I work in a Engineering/Manufacturing facility in Orange County with 155 people and my estimate is that about 15 people make more than $100K. Most of these people are Managers, very Senior Engineers and Controller. So, about 10% of the people make more than $100K. However, this is a Engineering and Manufacturing facility where wages tend to be higher than average.

Check the Irvine Housing Blog post that Irvine Renter did about a month or so ago on this subject. It was very detailed.

kev374 queried, “[H]as it become so common that almost everyone here in Orange County is earning at the six figure mark?” Maybe almost everyone he knows makes that much but it is hard for me to imagine all the barristas, store clerks, surfing instructors, teachers, etc coming from elsewhere in the state just to work in OC. The US Census bureau states that median “household” income for the county in 2004 was 58K (and change) and that the average household has 3 persons.

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06059.html

Beatus ille qui procul negotiis … paterna rura bobus exercet suis, solutus omni fenore….. Horace

And no, the median HHI was not well above the 100K mark.

I think people in Southern California, in general, make more money than the tax and census rolls suggest but less money than their lifestyles would suggest, if that makes any sense.

For reasons that I won’t go into I see a fair number of individual financial statements of people here in Southern California. There’s a large subset of real estate entrepreneurs that have huge cash flow but little or no reported income due to allowable depreciation. An extreme example: I saw financial statements for a developer of apartments that showed a net worth of almost $300 million (on assets of about $660 million), cash flow of almost $12 million/year but the guy hadn’t paid taxes in over 20 years; in fact, he reported losses due to huge depreciation and the fact that he keeps developing new projects (all over the U.S. – not just here in SoCal) to keep the depreciation train running.

In addition there are a lot of non-real estate entrepreneurs that run a lot of “otherwise personal” expenses through their businesses, thus reporting lower income for tax purposes than is really the case.

So part of the disconnect between household income and housing prices is due to the much higher rate of entrepreneurial activity in SoCal versus the U.S. in general. But the other part of the disconnect is that Californians tend to spend above their means to a greater degree than the rest of the U.S.

In a dual income family even if each makes 60K. The household income easily touches 120K