The Rising Rents Versus Falling Prices Paradox And Salary Debate

local tech jobs just don’t pay all that well. It’s enough for a 28-year-old to rent a decent small-ish pad. But it is not nearly enough to buy a nice SF place, especially if you have kids.
Yes, the average salaries at all of these companies are substantially less than the starting salary for a brand new, fresh-out-of-law-school lawyer at a major law firm (though these folks presumably have not acquired three extra years of graduate education debt). But $100k or $200k is nowhere near enough to reasonably afford a ~$1M or even $700k home/condo.
This has always been a great puzzle to me. Despite the constant talk of how much wealth is in SF (and there are undoubtedly a number of people with enormous wealth here), less than 10% of the population makes even $200k *per household.* Which is relatively little money considering what prices still are.

[shza] is absolutely correct. After taxes and living in SF, at $100k/yr, you are going to need to live like a monk and save for a long time to afford even a middlin’ place in SF (however, you could buy a place elsewhere, which is the far more common outcome). You’d have a much nicer, more financially savvy life by continuing to rent.

How can someone live here on $100K/year? I see one example almost daily, and it ties back into my original comment. Buy a house, illegally build out the downstairs into two rentals (inc. sealing off the garage). Obviously we’re not talking PacHts, but now your monthly payments are perhaps only $2,000.
I like the increased density, actually, but it isn’t managed as it would be if addressed via zoning changes and the like. Instead you get pervasive civil disobedience.

“Not true. With dual income, my wife and I make about 250k/yr (both in tech). We saved our 20% down payment on a 700k home in 2 years.”
3x income is pretty much in line with what pre-bubble estimates of reasonableness. The 200k HH’s going for $1.5-$2M places are the problem cases. I assume shza’s question of how this happened was rhetorical, but the answer obviously is large loans!
A point here though is that while individual personal income may affect your ability to weather losses or temporary fluctuations, it is really unrelated to if a particular investment (such as a house) is worthwhile at a particular price point. A bad investment is still a bad investment even if your income doubles.
The solution to shza’s “puzzle” in my opinion is that given the home price increase expectations present during the bubble it would be rational to lever up to 10x income to get a piece of that. The error of course being in the expectation of future prices.

“big friggin deal man — make 25% less and save for another 1/2 year”
Well, saving 20% down in 2 years on a 700k place means saving $70k/yr. However, if you make $50k less a year, then that makes it quite a bit more difficult to save that $70k/yr! When you’re only saving 20k/yr instead of 70k, it is not as easy as just saving up for another 1/2 year.
But, hey, let’s not let simple math get in the way of this “real life” counter-example. (and yes, I know that you need to account for taxes, etc. — use any realistic numbers you can conjure up and the point is the same)

Of course I don’t expect you to do the math for me. Because as I demonstrated the math does not add up, and you cannot “do the math” so that it does.
I didn’t say infinity. I said that at these relatively low pay scales in tech, you’d need to live like a monk and save for a long time to afford even a middlin’ place in SF. Sure, at higher, and more uncommon, pay scales, and with no kids, and without saving for retirement, and with little to no student loan debt, one can afford that middlin’ place sooner (and start paying more than comparable rent sooner).

UsuallyNamed,
So you are saving $150/year. A $2M house would cost you $100K a year if you put $500K down. Basically you could save for 4 years and buy a $2M house.
Why do you find it so hard to see where all the $2M sales are from.

people making $300000+ a year and living in an urban area like sf often decide to go the private school route or move to the burbs

Historically the rule of thumb used to be house price = 4 X gross income. More than this was considered too risky.
Of course low rates, relaxed rules and industry pressure have pushed prices up and many stretch a purchase to 6, 7, even 8 X income.
To everyone his comfort zone. I stayed in the range 3-3.5 myself and live well beneath my means.
In my opinion people who go over the ratio of 5 in SF should be very very careful about what they are actually purchasing. Any kind of work on a house is prohibitively expensive in SF for most paychecks. If you do not have the cash flow or something stashed for that purpose, a house can affect your family’s lifestyle big time.

“Historically the rule of thumb used to be house price = 4 X gross income. More than this was considered too risky.”
A common “risk” is that dual income households don’t always stay dual income over the long term. You can get an empirical taste for this by looking at the stroller density in Noe Valley.
Buying in at 3-3.5x and going to 6-7x is probably workable even if a little tight. But buying in at 5+ and going to 10+ is a different story. For the $~2M house example with $100k mortgage & costs, $30k property tax, a $150k income won’t work out well.

Our 300k breaks down pretty much 1/3 taxes, 1/3 expenses, 1/3 savings. That income does not include the 24k of rental income.
A $2M house on our income would be pretty tight, even with 20% down payment saved. A quick calculation of a $1.6M mortgage at 4.75% gives me $100k in mortgage and another $24k a year in taxes.
I just can’t see spending 62% of my after tax pay on housing. Sure there would be a tax break, but not really that much, since only the first $1M is deductible.
And that would mean very little or no savings, a 30 year mortgage with no desire to work another 30 years and everything tied up in a massively leveraged bet on San Francisco real estate.
I am absolutely following the Your_Money_Or_Your_Life plan to achieve financial independence and be a stay at home parent. This helps make the scrimping and saving not feel like so much of a sacrifice. I couldn’t do it without the 100% support of my spouse.

Most people in this country making 300k/yr have a substantial part of their income from capital gains, taxed at a lower rate. It is the two-income W-2 wage earner couple that gets most screwed on taxes — paying payroll taxes to the cap twice and paying the highest marginal rates. That’s why even a couple each earning these okay, but not spectacular, tech salaries aren’t living high off the hog in SF.

200k per year is enough to own a million dollar home if you can get started. An 800,000 loan costs about 4400 per month to service, net, including property taxes, MID, etc. Someone making 200k per year is paying 50k in fed taxes and perhaps 15k in state, leaving them 11k per month. 4400 per month is not difficult at that income level.

the discussion of 3-5X-10X is pointless unless you know what you’re putting down and the absolute size of the mortgage. Even if you’re pulling $1m, the debt service on a 5m mortgage is going to crush you.

@tipster: their problem is that $200k/year doesn’t go that far especially if you have kids. You’ve really got to get your income up north of $300k to get ahead of the curve.
There is certainly no special challenge to spending all of a $250k/year income while living in any expensive metro area in this country.

Shza, You really need to get yourself a home (and mortgage payment) to call your own instead of that Prop 13 protected rental. I’ve been meaning to ask, do other parents give you the stink eye at PTA meetings when they find out you’re a renter? I suppose you can endear yourself to them by saying that you always vote for the school bonds and parcel taxes! Regale us with a tale or two; you’re the closest we have to LMRiM these days.

“My friends with $200K in household incomes all have car payments and monthly credit card balances”
Just a generla question, as I see thiskind of comment frequently. Do people here just sit around and discuss salary details, credit card balances with each other?
Maybe you do, and I’m just so terribly..British..about all this. But the couples my wife and I know, really, I could guess but I have no idea whether they’re, say, a $200k or $300k household.
I don;t think I;ve ever asked anybody what their salary is, and I don’t think anybody has ever told me that information,either…

$2.2MM building with a mortgage of $1.7 at 3%. Heck, we spend $1,400 a month on groceries alone
The $1,400 is mind blowing tbh..
But I found the 3% mortgage even more surprising..are rates that low possible??
Curious as we own a 2 unit building, and rent out one of the units. Have bought enough of the mortgage down to below the conforming limits (limits are higher for 2 units) but our mortgage rate is still no where as low as 3%.

“the discussion of 3-5X-10X is pointless unless you know what you’re putting down ”
The WSJ had an article a while back stating that the median down payment in SF dropped to zero during the boom. Even now, I think the rise in FHA loans is mainly due to the low DP required and I’d guess that average DP size isn’t huge.
“There is certainly no special challenge to spending all of a $250k/year income while living in any expensive metro area in this country.”
Since by and large these tech jobs do not have defined benefit pension plans, it’s worth considering the amount of saving you’d need to do to keep up an inflation adjusted standard of living at a $250k burn rate compared to the $80k burn mentioned by the other poster. If you assume SS stays in its current form, it’s probably worse then simple scaling since for a dual wage family social security would provide a chunk of that $80k.

I’m sure people making $100,000 and up feel like they can’t keep up. But give me a break–it’s unseemly for people that are in the top 15% of Americans (households over $100,000) to be complaining. Those in the top 5% (households over $150,000) may have a hard time buying a million dollar home, but they have a lot of freedom and more options that most Americans can only dream about. sdfsdfds is in the top 1% or 2% of American households by making over $300,000 a year. [most of this data comes from here.]
In San Francisco, the median income in
2009 was $70,247. I can’t find data as to the exact breakdown of SF income brackets but I imagine a household income of $150,000 is still in the top 10% of San Francisco households. I would imagine, even though San Francisco probably has more high earners than other places, that the $300,000 household income still puts one’s family in the top 5% of San Franciscans.
There was a housing bubble that effected all income levels. The housing for the middle and lower income levels have suffered the most and this is where housing is more affordable. Housing for the upper income levels is still elevated and here it is much less wise to buy a home. So buying in San Francisco pretty much only makes sense on a fundamental level for those looking in the less expensive neighborhoods and for less expensive houses. Of course, our mythical, yet all-too-real 30 year old Master of the Universe, making $100,000 doesn’t want to move to Bayview or out by the Ocean, or anywhere it may actually make sense on a fundamental basis to buy.

someone making 100k per year can buy 1/3 of the houses for sale in SF
someone making 200k per year can buy 80% of the houses for sale in SF
what’s the big deal? A married couple, 30 years old, with decent tech jobs can buy almost any house in SF.
I don’t get it. Yes, financially profligate people won’t be able to, but they box themselves out of many things, not just house purchases.

I fail to see how tc_sf got to the 36% figure. I linked to this Forbes article before, showing that that the plutocrats are paying a crazy low effective tax to the federales, up to 18% 2008 from 16%. The article goes on:
“By comparsion, as the IRS report here shows, in 2008, taxpayers with an adjusted gross income between $500,000 and $1 million paid an effective tax rate of 23.4%. Even those earning between $200,000 and $500,000 paid a higher effective tax rate —19.6%—than the plutocrats.”
Presumably Tc_sf added in payroll taxes to go from 19.6% to 36%? But these taxes effect those making under the cap even more than those making more than the ~ $100,000 cap. A person making $150,000 is only paying payroll taxes on roughly a third of his income. A person making $300,000 is only paying payroll taxes on one third of his income. A person making the minimum wage in San Francisco of about $20,000 a year is paying payroll taxes on 100% of his income. It would obviously be better from a payroll taxes standpoint if one family member were making the $300K rather than two $150,000 family members.

SFHawkguy, I hear you. I don’t think people on this board are complaining or whining. I at least hope I am not coming off that way.
At the same time, people that have reached a certain income level view their success as primarily a function of hard work, tough decisions, and sacrifices they have made in life. I can only speak for myself but I for one have worked my tail off in life and have certain expectations of what that would mean in terms of life style and rewards. Am I in the far right of the bell curve of incomes in this country? Probably. Do I feel like my lifestyle is even close to the far right of the bell curve? Hardly. But then again, we all live in quite the bubble relative to places like Des Moines, Madison, Portland, Jacksonville, etc. But I don’t want to live in those other places… That is, at the end of the day, my choice.

I’m with SFHawkguy. The capital gains tax structure is abused in this country. Huge advantage to people that make most of their money through investment carry from investment vehicles. If I trade stocks in a hedge fund for a living I do nothing more than create liquidity in a market for secondary securities. If I run a business with 100 employees that creates something not only do I provide meaningful jobs across the socioeconomic spectrum but I also am adding something back to society, be it toilets, cars, telephones, and pens. Yet the small business person will pay a much higher tax rate.

I hear you too Bozette. Most people in all income levels have had to readjust their assumptions. This is a personal adjustment that will be difficult on all people. I do not deny that there is emotional trauma and other effects associated with someone that makes $300,000 a year and can’t have the things she thought she would have. That she won’t be able to live in Noe Valley but will instead have to settle for Glen Park, or that the yearly trip overseas will have to be scaled back, etc.
I’m just saying that one should keep some perspective. The people that are really getting screwed are in the bottom 50% of our society and they have no voice. Our media writes them out. And as much as I like this blog, it is definitely geared toward the mindset of a person in the top 5% (which is fine–there’s value in all sorts of opinions–it’s just that all of our media is filtered through a lens just for the top 5%).
Imho, the attitude adjustment, or the emotional trauma associated with diminished expectations, will effect the top 20% to 50% the most–people that 10 years ago had [misguided] expectations about their lifestyle. This group was really encouraged to live beyond their means. Lots of Americans bought into the hype. In fact, trillions is spent on convincing us to live beyond our means.
I’m not discounting the personal feelings of those who have to readjust–even the wealthy–I just think its health to remember that lots of people are suffering even more severe emotional and physical pain from the recession. There’s a big difference between losing a home (or losing a pension or something like that) and *only* being able to afford a $700,000 home and not a $1,500,000 home or to have to drive a $15,000 car instead of a $50,000 car.

