Want to be able to buy a house in California? Don’t become a teacher.
Teachers’ salaries have been rising in California, but not nearly fast enough to keep up with soaring housing prices, according to a new analysis that could shed some light on one reason why the Golden State is having trouble finding enough qualified educators for its public school classrooms.
Redfin, a national real estate brokerage, examined California’s 31 most-populous counties, from Sonoma Valley wine country in the north to the agricultural towns of the Central Valley to the sprawling metropolis of Los Angeles to the south. Just 17 percent of homes for sale in those counties were affordable on the state’s average teacher salary of $73,536, Redfin found.
That’s a marked decline from 2012, when 30 percent of homes for sale in those counties were affordable on the average teacher’s salary at the time: $70,487. “Affordable” means the monthly mortgage payment would eat up less than 30 percent of a person’s gross monthly salary.
Lindsay Katz, a Redfin agent in the San Fernando Valley, said one of her clients is a teacher who lives an hour from her school and wants to move closer. But she hasn’t been able to find anything affordable. It’s hard to find any home under $400,000, Katz said: “It’s a tough market. … Everything that’s in the lower price range you have to compete with developers who come in with all-cash offers. You keep getting beat out.”
The outlook is bleakest for teachers in Silicon Valley, home to countless tech millionaires — and billionaires — whose money has transformed the housing market. In San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, exactly zero homes for sale on Sept. 6 — the day Redfin chose for its analysis — were affordable for the average teacher. Things weren’t much better in nearby San Francisco (where 1 of 571 homes for sale were affordable for teachers), Sonoma or Santa Cruz.Want to be able to buy a house in California? Don’t become a teacher. - The Washington Post: