58% of Silicon Valley Tech Workers Delayed Having Kids Because of Housing Costs

An anonymous reader quotes the Mercury News: Though some residents blame the area's highly paid tech workers for driving up the cost of housing, data increasingly shows that these days, even tech workers feel squeezed by the Bay Area's scorching prices. Fifty-eight percent of tech workers surveyed recently said they have delayed starting a family due to the rising cost of living, according to a poll that included employees from Apple, Uber, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Lyft, and other Bay Area companies. The recently released poll, was conducted by Blind, an online social network designed to let people share anonymous opinions about their workplaces. Blind surveyed 8,284 tech workers from all over the world, with a large focus on the Bay Area and Seattle. Blind spokeswoman Curie Kim said the findings were "really surprising. In the Bay Area, tech employees are known to make one of the highest salaries in the nation," she said, "but if these people also feel that they can't afford housing and they can't start a family because of the rising cost of living, who can....'" The average base salary for a software engineer at Apple is $121,083 a year, the article notes, yet the company also had the largest percentage of surveyed tech employees who said they'd been force to delay starting their families -- 69%. "Anywhere else in the country, we'd be successful people who owned a home and didn't worry about anything," said one 34-year-old in a two-income family. "But here, that's not the case." While her husband helps Verizon deploy smart devices with IoT technology, they're raising two daughters in a rented Palo Alto apartment, "only to experience a $500 rent increase over two years."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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