Life as a family is harder than most of us pictured. The unexpected root canals, the out-of-network therapist, the sports teams your children want to join, the travel you’d like to enjoy together, the sudden death of family across country and the resulting plane tickets; the costs add up.
Life in the Bay Area has come at a cost for my husband and me. We moved here with good degrees and plans for a family. We thought San Jose would be a temporary stop on our way to our forever city. But as so many do, we find ourselves still here, 13 years later. We’ve been fortunate in many ways and have a home and the means to watch our kids thrive.
However, we are standing by as our peers pedal up an unending hill of bills and rent, renting homes they can not buy as they routinely comb through the MLS listings in Portland, Seattle, Austin, Tennessee, and anywhere else. Families are making sacrifices to live in the Bay Area and it’s hard to believe that what this area has to offer is worth the struggle it inflicts on its young families.
According to Business Insider in 2015, a resident of Silicon Valley would need to make over $212,000 in order to afford a mortgage. Last year, Business Insider reported that a young engineer had posted an online question, “can I live in the Bay Area on $120,000?” and nearly all of the respondents to this query said one can get by on that salary only as a single person. In fact, one respondent explained something many Bay Area workers in tech have found themselves chasing, “Salary alone is relatively meaningless. You need equity and lots of it that performs extraordinarily well to live a stable life here.” That is, you don’t just need a basic income high enough to afford the soaring rent/mortgage, you also need to own stock in your company with significant promise of return if you want to eventually buy the family home you’ve been envisioning. But that’s not something you just ask for and get. It requires luck, education, experience, and privilege. Very few people can obtain this magical amount of equity in a highly successful company at the right time.
So what is it that we are after, as young families, that we feel we can get only in the Bay Area? Is it worth the exorbitant cost? In an effort to parse the cost/benefit of living in such an expensive locale, I interviewed family and friends in Silicon Valley and in central Ohio. Ohio, you may sense, is notably more affordable than the Bay Area and provides an interesting comparison. Central Ohio is not globally recognized for its temperate year round climate, ocean cliffs, ancient forests, or mountain ranges. Yet, it is a happy and beautiful home to many. I asked about lifestyle, challenges and benefits of location.
For my husband and me, we find ourselves outdoors most weekends. Our children play sports year round, outside. When sports schedules let-up we hike, we go to the beach, we swim in rivers, and we visit family-friendly wineries. When we want snow we drive 3.5 hours to Tahoe. We enjoy Thanksgiving dinner outside at a family-owned apple orchard. This year-round lifestyle would be hard to replicate in other parts of the country.
One Bay Area friend stated that he has worked his way so far into a niche tech field specific to the area that he would never find work nearly as professionally satisfying elsewhere in the country. And yet another Bay Area friend expressed the truly Californian overture of love for the proximate mountains and ocean, and for the relative ease of driving south to Disneyland and east to Yosemite.
Interestingly, most of my friends and family living in the comparatively bleak climate and flat landscape of Ohio also cited outdoor activities for how they spend their family time. Metro Parks, a central Ohio park system boasting 23 wooded parks with hiking trails, streams, ponds, and wildlife was frequently mentioned by Ohio families as an important part of their family life. None of the Ohio families claimed financial stress whereas Bay Area families all did. According to Columbus Business First, the median household income in central Ohio is approximately $50,000 and the average home cost is $131,700 according (Zillow).
Those numbers are in contrast to the average Bay Area household income of approximately $108,000, (which is remarkably close to this area’s designation of “low income” being just over $90,000) (The Mercury News) with the average cost of a home at $709,000 (CBS San Francisco).
One family moved two years ago from a $2200/month garage rental in the Bay Area to central Ohio where they immediately purchased a 3 bedroom home for $100,000. This discrepancy is no secret, but the living of it is not often examined, after all, who wants to be the one complaining about their $110,000 income in the valley of sun and plenty?
Ohioans and Californians both noted outdoor sports as family activities. Both said that proximity to extended family is a priority, either to maintain it or to achieve it. When asked what they would change about their area, Ohio residents said they’d like more population diversity, less crowds and more mountains. Bay Area residents want to be able to afford homes that fit their families and would like less crowds and less traffic.
So what makes residents stay in the Bay Area? Well some Bay Area friends said they are indeed considering a move. However, they must factor in the benefits of local grandparents parents and the availability of jobs elsewhere that pay well enough to cushion the inevitable wage drop anyone leaving the Bay Area must expect.
It may also be as simple as being stuck. Whether you want to move east, west, north or south, inertia can be a devil. The roots we immediately plant when we have children can make leaving a place difficult. Taking your child out of a school that knows how to handle his IEP (Individual Education Plan), leaving the middle school you finally chose for your 11-year-old after spending all summer agonizing over it, taking your child off the competitive hockey team he’s been training for years to join, pulling yourself away from the close group of friends you’ve made; these are roots that don’t lift easily.
For families who just can’t get a couple hundred thousand dollars saved up for a down payment, maybe swallowing the disappointment of not owning a home or owning a home that feels too small is the best option, as one dear friend explained . Perhaps sweating out the end of every month as the checking account balance drops faster than you planned may be worth it if it keeps everyone in their comfortable spot. Maybe it’s better to keep the world turning for your family rather than making a drastic change. In the meantime, Bay Area residents do have year-round weather to enjoy, mountains to climb, oceans to surf and wine to taste.
Of course, it must be said, these ruminations are in relation to people of an implied degree of privilege. Bay Area poverty rates are currently estimated at 11.3% of the population living at or below the poverty line, according to the San Jose Mercury News. These are often people working more than one job and raising children. And, startlingly, the poverty rate in Columbus, Ohio is at 21%, per http://www.datausa.io.
So while we may be pondering the challenges of both buying a home and paying for the soccer uniform, greater struggles do exist next door. Some of our children’s classmates are food-insecure and are at risk for all of the accompanying symptoms of poverty including poor health, mental health, and academic performance, according to the American Psychological Association.
Raising a family is more challenging than perhaps anything, or at least some days it feels that way. And the pressure of a household under financial duress surely can’t be maintained indefinitely. Whether we move when we’ve exceeded our threshold for financial stress or we find a way to hang on until the kids move out, let us enjoy where we live; the sun on warm days, the drizzle on wet days and local produce grown year round.
When we see other families schlepping from one end of the valley to the other, we nod to them in solidarity. And for my comrades in Ohio, may we always visit for the novelty of your snow, the hygge of your hearth and whiskey at Christmas, and the balls-out Americana of your July 4ths.
Works Cited
- Madeline Stone. “Silicon Valley unaffordable even for software engineers.” businessinsider.com. Business Insider, 28 May 2015.
- Eugene Kim. “What people say about making $120,000 in Silicon Valley.” businessinsider.com. Business Insider, 19 June 2016.
- Metro Parks. metroparks.net
- CBS “Bay Area Median Home Price Approaches All-Time High.” sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com. CBS SF Bay Area, 28 April 2017.
- Annie Sciacca. “In costly Bay Area, even six-figure salaries are considered ‘low income’.” mercurynews.com. The Mercury News, 22 April 2017.
- Tatiana Sanchez. “California, Bay Area poverty rates updated in Census report.” mercurynews.com. The Mercury News, 16 Sept. 2016.
- Maureen Black, PhD. “Household food insecurities: Threats to children’s well-being.” apa.org. American Psychological Association, June 2012.
- Data USA, datausa.io
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