Here’s the irony in our case: for the first time this year my wife and I will have a combined income just north of $300k. We have only one child in a nanny-share arrangement and almost never eat a meal out (once a month or less, when we can get the grandparents to babysit). We went on one vacation all year, for 3 weeks. We own our cars outright. I never go shopping for new clothes, kitchen gadgets, electronics, nothing. Ever. We have zero credit card debt and zero student loans. No loans of any kind except for mortgages.
I have a weakness for wine and I have no idea what my grocery bill is every month. We have a gardener and a housekeeper (each come weekly).
We don’t save a penny.
Its.all.gone.

“Hi DLotus –
I think we just got lucky on the mortgage. It adjusts every year at 250 basis points over this index, which I am not worried about increasing prohibitively any time soon: http://www.moneycafe.com/library/cmt.htm
On groceries, how many in your family and how much do you spend? Curious.”
Think the q was meant for me, not DLotus?
anyway, 3 in our family, probably spend around $600 a month, but trying to get it down, and have done so. mainly by moving away from an exlcusivley Whole Foods only shop. Their produce is great, but I find the prices an aboslute, total rip off – having said that, have managed to shop a bit more cleverly there than I used to – buying sale items, more bulk etc. agree re Safeway meat/fish quality. usually top up the WF stuff from other places when ‘out and about’ typically in Mission eg Sun Fat fish (some of their fish is half WF price, and good quality),or produce places in Mission (again, half price but varying quality) at Church 30th (a little cheaper) etc. So,no special extra trips, but sometimes a detour of a few blocks.
This is as much for my own satisfaction as anything else, as don’t want to give WF ALL of my money!!
Also, got good at cooking cheaper meals, eg a box of pasta, some tinned tuna, tinned sweetcorn, few blobs of mayo would serve family of five for less than $10, and kids (and me!) love it.
But, I wouldn;t worry too much – you have a great deal on your mortgage at moment, which clearly compensates for a few excesses at Whole Foods! curious, though, when you say the rent covers your mortgage – you mean just the mortgage on the rental part of the property..or the whole thing?
If the latter then I would wonder where it all goes!
we have 2 units, rent out one and I think the rent covers around half of our total interest, property tax and principal payments, so fairly happy with that atm.

“Of course, our mythical, yet all-too-real 30 year old Master of the Universe, making $100,000 doesn’t want to move to Bayview or out by the Ocean, or anywhere it may actually make sense on a fundamental basis to buy.”
I didn’t realize that $100k made you a master of the universe. Or that buying in Bayview made sense (unless you’re a developer and are going to tear the whole place up).
As far as the tax burden – you have 10% CA, 35% federal, 15% self-employment; SF 1%; on top of sales/use, car taxes/insurance, and all kinds of other crappy fees – incidentally, deducting CA may well put you into AMT. But heck, if SF employees are supposed to be getting $200k salaries by the thousands (!) then someone has to be fleeced for it.
So yes, if you’re a VC and all your income is cap gains you may end up with 15% and 10% CA but most business owners don’t fit that pattern.
Finally, as far as people who have “no voice” (and, no tax burden BTW), this is America, had they gone to school and gotten MBAs, or started their own companies maybe they’d have grown some chords that spoke a baritone. Assuming that doesn’t work there are many countries in the world if their socialized shores beckon at one’s heart. But of course, sitting and complaining and looking at another person’s wallet is so much easier.

Some of the renters I see around my neighborhood, Noe Valley, all drive new cars. I’m talking I see a lot of new 2011 bmw’s, audi’s and lexuses parked on the street in front of their nice little rental flat.
Hmmm. no wonder they can’t afford a house. What about priorities, and saving?
I applaud what S says above: sure, it’s not easy but it is possible. Congrats to them!

“Hmmm. no wonder they can’t afford a house. What about priorities, and saving?
I applaud what S says above: sure, it’s not easy but it is possible. Congrats to them!”
Making leveraged real estate purchases has been a poor, poor priority/decision for the last half-decade. I’m even less sure why you’d be applauding someone scrimping to piece together funds for a $500k shack in Bernal rather than renting a superior place for the same money on very limited income. Seems like a much more reckless financial decision than buying a bmw for 40k.
You also have no idea what these “renters” you look down upon are making, money-wise, or doing with the other money they’re not spending to service a huge loan. I’m far from the only person I know who makes substantially more money than the average SF mortgage-servicer. These folks could all be better off financially than you for all you know. They just haven’t “prioritized” your fetishism for home ownership. There’s nothing morally or objectively wrong with that (to the contrary, it’s been the objectively correct decision in the great majority of instances over the past half-decade).

Possibly nnona. But nobody answered my q above about how posters know so much about friends/acquaintances incomes. My point was I,d be guessing for most I know, and only confident at a combined 200 to 300k range say. A very big range.
Do people really sit around and compare their and spouses salaries with friends? Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve never done that.
Tipster, I think it was you specifically mentioned friends with specific combined earnings, but I know others have said it too.

nnona wrote:
> Don’t know about y’all, but every time I hear
> (or read) self-reported salary/income/wealth/money
> figures or sexual conquest numbers/escapades,
> my reflex is to start looking around for the
> salt bowl.Just sayin’….
After reading Blogs for years I’v noticed that “most” people don’t out and out “lie” but tend to exaggerate to prove a point (so the guy that makes $100K that can’t afford an iPhone probably makes $60K and the guy that makes $100K and just bought in Pac Heights probably makes $180K and got the $250K down payment from his grandma)…

“Single mothers deserves to live in poverty because they weren’t smart enough to get the money to pay for graduate degrees!”
were they raped? were they unaware of Roe v. Wade being law of the land> or did they make a decision to have kids they could not afford without first getting a graduate degree? I am not knocking it but those are choices.
“I would rather have the millions of hungry children live here and be treated with human dignity that to have a country serve a bunch of selfish Masters of the Universe.”
There are countries like that already – you should search for subsaharan africa on the map. they have no master of the universe and no one really cares about them – most of these countries do not even have resources to “steal”. are they better off? how are they going to be treated with dignity? who’s going to pay for that?
“Those 37% of families with children living in poverty?”
Source please? Also, did it ever occur to you that, if you really wanted to equalize incomes, the best way to do that would be for the rich to have millions of kids and for the poor to have few – heard of primogeniture?
“Single mothers deserves to live in poverty because they weren’t smart enough to get the money to pay for graduate degrees!”
No one wants anyone to live in poverty but don’t pretend that most people just are born to lives of permanent poverty – look at the Indians or any other non-US group in Silicon Valley.
“I’m not jealous of your wallet wrath. I’m sad that so many Americans are so cruel they would rather protect their relative comfort while millions of children are hungry and face bleak futures.”
First, I didn’t say anything about my wallet. Second, what makes me sad is when I see evidently poor families walking up and down the street with 3,4, 5 more? kids. Then you say to me there are “millions” of them! My God they’re poor and I’m cruel for not wanting to feed them!
You know what? Here is five bucks – give it to your friends, tell them next time to use a condom (yeah, I know, it doesn’t feel the same – life sux).

