[quote=AN]Do you have proof that for many people, their incomes haven’t gone up at all?
7-8 years ago, entry level software engineers were making $45k-50k. Today, according to salary.com, they should be making around $50k-$56k. That seems like a 10% increase in income to me. Also, 7-8 years ago, mortgage rate was in the high 5s, low 6s. Just the rates alone can give buyers more buying powers. Lets assume income haven’t gone up in 7-8 years and lets say people who make $200k/yr can afford $800k back then, they now can afford $900k and still have the same payment.
To those who say, due to cost of everything else going up over the last 7-10 years, cost for housing have to stay the same. Have you guys taken a look at rent over the last 10 years? 10 years ago, a 2bed/1bath on the west side of Mira Mesa was going for around 1000-1050. Today, the exact same apartment is going for 1250-1300. That’s an increase of 20-30% over 10 years.
sdcellar, mid 90s, we just came out of a big defense layoff, QCOM was tiny, Broadcom wasn’t here, etc. Take a look at how many people those 2 companies a lone employ and take a guess how many of those people are looking in the 600k-$1m range.
CAR, I know SD and LA are different. But LA is much bigger and more diverse. LA must have all the neighborhood that’s similar to SD but the opposite can’t hold true. That’s why I’m asking for comparable to those places in LA w/ those criteria.[/quote]
EPI data tracking income and wage patterns show that the majority of income growth has for decades gone to a startlingly small number of top earners, while other workers have suffered a persistent stagnation or even decline in real earnings. While many middle-income families have lost jobs, homes, and retirement savings during the latest recession, their economic woes date back much further.
“The slow economic strangulation of the Freemans and millions of other middle-class Americans started long before the Great Recession, which merely exacerbated the “personal recession” that ordinary Americans had been suffering for years. Dubbed “median wage stagnation” by economists, the annual incomes of the bottom 90 per cent of US families have been essentially flat since 1973 – having risen by only 10 per cent in real terms over the past 37 years. That means most Americans have been treading water for more than a generation. Over the same period the incomes of the top 1 per cent have tripled. In 1973, chief executives were on average paid 26 times the median income. Now the multiple is above 300.
