The Bay Area, in California, is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. The median rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $5,000 a month. With diminishing tenant rights, renters live in fear of massive rental hikes. If you live in San Francisco, your chances of being able to afford a place in San Francisco are not good at all.
Only 13 percent of San Francisco households can afford to pay the nearly $7,000 a month in housing costs for a median-priced home here, according to recent analysis by Paragon Realty. “By definition, half the homes sold in any given county were at prices below the median sales price, i.e. there were numerous homes that were more affordable than the median prices used in this analysis,” said the report. “However, any way one slices it, the Bay Area has one of the most expensive— if not the most expensive—and least affordable housing markets in the country.”
Using data from the California Association of Realtors’ Housing Affordability Index, Paragon found that the 13 percent affordability rate is actually better than the all-time affordability low of 8 percent during the housing boom of 2007, despite the fact that the $1.375-million price tag for a median-priced home in S.F. is about 50 percent higher than it was in 2007. (The data only examines single-family home costs; if condos were included, the median would drop to $1.2 million.)
What can of scratch do you have to bring in to make your modest San Francisco home happen?
Even with the historically low interest rates, the report found that San Francisco households needed a minimum income of nearly $270,000 in order to qualify to buy a median-priced home. Those minimum incomes were only slightly lower in San Mateo and Marin. A Santa Clara household would need about $212,000 to buy a median-priced home there; in Alameda the income needed dropped to about $160,000.
Two-hundred-seventy … thousand. A year! Time to start that GoFundMe page.