wrath: “As far as the tax burden – you have 10% CA, 35% federal, 15% self-employment; SF 1%; on top of sales/use, car taxes/insurance, and all kinds of other crappy fees – incidentally, deducting CA may well put you into AMT.”
What a bunch of bs, just throwing out the top tax rates without any acknowledgement that no one is going to get hit by all of those.
The 35% federal rate doesn’t kick in until $379,000. Meanwhile the 15% self-employment tax drops off after $100k to less then 3%, and half of the self-employment tax paid reduces AGI. And further just deducting CA tax will not subject someone to the AMT, you need a lot of other deductions before triggering the AMT, plus the AMT tax rate is 28%, so if someone is actually paying the 35% they aren’t going to get hit with AMT on regular earned income (they may still get hit with the AMT if they have some unusual types of income particularly related to things like options).

^
http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/09/27/what-are-we-spending-our-money-on/

@shza: Buying a house is far more than just for financial reasons.
You can begin to lock in your monthly housing costs. Rents keep going up.
A pride of ownership may support one’s goals and sense of accomplishment. These are called values.
You can do what you want with your own house, remodel it, make it reflect your personality.
Owning creates stability in the community. ALL of the owners on my street in Noe keep the streets clean, plant trees, become involved. Not ONE of the renters I know on my street have been interested in nor offered to help with tree planting. They have no desire, or reason to be a participant.
My partner and I bought many years ago in Noe for around 100k, saved and scrimped for the down payment. Today: $1.5m
Not bad for a “leveraged” investment.

tc_sf,
Why do you prefer you source to the one I provided above? It seems my source is better because it looks backward looking at real tax returns rather than projecting forward. Again, for the bracket we are discussing, the Forbes article (reviewing the most recent annual IRS data), states:
“Even those earning between $200,000 and $500,000 paid a higher effective tax rate —19.6%—than the plutocrats.”
19.6 is a lot less than 26%. Now, if we want to add payroll taxes into the discussion I don’t see how this is evidence that the wealthy (the top 3% or so) pay a greater share of taxes. As you know, the payroll taxes is an extremely regressive tax, effecting the middle and lower classes much more than those making over $100,000. Maybe you aren’t making that exact argument though . . . .
But the best evidence supports a 19.6% effective federal tax rate for those making $300,000.
Shza,
I understand your point and A.T.’s point. But you seem to be in the minority of the top 2% to 3% in that you have a dual wage income and don’t earn as much passive income. But ON AVERAGE, people in your income bracket pay a much lower effective tax.

Yes, the baby boomers mortgaged their future, shifted wealth to a concentrated few, off-shored most entry-level positions, and wonder why their children aren’t as well-off as they are.
I’ve gone from Starter MotU to Senior (not Executive) MotU in my career. As a conservative midwesterner I never spent above my means, saved at least 10% of my after-tax, and put 30% down when I could finally afford a condo. With 11-12 years left on my 15 year refi I can taste the path to a much lower overhead existence.
On SocketSite the analysis is usually “home as investment” as compared to arenas with different risk sets. But you can’t sleep in 30 shares of BRK.A or any amount of oil futures. Home ownership has an end-game – my nut will shrink to property tax and condo fees – ~$1500/m in a good part of town. At that point I’ll be a Retired MotU laughing in my leisure.

Exactly, elbee: home ownership does have a good end game.
@AT: not sure how you can say that SF real estate has not been “remarkably strong” for me and many others like me who bought 26-30 years ago. Ive had a wonderful house to enjoy and sleep in as well as a solid investment.
Like elbee, I too shall be laughing and lounging the pool in my all cash paid for home in Palm Springs.

ModernQueen,
You got lucky. Period.
If you would have lived 20 years later and all other things being equal you would probably be in a much different situation.
And why will you be laughing? Can you only be happy about your circumstances if others are suffering?

“Why do you prefer you source to the one I provided above? I”
As I mentioned above, I was mainly trying to ballpark take home pay (as it turns out due to a misunderstanding of what UsuallyNamed meant by “tax”). The CBO link just popped up as an early result on Google and is a credible source.
But I don’t even think there is that much of a discrepancy. If you look a few sentences up in the Forbes article you’ll see that they are quoting effective *income* tax rates. Your article quotes 19.6% for this while the CBO table has 18.5% for 2010 (top 10%). sfrenegade’s points about this being a prediction are vaild. For a pair of $150k earners, about 2/3 of their earnings will get hit by payroll tax maybe adding ~5% to their total ETR.
Mainly though if you look at the scale of the discussion a few percent difference isn’t that relevant compared to the range of low end leverage (3x) to high end (7x) that people were discussing. For a 300k couple this difference spans from a 900k to a $2.1M potential home purchase.

SFhawkguy:
huh?..No, I wouldn’t call it luck, just part of the times then. But, seriously: we did sacrifice for a few years to save for a large down. We lived in a small 1 br apt, cheap rent, when many of our other friends had large view apartments in Twin Peaks or Pac. Heights. We didn’t go on elaborate vacations, we had an older car.
That’s (partly) what it’s about. Of course, good double incomes helped, yes.
But no, I’m not laughing at the expense of anyone else’s “suffering” as you imply. I’m laughing at those who still keep saying owning your own home is not a “remarkably strong” investment.

