You have a skewed sense of the middle class. Assume it costs $50,000 a year to live in a million dollar house (which seems on the low end of reasonable.) The median tax-home pay for a household in San Fransisco is $84,500. So you think most people are spending 60% of their take-home pay on housing?

Also, the median value for an owner-occupied house in SF is 1.15MM. So half the people live in something less than that.

> Also, the median value for an owner-occupied house in SF is 1.15MM. So half the people live in something less than that.

This contradicts your earlier statement. If the median owner-occupied house 1.15M, that means more than half of homeowners are living in houses worth $1M or more. Clearly that includes middle class people, since it's more than half of the people.

Also, note that it doesn't take much money to live in a $1M house if you bought it a while back.

Assuming you bought a whole back and have $1m equity, You could sell your $1.15m house and take 4% a year or $40k from that for doing nothing. You just need to live in a sensible location and let SF die.

Who is giving you 4%? Subtract taxes and you've traded a nice city for a life of poverty because chances are finding a new job at a similiar salary is almost impossible.

Looks easy from the outside but rarely is

I think he's saying you could withdraw 4% of your principal every year, which would be a great idea if you are planning on being deceased in 25 years.

> You just need to live in a sensible location and let SF die.

Please let SF die so I can buy some affordable real estate there. Thanks!

Seriously though. SF’s problem is that it is too crowded. If people left, then it would be less crowded, an equilibrium would be reached eventually (if you believe we aren’t at one already).

More than half of all homeowners. Not everyone is a homeowner.

No, because homeowners are not a representative sample of the population. If I slap you down in the middle of Beverly Hills, I could say that on average you're a millionaire, but that doesn't exactly tell the whole story.

It includes _some_ middle class people. Fewer and fewer as property taxes raise and the value of their home rises. Sure, they'll have a bunch of cash once they sell it, but not everyone wants to move away from where they were born just because there's a bunch of overpaid tech bros now living next to you.

California has proposition 13, so your property taxes aren’t rising much.