"Affordable" Seattle Living: Defining the Term
Posted 02-26-2014 at 01:52 PM by Blondebaerde
What is "affordable" living in Seattle metro, specifically around rent and mortgage? The word drives me bats: too ambiguous, without much more situation-specific details.
So: what if we put a methodology around "affordable," starting simple. I'm a simple guy, how about the following:
Given: 30% gross of monthly income for rent/mortgage is acceptable (1). 28% gross disappears in taxes (2).
I popped over to US BLS website. Tons of data, on all sorts of cool stuff about occupations, labor trends, etc. I like Excel, and downloaded some of their raw data. Data set around occupations I snagged was from May 2012.
Filtering for Seattle-Everett-Bellevue, 720 occupations (approx) were listed, with all sorts of data: hourly and annual averages, number employed, percentiles, other cool stuff.
Without being specific to any occupation, couldn't someone interested in "moving to Seattle" and seeking "affordable" housing simply download that data (or similar), do some rough calcs around salaries, taxes, and etc. specific to their situation, then determine upper and lower reasonable boundaries for rental or purchase, when cross-checked against similar housing rental/purchase data from Trulia, Zillow, etc?
Seems to me the above might eliminate some (not all) of the ambiguity around "affordable" related to the housing portion only.
Your thoughts? I put maybe 15 min into the exercise; it took far longer to write-up than research.
Notes:
(1) Yes, 30% of gross for rent or mortgage is debatable. Should it be net, not gross? More, less? You decide.
(2) I personally thought 28% gross taxation is a reasonable "average" these days: Federal, no State. Same caveat...
So: what if we put a methodology around "affordable," starting simple. I'm a simple guy, how about the following:
Given: 30% gross of monthly income for rent/mortgage is acceptable (1). 28% gross disappears in taxes (2).
I popped over to US BLS website. Tons of data, on all sorts of cool stuff about occupations, labor trends, etc. I like Excel, and downloaded some of their raw data. Data set around occupations I snagged was from May 2012.
Filtering for Seattle-Everett-Bellevue, 720 occupations (approx) were listed, with all sorts of data: hourly and annual averages, number employed, percentiles, other cool stuff.
Without being specific to any occupation, couldn't someone interested in "moving to Seattle" and seeking "affordable" housing simply download that data (or similar), do some rough calcs around salaries, taxes, and etc. specific to their situation, then determine upper and lower reasonable boundaries for rental or purchase, when cross-checked against similar housing rental/purchase data from Trulia, Zillow, etc?
Seems to me the above might eliminate some (not all) of the ambiguity around "affordable" related to the housing portion only.
Your thoughts? I put maybe 15 min into the exercise; it took far longer to write-up than research.
Notes:
(1) Yes, 30% of gross for rent or mortgage is debatable. Should it be net, not gross? More, less? You decide.
(2) I personally thought 28% gross taxation is a reasonable "average" these days: Federal, no State. Same caveat...
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