I think we’re all assuming that the 300k couple has no education debt, which considering what I know about my friends from college who have gone onto law school, med school, etc can easily be 100k to 300k each especially if they had debt from undergrad! The national numbers about student debt are a little sick – the average debt for undergraduate nationally is almost 20k. For graduate school, the med school average is $156,456, law school is $93,359, MBA is $34,691, and simple MS (aka what a silicon valley type usually needs) is $34,824. They all now think I was brilliant for working straight out of undergrad and having my employer pay for my graduate degree. I know what my friends make as we all helped each other proof each others’ FAFSA paperwork and talk about strategies for debt payoff, scholarships, etc.
Now assuming you both get that 150k job in the same city (several couples I know ended up being separated for residencies or grad school, which leads to maintaining two households AND travel expenses) and can share expenses, it can take 5 to 10 years to pay off that debt. Then they are ready to buy and they don’t have that down payment unless they borrow from their 401k or go to the parents. If you think about professionals that who also need to buy into their practice (dentists, doctors, some lawyers…), it helps explain why some folks may lead modest lifestyles yet still not have 20% down with a 300k income.
What if they have a medical crisis or job loss during those years? Even wonderful insurance doesn’t cover everything and chronic conditions can mean an extra 10k a year out the door pretax to pay copays, deductibles, and coinsurance.
Average student for those with graduate degrees from finaid.org:
Submitted FAFSA Graduate Education Debt All Education Debt
(Grad & Undergrad)
Graduate & Professional Degree Programs Percent Borrowing Cumulative Debt Percent Borrowing Cumulative Debt
Total 94.3% $46,865 96.9% $62,285
Master’s Degree 94.5% $34,741 97.7% $51,223
Doctoral Degree 82.8% $73,885 85.0% $85,366
Professional Degree 99.4% $92,575 99.9% $105,705
Master of Business Administration (MBA) 98.2% $34,691 98.9% $53,779
Master of Social Work (MSW) 91.9% $36,924 91.9% $54,020
Master of Science (MS) 95.2% $34,824 98.3% $52,102
Master of Arts (MA) 94.0% $34,357 97.4% $50,102
Master of Education or Teaching 92.6% $31,540 96.8% $49,286
PhD 67.5% $58,353 72.0% $69,754
EdD 94.5% $51,695 94.5% $61,121
Law (LLB or JD) 99.9% $82,601 99.9% $95,914
Medicine or Osteopathic Medicine 100.0% $126,152 100.0% $136,474
Pharmacy (PharmD) 100.0% $66,319 100.0% $88,648

The comments regarding buying vs renting remind me of discussions surrounding bonds vs stocks. There will be times where bonds outperform stocks and vice-versa. If you can time the market (ie: rent rather than buy), then you can do well but the trick is timing it right. For those people who look at a house as a home rather than an investment, they can buy a house and over the long term (perhaps 30+ years) they will likely do better than those who rent. Of course, this does not take into consideration rent control and all that that entails.

@rillion:
“What a bunch of bs, just throwing out the top tax rates without any acknowledgement that no one is going to get hit by all of those.”
of course, you will be hit – you just mean not on all the income.
plugging in, e.g., 500k (small business owner business income?) and 100k in wage income with a 60k state (CA at 10% roughly, yes it’s less for under 48k but on these numbers that’s not really relevant) gets you:
– 176k in federal taxes (which, oh BTW, includes over $8k in AMT – they said it couldn’t be done!)
– 60k or so in CA;
so, basically, 236k out of 600k or 39.33% effective rate; this does not include sales/use taxes/fees, etc. or the 1% SF taxes.
would you like to elaborate where I am wrong? Or is Turbo Tax part of the Bush-Cheney conspiracy?
http://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/calculators/taxcaster/?s=1
re: sfhawkguy – in his world the rich get richer through (a) luck or (b) theft – that’s a predicate for redistributive theories – you must first delegitimize the source of people’s wealth before you can convince others that it must be redistributed. I mean, they stole it and they don’t even want to pay taxes on it!

Modernqueen wrote:

Some of the renters I see around my neighborhood, Noe Valley, all drive new cars. I’m talking I see a lot of new 2011 bmw’s, audi’s and lexuses parked on the street in front of their nice little rental flat.
Hmmm. no wonder they can’t afford a house. What about priorities, and saving?

They’re probably leasing those cars.
And being able to lease a 40-50k vehicle is a whole different ballgame than being able to save up 100k cash for a down payment with no help from family members, particularly when your bank five-year CD yield is 1.2 percent and falling.
It really depends on your household income; if you’re priced out of the market due to your household income level, you can have all the priorities you want, you’ll still be priced out, so you might as well go ahead and enjoy the little luxuries that you CAN afford.
I personally don’t think this way (and have embraced the monk-like existence that A.T. at 10/03/2011 4:01 PM describes), but I have a lot of friends and associates from college who do.

@tc_sf:
Read my post again. Clearly, I said owning was far more than JUST financial.
And I listed many reasons. Period.
Wondering: are you an owner or renter?

Regarding how much people make, it’s simple: I ask. I’m an employer and I am constantly trying to obtain market data on salaries.
For example, I was speaking with someone yesterday, new college grad, doing exactly what I used to pay $48K for, but then lowered it to $40K two years ago. Then I automated almost all of the job and so now I have a high school student doing it for $14 per hour, 6 hours a week = $4300/yr.
The gal I was talking to was a UC grad near the top of her class. First year out of school. Exactly like those I used to hire at $48K, then $40K. She’s making $33K. Off by 32% since 2006.
I’ll ask friends what they are making, and no one has ever not told me. It usually comes up in the context of a complaint about bills piling up, which of course means they aren’t making as much as they should (as opposed to them spending too much, which is *always* the real problem), and that’s when I ask.
I’ve learned not to ask about spending. That’s where people get more defensive. But clues usually come out. Bozette above mentions she has a stay at home husband and two kids in pre school. Um, no. The stay at home husband can take care of them.
There are probably 100 other similar patterns in their spending habits that could save money, but my friends will never do it. One of my friends eats breakfast at whole foods every morning for $6, coffees at starbucks, etc, yet complains she wants to move to a nicer place but “can’t afford it”. I have oatmeal with fruit that costs me about 35 cents, and never go out for coffee – I make it myself using TJ’s coffee.
While we are on the subject of salaries, the people who work for startups do not do it for financial reasons. The typical startup will pay about $15K less per year than you could get on the open market. Over three years, you lose $45K. If the startup gets bought (as opposed to gets sold because it’s running out of money) or goes public, the rank and file employee can expect to get about $300K. But only one in ten (if that) ever gets there.
So you lose $45K to get an expected payout of $30K. People generally work for startups for the opportunity to work on cutting edge technology. A payout is nice, but is generally not going to do much for you financially.
You may have worked for three companies before one hits, and by then you are down $150K from your peers, so the $300K payout (which would be lucky) really is just enough to hit parity for the 3 companies before and the three companies you may work for after. That’s not to say there aren’t black swans, or people who don’t hit pay dirt on the first try, or hit it three times in a row, but the typical experience is, from what I can tell, not financially positive from working for startups – you just get to do stuff cutting edge and something in which you may be interested. The payout is a nice bonus if it happens, but it usually doesn’t happen.
The same thing goes for the investors. You can see that someone investing in LinkedIn made so many millions of dollars from that investment, but what you can’t know is how many duds it took to get there, how much money and time was wasted in that process, and how many other investors who didn’t get to invest in Linked in but invested in the duds lost without ever hitting any successes at all. The newspapers make everything look so rosy.

i agree with the inital quote
it is very expensive to afford a nice detached single family home in sf ,pay for private school afford a nice car and decent vacations.
presidio heigths 94% of kids in private school
st francis woods 69%
forrest hills 63%
easily $20,000-30,000 per kid
there is a reason sf has the lowest percentage of children of any california city
being able to afford a condo in the mission or protero does not equate to being able to afford to have a family in sf
unless you want your kid going to school with kids from the protero projects or have norteno /sureno family ties.
mamy people with kids move if they aren’t making $400,000+ a year

@usuallynamed
I once knew a guy who always railed against rich people not paying their fair share and how the rates were very low, etc.
Now, he ran a business (legal) and the interesting thing was he never wanted to be paid by check…….

