If you think it's hard to live on $50K salary in San Francisco you should think about how everyone else in the service industry supporting all those tech workers manage to live on minimum wage or barely above that. Think about the people serving lunch, or making coffee, or cleaning offices, etc. Where do they live and how can they afford to be in the city every day at less than half of $50K per year? Working remotely isn't an option for them either.
If it's truly prohibitive for a single person to live in SF for $50K per year then we should be really concerned about the families that earn $50K from two minimum wage jobs, and need to support 1 to 2 children on top of it.
This may shock you, but yes, it's livable. Many people live on $50,000 or less everyday in San Francisco. It may not be a standard of living that we as engineers are familiar with, but it is not poverty either. It's not a salary you'd want as a household income with dependents, but for an individual it is fine.
I live in Spain and am very frugal, so I haven't experienced first hand the high cost of life in SF, but if someone has to spend $1000 on the rent, there won't be much left from the salary received.
Also the job in question is "Customer Success", and consists in interacting with customers "through phone, email, and live chat" (from the job description). Those can very well be done remotely.
You can't afford rent in San Francisco at $50,000 a year, period. The going rate for a single bedroom (usually with no tenant's rights) is somewhere around $1,200 a month, well over 30% of your monthly take-home at $50,000/year.
If you're going to force people to move to the Bay Area to work for you, you need to pay them enough to afford it. Good luck hiring though.
just playing devil's advocate here but since when do you NEED to spend less than 30% of your take home on rent to survive?
There are people out there paying 50% or more of their take home on their rent/mortgage I imagine - it's just not really considered to be wise move in most cases. 1200/mo for a 1 bed doesn't even sound that bad for what's supposed to be the most expensive city to live in America. I know people in DC who spend 1800/mo on a studio and that's pretty average. You could easily share a room and cut your rent in half if you were smart/willing.
>since when do you NEED to spend less than 30% of your take home on rent to survive?
While on one side the 3x rent rule might be just "good sense", most places won't consider you if your salary (or the salary of all tenants) isn't 3x your rent.
just playing devil's advocate here but since when do you NEED to spend less than 30% of your take home on rent to survive?
That seems to be one of the common and very popular requirements to even have your lease application put aside for consideration, that being income must be 3x the ask for rent. At least this was the case in Austin proper (i.e. inside the city limits, and inside the I-35, Mopac, 183 and Hwy 71 box), I saw similar requirements when helping a friend scout for a place in SFO.
When I was looking for a place I found a landlord willing to negotiate and haggle on the deposit since my income wasn't 3x the rent ask. They took a larger deposit, I signed a lease, wasn't late once.
> since when do you NEED to spend less than 30% of your take home on rent to survive?
Yeah, that's the same question every scumbag landlord in America started asking themselves a few years ago when demand for rental units started going up.
You don't "need" to spend less than 30% of takehome on rent. If you assume you're going to be running in a treadmill your whole life, and you're satisfied working for subsistence only, then sure, go for it, blow half (or more) of your paycheck on rent. Lots of people in San Francisco and other expensive cities do this.
If you have life goals that don't involve being stapled to a desk forever, it's probably not such a good idea.
The discussion is living on entry level job salaries. Life goals shouldn't come in to the equation because one of those life goals should be "don't have an entry level job for your entire life"
My rent in Los Angeles for my studio apartment is about 43% of my monthly take-home, and that's sub-$1000. I'm not saying it's easy, but it's definitely liveable. I don't often have to /worry/ about money... I just am also not saving anything.
You can quite comfortably live on $35k a year after rent, if you're a single person supporting just yourself.
I managed to spend 3 years at university living on less than that. I've just spent the last 3 months interning for NZ$20 an hour (~$40k a year), much of that was spent paying about $260 a week for rent (paying rent for 2 places due to contracts). I managed to get along just fine.
Cost of living-wise, where I am isn't radically different from SF.
I really don't see how you can't live for $4160 - $1200 = $2960 a month? Heck, I could live on $500/month easily (after rent and taxes), if I wanted (as far as I'm aware, living costs are a lot cheaper in the US than were I'm from). That would make my yearly salary $20.400 (ignoring taxes, since I don't know what the rate for US is).
$50k is livable, but on the other hand you have to live In a city full of people who don't shut up about the Internet. I'd say that's a definite net loss.
...and I'm assuming you've got some killer rent control, or some other non-scalable, non-replicable housing situation. That's neat for you, but it's meaningless to anybody else.
I signed the lease in the past two years. So rent control has kicked in once. I have a room in a shared apartment. There are plenty of open rooms on Craigslist for similar rents. I'm not saying life will be great but it's entirely possible to live in the city on $50k/yr.
Most adults do not consider having a "room in a shared apartment" to be adequate. A living wage allows you to rent/mortgage a place of your own. What I'm hearing is that $50k is not a living wage.
You're out of touch. It might not be common for families, but it's very common for young adults to share an apartment. And you're trivializing what activists are trying to do when they talk about making sure people have a "living wage."
As an only slightly older adult, let me assure you that after years of petty arguments, no-fault evictions, playing Craigslist roulette for new roommates, sitting in massive group interviews to compete for a room, other people's animals ruining your shit, etc. ad nauseum, "a room in a shared apartment" will stop being an acceptable option. I never thought I would get there either. Just give it time.
Depends on your standard of living. A studio apartment there goes for around $2500/month these days with no parking or utilities. Agreed that remote would be a nice option.
> As a grown adult, having roommates is not really an acceptable situation.
I know plenty of grown adults that have roomates, because they prefer the quality of accommodations they can afford that way to what they would be able to afford without them. (And not even in places with Bay Area-level high cost of housing.)
If it is unacceptable to you, that's fine, but don't pretend it has something to do with being "a grown adult".
What do you count as an adult? I was the weird one by having my own place. Every 'adult' I know had roommates until they found an SO and moved in together and/or got married. These people all made enough money to live alone, but preferred spending money on other things. I also do not live in a super expensive place. A 1br apt. goes for ~1200 in the trendy spots.
A reasonable approximation is to target no more than 25% of your take home for housing, but you can probably survive closer to 50% for a while if you must. So for 50k, you're looking at something like $800 - $1600 being manageable. You'd be much better off near the other end of the range.
