Price Condition of Housing Too Expensive in Silicon Valley

It is said that the home prices in the Bay Area or Silicon Valley in particular are so out of reach for many families of middle income group. Even for the high paid tech workers of big companies, the housing here is not affordable. This is the very observation of a study conducted by a real estate startup Open Listings.

It is said that the so-called techies can come close to owning a Silicon Valley home than other workers like teachers, service industry workers and others. But lately, there is now a signal of the area’s explosive housing costs that home ownership is not that easily obtainable by these techies or high salaried engineers.

In order to pay a home which is 20 minute away from their offices, software engineers for example at the Bay Area tech big companies have to even allot more than 28 percent of their monthly salaries. As an example, an average software engineer of a tech company makes a $188,000 every year and will have to allot 33 percent of this salary in order to afford a home in Cupertino which is median priced. Another example would for software engineers in other high tech companies to allot for their mortgage and tax payments around 32 percent or 30 percent or 29 percent of their income.

But still, these people who are allotting those mentioned percentages of their income for the mortgage payments are still having a hard time in getting a loan for a house. However, if their loan is ever granted, the amount is not the full amount of the price which would need them to save more money in order to pay for the down payment. For residents who are paying the very high rent prices already, still saving 20 percent for a down payment is still not enough.

Thus this difficulty in obtaining a home in the area is true for these high tech workers, this could possibly hurt the big high tech companies in their recruitment and retaining of employees.

It is with this realization of the difficulty or condition that made the executives of these Bay Area tech companies to sign and support a bill that will make it easier to develop dense housing projects at nearby transit stations.

According to the leaders of these tech companies, this housing problem is a detriment to their ability to hire employees and of the growth of their firms. These leaders recognize that this concern about housing shortage is leading to displacement of employees, impacting rent burdens, long hours of commuting, and harm to the environment that they want to be part of the solution that they government would implement.