A single person making 82k is considered low income in San Francisco.

You can compare it to your area.

I believe it. My husband and I lived there for a year for his job. He was making $90k and we struggled before I found a job. We were miserable and couldn’t leave fast enough.

Where did you go to, R2?

So minimum wage should be more tha $30 an hour in SF.

R3 we moved back to NYC! Even though the cost of living is high here, too, we get paid more (hubby makes $135k now for essentially the same job) and were able to buy something. When we were in SF, we started looking at homes to buy and the reality was a bungalow in an “up and coming” neighborhood in Oakland surrounded by ghetto.

SF is such a high cost of living area, even the homeless junkies make around $50K a year.

[Quote]reality was a bungalow in an “up and coming” neighborhood in Oakland surrounded by ghetto.

Isn't Oakland becoming highly gentrified, like Bed-Sty?

I grew up there, and was forced out by the high housing costs years ago.

I'll be forced out of where I am when I retire. I resent it.

Yes, r7- I used to live by the MacArthur Bart station in the early 80's- I had a homeless junkle sleeping in my car everyday (I was tired to replacing my broken windows all the time). Now the area is called, "Temescal" and has a ton of development, a large Korean population (like L.A., they love their Craftsman houses), and some great restaurants. I don't even recognize the neighborhood around Oak Tech now.

While SF proper is crazy expensive now, there are still semi-affordable suburbs (like East Bay)

NYC went through this exact change a decade ago.

New York is more affordable than San Francisco, there are more affordable options to be found there than you can find in SF.

The city of my birth and youth is now an utter shithole. A very expensive one.

Completely unsustainable. Hollowing out the lower-middle class will kill a city like SF.

San Francisco has an especially limited supply of housing due to height restrictions on buildings, and tons of high income earners thanks to the tech scene. That leads to what you see.

No shit.

I was bored so

New York: 58,450

Boston: 56,800

Seattle: 56,200

DC: 54,250

Los Angeles: 54,250

Chicago: 47,400

Dallas: 43,250

Houston: 41,950

Atlanta: 41,900

SF is a huge outlier compared to other cities.

Permit Patty crackers run amok in gentrified Oakland and highly paid zombie Tech wunderkinder in SF.

Is Mobile, Alabama a pleasant city to live in?

"San Francisco has an especially limited supply of housing due to height restrictions on buildings, and tons of high income earners thanks to the tech scene. "

Plus it's physically small as major cities go, and is surrounded on three sides by water (and on the other side by extremely expensive real estate). It's physically impossible to expand the city in any direction but up, plus the place has limited access from other towns and totally inadequate parking, so commuting there is horrible. Face it, the place is geographically unsuited to be a center of industry, but there we are.

I wonder if they'll ever have the sense to convert all those unused piers into houseboat docks? Because really - the only way to expand the place is up, or over the water.

Toronto is going the same way. And with the worst commutes in North America to top it off. Sad to see the city become unaffordable for so many earning what used to be a reasonable salary , but the rich are raking it in and keeping it off-shore: musn't pay those pesky taxes.

I just visited for San Franciso Pride. So, then where do all the low income workers live? Outside of the city? What about the surplus of gay men? They can't all be working in the tech industry? Are they all living four to a studio apartment? I don't know why anyone making that type of money would want to struggle like that, all for location? Completely idiotic.

I'm sitting here in high-desert 85-degree heat @10% humidity and I can almost taste Ocean Beach..

I miss the climate more than anything. Which a lot of people find to be a hysterical sentiment..but I grew up in the pea soup of The Avenues and it becomes a part of you. A refuge. Climbing the rickety hand-made wooden ladder to the top of the lightwell of my grandparent's little stucco house, to sit on the still-warm asphalt roof. The tin flashing and pea stone crackling under my bare feet. Watching the features of the night sky go in and out of view as the fog rolled over the streets, just above the streetlamps. The smell of the dripping cypress trees...

Now that little house sits mutilated, it's tiny, friendly window deck torn out, along with the big casement windows tall enough to walk through-replaced with hideous double-glazed vinyl . Last I cared to look, it was worth 1.6 million dollars. I can't wrap my head around that..it makes me want to scream.

I haven't set foot in SF in a dozen years, and that day I couldn't get out quickly enough. As it is, I don't care if I never go back again.

LOL at all the people who think NYC will be their saving grace. NYC is going to be San Francisco in 5 years. They're tearing down every "affordable" apartment building and townhouse here (with tall ceilings and spacious rooms) to put up shitty boxes where you get to live in micro apartments for $2-$3K a month. Affordable stores are being bulldozed and supplanted by luxury boutiques and chains or left vacant by greedy landlords.

You guys don't get it. This hyper-gentrification issue is affecting every major city in the US and even world. If a city seems "not as bad" as SF, it's because it's in the earliest phases of transitioning from a city with varied incomes into another Dubai, where only the super rich people, tourists, and the working poor (who have to do all the menial work) get to live, play and work there. So, moving to NYC is just jumping out of the frying pan into the oven.

[quote] What about the surplus of gay men? They can't all be working in the tech industry?

SF has rent control, or they own property. The gay scene is a lot of older men who have been there for a while, they got to SF when it was more affordable than it is now.

[quote]So, then where do all the low income workers live? Outside of the city

And yes, people whose salaries aren't high either live far away and commute for work, or they have a lot of roommates. Living alone is a luxury.

What a contradiction with all the junkies lying around..

That's what you get with "hypergentrification", R25, a city where nobody lives but the wealthy and the poorest of the poor sleeping on their doorsteps. The working poor and the middle class live elsewhere, and can't do much with their lives but work, sleep, and commute. If they ever want to do anything else, they give up the sleep.

The poor who spent the last few decades complaining about gentrification were the canaries in the coal mine, the same thing that happened to them is now happening to the middle class.

The junkies are the only non-rich these cities love and support.

[quote]a city where nobody lives but the wealthy and the poorest of the poor sleeping on their doorsteps. The working poor and the middle class live elsewhere, and can't do much with their lives but work, sleep, and commute.

This is globalism. Remember when we read about cities like is 20 years ago - and it was Brazil or China. This is happening in the West now.

A lot of it is due to the fact that it's a beautiful city in a beautiful location in one of the world's most desirable climates - especially with global warming staring us all in the face. Of course everyone, including the rich and the gays, wants to live there....... too bad that a functioning city needs restaurant workers, daycare providers, nursing aides, grocery store clerks, retail salespeople, all those jobs that we rely on, but which pay very little

[quote]A lot of it is due to the fact that it's a beautiful city in a beautiful location in one of the world's most desirable climates

It is 100% due to the booming tech industry being located there.

It was a beautiful city 20 years ago, without being this expensive.

American amateurs!

Yours in über gentrification, Paris, Zurich, Hong Kong, Geneva, Copenhagen

Something's gotta fucking give. Many highly educated people are reduced to making dunkets at jobs they're overqualified for. I'm surprised more don't off themselves by how unjust this world is.

82K in San Fran is 41K in flyover. No?

If I had 8 dollars I would like to try Nutella, and a Big Mac.

82k in SF is 41k in places like Houston and Atlanta r33, pulling the numbers from the HUD website.

So it’s actually poverty level income—21K.