Big city living costs more, but still gives you more bang for the buck

One thing you'll notice, if you stare hard enough at demographic data (or if you just travel around the country with eyes open), is the circular relationship between place, income, education, and housing costs. Whether that's a vicious circle, or a virtuous one, depends largely on whether you've been able to get inside the circle or not.

In other words, a place with well-paying jobs is likely to have higher housing costs, because more people wanting to live there to access well-paying jobs creates more demand, and landlords or sellers are better able to demand a bigger premium from those people. To have enough money to be able to find a place to live in a city with well-paying jobs, though, you already have to have a well-paying job (or a willing benefactor).

Likewise, well-paying jobs usually require more education. Obtaining more education requires tuition and fees, and the ability to defer wages temporarily while getting educated ... again, requiring a well-paying job (or that same benefactor). And getting a good education requires living in a place where a good education can be obtained, which tends to overlap with places with well-paying jobs and high living costs, again requiring you to already have money to get your foot in the door. It's a difficult carousel to get on, and a hard one to get back on if you get thrown off.

The increasing speed of this carousel—the greater disparity in pay between jobs that do and don't require a lot of education, the greater disparity in costs of living between places that do and don't have well-paying jobs—helps drive the growing inequality in this country, both economic and spatial inequality. Two different recent studies... shed some new light on the growing segregation.

More from Daily Kos.

Rising Costs Hitting Homeowners & Renters Across New York State

Housing costs in New York rose sharply relative to income from 2000 to 2012, with more than half of renters and more than a third of homeowners paying at least 30 percent of their 2012 income for a place to live, according to a report released by State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli.


“Regardless of where they live, more New Yorkers are feeling pinched by rising housing costs,”DiNapoli said. “When half your income goes to pay for a place to live, you are going to be stretched thin on other every day purchases. This unfortunate trend has troubling implications for our economic growth and for New Yorkers’ quality of life.”

What's driving K-12 school costs?

New York’s annual budget battles over state aid to public education have taken on a new urgency in the wake of the Great Recession and the 2011 enactment of a law empowering local voters to cap property taxes. Education spending advocates are emphasizing local budget constraints they say have been created by the tax cap and by Governor Cuomo’s limit on school aid increases. The statewide teachers’ union has even gone so far as to assert that the governor and Legislature “have put New Yorkers on a starvation diet.”1

Public schools statewide retrenched, eliminating thousands of staff positions in the four years following the economic downturn, yet their expenses continued rising at a pace few could sustain. The latest State Education Department (SED) data highlight two important trends:

More from Empire Center.

Few Plan for College Expenses

Description from the New Strategist:

Only 43 percent of American families know how they will pay for college before their child enrolls in school, according to the latest Sallie Mae report, How America Pays for College 2013. The college cost "surprise" that greets many families as their child heads out the door is one factor behind the rise in student debt.

The typical family with an 18-to-24-year-old enrolled in an undergraduate program paid $21,178 for college in the 2012-13 school year. The funds came from a combination of parent income and savings ($5,727), loans ($5,760), grants and scholarships ($6,355), student income ($2,284), and gifts from relatives and friends ($1,053).

And in a similar vein, The One Comic That Explains Just How Screwed America Is.

Construction: square foot cost estimate to build your particular project

Is there a book or other resource which gives construction costs per square foot for different types of building projects?

"An accurate estimate of the costs to build your particular project depends upon the location, project scope, specific components used and current market conditions and is available on RSMeansOnline.com. But cost estimates are available for certain building types here.

What Is the Price of College?

Source: National Center for Education Statistics

This Statistics in Brief describes the annual price of education among undergraduates enrolled in U.S. postsecondary institutions in 2007–08. The most recent administration of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS) supplied the data.

Prediction: U.S. Election Will Cost $5.3 Billion

The 2008 election for president and Congress is not only one of the most closely watched U.S. elections in years; it’s also the most expensive in history. The nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics estimates that more than $5.3 billion will go toward financing the federal contests today. The presidential race alone will cost nearly $2.4 billion, the Center predicts.

US a better bargain for foreigners

Cost of living shifts on global scale.

2010 Census Cost

2010 Census: Census Bureau Should Take Action to Improve the Credibility and Accuracy of Its Cost Estimate for the Decennial Census. GAO-08-554, June 16.

Highlights.

Hi -Tech Census Costs, Accuracy in Doubt

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Big worries for the nation's first high-tech census should have been obvious when the door-to-door headcounters couldn't figure out their fancy new handheld computers.

MORE.

I've seen these handheld machines up close for only a brief time; they SEEMED easy enough...

Track the true cost of meetings

"Meetings can be a waste of time. Well if that’s true, they’re a big financial drain, too. Ever wondered how much?"

The Meeting Miser is "a handy new management tool for BNET users: Type in the titles and locations of all your attendees, click the Start button, and the Miser runs a tab of your meeting’s actual cost, as measured by the median salaries of everybody in the room."

It's imprecise - sometimes it's difficult to find the exact job titles - but not without value. The monthly staff meetings in my office cost about $5.16 per minute.