Just to chime in that you can buy and live a very comfortable life in SF on $125K, but it does take some work. My wife and I both work part time in steady, non-tech fields. Our best years were in the early 00’s – earning $125K combined when we were both out of graduate school and working fulltime. With the help of a small inheritance (40K) and our savings, we were able to buy a SFR in ’02 in a decent (but not primo) neighborhood for ~$500K. The monthly was not much more than renting an equivalent sized apartment. In the past 9 years we have had a kid, took significant maternity and paternity leave, went back to work part time (80% time for me, 50% for her), paid for part-time day care/preschool, and are back to earning $125K per year. Our kid is in a decent public school, but we could afford to put him in Catholic school if it didn’t work out (the $20K+ privates don’t seem possible!). We max out our 401K contributions, are saving some for college, and live pretty well (shop at Rainbow and TJs, eat out often, vacation 3-4 weeks per year). The downsides: we don’t save a lot of spare cash, we drive a 15 yr. old Honda, and the house is now worth what we paid. We don’t regret any of it, and could certainly tighten our belts in a number of ways if our luck turned. Be we also realize how lucky we have been to have decent, flexible, well-paying jobs, supportive friends and families, great educations, and many of the other privileges that come from starting life in the educated middle class.

“particularly when your bank five-year CD yield is 1.2 percent and falling. ”
If that’s all you’re getting on a 5-year CD, you’re not looking hard enough. You could easily get twice that without any effort, although 2.4 is still low.
“I think we’re all assuming that the 300k couple has no education debt, which considering what I know about my friends from college who have gone onto law school, med school, etc can easily be 100k to 300k each especially if they had debt from undergrad! The national numbers about student debt are a little sick – the average debt for undergraduate nationally is almost 20k.”
Yes, I’m surprised more people haven’t mentioned student loan debt in the calculation. By the way, I believe the standard undergraduate loan amount for 4 years is $20K if you are on financial aid, when you include Stafford plus some Perkins loans as calculated by the federal formula. That’s where that number comes from — if you apply for financial aid, at many schools you have to get those subsidized loans first, and then you could get grant aid.

Some pretty interesting anecdotal personal financial info here (or confessionals perhaps.) I think the takeaway is that people have vastly different spending habits, which more than offset the range of incomes we’ve discussed: namely a low of $100k to a dual income high of about $400k. We’ve seen people making $120k buy $500k condos and couples making $400k renting, as buying does not meet their personal expectations. And most of the discussions have centered on w-2 income and not investments/windfalls/or losses. Add those in and the variance will be even greater!
As for RE buys, there are good and bad buys in almost every market. Like a few others here, SF RE has been good to us. I leveraged my first tic/condo brought in the mid 90’s into a few SF properties and now live on the rental income alone. (And anecdotally I can confirm many of the salaries mentioned here; as a landlord I’ve rented to docs, lawyers and scores of tech workers and get to see their w-2’s when they apply.)

Regarding tech start up windfalls- so tipster is saying that the average windfall is about $300k for a non founder or core exec? And that it happens 1 of 3? Can’t comment on the $300k estimate, but I thought that way more than 2 of 3 fail; more like 8 of 9 fail. Or perhaps some fail worse than others? Meaning some losers are sold for some value, whereas the ‘winners’ Are purchased for a premium (I.E. The windfall events)?? Deets please!

@47yo hipster, you misread tipster’s post, which said “1 in 10 (if that),” not 1 in 3:
“If the startup gets bought (as opposed to gets sold because it’s running out of money) or goes public, the rank and file employee can expect to get about $300K. But only one in ten (if that) ever gets there.”

“Lately, the stories have been macro stories that get”
I guess the question is if the macro focus is unwarranted or not?
A great deal of the anecdotes above could apply equally well to other parts of the country if appropriately scaled down. (wide variances in HH’s fraction of income devoted to saving, two incomes going to one after kids come, unexpected expenses, needing to save for retirement,…) And I haven’t seen that much evidence that credit issues such as low/no down, reduced standards were much different here then for the nation as a whole.
With some exceptions such as the high cost loan limit, credit and lending factors tend to be macro and national.
I do think that the outlook for tech is in general brighter then for the country overall and I do give some credence to the “superstar city” theory. But in my mind, the credit issue looms large even in SF.

Sorry this is not an allusion to the $400k mom poster, whom I fully respect. I mean tiger mom is like a very high income person who is out of touch with the rest of the world.

1905- i must take exception to your characterization of most SF tech workers being foreigners. Judging by the applicants I get, there’s a broad variety, Inc. Plenty of Anglos. But i will say that many are from out of town, coming in for new jobs. But still, probably at least 50% Anglo.

$100k is not much. Option vests in 4 years. So it is like 25k a year. Now take a 40% off for tax. This is the true story of startup option for most people.

middleclassjoe wrote:
“They work in gov’t, education, non-profits, some medical, some finance, some small business. No idea what they earn, but most likely in the $80-$200K range.”
Then around1905 responds:
“middleclassjoe — the SF owners you know are the folks I am referring to as lower-middle-class.”
Uh, how do you figure? As I linked to above, the median family income in SF in 2009 was $72,000. That’s The middle class would therefor be a range around that median. Something like $50,000 – $100,000. Those that make above $100,000 are in the top 15% nationally, and probably the top 20% of San Francisco. I personally would cuttoff the “upper class” at about the 20% mark, so around $100,000 for SF.
I guess it just goes to show how many here view these issues from the perspective of the upper class.

p.s. if anyone want to see the Sesame Street episode where they introduce the Hungry Muppet and talk about the 1 in 4 children in this country who don’t know where their next meal is coming from, it’s here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhJ6hfbn4x8
This is the exact opposite population segment from the one this post is geared for. The bottom 20% is worried about being homeless and not being able to feed their children. The upper 20% is having to readjust their assumptions–but out of all the segments they are about the only ones still getting wage gains and of course the ones with the wealth in this country.

