Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart
by dougmccune on Thursday July 21, 2016 @02:34PM
(#12138968)
Very good point! Yeah, please be advised there's artistic license taken and the Z-axis scale is arbitrary (well, not arbitrary, it's linear but stretched and certainly doesn't start at 0). You're totally right that the difference between the lowest areas and the highest isn't really as exaggerated as it appears. The real delta between lowest and highest is about 2.7x. I'd argue though that a difference between ~$500/sq ft vs $1,200/sq ft is enough of a difference to make the top of the range feel entirely out of reach for anyone living in the bottom of the range, and that's what the sculpture was meant to convey.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart
by ramses0 on Thursday July 21, 2016 @04:28PM
(#12139795)
Truly, you'd want to pin rent as 25% of income and then have the height be related to where you would need to be on the U.S. income scale as a percentile to be able to afford it.
ie: You've got a $899,000 home sale, that's supposedly a ~$4000/mo rent, which leads towards a "25% rule" of $16,000/mo income => $192,000/yr => which is supposedly 93.9%-ile.
Going from $4000/mo => $5000/mo, it seems like it takes you to 96.8%-ile.
Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart
by stouset on Thursday July 21, 2016 @10:52PM
(#12141444)
The absolute difference in dollars scales ridiculously high though once you start getting above 90%ile though. Going by percentile practically makes it a logarithmic scale.
Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart
by xapata on Friday July 22, 2016 @01:39AM
(#12141905)
> Going by percentile practically makes it a logarithmic scale
In theory as well. Small changes of the log of a variable are approximately equivalent to small percent-changes.
Edit: Though percentile is a little different than percent-change.
Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart
by arcticbull on Thursday July 21, 2016 @02:46PM
(#12139068)
My interpretation of it was that a 2.7X delta in price between lowest and highest isn't correlated linearly with affordability. i.e. a house that's twice as expensive per square foot doesn't make it half as affordable. People who already have to leverage themselves extensively to mortgage a property will never afford a property twice as expensive per square foot so it's actually infinitely less affordable, if you see what I mean.
Re:Sculpture of Housing Prices Ripping San Francisco Apart
by oldmanjay on Thursday July 21, 2016 @04:17PM
(#12139719)
That's the sort of "artistic license" that leads the adherents to the politics of envy to make proclamations about how life is somehow less worth living when you know someone else has more than you. When charitable, people call it hyperbole. At its core, it is simple emotional manipulation. At least you were subtle about it!