I love statistics and I love them even more when they are stack ranked. So the Sunday Comicle article titled "Here’s where median household incomes increased the most in the Bay Area during the last decade" drew me in immediately as I wondered how they came up with these statistics and where B'game landed. The answer to the first question is
The data set comes from the U.S. Census Bureau’s five-year American Community Surveys for 2015 and 2020, and included places in the Bay Area with at least 20,000 residents.
That is interesting because I was selected this time around to fill out the full "ACS" as part of the census. It was a chore due to its length, but as I recall it used pretty wide ranges to gauge income. So averaging them all together across any given town and reporting it down to tenths of a percent seems a bit overly precise. It's not like the IRS came up with the number. But wait, there's more. Burlingame's 34.3% increase over the last five years came in eighth and landed just below EssEff, but
San Francisco’s median household pay increase fell short of East Palo Alto’s increase of 47%, partly driven by the historically economically disadvantaged city’s proximity to the Meta, formerly Facebook, headquarters (Ed: Hey, we got one of those too). That increase was more than any other place in the Bay Area during the last decade despite the city’s population barely increasing, as median incomes soared from the $56,000 range to more than $80,000 annually.
“It’s gentrification,” said Stephen Levy, director of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy. As Meta and other tech companies expanded their sprawling campuses on the peninsula and in the South Bay, “The people who lived (in East Palo Alto) who had been relatively poor got a chance to sell their homes for a whole lot of money” to people who could afford them, he said, driving up income levels.
Is Levy saying "gentrification" isn't the bad word some people claim it to be? Sounds like it. More caveats came from Sonoma State econ professor Robert Eyler who said
where he lives in Petaluma, which was third from the bottom of the entire list of the list in terms of income growth, has both a somewhat transitory population and an already-high median income for the Bay Area, possibly leaving it with less room to grow.
So describing the growth rate without knowing the baseline numbers from 2015 only tells half the story--or less. You will probably hear our 34.3% number bandied about for better or worse, so now you have "the rest of the story".
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