care (or just hope for the best), and they live in low-cost housing often in pretty bad neighborhoods with bad schools that are far away. They also have trouble affording health insurance, they often share a single car (if they even have a car), have debt, and aren't saving.

Do you send your kids to daycare when you have a stay at home wife? Those numbers doesn't make sense, either your wife stays at home so no need for daycare or she works and earns money covering for the daycare costs and likely more.

The Median houshold in SF has a rent controlled apartment and no kids (roughly 70% or more is rent controlled). If that's not you, you will have hard time.

>If that's not you, you will have hard time.

Only if you're a buffoon with your budget. A non-rent controlled, very large apartment in SF proper will run you $3-4k/mo. You can even bump that up to $5k/mo if you really wanted to go luxurious or pay for a 2-3 bedroom, and you would still be under the recommended "30% of salary goes to housing" metric. If you purchased a typical 30 year mortgage on a $1.5million house, you would still be at only 40% of salary spent on housing, and that's with an entry level salary! Most people cannot even dream of affording a home until they are in their 30s.

An entry level worker being able to afford a sizable home and still take away several thousand dollars a month in savings is so well off compared to the vast majority of Americans that it's outright insulting to say that they are anywhere even remotely close to "scraping by" or "having a hard time".

Sure but 200k is a 1-2 yoe number. A single income family of four with a just-graduated breadwinner won't be incredibly comfortable anywhere. Especially if they're paying for childcare instead of having the stay at home parent handle it.

Scraping by with a stay-at-home wife?

*spouse

with a family of 4 (2 kids and a wife)

Ugh, really? It's 2019. Women actually have careers too, even in tech! And men can marry other men and raise children!

The fact that you have have to stipulate that one can live without roommates and "all basic needs are met" with a $200,000 salary proves the OP's point. That's more than 6 times the median annual income in the US.

The median home price in the Bay area is ~$1.5 million, so at $200k salary you'd be stretched with that kind of mortgage. Most homes where I'm from aren't worth $200k. What about child care, and the cost of commuting? You might not be "scraping by" on $200k in SV, but should that even be remotely a concern at a white-collar job working for some of the biggest companies on the planet?

No, my stipulations don't prove OP's point, and it's concerning to me that so many people think they do. Believe it or not, there is a vast underclass of people who live and work in San Francisco who are actually struggling because they make less than half that. They don't work in tech and they can't even think about these problems because of the more pressing ones they're facing.

You're talking about things like buying a house and finding non-familial child care; these are people worried about receiving government assistance for food and finding affordable rent with bad credit and almost intractable debt. They're scraping by because they wish they could "stretch" a salary like $200k to afford any home and make day care work. Most Americans do not pay for child care, and wouldn't expect to.

I'm going to double down and reiterate here: just because you can't do all the things you want to do doesn't mean you're scraping by. That's a disingenuous definition of the term. If you consider $200k to be "scraping by", what do you call the people who will actually be looking after your kids in day care? How much do you suppose they earn per year?

Having grown up below the poverty line, I'll double down on my original point as well. Most people don't work in tech and most people get screwed. The idea behind minimum wage is to provide all the necessities to everyone, be it housing, childcare, or food. When I interviewed with Google my Uber drivers all talked about how they had been forced to further and further suburbs because of tech workers and the rising cost of housing. I'm not bashing people on government assistance. Instead, I think more should be done for them by people like us.

That being said, you have just proved my point. If I can buy a house in Austin for half the starting salary in the Bay Area then, by that metric, if I can't in the Bay Area, I'm just scraping by.

I agree. Whenever someone points out high cost of living, they mention high rents.

Is $3000 per month a good estimate for bay area? or am I underestimating.

This is about $2000 a month higher than reasonable rent. This means, your annual cost of living increased by $24,000.

$24,000 per annum is the difference between a small town, and bay area. Am I missing something? Do you pay for apples $20 a lb instead of $2-5 a lb? Is your electricity bill $600 a month instead of $100-200 a month?

What else is expensive in Bay Area other than rent?

If you barely scrape by on $200K in bay area, are you saying you barely scrape by on $176K in a small town?

> What else is expensive in Bay Area other than rent?

Childcare, income taxes, transportation.

edit: I don't understand why I'm getting downvotes these things are all expensive.

That's a good question. Eveyone focuses on rent/ mortgage. Do normal goods cost more cost you have to pay all workers more, do costs go up across the board?

