9.75% here.
Sucks.
Ringo, as someone with experience in both Houston and NYC, I’d say 238% sounds about right. Prices in Houston are noticably cheaper than they are where I live now and people in NYC move to where I am now (about fifty miles from NYC) because they find the prices here noticably cheaper.
Ours is only 9% here, but we have other special taxes when we go out to eat or go to a deli (and there are 2 other big places where the tax is higher) that make the sales tax 11%. And it’s actually gone down in the last few months. Buy a double cheeseburger at our McDonald’s and it’ll cost ya 1.11. Ridiculous.
Here’s a game that NYC residents will find amusing. Go to the Houston Chronicle website and click to their classified section. Go the the real estate page and click on houses for sale. Set in an upper limit of $50,000 (that’s not a typo) and click search. AND THERE ARE TWENTY PAGES OF LISTINGS. You’ll laugh until you cry.
I think the crying might come earlier than that. I live in an area with a fairly low cost of living. You can get a pretty nice house for less than $100,000. My parents rent, but buying the house they live in would probably cost $70,000, if that. Don’t be too choked up, though–think of where you’d have to live if you bought it.
Disclaimer: I love Louisiana. Really. I’m only kidding. But not about the prices.
To maintain the same purchasing power,
a salary of $ 20,000 in Lake Charles LA
needs to be $18,992.64 in Houston TX
In going from Lake Charles LA to Houston TX
Grocery items are 2.55% lower
Housing is 22.272% lower
Utilities are 7.512% higher
Transportation is 11.514% higher
Health care is 15.218% higher
Misc goods/services are 0.931% lower
Just for fun, let me try Philadelphia, since I used to live about twenty or so miles from there.
To maintain the same purchasing power,
a salary of $ 20,000 in Lake Charles LA
needs to be $25,032.65 in Philadelphia PA
In going from Lake Charles LA to Philadelphia PA
Grocery items are 23.633% higher
Housing is 26.854% higher
Utilities are 26.896% higher
Transportation is 33.178% higher
Health care is 34.687% higher
Misc goods/services are 20.267% higher
Now for San Francisco. I have a feeling I won’t like this.
To maintain the same purchasing power,
a salary of $ 20,000 in Lake Charles LA
needs to be $35,187.07 in San Francisco CA
In going from Lake Charles LA to San Francisco CA
Grocery items are 39.436% higher
Housing is 186.99% higher
Utilities are 14.046% higher
Transportation is 35.561% higher
Health care is 69.753% higher
Misc goods/services are 18.539% higher
I just picked $20,000 as a random salary.
Re: The Bonfire of the Vanities and Lexington, KY
That was written quite some time ago, and while prices in Lexinton have risen quite a lot in that interim, I doubt the cost of living increases have kept pace with Manhattan. It’s quite possible that at the time of writing, things were such that the author was quite correct. Does anyone know where we could get cost-of-living comparisons for that time frame?
We were planning on buying this year after our lease expires. Since I can live anywhere in California and still do my job (I work form home) I was really intersted in these caluculators. According to Salary.Com if I move to Sacramento or Stockton it would be like giving my self a 10k raise. Yipee!
I live in Austin rather than Houston. More expensive? Yes. Worth it? Heck, yeah!
Laughing Lagomorph said:
I wondered about that, as well. Perhaps it’s somehow based on using cities that are seeing the most population growth or decline? Also, the list is not alphabetized very tightly, so if you missed your city, look again (but, no, Detroit is not there).
Shalmanese said, in reply to Laughing Lagomorph:
Thanks, that is what I meant.
While I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, I do have to wonder how a city as huge as Houston could be so much cheaper to live in. As I said above, recent examination of real estate prices have left me slack-jawed. While Little Nemo is correct that there are $50K houses, my visits with a real estate agent (friend since junior high) found mostly houses (not mansions) in the $480-590K range, with the cheapest being a one bedroom house for $276K.
We have some high taxes, but we don’t have a state income tax. Also, we’ve defeated zoning (yay!) pretty soundly every time it’s come up, and I do recall a HUD paper that reported zoning accounting for as much as 30% of the local cost of living. Another thing that I’m just guessing might be a factor is that some older cities, such as San Francisco and Chicago, are physically hemmed in while we’re perched on the edge of the coastal plains and have historically had City Councils that have been much enthralled with emminent domain. And, it’s a younger city in many ways.
Austin, when I lived there for many years during the 1970s, enjoyed the reputation of being one of the cheapest places to live in the U.S. But that began to end with the electronics/computer boom that started the week after I left in January of 1981. Now, while it still has the lakes and the music scene, it’s a big city (~4x the size as when I lived there) with an infrastructure that is struggling to catch up. Still, though, while a bit (8-9%) more expensive than Houston, compare it to San Francisco, LA or Manhattan.
Checked “Data provided by”. It is a company that compiles CoL indexes on a quarterly basis, and sells that info. So they are giving a taste of the index, without giving away most of the major cities.