The lack of affordable housing in California means that millennials have limited access to move up homes, forcing them out of the state. The Mercury Times takes a sharp look at what's happening in Silicon Valley, similar to what Dowell Myers and Richard Green discussed in this HIVE RE:Think podcast.
The young couple skipped fancy vacations, ordered appetizers for dinner on date nights, and lived with roommates to scrape up nearly $150,000 for a down payment on a home.
After four, tight-belted years, the couple bought a modest two-bedroom in East San Jose for $700,000 in late 2016. They continued to juggle several jobs to make ends meet and fix the home up for the family they hoped to start. Two-and-a-half years later, the Hursts put a “For Sale” sign up in their yard. Exhausted, they were done with the Bay Area.
“I’m working at 150 percent,” said Jen, a bio-chemist, “to be lower middle class.”
More than 6 in 10 Bay Area residents under 30 said in a recent poll they expect to leave the Bay Area in the next few years. Millennials are the most likely age group to say they’re leaving, with 55 percent of those under 40 looking to escape, according to the poll conducted in February by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group and this news organization.
It’s a trend that sets off alarms for regional leaders, watching the lifeblood of new workers drain to other regions and states.
“The Bay Area is increasingly becoming a place unaffordable to the children of NIMBY parents, who have blocked the approvals of new homes that lock out our own sons and daughters from being able to live in the communities in which we raised them,” said Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino, noting the state has a deficit of 3.5 million homes.
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