Cheaper home prices make Utah more affordable than San Francisco, Seattle
Less expensive homes are luring workers to Utah from locations like San Francisco and Seattle, Bloomberg reported.
The median Provo home costs two-thirds less than San Francisco, a drop that means more employees can own a home quickly after graduating from school. Qualtrics’s VP of Engineering Steve Brain moved from a 2,800-square foot home in Seattle worth $1.1 million to a 4,800 square foot one in Park City for $950,000.
The issue is most acute in San Francisco, where the median home sold for $779,000 in the third quarter of 2013. Only 16 percent of new and existing homes were within the means of households earning the median income of $101,200, making the area the nation’s least affordable, according to the National Association of Homebuilders.
In Provo, where the median income is $61,900, the median home price is $241,000, two-thirds less than in Silicon Valley. The differential is helping a Utah business coalition lure technology companies and workers to the area’s so-called Silicon Slopes. In the year ended July 1, Utah’s population growth in percentage terms was second only to North Dakota’s, according to data from the Census Bureau.
“I have employees at Qualtrics working a year out of school and buying a house,” Brain said. To become a homeowner in San Francisco, a worker would have to hit pay dirt at a successful start-up, he said, “and you might never pull that winning ticket.”
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