To more or less illustrate the biggest difference in housing costs between the Bay Area and other cities I spent ( no kidding) a total of 2 minutes clicking the real estate links on various real estate sites in cities across the country. I started with SF and wound up picking a comparable house in Austin, TX. Here are the winners of today's exercise. To be fair I chose houses that are fairly close in size, bedroom count, proximity to downtown, in the same general condition, with the same compliment of amenities.
The house on top is a 3 bedroom house with a garage, central heating and air, garage, and a recent general renovation. So too is house No.2 below. The biggest difference is that the house up top is in Austin, TX and has an asking price of $124,000. House No.2 to the left is located in the Bay Area and has an asking price of $699,000. Neither one of these are exactly mansions but rather fairly modest suburban houses. The comparison in price shows that the Austin house costs almost 7 times less than its similarly sized Bay Area cousin.
One common reason I hear people frequently give as to why houses cost so much more in the Bay Area is because people make more money. Thus the additional cost is justified accordingly. But looking at the median income for the area in which the Bay Area house resides, the median family income is approximately $60,000. But in Austin the median family income is $54,000. So yes- the median is higher in the area that the Bay Area house resides yet the median in Austin is only $6,000 a year less yet the median price for a house there is under $200,000. Long story short, the cost of living in the Bay Area is significantly higher and takes a bigger percentage of the average family's take-home pay if they have a mortgage.
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