“I think it can be argued that encouraging homeownership is actually poor public policy and has helped to decrease the mobility of the US workforce. ”
I agree. Mobility probably isn’t much of an issue for people in the tech ecosystem near a major hub like the Bay Area. But I think it’s a real problem for the country as a whole. Particularly for one company towns, or even one industry towns where the industry is in decline.
For a segment of the population that isn’t prone to saving, the forced saving aspect of home ownership was beneficial in my view. But allowing cheep and easy cash-out refinancing has basically negated that benefit.

this youtube video shows how the Democrats have politicized even children’s shows. That is precisely why we should have defunded public radio and tv years ago.
Nonetheless, it shows that most of his knowledge comes from some sort of twisted muppet/guevara collage.
Say no to Sesame Street – say yes to Wall Street!

wrath,
Like I implied above, you really need to look into the definition of sociopath. Ignoring hungry children or mocking a show that simply wants to bring the fact to light is the very definition of someone that lacks empathy. Usually, people like this were abused themselves as children.
And I’m not a Democrat. The Democrats are on your side, you’ve just been bamboozled by right-wing propaganda into thinking the neoliberal corporatist Democrats are “socialists.”
To you all those mostly brown and black hungry children are sub humans that you would never have your children associate with (in a public school), let alone even acknowledge their existence. They all live in the Ghetto (not really, but you wouldn’t know reality if it hit you over the head) and deserve to go hungry because of their parents’ perceived sin of not getting one of the low paying jobs that 4 other people are also trying to get.

Completely off topic. Take it private, please.

@ modernqueen – I apologize – once the again the troll hijacks the topic and I let him snare me into a sysyphean debate.

Wow around1905, you must live in a strange world where people making $80-200K, own their homes, and live well in SF are “lower middle class”; and who are all university or higher-educated somehow “aren’t demanding much from their kids school.” How do you calculate that – based on the price tag for the school, or the pedigree of the cars at drop-off and pick up?

Here’s the equation to calculate someone’s class:
Family Income / (Median Income * 5) 1: Upper Middle
You get bonus points for having a car that cost over $75,000 when new (and you bought it new) or a handbag that was over $2500 at Neiman Marcus.

@ elbee: “Encouraging home ownership for stable owners in a stable market is good for a nation – people build equity instead of flushing money down a rent toilet forever.”
The “building equity instead of flushing money down a rent toilet” point only makes sense if the rent-versus-buy equation pencils out in any given instance. Which, more often than not over the past half-decade, it has not.
If I were to purchase the same home I’m renting, my property taxes alone would be more than my rent. (That’s Prop 13 at work, subsidizing my rent to an owner that is, for whatever reason, not sharply profit-driven.) That’s before we even get into mortgage interest, which would be significantly higher. No equity-building in either of those payment streams, so you’d need quite a bit of growth for it to make any sense. And in the last 5 years, we’ve had the opposite.
Granted, I’m an extreme example because my rent is *way* below market. But there are plenty of less extreme examples that fall on the same side of the ledger in SF, where people have been bilked into thinking they should break with history and actually pay a “premium” to buy (borrow) versus rent.

^^^^^^^^^^
Correction: our property taxes on the same house would be roughly half of what we pay in rent. I don’t want to detract from the point with an overstatement. Property taxes plus mortgage interest would be significantly higher than our rent, even after deductions.

And by “Bayview” I mean one of the few areas in San Francisco where it may be cheaper to buy rather than rent. I haven’t really looked into Bayview specifically, but generally it seems that buying is cheaper in the lowest segment.
The East Bay has a number of areas that are definitely getting cheaper to buy than rent but I don’t know of many in San Francisco.
And szha, I believe you. In the popular SF neighborhoods it seems like a no brainer to me that it is much cheaper to rent.

I consider myself a strongly dispassionate person when it comes to home ownership. We were in a rent controlled house that was slowly falling apart, that barely kept out the weather, that was growing too small for our family of 5. Yes, plenty of people make do with 1700 square feet for their family of five. But both of us had hobbies that required more space, hobbies that were very strong interests that neither of us could pursue. We looked for housing in our community (EB) starting in 2007 and averaged one offer per year. We went from the lowest of 25 bids the first year to the only bidder the year we bought (last year). It cost about 20% more than renting something minimally adequate, not including the down payment opportunity cost. But for that extra 20% we got something far far exceeding the minimally adequate. We bought at a level assuming the MID went away, federal and state taxes went up, and the economy stagnating for years. We don’t consider it an investment, but we bought it like an investment: architecturally interesting, most desirable location, perfect layout for raising a family and entertaining, extremely well built, and a dream for our hobbies. Not an investment. A 20% monthly premium over renting. No pride of ownership and not living the American Dream. Just a better situation all around than the alternatives. Choose the best among alternatives.
Ref buying in SF: I stick to my earlier comment. Someone making 100k can buy 1/3 the SFH’s in SF today, and someone making 200k can buy 80% of the SFH’s. These aren’t high salary levels for a couple.

most people don’t need a quatro or even a duo porte or whistler. But you can’t buy a decent house in a decent area for 1.25m.
on the other hand, you can in lamorinda where your schools are better than PA. of course if you have to commute to PA, it could be a bit of a pain – on the plus side you’re increasing your carbon footprint.

correct. a decent (2500 sq. ft.) house in a decent area (to me inner richmond, Rhill, pac/presidio heights, telegraph hill) with a nice (for a city) back yard will run you approximately 2m and up – maybe you can do inner richmond at 1.8 or something like that. and in pac presidio there really aren’t houses of that size anyway (or few) except maybe former carriage houses. unless maybe you are ok living on California.
you can get a cheap car – I don’t get people who showcase their wheels. I mean if you’re Larry Page, maybe it makes sense to buy an F-50 for the experience, why not – but for most other people, why bother?
I am not sure most people have time to take 2-3 vacations to europe/asia a year – i go locally for a weekend

wow, those last few comments are ridiculous and so personal on what makes “living well”. They are opinion on what a good hood is for starters and therefore what you can get for the money, let alone what makes a good vacation.
I have no interest in any of those cars. I have a truck. Wife has an SUV, but wants a minivan.
We love our house, and it didn’t cost $1.2M and it’s not in the list of hoods.
We like our daughters school, we are sending the other one there next year. Not nearly that much money.
2 to 3 trips to Europe or Asia a year. Not when your kids are in school, or even something that would be fun for them. But we go away 5 weeks or so a year.
I love not having a big commute and can’t imagine driving in everyday.

I’m using very conservative traditional lending standards, with 20% down and monthly payment not exceeding 34% of net income.
Look at SFH’s sold on Redfin over the last 3 months. Someone making 100k, under conservative lending standards, could have chosen from 1/3 of SFH’s in SF, while someone making 200k could have chosen from 80% of SFH’s in SF.

