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Comment by dspeyer | Hacker News Reader

As usual, "afford" means "make roughly three times the rent".

Take a look at Outer Mission, which has a monthly rent of $2150 and an affordability of 4.0.

   10.24 $/hour * 8 h/workday * 21 wd/month = 1720 $/m
   4.0 * 1720 $/month = 6881 $/month
   6881 \approx 3 * 2150

So while having 4 incomes is recommended for living there, it isn't actually needed. You could live there on a smaller income by being careful about your smaller expenses.

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Actually, in SF many landlords want to see proof of earnings and require you to be earning 3x the rent. They don't give you the option of living frugally to afford the rent.

If you're not going to say that affordability is roughly 3x rent, then you shouldn't be using gross pay, you should be itemizing. "Roughly 3 times" always seems to be a fudge so you can use gross pay instead of analyzing everyone's taxes and number of mouths to feed - and results in a rough estimate of affordability.

The problem with the 3x approximation is that other expenses don't really scale with rent. If you spend $1000/month on food and $2000/month on rent, and then move to a $3000/month apartment, your food cost isn't going to change to $1500. Sure, the local grocery stores and restaurants might be a little more expensive, but not much.

And $1000/m for food is actually really high. That's if you eat lunch and dinner at restaurants every day and don't worry about the price. Figure $500 for food, $500 for health insurance, $150 for transit... it's not adding up to twice rent.

A 4x factor sure sounds very high, though maybe the costs in SF (or in the US in general) are different to my own;from my experience over the last 6 years, living in a variety of setups in different cities in Europe, I spend 50-60% of my monthly outgoing on rent (then about 10% on bills, 10% on transport, leaving ~20% on misc and recreation). A 2x factor seems much more reasonable.

You won't find an apartment in SF with a 2x ratio, landlords will run screaming away from you. This is a city where you line up with other prospective tenants to see apartments, and deals are sealed frequently on the spot - and where bidding wars are not unheard of.

If you come to SF intending to rent an apartment on a 2x factor, you will be homeless.

The insane rents in SF is an express of the extremely constricted supply - which has other effects beyond merely just rent. It's a landlord's market and they can afford to be extremely choosy about who they rent to.

I've found NYC almost as bad. Just being able to afford the rent isn't enough. Here, yearly income 40x rent is standard, and sometimes even that's not enough.

Since I'm doing contract work and don't have a regular salary, one landlord told me outright that even though I had demonstrated I could pay, he wouldn't rent to me because he "wanted a more stable tenant".

It feels terribly insulting to be told that, and makes me long for a humbler city like Chicago or Minneapolis, where if you have money, a landlord will take it without nearly this level of nonsense.

Or Berlin. I looked at apartment prices there and began to feel quite jealous of the Germans :)

Thanks, that clarifies a lot. Different worlds.

Are you including food in there somewhere?

Good point :) Grocery shopping is such a small part, maybe 5%; going out to eat once or twice a week would be part of recreation budget.

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