I can’t speak for cops, but as an ex-teacher I can tell you…TONS!
Rich community == some more money in salary and much better working conditions and equipment. They will knock down the door to teach there. They won’t live there…but they can commute in.
I suspect cops would be the same.
Getting the first few wealthy people to move into poor neighborhoods is often a hard sell. The houses might be small, old, or not in very good shape. If their kids go to public schools, they’ll be going to schools with lots of poor kids, which are generally not the higher-performing schools. There aren’t likely to be a lot of nice shops, parks, and the like around. The crime rate is likely to be high. Most wealthy people, who do have a choice of where they live, are going to want to live in a well-kept-up house in a community that already has the amenities they want.
Some city neighborhoods are undesirable for other reasons, too- they might be near a noisy freeway or railroad track, or on a heavily trafficked street. And if poor people live in those locations, wealthy people aren’t likely to want to live near them.
The rental market in the San Francisco Bay Area is doing quite well right now. Obviously not all Bay Area residents who can’t afford to buy are leaving the area.
My Bro is on the local Gov’t rental housing committee.
And not only me, but nearly all my co-workes and my half my fellow tenants. Of my co-workers, there is one woman whose husband earns double what she does and they own a house, and one younger couple that inherited their parents house. Myself I live in a small one bedroom apt.
In any big city, really poor people (I am decidely middle class and anywhere else I’d be “owning” a home/laboring under a huge motgage monkey) can still live: there are bad neighborhoods where rents are cheap. Also dudes double and triple up.
Around here I know of many dudes that have illegally converted a house to a boarding house, where each room (and the garage) is rented out by the month. Rents there are like $300-500/mo.
Don’t bet on it. Will it go down 20% or so? Sure, probably. But I don’t think you’ll see a drop of more than 50%, which is what you’re talking about.
But to answer the OP- no, probably not. A 20% drop from prices one year ago is still not considered “affordable” by most people. Rents are pretty damned high too.
Not with my own money, I wouldn’t.
I agree. 20%, maybe even more in some marginal markets.
Yes, but my point was that these people don’t live there. As areas like this expand, the commute becomes longer and more intolerable.
And most people with families will not be renting out their garages or doubling up. The cite someone else provided said a one-bedroom in SF is close to $2000/month. That is a stretch on a teacher’s salary, especially if you are paying back loans and/or saving up for a house. I never said ti was impossible for people in these lines of work to live in affluent communities, just that it is obviously squeezing many of them out. If you think this is not the case, please provide some evidence.
Realfacts http://www.realfacts.com/ (My Bro has access but we’d have to pay for it) sez SJ is around $1000 for 1 bedroom. But just go to Craigslist yourself. Quick check today (*in the entire SF area) *has 8379 apts with rent under $2000. **4906 **with rents of $1000 or less. And that’s with a total of 12000 some odd apt listings. 70% of listings are under $2000. $40% of listing are $1000 or less.
If you go to that cite from the “Comical” San Francisco Chronicle, the facts are from one dudes blog. “Garner managed to find a nice spot in Cole Valley, but his curiosity about the rental market had been piqued. Because he was enjoying a slow period in his research, he decided to use his idle hours to investigate. He created a Web site, Craigstats (links.sfgate.com/ZTU), which automatically grabs information from Craigslist rental listings and crunches it into various visual forms: maps that display the listings; heat maps displaying prices across San Francisco neighborhoods; and graphs that chart the average price per bedroom over time.” It’s bullshit.
The City of SJ official site Housing | City of San José
has “average monthly rent- $1468” That is for one bedroom, 2 bedroom, 3 bedroom and even larger. All apts. That matches quite well with my Bro’s Realfacts report of around $1000 for a 1 bedroom.
Dude, I live here, and pay rent here. My Bro is on the fucking Rents commitee. Do you live here? Rents are bad, but that article is full of shit.
I live in the SJ area, and I’d say DrDeth’s numbers sound right. The teachers that I know who live around here either have roommates, or have spouses who work, too. Supporting a family on the income of one teacher would be pretty tough. But teachers make pretty good pay here, and if you were willing to live in one of the less desirable areas, you could probably do it.
Comparing SF and SJ can be problematic, though. SF is a typical city with a high population density, but SJ is very atypical-- it’s a big, sprawling bedroom community, mostly. You can live pretty far from the city center of SJ and still be in SJ. Hell, there are still farms inside the city limits! SJ should really be thought of as some really big suburban community with a tiny urban center.
But they will still do it, most likely.
We are not talking about the entire SF bay area.
What is bullshit about it? Do you have any facts to dispute what he is saying?
Again, unless you brother has some facts about San Francisco and not San Jose, then it doesn’t disprove anything the article says. Do you actually understand evidence? Saying my brother is a big important guy who knows about this stuff proves nothing. Here is another cite from Fannie Mae :
Or this site stating the following:
How many teachers or cops have a household income that high? In short, businesses and governments have a hard time attracting and keeping people in an area where the housing is so expensive. When your brother, the king of Siam, has some evidence that this is not the case, tell him to present it.