Run some tax simulations in Turbo Tax. Someone making 100k per year who has a 500k house has a taxable income of 80k per year due to the MID and state property tax deduction. Adding the monthly payment (4% interest!), property tax of 1.5%, tax benefits, and insurance, it’s about 2200 per month. 70k after tax is 5800 per month. What’s the big deal? Our monthly net cost on a 900K loan is $4700 per month. Someone making 200k is bringing home at least 11k per month net.

Your right I should focus on getting a 911.
I am pretty sure I didn’t go to “the best” school when I was young, but I still got a good education there. Just because something is the most expensive doesn’t make it the best, by the way.

“Look at SFH’s sold on Redfin over the last 3 months”
My main point was that the focus on what people can buy for some income is misplaced compared to what or if they should buy and for the market in general what people are buying (relative to income).
You might be able to infer something about what people are doing by looking at what people could buy given some assumptions. But the correlation might not be that strong. Taking your specific example, when I do that Redfin search for SFH’s <$500k the results are dominated in south of the freeway places like bayview, hunter’s point, excelsior… Not places I expect many tech workers to be buying. If you compare the sales locations to Google shuttle stops for example you won’t see much overlap.

san francisco has many crappy schools
san francisco has the lowest percentage of kids of any city in the state
according to the article refrenced below many families leave because the combination of high housing costs and private school are not sustainable
i get the feeling some of your are deluding yourselves or feel guilty about sending your kids to sub par schools
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-06-19/news/29676021_1_universal-health-care-jennifer-siebel-newsom-fewer-kids

ACCORDING TO GREAT SCHOOLS
sf has one middle school ranked a 10 and nine middle schools ranked 3 or less
in palo alto EVERY middle school is ranked a ten
in my opinion you seriously rethink your priorities if you make $200,000 a year and have to send your kid to a school ranked 3
wait a minute. thats exactly what that article i refrenced said families are doing when leaving sf

San Francisco Unified School District is an above average school district. There are a great many good schools and everyone I know that has made a serious effort has gotten into one of them. In some people’s mind “above average” equals “bad,” oddly enough.
In my opinion if you work 70 hours a week and farm out your child raising to someone for hire you need to seriously rethink your priorities.
Your statement about middle schools is not correct, btw. I just checked, here are the scores for SF middle schools, according to Great Schools:
AP Giannani – 9
Presidio Middle School – 9
Roosevelt Middle School – 8
Aptos Middle School – 7
Herbert Hoover Middle School – 7
Marina Middle School – 6
Francisco Middle School – 4
James Lick Middle School – 4
James Denman Middle School – 3
Martin Luther King Junior Academic Middle School – 3
Horace Mann Middle School – 3
Visitacion Valley Middle School – 3
If you add in the K-8 schools, you will see a number of 8, 9 and 10 ranked schools as choices for middle school.
You were saying?

these public schools also serve middle school age students
Everett Middle School – 1
Brown Junior (Willie L.) Elementary School-1
grades 4-8
Visitacion Valley Middle School-2
Cleveland Elementary School-1
grades k-8
Civic Center Secondary School-2
gradesk-12
Paul Revere Elementary School-2
grades k-8
craptastic
many parents want 9 or 10 for their kids
this ain’t reassuring when half the schools you listed are under 5:
AP Giannani – 9
Presidio Middle School – 9
Roosevelt Middle School – 8
Aptos Middle School – 7
Herbert Hoover Middle School – 7
Marina Middle School – 6
Francisco Middle School – 4
James Lick Middle School – 4
James Denman Middle School – 3
Martin Luther King Junior Academic Middle School – 3
Horace Mann Middle School – 3
Visitacion Valley Middle School – 3
did you read the article ?
sf is losing school age children .it’s a statistical fact.
when asked why it’s schools not as good as suburban ones and high housing costs.
are you trying to deny this ?
are you arguing the schools are as good as palo alto and lamorinda and the housing is cheaper in sf?
give it up.

Housing is cheaper in Palo Alto than San Francisco? “Suburban” schools are all superior to San Francisco schools? What about EPA, like Sparky-b mentioned? Daly City? Richmond? A few extremely expensive cities have uniformly good schools. Most are about average, surprisingly enough. Most schools everywhere are about average. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why.
Willie Brown school is closed, which you would know if you were as much of expert at public schools as you make yourself out to be.
Other schools that serve K-8 kids:
Alice Fong Yu Elementary School – 10
Lawton Alternative Elementary School – 9
Claire Lilienthal Elementary School – 9
Rooftop Elementary School – 8
San Francisco Community Alternative School – 8
Bessie Carmichael/Fec School – 4
Why didn’t you list those? Did you forget? Are you engaged in a deliberate distortion of the facts to support your already decided upon mind?
Half of the public schools serving middle students are above average according to Great Schools. Do you agree with that statement meep?

you people are distorting the facts
did you read the article ?
sf is losing school age children .it’s a statistical fact.
as infants reach school age many parents leave
when asked why -it’s schools not as good as suburban ones and high housing costs
http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-06-19/news/29676021_1_universal-health-care-jennifer-siebel-newsom-fewer-kids
is newsom lying?
is the sf chronicle ehgaged in a “distortion of the facts”?

SF public schools should be closed and the money returned to the taxpayer – with interest and an apology.
and the “teachers” should be sent to Corcoran (where their former “students” already reside)

“and the “teachers” should be sent to Corcoran (where their former “students” already reside)
Whatever. Like you know what you’re talking about.

A.T.,
House are more in Palo Alto and Piedmont than in SF, aren’t they?
meep,
you keeping going back to 1 article that, yes states that there are less school age kids in SF than there were. But it also says that kindergarten apps are up for the last 4 years. So, it seems like maybe the school were bad now they are getting better so more people are staying.
Oh and the woman who left went to Marin, he friends went to Michigan and Texas. Was it the better schools for them or moving back near family? The last couple pages are about people staying here or about Manhattanizaion. Not such a great article to reference 3 times.

Well this site is actually about buying real estate, and so was this thread a while back.
You go rent in Palo Alto.

“Whatever. Like you know what you’re talking about.”
A SF public school system alum bedazzles fellow bloggers with his argumentative powers and verbal adroitness.
Those are those hard core API scores baby!

So you only want to talk about the headlines and not the actual article. I paraphrased the article, applications have gone up for 4 years. 2 women are quoted 1 moved to San Raphael, 1stayed here.

There were 3869 who applied for kindergarten in 1996 and 4931 in 2011. This is an increase of 27% in five years. The facts simply do not support your thesis.
Remember who the term Yellow Journalism was invented for.