Once upon a time, a family of four had the same number of working adults as a family of one.

Once upon a time a family of four would live in a 1200 square foot house and own one car and one television, would rarely travel, rarely go out to eat. That kind of life style can still be sustained even in the Bay area on $100k/yr.

Once upon a time, the woman stayed at home and didn't need a second car.

Televisions were prohibitively priced as to make one even a stretch.

And, travel was prohibitively priced so that only the ultra-rich could afford planes. When cars hit the scene en masse, it brought rise to car trips.

So, I guess you're saying people aren't living within their means? But they weren't necessarily then either... And boy, I sure miss all of the great stuff from the 50s.

> Televisions were prohibitively priced as to make one even a stretch.

It's just astounding how cheap televisions have become. A 32" flatscreen is like $150, and weighs ten pounds.

Whereas content is $100/month when it used to be $0.

Broadcast TV is still free. Movies always cost a fair amount of money.

An internet connection with youtube is $30 which is WAY more variety than "back then".

Mmm. Yeah, I get loads of value from Univision and Home Shopping Channels like HSN, QVC and the others.

Can't forget Qubo and Me.tv. Good times, for sure.

CBS, NBC, ABC, FOX, PBS

Also, I'm suspecting you're not a Spanish speaker, so I guess it's okay to discount a channel that over 10% of the US has utility for.

Cable TV is a relatively recent invention, has quickly declining subscription rates, and has always been billed as premium.

You know, maybe not. Even in the excelsior, a 1200sf ft house that is liveable (not remodeled highly, just liveable) will run you $900k. It can go up from there easily.

It's possible, I suppose... You'd need to be a one income family at 100k, because there's no way you could cover that and child care. But yeah, a stay at home spouse and a working spouse who brought in 100k might be able to make it work south of 280.

EDIT: just realized you said Bay Area, not San Francisco. That changes things.

Even with your edit I would like to chime in that I got a condo in San Jose that is 3 bed, 2 bath for <500k. It isn't fancy but it is home.

When did you buy this condo? Surely not recently.

I closed in December of 2016, as I nice side affect I got a rate that was a little lower then they are now.

Great point. Let's regress backwards. San Francisco's housing crises and living cost is self inflicted by limiting supply.

That did not last for long though, maybe forty years from after the second world war till the early 80s. The model that did last for centuries had families of 8-12 people, with men working in the fields and women looking after children and grandchildren.

That's inaccurate or incomplete. Women shared a significant portion of agricultural labor throughout history and on top of that maintained the household and performed auxiliary labor.

Yes, I was simplifying a lot. The point still stands, in that except for a short period of time it has never been "one person working", because maintaining the household and looking after all the young in the extended family is a job of its own. It was not at all like having two kids, who spend half the day or more at school.

Yes, but any spare income earned by multiple working adults in a family will eventually be siphoned up by either landlords, or banks.

Um what!? My family has two incomes. We save the entire second income (before taxes) and then some. Not to mention interest rates are at historic lows.

(PS, people's spending tends to match their income no matter how high the income, it's called lifestyle inflation)

In hot markets, landlords will charge as much rent as their tenants can bear. If enough people have an entire income available to them, rents will rise.

If your bank is eating your income, you need a new bank.

Keep in mind that 1. California has high taxes, and 2. those taxes go down as your number of dependents goes up. Your employer has the same number in your salary column either way, but your take-home pay tends to rise to match your needs, up to a point. (It doesn't work out for e.g. n=8, but it tends to take care of n<4.)

There's only four zip codes in Denmark that have a higher average income per household, and Denmark is a pretty expensive place to live.

It seems obvious to move that some tech companies would move away from San Francisco, offer lower wages, but still manage to give their employees a better deal.

> There's only four zip codes in Denmark that have a higher average income per household, and Denmark is a pretty expensive place to live.

In Denmark the following costs are cheaper or entirely nonexistent: Paying for health insurance (for every member of the family), saving for retirement, saving for sending kids to college, kids daycare, kids school fees, and also rent or cost of buying a house is cheaper than in the Bay Area.

While you partly right, you do need to pay for at least daycare, and retirement. It varies, but around 15% of your salary should go towards retirement and even if you employer pays part of you retirement that normally include in the statistic for house hold income.

The four zip code, with the higher average income also have an average price per square meter of 7000USD, so that's of cause a little less than in the Bay Area, assume the 8000USD per square meters I saw a while back is correct.

> you do need to pay for at least daycare

I guess in the richer areas in US, $1000 per child is not an unusual monthly fee for daycare. Whereas in Finland, the monthly fee tops at 290€ per child, and I would guess Denmark is more or less similar to Finland.

How much does that have to do with our increasing desire for more space though? The square footage of living space per person in a new home has increased from 506.6 to 980.7 since 1973.

https://www.aei.org/publication/todays-new-homes-are-1000-sq...

I've seen this argument before and it's not a clear-cut relationship to desire at all. Did home buyers absolutely demand more and more space, or did developers realize they could make more by building bigger and bigger homes? Now we are in a situation where many, many young people looking to move to cities would be perfectly happy with smaller living spaces at associated smaller costs, but those properties straight up don't exist, and also aren't being built.

"many, many young people looking to move to cities would be perfectly happy with smaller living spaces at associated smaller costs, but those properties straight up don't exist, and also aren't being built"

This is it right here. Many municipalities won't even allow them to be built. I would love to live in a small town but such towns are designed around car ownership, total separation of residential and commercial districts, and massive housing lots. If you can't drive, you're stuck living in the big city. And that's only getting more difficult if you're middle income.

The space doesn't cost as much as it once did. In almost every market, the land is the expensive part, not the house. Modern building materials are cheap and energy efficient. I moved from a 1400sqft 1930 built house to a 3600sqft 2014 built house, and the new house costs half as much as the old one to heat and cool. For a builder, there's hardly any reason not to build the largest house that fits on the property, because most of the high cost components are the same if you have a small house or a large house.

Across America that is true, but in hot real estate markets people are chopping up houses into smaller condos and new apartments have tiny rooms.

I bet living space per person in the bay area, NYC, DC, etc. has gone down over that same period.