Food costs more. When I visit people in other parts of even the state of California I'm shocked at how cheap stuff is at the market.

Services cost more (going out to eat, the car wash, childcare, anything where labor is involved).

What's wrong with hyperbole? You seem to be saying: unless you're sickly and starving in some unloved corner of Ethiopia, then you're not "scraping by"? Ok, then, but then by that same logic, no one in the Bay area is "scraping by". People are pointing out (validly IMHO) that 2 bed rent + preschool for 2 kids don't leave you a whole lot of disposable income left in the Bay each month if your household income is 200k and you're used to middle class lifestyle anywhere outside of Bay Area (which would be a reasonable expectation, given that that's what the equivalent work experience elsewhere would grant you).

> You seem to be saying: unless you're sickly and starving in some unloved corner of Ethiopia, then you're not "scraping by"?

Nope! I'm not saying that. Read my reply to a sibling comment here, I think it largely responds to the point you're making. I'll reiterate again: being unable to afford all the luxuries you'd like is not equivalent to any reasonable definition of "scraping by."

As an aside, I find it funny in a meta sort of way that while we're talking about hyperbole, you interpreted my point to be literally about starving people in Africa.

Is it that much different though? You're saying "X is not scraping by, look at Z for proof"; I just happened to pick a Z for which your argument becomes weak: I could have picked single moms w/ kids w/ cerebral palsy too, but the point is that we're cherrypicking a sob story that isn't all that relevant to the demographic being discussed. The non-literal interpretation of the OP is more along the lines of what I said earlier: "Bay Area middle class is shittier than middle class elsewhere"

Yes! We're working on Cost-of-living (CoL) comparisons and adjustments. We've just finished extensively normalizing our data (which we used for this report). The next steps are better analysis over it including things like CoL.

> 200k in the bay area is scraping by

People say these things, it's not very accurate even though the bay area is obviously very expensive.

You've got roughly $130,000 in take-home pay at $200k in the bay area. Your employer is paying for your health insurance.

Even if you're paying $5,000 per month in rent for an apartment, you're still not scraping by. You've got $60k to $70k (depending) to distribute to everything else (food, utilities, lifestyle, etc), with housing and health covered. You can trivially buy a year old Mercedes or BMW sedan every year if you feel like it, like all those other people barely getting by.

You can spend $2,000 per month eating out, instead of $400 cooking for yourself, if you feel like it, as with all those other people choosing between their vast food options while living on food stamps.

>200k in the bay area is scraping by

What a gross exaggeration. Had you said 90k and for a family, then sure, but unless you consider "not having a new Tesla" as scraping by, this is disingenuous.

Source: Lived in Bay Area all my life with under $200k salary, not homeless, not scraping by, saving (a little bit) of money, able to go out with friends and my hair isn't falling out from being unable to pay bills. Maybe some of the big earners out there would consider my lifestyle "scraping by" but I like to think I know the difference between "scraping by" and "living within your means".

Probably just talking about owning a home.

To a lot of people it doesn't matter how many fancy toys they have, they want stability.

That makes it even more to the point; there are probably a dozen cities in the Bay Area where one could afford a house on a 200k household income without "scraping by".

San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Martinez, Antioch, Pittsburg, Hayward, Union City, Livermore, Milpitas, Morgan Hill, Gilroy, Richmond are all places you can get a house with a 200k salary in the Bay Area. There's probably a lot more, too. It's an indefensible statement.

> Lived in Bay Area all my life

I have as well until recently. Living in SF that's probably a close to accurate statement. If you live in Concord or Martinez (which is still technically the Bay Area), you can do quite nicely. Although, you'll trade ~2 hours of your life in commuting on Bart. Not to mention the overall discomfort of the Bart commute itself (better than the drive however).

> living within your means

This cannot be understated.

> I feel like this list is skewed by cost of living. The top four cities are also very expensive cities to live in and around.

This... is how the world works.

Is it? Shouldn't salaries be higher in Vancouver or Hong Kong?

I've adjusted avg salaries based on cost of living here: https://skilldime.com/blog/see-which-cities-pay-the-highest-...

But, note, the above is for average software engineering salaries, not for the sky high FANGS.

Pittsburgh is not that expensive, you can get two bedroom apartment in the middle of the city for $1k a month and they still pay huge salaries there. So the CoL adjustment is not that big, you get a little less in low CoL than in high CoL, the main driver of these large salaries is the company and not the location.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com