I'm genuinely curious why they bothered publishing this in its current state. They don't make tax calculations, so they assume you're paying rent with untaxed income, which makes the comparison all but meaningless.
I just want to add that the rent doesn't scale proportionately to number of bedrooms.
E.g. a 1BR in San Jose where I live goes for $2100/mo, a 2BR goes for $2400 (obviously, it's different everywhere - a friend of mine is renting a room in SF for $2K+).
It makes sense for a couple to get a 2BR even on a single income if it's good enough (and usually, once you can afford spending $2100/mo on rent, you can afford $2400 too). For 15% increase in rent, one gets the ability to e.g. comfortably invite friends/parents from out of state for a couple of days.
Of course, single-income no-kids couple does not look immediately look like the norm these days; but once you think of it, there are plenty of situations other than children that make sense for such a scenario: one of the partners might be in school / looking for a job / changing fields / being involved in something that doesn't provide a stable salary (arts, entrepreneurship) / did I mention start-ups? / etc
This is also because in San Jose// San Francisco, most of the population is a single twenty or thirty something that only need a 1Bedroom. The demand for 1BR is therefore absolutely huge compared to 2+BR
Unsure. But equality is one factor. At least where I live women outnumber men at universities - meaning that if one partner in the relation has an "important career", it's very soon going to be more often the mother.
Another factor is rents and house prices. If everyone you are competing with for that house can pay the mortgage on two incomes, you aren't going to afford it on one. So that's economic necessity I guess.
> At least where I live women outnumber men at universities - meaning that if one partner in the relation has an "important career", it's very soon going to be more often the mother.
You can't logically conclude that based on that one data point.
She has to work because most women work. Property is the bottleneck in the system, prices and rents rise to consume any surplus. If most women work, then prices and rents rise to the level only affordable for dual incomes. If one half of every couple stopped working, prices and rents would have to fall back to single-income affordable levels.
I'm from Indiana. The price difference between a 1br and 2br is sometimes small. Sometimes you can get a 2br cheaper than a 1br, and sometimes both of these options run the same as a small studio in an apartment complex.
There are slightly fewer 3br apartments there, so sometimes those prices are higher. Of course, in many small-to-midsize towns there was the options of renting a trailer for the same price as the 1-2 bedroom apartments.
One city was an exception: A college town I lived in. It was fairly common for rent to go up with each inhabitant because they were accustomed to making separate leases for each student. Mighty expensive when renting to a family, but made sense for their normal renters.
I think the person above you is literally saying that in places where it’s cheap enough a single income earner can easily get a 2br. I don’t know how true that is but I believe that’s what they were saying.
Definitely doable if you're not in places where real estate has gone completely bonkers. There are lots of places where it isn't unreasonable to rent an entire house on a single income, even though most incomes there are fractions of a Bay Area salary.
I live 10 minutes from downtown Kansas City. I rent an entire house with an acre backyard for 700$ a month. I could have got more for less if I wanted to live slightly further away from family.
2BR units are used for rent price comparisons in the US because they are the most common size unit nationwide, and are the easiest to collect data on. They're what HUD uses in their Fair Market Rent analyses and many organizations follow their lead.
If you are a family or couple renting a 2BR, you probably have more than one income earner. Exception to this case would be a single parent with children, but that rate is not especially high. And smaller households (i.e., just a couple, or a single mother and one child, etc.) are not especially likely to get a 2BR.
If you are a single person with a single income, you are not renting a 2BR. You might have a roommate, but in that case you are a two income household splitting the rent on a 2BR.
Single income for 2BR is such an odd case to base an entire statistic around.
If you're in a major city, this is probably a safe assumption, but there are plenty of areas where an extra bedroom is a pretty modest expense. A few years ago I had a nice 2 bedroom apartment right off the campus of a major midwest college for $900 a month - I had a nice king sized bed in the bedroom, and a man cave room with a gaming rig and music gear. It's one of the advantages of living outside of the biggest cities.
>Single income for 2BR is such an odd case to base an entire statistic around.
It may be the wrong choice for this analysis but it's not some weird outlier in many places in the country. Over the years, I've known many single people renting 2BR apartments and even buying houses.
> If you are a single person with a single income, you are not renting a 2BR. You might have a roommate, but in that case you are a two income household splitting the rent on a 2BR.
Hi, I'm a single person on a single income renting a 2BR townhouse.
I've lived in my current home for just over a decade (since November 2007), and during this time I've only had roommates for two very short periods. Both of those times were when I temporarily took in friends who were suffering from long-term unemployment and had nowhere else to go. One of them, in 2008, got a new job and moved out a few months after he moved in with me, and the other, in 2011, lived with me for two weeks before he mended fences with his parents and decided to move back to his hometown.
I think I might have had a roommate for a grand total of six months in the nearly 11 years I've lived here.
I like my space.
(edit: Oh, and my best friend just bought a huge house in an exurb. He's single and has no roommates.)
Same here. I lived in 2BR apartments by myself until I moved in with my girlfriend. One office, one bedroom. Life is better when you can literally sprawl out on the floor.
We live in a 4BR with a basement, with two roommates who will be (slowly) transitioning out of the house over the next couple years. And with two dogs. It's literally basically Just Enough House to feel comfortable for us.
> If you are a family or couple renting a 2BR, you probably have more than one income earner. Exception to this case would be a single parent with children
Or a married couple with children and a stay at home parent. Or a working adult and their non-SS-eligible (e.g., immigrated too late in life to get the needed work credits) elderly parent that they care for. Or...
> If you are a single person with a single income, you are not renting a 2BR.
You might for a home office, especially if you do a kind of work from home that involves substantial paperwork and reference material, not just a simple workstation.
From my experience, this is incredibly uncommon in the northeast. I only know one couple like that in NY, and she has a large enough trust fund that neither one of them really needs to work at all. Every other couple with children that I know actually living in the cities are 2 income households. The same holds for everyone I know in Boston.
While that would be much more useful, factoring in state/federal/city taxes including brackets is going to be very high effort in comparison to what was done here.
Even factoring in an approximation of federal tax would have made the comparison much better. Adding in an approximation of state tax would give a pretty decent boost to cities in states with no income tax (although you have to watch out for sales taxes in that case).
Absolutely. It's completely worthless in it's current state.
Also, the rent jungle numbers look a bit conservative for palo alto. In PA a 220 sq ft loft costs nearly 2000$/mo to rent. I think the 3900$/mo figure they have is a bit conservative for PA.
Furthermore, they compared 2BD as their normalization factor, rather than $/sq foot. I would imagine the more expensive areas get less Square footage for a given 2BD apartment.
And, notice how they conveniently didn't even mention any comparisons of salary to housing Buy costs.
The housing numbers look poorly researched in general. Sunnyvale for example is not that hard to find a 2 bedroom apartment for under $3k - I'm paying $2700 a month myself for one with over 1k sqft and modern appliances.