Bay Area Median Home Price 2016

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The San Francisco Bay Area is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States. The map above displays the median home price for the top 30 most populated cities in the Bay Area. The larger the bubble, the higher the median home price. The bubbles are also color coded – Red the highest 20%, Orange the next 20%, then Green, Blue, and Purple the lowest 20% by median home price.

Regionally, the cities comprising Silicon Valley are the most expensive and the cities in the northeastern bay are the cheapest. In order, the most expensive cities in the bay area by median home price (via Zillow) as of 2016: Palo Alto at 2.5 million, Cupertino 1.8 million, Mountain View 1.4 million, Sunnyvale 1.4 million, Redwood City 1.3 million, San Mateo 1.1 million, and San Francisco 1.1 million.

The most affordable housing in the Bay Area (of the top 30 by population) are: Richmond 411k, Vacaville 391k, Fairfield 390k, Antioch 364k, Pittsburg 357k, and Vallejo 326k.

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House Prices and Tech

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The bar chart on the left displays the number of technology related jobs per 1000 jobs for select cities. The bar chart on the right displays the median house price for the same cities on the left. What jumps out from this comparison is how expensive house prices are in the Bay Area compared with other tech centers around the country. Despite having roughly the same number of tech related jobs (7.9% and 7.6%) home prices in San Francisco are more than two and a half times more expensive than homes in Seattle (1.2 million compared with 430k). Another finding is that even if cities have a higher fraction of their laborforce working in tech jobs, most cities in this sample do not have home prices far above the US Average.