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by nostrademons 2157 days ago
Rent for a low-end 1BR in Silicon Valley is about $2000/month. Low-end 2BR = ~$2600/month, high-end 1BR = ~$4500/month. Houses are ~$10K/month and up.

Entry-level tech compensation is ~$180K/year, mid-career = ~$600K/year. If you're not in tech you're screwed here - formerly middle-class professions like teachers/police/firemen live 4 to a 2BR apartment, or they buy houses an hour or more away. Even mid-career finance professionals get screwed - salary for CEO of a local (not nationwide) bank is in the ~$150-200K range, and barely competes with a new grad at Google or Facebook.

2 comments

> Houses are ~$10K/month and up.

That's way high. A million-dollar house on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, assuming a 20% down payment, is ~4800/month including property tax. With a 10% down payment it would be about $5800/month.

To get to a $10k/month housing bill you need to buy a place that costs close to $2 million. The median sales price in Santa Clara county is closer to $1.3 or $1.4 million. Most people are paying a lot less than $10k/month for their house.

The median buyer in Santa Clara County buys a condo - that's what's going for $1.3-1.4M.

Low-end SFHs - we're talking a 3/2 built in the 1950s - go for about $1.8-$1.9M in Mountain View, $1.6-1.7M in Sunnyvale. A SFH like what you'd get in most of the rest of the U.S. - 4/2.5 or 5/3 on 1/4 acre lot, built somewhere between the 70s and 00s - will run about $2.4-2.8M.

No, the median SFH sales price in Santa Clara county is ~1.4 million. I just looked it up. https://scc.rereport.com/market_reports

Mountain View is one of the most expensive cities in the county, second to Palo Alto and maybe Los Altos. Most of the area is cheaper.

That is the most expensive area in US. This compensation is given to EVERYONE.