[chanri]

The statistics on this infographic are misleading. It does not cost 200,000 to buy a house in San Diego or San Jose!

Maybe the average for downtown San Jose and San Diego are close to 200k, but that is the poorest area of both cities and not what should be used to compare. The green bubble on the point for San Diego should be much much smaller in radius(like miniscule), otherwise you think the 200k number refers to the entire city!

People should not be using this to make informed decisions (obviously).

[showerst]

I believe that they're basing this data on stats collected by the census, so you have take the city as defined by the census bounds, which aren't necessarily similar to common conceptions of what area is 'in' a city.

[chanri]

There are many cities in the county of San Diego. The city of San Diego (where you are suggesting that the 200k number came from) is about 10-20% of the size of the county of San Diego.

They should make the size of the bubble smaller to only cover the area of the city like you are saying.

[showerst]

The issue isn't really the city scale then, it's the numbers for the avg house price: http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/San_Diego-California/marke...

http://www.trulia.com/home_prices/California/San_Diego-heat_... breaks it down better, my domain knowledge of SD ends there, I couldn't tell you whether they're showing an accurate pic of what constitutes most people's idea of San Diego.

The circle is definitely scaled correctly though, the ratio of area of the circle to population (1306300 people per 1809 pixels, or about 722 people per pixel) is within the margin of error for my numbers for new york (about 662ppl/pixel), and LA (about 725ppl/pixel).

[bengebre]

I noticed they are using "listing prices" instead of sale prices or any kind of constant quality index to calculate their ratios. That's probably not ideal, but since price series are hard to find for homes it's at least understandable (that and it's their business model to collect listings).

I do a lot of work in this domain and the price-to-rent and price-to-income ratios for California look higher by my calculations. Using median sales prices for the broader metro area and income and rent data from the Census, I'm finding California is still quite expensive.

http://www.deptofnumbers.com/affordability/metros

Click on the table heading columns to sort and you see some pretty unaffordable stuff in California. For San Jose the rent ratio is ~35.

Note: In case it wasn't obvious, I'm linking to a site I maintain above.