Middle class leaving San Francisco, census says(blog.sfgate.com) |
Middle class leaving San Francisco, census says(blog.sfgate.com) |
So once again pitting the middle against itself...
Come on, nothing builds character like that.
The private sector hasn't done anything wrong. In fact, the people of San Francisco and their government should be grateful that, in such dismal economic times, the tech industry has chosen to locate itself in a jurisdiction so viscerally hostile to the private sector.
Without tech, San Francisco might have become a Detroit with nicer weather (a situation that the hipsters would no doubt have thoroughly enjoyed).
I sure as hell wouldn't want to raise a family inside SF, and the city government is the cause of the reasons why.
The people in Silicon Valley working for others are working class.
While the American definition of "middle class" is best translated as "working class" into English English, it seems far from bizarre given it covers someone making the median income.
Techies seem to be anxious to claim middle-class status, but if you're in a 6-figure household family, you're still pushing upper class compared to nearly anywhere.
And the statistical fact is that if you're $250 k in the US in household income, you are in fact the 1%.
I can't buy a house in NY. I'll have to move upstate for that. I have only one car, second car would be a little bit hard.
SF has severely restricted supply for decades with some of the most restrictive planning and building codes in the US. In SF anyone can force a hearing on a building permit - after planning review, neighbor notice, hearings appeals, etc. This is unheard of anywhere else and is why it takes years to build new housing. Then there is the rent control ordinance that stopped new apartment building for a decade and keeps thousands of units vacant today.
EDIT: accidentally downvoted you. Sorry.
Super elite term taken from Lauren Rivera's "Ivies, Extracurriculars, and Exclusion"
Let's be absolutely clear here. A six figure household income puts you in the top 20% of the US. You are not middle class. You are in fact upper class.
FWIW, there's a lot of talk in the United States since about 1970 or so of there being a "professional class", which has education and income markedly higher than the traditional middle class but which has lifestyles which resemble middle class more than the traditional upper classes. It was traditionally filled full of doctors, lawyers, and accountants. Engineers are entering the professional class, which discomfits a lot of people.
But come on, the fact that your career path doesn't tolerate 2 week vacations doesn't move you down the percentile ladder.
As far as your last paragraph, that's my point. If you're making six figures, you're "rich" in America, still, whether you want to accept it or not.
To think you're not is to be very, very out of touch.
The concept of class was invented by Karl Marx, a person belongs to some class based on his/her relation to the means of production. There are 3 factors of production: labor, capital, and land (that final one is of much less importance now than it used to be in Marx's era, but still). So there are classes: middle class are those deriving their income from work (rent on their labor), rich deriving their income from capital, and aristocrates deriving their income from land (these are now extinct). Poor are those who don't have any means of production, so they depend on social transfers like foodstamps. Of course these sources can mix in a single person - like a coder who rents out spare bedroom on airbnb, or a top manager who has some stock of the company he runs in addition to salary and bonuses, and gets some dividends on it - but the largest one 'wins'.
Because the IRS collects sources of income of people (because they are differently taxed), and publishes summary of its results, it is possible to make a very precise picture of American class structure/thresholds of classes. It is just that nobody likes these results.
Please. Class and caste have been around since the dawn of civilization.
And the definition for upper class as being top 1% is arbitrary, it is in fact invented by Obama during his first presidential campaign, solely for finger-pointing (he could safely say 1% is not many people so they won't impact election results enough and safe to be finger-pointed).
Upper class are ought to be people who don't derive their income from work, but from their property - business profits, stock dividends, rent etc. - in all societies upper class are those who DON'T depend on salary, and many of them don't work at all. So it is natural to define upper class income threshold as a point above which less than 50% of income comes from employment. In the present United States, this is about 3-4 million bucks a year per household. This will be economically defined upper class, not just some 'people rich enough to hate them'. So McCain was closer to reality back in 2008 is his upper class definition.
I personally don't know anyone making that much, but i can safely say that all people i know making 150-1000k a year will be broke months or at most, a year or two if they stop working, with one exception (a guy living in East Asia with about 400k of annual income, who never married or had kids). So they are not upper class. And i am speaking of the places which are cheaper and have lower living standards than USA.
Go ahead, enter your household income here, find out where you really fall.
http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2013/09/what-is-yo...
Hint- if you're a techie in SF, you're reaaaaallll near the top.
This was entirely predictable. There is no free lunch. You can't have cheap housing for some without raising the price for everyone else. SF is just a particularly extreme example.
BTW - Don't worry about rent control going away anytime soon - we are locked in politically. And planning restrictions are unlikely to ease either. So expect continued above inflation price/rent increases and a slow exodus of the middle class. Due to the poor schools we have already lost many families.
> have the well know effect of reducing supply
This critique seems rather incoherent.
Understand? I'd not, I suggest reading any basic economics text.
Rent control in standard economic theory
http://homepages.wmich.edu/~u5nwaogu/Overhead/Chapter%206%20...
Rent control in practice in SF
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/opinion/king-of-my-castle-...
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2011/05/because-of-rent-control-...
For folks who are confused by this: SWPL is the acronym for Stuff White People Like, which is a blog. It basically described (by means of caricature) an emerging social class in America of urban, socially liberal, upper middle class professionals. Kinda like "yuppie" but with acid tests more appropriate to 2012.
"SWPL" has subsequently been appropriated to describe that social class by commentators on the Internet. It's not a perfect map to the territory but fits it closely enough to have significant predictive power.
The third made a lot of noise about rent control, but then cited another article which, again, made no reference to the practice.
A comfortable salary in Houston would be much less comfortable in San Francisco because you're suddenly paying 10% of your income to state taxes and paying 4x as much rent.