How do teachers live in SF Bay area? (Los Angeles, San Jose: 2015, renting)

[jade408]

Originally Posted by shooting4life

Factory workers are skilled, it is just a different skill.

I value the skills teachers provide, but that skill in relation to supply available and should not be somehow linked to owning a home in the city you work in as is the topic of this post. And never once did I say I didn't care about education, it is best when you don't put words into others mouth.

Civil servants should have the city they serve as a choice to live in. Cities where only people making 2-3x the median income can afford are doomed to fail.

[04kL4nD]

Originally Posted by shooting4life

Factory workers are skilled, it is just a different skill.

I value the skills teachers provide, but that skill in relation to supply available and should not be somehow linked to owning a home in the city you work in as is the topic of this post. And never once did I say I didn't care about education, it is best when you don't put words into others mouth.

You've shown zero respect for the profession and compared it to factory work. As an educator myself (community college and university) I'm inclined to be offended, but it's really par for the course. People like you are why education lags far behind the rest of the developed world. Good thing we have a governor like Jerry Brown and powerful unions fighting on our behalf, otherwise we'd be even more screwed. Yes, there are lots of lousy teachers who are dead weight, but most teachers I know are incredibly intelligent, well-educated, hard working, and altruistic people. Sorry you seem to think otherwise.

[shooting4life]

Originally Posted by 04kL4nD

You've shown zero respect for the profession and compared it to factory work. As an educator myself (community college and university) I'm inclined to be offended, but it's really par for the course. People like you are why education lags far behind the rest of the developed world. Good thing we have a governor like Jerry Brown and powerful unions fighting on our behalf, otherwise we'd be even more screwed. Yes, there are lots of lousy teachers who are dead weight, but most teachers I know are incredibly intelligent, well-educated, hard working, and altruistic people. Sorry you seem to think otherwise.

Someone hasn't been paying much attention, Jerry Brown decimated school funding over the last few years. Costs have skyrocketed under his tenure, far outpaced inflation and the unions are busy protecting the worst of the worst to the detriment of the group.

Please point to a post where I disrespected teachers? To save you some time, I haven't. All I have said is teachers should be paid based on market forces, not some mythical expectation of being able to own a house in the city where you work. Maybe teachers would be able to afford more if they worked 2,080 hours a year like the rest of the full time work force.

All teachers average over $50 an hour including benefits. I am sorry that I don't carry water for the teachers unions by perpetuating common held misconceptions.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/warrenme...ers-underpaid/

[shooting4life]

Originally Posted by jade408

Civil servants should have the city they serve as a choice to live in. Cities where only people making 2-3x the median income can afford are doomed to fail.

I am sure the janitor at the DMV would love a nice 900k house in Redwood City where they work. Houses for everybody, probably going to have to fill in the bay to make room for all these new houses for public employees.

[shooting4life]

Originally Posted by jade408

100% agreed. Educating our kids is the foundation of a successful society. We have devalued this so much we literally do not care if half of our kids are not educated enough to contribute productively to society and our schools are failing even though it is detrimental to the future labor force and economic outlook.

Children are failing because of the break down of the two parent family and the lack of emphasis on education in some cultures. The success and failure of a child is mostly determined before they take a step into a public school. A small subset of teachers can overcome this, but they are extremely rare and truely gifted. Fixing the education system starts with the parents, not the schools.

[neutrino78x]

Originally Posted by jade408

Civil servants should have the city they serve as a choice to live in. Cities where only people making 2-3x the median income can afford are doomed to fail.

You can live here if you make the median income or less. You just won't buy your own home. Not being able to buy a "SFH in an excellent school district" doesn't mean you can't live in the area.

And most non-military public servants are paid too much as it is.

[neutrino78x]

Originally Posted by shooting4life

When did being able to own a home in the city where you work become the standard?

Sometimes you have to commute from one area to another area, this applies if you work in tech, a teacher, garbage man or work at McDonald's. Welcome to the real world.

Yep, or share housing is the other common option if you can't afford your own apartment/condo/house.

[neutrino78x]

Originally Posted by 2sleepy

Here's some 'real world' for you. A teacher in SF makes about the same as a teacher anywhere else in Northern California. Why would a teacher accept your 'suck it up life is tough' philosophy and commute from Vacaville so that they can teach there when they can get a job in Vacaville and walk to work?

They can share a place with others if they can't afford one of their own. Welcome to living in a big city.

Everybody in London and Paris lives in a "flat" too. Or shares one.

There will, at some time in the not too distant future, come a time when San Francisco will run out of local residents with teaching degrees- they only exist now because they rented or bought before the run up in prices.

Or they don't try to own a "sfh in an excellent school district".

That's the most desirable housing in any given area if you have kids. So logic requires that it also be the most expensive location and the most expensive type of housing.

[eudo]

I didn't originally post the question to make some sort of ideological point about the morality of paying teachers too little. I'm trying to understand the economics of San Francisco's high home prices on a human level. The article I read used teachers as an example, and teaching seems a good example of a solid middle class job. As someone else pointed out, teaching is a skilled position requiring quite a bit of college-level education. It's not really comparable to a factory job that has disappeared: there is still a high demand in the San Francisco region for K-12 teachers. We haven't outsourced teaching to China. We have just as many children as we used to have. I could have used any other solid middle class job, though. Basically I'm just saying that in a metro area of millions, not everyone can be a software engineer.

The real question I'm trying to answer is, how can a metro area function when housing prices are so out of line with incomes? I mean, according to city-data, the median household income in 2012 was $73k, while the median house or condo value was $727k. I understand that people can commute, but I don't have statistics on the whole of the Bay Area, and it looks like house prices are pretty darn high everywhere in the Bay Area. For comparison, picking another city at random, Denver has a median income of $50k and a median house or condo value of $251k. That's a huge difference. a 10:1 ratio vs a 5:1 ratio.

How can a city have median home prices ten times its median income? I can think of a few ways:

* People bought homes back when they weren't so expensive. This is unsustainable because eventually those people move out of the region or die and have to sell those houses to people who didn't win the housing lottery like they did.

* People commute from outside. Like I said, I'm curious where they're commuting from. It's not like San Jose is a lot cheaper. Even East Bay is not cheap. And if half the population makes less than $73k, how can they all live in East Bay? And there are still a lot of houses in SF. Who owns them? Does the top 5% of households own all the houses in SF and the peninsula?

* Most people rent. This only works if rents are substantially below what they should be, given home prices. For SF, that's likely to be somewhat true. Buying a home at these prices and renting it out at market rents probably won't give you a very good return. But rents still are really pretty high, too.

* People simply pay a much larger portion of their income on housing. This only works up to a point because banks won't lend beyond certain debt-to-income ratio, and landlords won't rent beyond certain rent-to-income levels.

* Something else?

So I was trying to ask actual teachers and find out which bucket they fall into.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by eudo

So I was trying to ask actual teachers and find out which bucket they fall into.

You'd have to find a teacher's forum for the Bay Area. But again, rents in the East Bay were low-ish relative to SF teacher's pay until just the last 6 months or year. So we're entering a whole new reality right now, with rents exploding all over the Bay Area. So we may see special measures enacted in the next year or two or three, regarding public servant pay. It's a good question; what about librarians? All the transit drivers? The retail clerks? Does retail only attract students and married people who have a 2nd income in the home?

Undoubtedly, someone will devise a study to find out how workers are coping.