Skip to main content

A six-figure salary is considered 'low income' in San Francisco, and the threshold is rising


#BayArea #MarinCounty #SanFrancisco #SanMateo #HighcostofLiving #LowIncome

The Bay Area is so expensive, earning $117,400 a year qualifies you as "low income" in some counties.

Every year the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development releases "income limits," the minimum income level required to qualify for some affordable housing programs.

To be considered "low income" in San Francisco, San Mateo, and Marin counties, a family of four must earn $117,400 a year. "Very low income" is considered $73,300.


The Bay Area figures are the highest in the country and continue to increase year over year. Income limits in some Bay Area cities increased by 10 percent just in the last year. 

Most residents will roll their eyes at such figures — they're used to seeing the cost of rent and homeownership increase with the years. In May, the median home price in the Bay Area hit a record high at $935,000.

The high cost of living likely accounts for what some perceive to be a "Bay Area exodus." It's hard to quantify such a trend with limited census data, but multiple reports imply Bay Area residents are at least thinking about leaving. Real estate site Redfin determined the Bay Area as the top region for "outward migration" in the nation by analyzing where people were searching for homes.

"Jobs and housing are really the primary criteria driving people's decisions," Hans Johnson, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, told The Chronicle in March. "It's kind of a balancing act between the two. If jobs predominate, people are moving in. If housing predominates, you have less people moving in."

Here's the list of counties and the annual salaries that qualify as low income for a four-person family:

Alameda County: $89,600

Contra Costa County: $89,600

Marin County: $117,400

Napa County: $73,450

San Francisco County: $117,400

San Mateo County: $117,400

Santa Clara County: $94,450

Solano County: $66,950

Sonoma County: $78,550






By Michelle Robertson, SFGATE Updated 10:53 am PDT, Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Most Americans will need a new ID to fly, starting in October

#RealD #DriversLicense #Travel #Airport #HomelandSecurity #TSA Think your driver's license is enough to get you through airport security in the United States and onto your domestic flight? Maybe not. Some two-thirds of US state driver's licenses are not compliant with a post-9/11 security law set to go into effect on October 1. Those who are not compliant will not be able to fly if they don't have other forms of "REAL ID-compliant" identification. Concerned about the impact on travel, the head of the US Department of Homeland Security loosened the restrictions this week, allowing the various state agencies to accept identity documents electronically. While Wolf says this "pre-submission" of documents will result in a faster application process, it's not clear how much faster it will be. The REAL ID Act, which established minimum security standards for the issuing of state licenses and their production, prohibits federal agencies from ...

New fascinating insights on the psychological effects of Hugging

  #Hug #Hugging #Emotions #Stress #Mood #BlackMaleTherapist #Psychotherapy #MentalHealth  During the COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns and restrictions, one of the things many people missed most was getting hugged by their loved ones. This led to an increased interest in the positive effects of hugging in the psychology research community and several studies published over the last year have yielded new insights on what it means to us to be hugged. Here are four of the most interesting new insights into the science of hugging. 1. Getting hugged by others, but also hugging yourself, reduces stress hormones A recent study by researcher Aljoscha Dreisoerner from the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, and his team focused on the positive effects of hugging on stress (Dreisoerner et al., 2021). Interestingly, the scientists not only investigated how getting hugged by other people could reduce stress, but also whether hugging yourself (e.g., when other people are not ...

Brain freeze: Why ice cream makes some scream

 #BrainFreeze,#Popsicle #Slush  #IceCream  Most people have likely experienced brain freeze — the debilitating, instantaneous pain in the temples after eating something frozen — but researchers didn't really understand what causes it, until now. Previous studies have found that migraine sufferers are actually more likely to get brain freeze than people who don't get migraines. Because of this, the researchers thought the two might share some kind of common mechanism or cause, so they decided to use brain freeze to study migraines. Headaches like migraines are difficult to study because they are unpredictable. Researchers aren't able to monitor a whole one from start to finish in the lab. They can give drugs to induce migraines, but those can also have side effects that interfere with the results. Brain freeze can quickly and easily be used to start a headache in the lab, and it also ends quickly, which makes monitoring the entire event easy. The researchers br...

Black History Month: 17 LGBTQ black pioneers who made history

Storme DeLarverie, Marsha P. Johnson and Bayard Rustin.New York Times, Netflix, Getty Images By Gwen Aviles and Ariel Jao From 1960s civil rights activist Bayard Rustin to Chicago's first black female and LGBTQ mayor, Lori Lightfoot, black LGBTQ Americans have long made history with innumerable contributions to politics, art, medicine and a host of other fields. “As long as there have been black people, there have been black LGBTQ and same-gender-loving people,” David J. Johns, executive director of the  National Black Justice Coalition , told NBC News. “Racism combined with the forces of stigma, phobia, discrimination and bias associated with gender and sexuality have too often erased the contributions of members of our community." In celebration of Black History Month, we honor black LGBTQ pioneers of the past and the present and celebrate their oft-forgotten contributions. Richard Bruce Nugent (1906-1987) Nugent was one of few openly quee...