How do teachers live in SF Bay area? (Sacramento: 2013, renters)

[shooting4life]

Originally Posted by 04kL4nD

Just out of curiosity, who is supposed to pay teachers' salaries? The private sector? How else are they supposed to get paid?



He obviously used the term incorrectly. It actually means to reduce something to 1/10 of its original size. I blame his teachers for not teaching him how to use the term properly, since the budget actually INCREASED.



I think you are confusing administrators with faculty. You do realize that most faculty, especially adjuncts who teach the majority of classes, are paid peanuts compared to them, right?

When you start arguing semantics to words in common use you have lost the argument. Plus you even got the origin of the word wrong;
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decim...8Roman_army%29

The irony is one example given by Merriam-Webster for decimate is
Budget cuts have decimated public services in small towns.

[chup76]

Originally Posted by 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.

It's just housing supply and demand. The bay area has way more jobs and people wanting to live here than they have housing. There's too much rules and regulations to create more housing with height limitations and views people are trying to protect etc.

[04kL4nD]

Originally Posted by shooting4life

When you start arguing semantics to words in common use you have lost the argument.

When you start comparing unskilled factory workers who receive on the job training with highly educated teachers, it's no surprise you use big words incorrectly.

Originally Posted by shooting4life

argument. Plus you even got the origin of the word wrong;
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decim...8Roman_army%29

The irony is one example given by Merriam-Webster for decimate is
Budget cuts have decimated public services in small towns.

Your example is still wrong. A reduction and an increase are opposites

[shooting4life]

Originally Posted by 04kL4nD

Given the amount of schooling, expertise, and actual workload of most professors, yeah it's not great pay. You think people with an MA/PhD that work 40+hours a week should make so little? Wow. Glad you're not the one paying my salary.

Education level does not guarantee income, just ask art history majors. If you want higher pay, stem fields are calling.

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by 04kL4nD

When you start comparing unskilled factory workers who receive on the job training with highly educated teachers, it's no surprise you use big words incorrectly.

lol!

[neutrino78x]

Originally Posted by 04kL4nD

Given the amount of schooling, expertise, and actual workload of most professors, yeah it's not great pay. You think people with an MA/PhD that work 40+hours a week should make so little? Wow. Glad you're not the one paying my salary.

Glad you're not an officer in the United States Navy who would work more hours. We stay up for DAYS AT A TIME on submarines. The officers too. That time when I stayed up for four days because we were doing operations, the Captain had to be up the whole time also. He was an O-5, a Commander, so he made 61k per year. He had a MS in physics. It doesn't matter what degree you have, if you are that rank that is what you get paid. You work fewer hours and your job is MUCH easier and not dangerous at all. So no I don't think 88k is peanuts for an assistant professor. I think that's too high.

O-1 officers, which is a 2nd Lieutenant in the Army and an Ensign in the Navy, make 35k currently. So an elementary school teacher in California makes more than an officer fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. That doesn't seem right does it.

They need to take away the ability of unions to negotiate pay for civil servants in California. They should be paid what the state can afford, not what the union extorted from the state.

[neutrino78x]

Originally Posted by shooting4life

Education level does not guarantee income, just ask art history majors. If you want higher pay, stem fields are calling.

Indeed. STEM field or at least private sector.

[shooting4life]

Originally Posted by 04kL4nD

When you start comparing unskilled factory workers who receive on the job training with highly educated teachers, it's no surprise you use big words incorrectly.



Your example is still wrong. A reduction and an increase are opposites

You see, education funding over the duration of JB term was cut leading to the increase in tuition costs. The tax payers were gracious enough to increase their own taxes based on JB telling them it would go towards education, yet tuition is still going to be increase 28% over the next 5 years.

Maybe you should ask your students about the cost of an education and compare that to the cost ten years ago. Maybe ask them about trying to get enrolled in the classes needed to graduate. For someone so close to the issue, you seem to lack a lot of knowledge of the challenges facing students.

State funding for UC this year is $2.64 billion -- but that's down nearly a half-billion dollars from where it stood back in 2008. A decade ago, the state picked up 60 percent of the tab, while students and their families paid 40 percent. Today, those figures are reversed.
http://www.governing.com/topics/educ...ion-brown.html

[04kL4nD]

Originally Posted by neutrino78x

Glad you're not an officer in the United States Navy who would work more hours. We stay up for DAYS AT A TIME on submarines. The officers too. That time when I stayed up for four days because we were doing operations, the Captain had to be up the whole time also. He was an O-5, a Commander, so he made 61k per year. He had a MS in physics. It doesn't matter what degree you have, if you are that rank that is what you get paid. You work fewer hours and your job is MUCH easier and not dangerous at all. So no I don't think 88k is peanuts for an assistant professor. I think that's too high.

O-1 officers, which is a 2nd Lieutenant in the Army and an Ensign in the Navy, make 35k currently. So an elementary school teacher in California makes more than an officer fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. That doesn't seem right does it.

They need to take away the ability of unions to negotiate pay for civil servants in California. They should be paid what the state can afford, not what the union extorted from the state.

Again, comparing apples to oranges. Teachers aren't housed and provided three square meals a day. And spare me the guilt trip about the military; I come from a long line of Army Vets. And nobody right out of graduate school is making 88k a year getting a full-time professor job- it just isn't happening.

And as far as what CA can afford, you do realize we spend way more on keeping people in prison than we do on educating them, right?

[shooting4life]

Originally Posted by 04kL4nD

Again, comparing apples to oranges. Teachers aren't housed and provided three square meals a day. And spare me the guilt trip about the military; I come from a long line of Army Vets. And nobody right out of graduate school is making 88k a year getting a full-time professor job- it just isn't happening.

And as far as what CA can afford, you do realize we spend way more on keeping people in prison than we do on educating them, right?

That is why it is an average wage, some get less, some get more.

Actually, over 50% of the budget goes towards education, where 10% goes towards corrections.
http://www.cbp.org/pdfs/2011/110728_...lars_Go_pb.pdf