But why would you? Two professionals working as a teacher and a cop have very little chance of owning a house in many of those communities. There are few incentives that people would exchange for the abandonment of the American dream of home ownership. Sure, some people will do it, but many won’t. That is a problem.
Yes, but that may not always be the case. That is the point. According to the SF Chamber of Commerce, businesses and governments are finding it increasingly difficult to keep people. People will only commute so far.
We moved recently from L.A. because of the housing situation and we are not alone. I worked a pretty big company and they have lost a lot of people because of it. So much so that when they outlined their largest risks for the company going forward, the inability to attract and keep people because of the Cost of living was one of seven big ones.
Yes, we are. See there’s these magical things called Freeways, roads, Caltrain busses and BART. SF city proper is very small indeed- it’s only 47 Square miles. You can easily live outside SF and commute in in less time that it will take you to drive across town to commute. Which is why Craigslist here is SF Bay area. I worked in Downtown SF for a while, my train comute was only 55 minutes, and that’s from San Jose. And, here if you are a Civil Servant (as opposed to an Elected Official) no one blinks an eye if you live outside the town you work for.
Yes, and I have cited them.
We are not talking about BUYING a fucking house, we are talking about rening an apartment. If you go back a bit you can see in my 1st reply to your first post I said “Wrong. We can afford to live, we can’t afford to buy. I live there and I do that. And same with my co-workers, even the lower graded ones. Yes, some have to have room-mates or be a two-job family, but rents aren’t horrible. 1 Bdr can be found for $800. A reasonable house in an reasonable neighborhood is $750K, however.” You’re comparing apples and oranges. Cops, teachers and other civile servants like myself generally can’t buy a house. However, with overtime, quite a few cops around here earn $100K, and Fire Captains earn $200K.
Santa Clara County discloses payroll – The Mercury News
"t public employers in the area, the county has more employees making more than $100,000 - 3,075, vs.San Jose’s 2,049. But as a percentage of their respective workforces, Santa Clara County has fewer workers earning into the six figures: 17 percent to San Jose’s 27 percent.
The median salary in San Jose’s workforce was $70,449 vs. the county’s $60,836. But both sets of data include some employees making only nominal amounts because they worked only a few days in the year or had some other unusual pay situation. The county’s lowest-paid worker was a former pharmacy technician, Aman Bhandal, who received $12.51 - which represented some residual vacation pay, according to the County Executive’s office. "
So, the heads of dept’s, top cops and fire captains and such can buy a home. The rest can easily afford an apartment with their median salary of $60-$70K.
Well, some of these communities have special loan programs to help lower paid government workers like teachers and cops. But cops get paid rather well around here, and a teacher/cop couple might make $150k per year. That’s still not much when the median home price is in the neighborhood of $700k, but some people (like me) just wouldn’t want to live anywhere else than this area.
So, it may be “a problem”, but one that we’ve been able to deal with for quite some time now.
Perhaps it is time to update the “location” in your profile. 
I work in real estate in Los Angeles. Overall, the general consensus in the market is:
The fringe outlying areas os Los Angeles experience the effects of the current market correction, but anything even somewhat centrally located will never significantly go down in value . . . there is far too much demand. Buyer’s won’t budge on their prices, they’ll just wait until someone will pay, because eventually someone will.
We are currently experiencing the “bursting bubble,” . . . this IS the market correction, not just the beginning of what is a much larger bubble.
The condo market is more volitile than the single-family homes market . . . prices will fluctuate more, but generally speaking, values will not significantly reduce, especially for anything on the west side.
There will never be a significant reduction in housing values in Los Angeles . . . the only thing that will happen is that they will not appreciate in value as rapidly. Overall, we’ll never see anything in the tune of a 20% reduction in housing prices.
I’ve already accepted the fact that I’ll be a renter my entire life as long as I live in Los Angeles!
The reason housing prices are so high in LA / San Francisco is because the market bears it. If housing was truely, truely unafforadable by everyone there would be no buyers. No buyers and the prices by default have to be lowered until their are buyers. Once you have buyers buying at the asking price you have your market right there.
20% drop? 50% drop? Who knows. It all depends when people are willing to pay the asking price. (Now whether they can really afford what they agreed to pay is another matter.)
Simple supply and demand.
Yes, but according to the SF Chamber of Commerce, people are finding this less palatable.
No, you cited prices for San Jose, not San Francisco. You are not discounting anything the cites I linked to contend. I don’t care about San Jose apartment prices or median incomes.
Yep. And along the western part of the SF Bay peninsula there just aren’t that many new houses being built. Go up the peninsula from Los Gatos to Palo Alto to Burlingame, and what you find are cities and town that are pretty much built out. But people still want to move there. Demand >> Supply, and there are structural factors that are going to keep it that way.
People move out Tracy and Los Banos because they are still building houses out there, and supply and demand is more in balance.