Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 12, 1995 TAG: 9502100047
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The lower cost of living in the Roanoke area is enough to make a recent transplant from Southern California spill his banana chips.
I entered my expenses in two columns since moving six weeks ago, one for there, the other for here. The result was pretty lopsided.
For those interested in fresh evidence of this area's relative affordability, I open my ledger:
I paid rent of $1,050 for a three-bedroom house an eight-minute walk from the beach in Ventura. I now pay $540 for a four-bedroom rental in Southeast Roanoke.
It cost $70.50 monthly to insure my pickup with State Farm out West. Here, State Farm wants $39.26.
I paid $1.17 for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline there. I pay 99 cents here.
The YMCA's monthly fee totaled $38 in California. It is $30 here.
A dog tag was $25 annually. It's $7 in Roanoke.
Utilities are meaningfully cheaper, too:
Electricity cost nearly twice there as it does here.
Gas service was 15 percent higher.
Cable television service was 17 percent more.
Water and sewer were 60 percent higher.
What's more, because of the taste and texture of Ventura's high-mineral tap water, I paid $9 monthly for purified water in five-gallon jugs. I don't buy special water anymore; the tap water tastes fine.
To be sure, there were trade-offs. I will shell out hundreds of dollars more here yearly for heating and cooling. And I traded in a beach-town lifestyle in what some affectionately call ``the land of fruits and nuts'' to dwell in decidedly more sedate Roanoke, where one can drive some distance before spotting a health food store.
But low real estate prices could make it all worth it.
Where I lived for the past seven years, high costs prevented all but distinctly middle- and upper-income families from owning property. The median price of a home was $190,000 last month. Locally, the comparable home would cost $84,950.
Taxes are harder to assess. The sales tax in California was 71/4 percent, compared with 41/2 percent in Virginia. I never paid a personal property tax on vehicles that cities here charge, but the state levied an equally hefty annual registration fee, and the municipality charged nearly $20 a month for garbage pickup.
The point of all this may seem academic to some, but the savings add up. Of course, California wages are proportionately higher than those in Virginia, according to William M. Mercer Inc., a human resources consulting company in New York.
People working similar jobs earn widely different pay across the country, according to the company's study released this month. The pay variations stem from variations in living costs.
Analysts chose as their benchmark a hypothetical manager earning $50,000 in Houston. A person doing the same job in Roanoke would be paid $48,250, the study said.
Even a few hundred miles can make a difference. The manager would get $49,750 in Richmond and $46,700 in Norfolk.
The study is intended to help businesses with branches in different cities set wages.
A company with a $50,000-a-year manager in Houston would have to pay someone doing the same job in San Jose, Calif., $60,999 to have the same buying power as the Houston employee, the survey said.
The manager would earn $58,150 in New York, $53,250 in Boston and $51,050 in Denver.
On the bottom of the scale was Brownsville, Texas, where the manager would earn $38,450.
The study also helps businesses adjust the pay of employees transferred between branches.
Which means, I suppose, that I should be taking home proportionately less here in Roanoke than in Ventura.
Fortunately, it didn't work out that way. And with dog tags and such costing what they do, I'm feeling a bit flush and looking for the health food store with the best banana chips.
by CNB