Whether you are a freshman or a senior, chances are you have already asked yourself the questions, “What will I do after high school? What will I do after college?”
If we were to follow the “American Dream,” the answer would be getting a job, buying a house, and eventually raising a family.
However, for most of us in the Bay Area, that dream could most likely never be fulfilled if we chose to stay in our hometowns. Why? Because even with a high-paying job, it’s nearly impossible to buy a house here.
A house in Belmont costs a median of around $1.5 million, and a house in Redwood Shores costs a median of around $1.2 million. San Francisco isn’t much better off either, with the median cost of a house being $1.1 million. To put that in perspective, the median cost of a house in Texas is only $159,000, and that is considered a high price for Texas. In other words, the Bay Area is incredibly expensive to live in, even for a stable adult with a job such as a Google employee or a doctor.
In fact, there are some Google employees that live in RVs parked in the company’s parking lot — and these are people that make an average of over $100,000 a year in their first years of employment.
The bad news doesn’t stop there — after getting a job, most of us won’t even attempt to buy a house and live the “American Dream,” simply because that would be unrealistic for most. Instead, most of us will try to rent an apartment or condo so we can still live independently.
Unfortunately, that seems nearly impossible nowadays in the Bay Area, at least for young adults.
The prices of living in the Bay Area have gotten so ridiculous over the past years that there was actually an offer for $900 a month to live in the tent in someone’s backyard in Mountain View, just 30 minutes from Carlmont High School. You were even allowed to shower once a day!
Considering that you can’t really find any decent apartments to rent in Belmont under $2000, perhaps that isn’t such a bad deal.
Still, if you thought that was a lot of money — rent isn’t the only thing we have to worry about. After college, most of us are going to graduate with a massive debt and there’s still the cost of living and taxes to take into consideration.
Overall, the verdict is quite clear: most of us are not going to be able to remain in our hometowns after we graduate. Even if we do get jobs in big IT companies in the Bay Area such as Facebook, Apple, Oracle, and Google, or other high-paying jobs such as being a doctor or lawyer, it will be almost impossible to be able to pay both the cost of housing and the cost of living.
We, the adolescents of the Bay Area, are going to go on a house-market induced exodus after we graduate — not because we will want to, but because we will have to.
