This city is the place where the national upper middle class and upper class traditionally live during their studies. Many of them stick to the place after their studies. There's also a quite a few foreigners in high income sectors. They are paid high gross incomes, and locally enjoy an expat regime with much lower taxes than locals. There's a considerable tech sector presence and a cluster of highly paid jobs in general. Just the university linked chip research lab employs about 5000 engineers, excluding the numerous spinoffs. This city is experiencing to a mild extent some Silicon Valley (US) or Cambridge (UK) like symptoms.guitarplayer wrote: ↑Sat Jan 27, 2024 6:07 pmwow, 50-70% is a big difference who such close proximity. What would you attribute this to?
I guess many of these people won't go through the effort of saving a paltry few hundred thousand by living in a cheaper area. My theory is they'd rather spend money on staying put here, because that's what they've been trained to do, in their case successfully.
My wife is the only one among her median income colleagues to live in the city center. She's realised from speaking to her colleagues that that is unusual. If median income, the typical pattern is either you're old and own a place here since before the real estate boom, you lucked into something atypically cheap, you were super frugal and shrewd about getting a place here (my case), or you live further away.
Just to give you an idea, our combined net income now is a hair above 6k€/month including all bonuses and benefits in kind. That is clearly above median here. Our modest townhouse is about 550k€, or about 7.64 times our combined annual net income. That ratio used to be considerably worse before the 2022 inflation and the decline in real prices.
In short, nothing wrong with the next city. Just hyper local effects at play.
My wife _is_ opening up to cheaper living ideas, just very slowly. It is a bit frustrating always being three or four steps ahead on this. Lead by example worked for several other things, but that's not a valid strategy for housing. Even if own this place, I can't just decide to sell or let it. We live here...