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Comment by alexhutcheson | Hacker News Reader

People buying houses for $1 million are wealthy even by the standards of the Bay Area. Median household income in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area is ~$125,000[1]. A traditional $1 million mortgage would require a $200,000 down payment, and ~$5000/month. The monthly payment alone would be 48% of the combined monthly pay for everyone in the household in a household making the median. House purchases at this price are only possible for households that are making significantly more than the metro-area median.

[1] https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=United%20States&tid=A...

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And most people spend >40% of their income on rent & mortgage payments in The Bay.

The average person with a house in The Bay probably doesn't make as much money as you think. They mostly have very high debt to income ratios.

Source? It would be surprising to me if lenders were regularly approving loans where the mortgage payment alone (not including insurance or taxes) was >=48% of monthly income. There are certainly lenders that will approve mortgages with high ratios relative to salary (due to the value of bonuses and equity comp), but the $125,000 figure is all-in income, so this isn't relevant.

A 40% ratio for the $125,000 household would give you a maximum purchase price of $830,000, which would be a conforming loan in the Bay Area, not a jumbo one.

You can check out the actual sale prices of recently-sold homes on Zillow:

https://www.zillow.com/homes/recently_sold/house_type/

In the South Bay near Mountain View, there's basically no single-family homes under $1.5M, and the majority of houses go for $2M up. Many are in the $4M+ range. You can get cheaper in San Jose ($800K-ish for a run-down 2BR from the 50s) or Daly City (low millions), but most of the Peninsula and SF has a floor at a million.

Most Bay Area residents just don't own homes. They rent permanently or maybe own a condo. But the context for this sub-thread is "people with a house", and basically all mortgages for single-family homes are jumbo if you're not paying in cash or putting >50% down.

Yeah my argument was that all the people who are buying those homes are significantly wealthier than the Bay Area median household.

The median Bay Area household cannot afford to buy a house, yes, but that does not mean that those buying houses are significantly wealthier. The Bay is far, far richer than you can imagine.

Buying a house for $1M is firmly middle class status. True lower class people simply cannot afford to live in the Bay at all.

To be in the top 1% in the Bay Area you have to make close $1M per year.

Top 1% in San Jose is $964,238 (with the average person in the top 1% making $2,732,379), so right on target.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/14/how-much-you-have-to-earn-to...

Truth.. me and my spouse sold our old house in san jose (2016) to a couple who had < 160k in 401k combined(no other assets) and were in their mid/late 50's, their downpayment was the 90k they got from the sale of their condo, they were in construction/design(unsure of income) and had to get a 2nd loan from the bank to make the downpayment. Their total new mortgage is 5k a month(payment and prop. taxes, guessed this), I was shocked that the bank approved them given they seemed leveraged to the hilt.

I wonder if this means a foreclosure crisis is coming.

I've wondered recently how much of this house price inflation is because of cash buyers from China vs. cash buyers because they sold their stock in a unicorn vs. dual-FAANG-engineers with a mortgage vs. people who leveraged up to the hilt with 3-5% down adjustable mortgages. ChuckMcM posted county property records a couple years ago that suggested the former category isn't actually a big one. The first 3 categories are relatively insensitive to downturns. The last will get hit hard this recession. If most houses are owned by people in the last category, the effect on housing prices will be much more dramatic than if they're folks sitting on houses with no mortgage.

A few years back I found a website where I could look up big expensive houses on the east bay area hills and it would mention who owned them. When I looked up a few of the big ones, 8 of 10 I looked at were owned by doctors.

Sure but someone is still running the drive-thru at every McDonald’s in the bay area.

And I imagine they take a hellishly long mass transit commute

And there's a good chance that they rent, not own.

Or live with family / many roommates.

And/or in section 8 housing...

Doesn’t basically everyone in the bay area?

First of all, a $1M house with $200k down means an $800k mortgage, not a $1M mortgage. With rates as ridiculously low as they are, monthly payments are closer to $3.5k/mo. Add in an amortized $500/mo in property tax and you're at $4k/mo, for about 39% of income, not 48%. For that married couple making median income (filing jointly), after the mortgage interest tax deduction I think it's like 46% of their after-tax takehome pay. They'd have about $4.8k/mo ($57k/year) left over for whatever. That doesn't seem like so much of a strain as to be inaccessible.

(I used some crappy googled income tax calculators, so it'll be off, but hopefully not by a ton. I only factored in mortgage interest deductions, and I don't understand SALT deductions and didn't factor that in, so they might be able to deduct more and have even more left over?)

(We're also both using the 2018 median household income, which is like $8k more than 2017, so 2019 was probably even more. Who knows how that relates to today's chaos)

Your numbers are way off - dangerously so. First, nobody is getting a sub-3% fixed 30 year mortgage right now - so your minimum for principal+interest on your 800k loan is already $3656 (assuming you can get 3% - every half% is going to cost you roughly another $350 per month)

Next, your estimate for property taxes is similarly low. I don’t live in CA but where I live taxes are roughly 1% of the assessed value. Let’s say the county assesses your 1m home for 900k - and not to mention the assessment will probably increase over time - so you’re looking at about $750/mo there.

You totally forgot about homeowners insurance - required for that loan plus it’s included in the front end dti ratio. That will set you back another ~$150 per month.

That adds up to a total of $4556, almost 14% higher than your estimate and representing one trip to Disney world’s worth of extra spending over the year.

Often overlooked is the savings you should make for maintenance, repairs, and improvements. Only after buying and selling a few houses do I finally appreciate exactly how expensive they are and how “only” a $100 per month difference adds up - quickly.

Looking at three different calculators from googling "mortgage calculator," I get an $800k loan at 3.25% (higher than the rate I pay on mine in SF, but I paid the rate way down) coming to $3,482/mo for principal and interest.

For property tax, i found this california property tax calculator [0], which says it's $6,490/year ($541/month) for a home assessed at $1M in SF. That brings us to $4023/mo.

You're right I totally forgot about insurance. Oops. Sure let's use $150/mo, but IIRC that's more than I pay on mine. Maybe because I'm in a big building and the HOA has insurance for parts that I'd need to insure if it were a single family home? But I didn't factor in HOA, so $150's fair, even cheap.

$3482+$541+$150 = $4173/mo.

I still think this median household is going to have something like $4-5k/mo left over after principal, interest, property tax, insurance, and income tax. That's the most important number to get right in terms of how accessible this is. It tells us how much to they have to squeeze on everything else to make it work.

[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-property-tax-calcula...

... also "$4556... representing one trip to Disney world’s worth of extra spending over the year." Holy shit really? I never would have guessed disney world is that expensive. Daaaaamn. Guess I'm never going there :(

(on second thought, I think you're right about the property tax estimate being low. I pay more than the online calculator said and my place is assessed below $1M. Maybe it's all the other stuff tacked on in SF? Add maybe ~$200/mo to my above estimate, we're still talking about something like $4k/mo left over)

My apologies on the mortgage calculation- you’re right on that.

I didn’t include HOA - depends on the community, some are as low as $100/mo, others are north of $400 but often those include amenities such as lawn mowing or internet/tv or golf/social club memberships

Disney is expensive - especially if you’re taking kids (kind of the whole point isn’t it?). The costs really do skyrocket once you add little people, which I never understood until I was knee deep in it :)

That site is completely wrong about property taxes in California. The property tax is 1% plus a county and city level supplemental. For example, my property tax in Oakland is 1.3688%.

I have no idea how that SmartAsset got that rate. Literally it makes no sense and is comically wrong.

https://sftreasurer.org/property/understanding-property-tax

San Fransisco is 1.1801%, so 11,801 on a million dollar house.

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