Boston isn’t cheap.  That’s no secret and for many young people in the city that reality weighs heavy in their daily lives.  In the face of triple-digit rents, monthly utility bills in the hundreds of dollars, $20-a-day parking costs not to mention car and health insurance outlays, many of them struggle to get by.

But in the eyes of a university economist, all will be well and will balance itself out.  Although costs of living remain high, so do average salaries, said Richard Arnott, a professor of economics at Boston College.

“For those students who are successful, salaries are much higher than they are in other parts of the country,” he said.  “The economy is very flexible and adaptable.”

He added, “When the Soviet Union collapsed, people kept on saying, ‘Well, people make $30 a week and the price of a loaf of bread is $5….  Well, people can’t survive.’  But of course they can.  Because prices adjust so that people can make a decent living.  And what happens in Boston is that wages are sufficiently higher that those people who are successful are able to make a decent living.”

But for those who do not have such lucrative jobs, it is obviously more difficult.  Many of them wind up moving out of the city to other places such as Chelsea, Springfield and Worcester and are forced to commute to Boston.  Others choose to relocate their jobs as well to those lower cost cities.

So there appears to be a dividing line between those who can afford to live here and those who cannot.  It may simply be the age-old disparity of the haves versus the have-nots.  And as usual, the have-nots are losing and are the ones who may have to make the most compromises.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average annual salary in Boston was $48,340 in May of 2005.  Compare that to Houston, where the average salary was $38,910 at that time.  For the purposes of this story, the latter earnings were rounded up to $39,000 and punched into a cost of living calculator on CNNMoney.com.  The way the calculator works is a person types in his or her current salary and the current city he or she lives in.  A destination city is then punched in and the calculator figures out how much the person should earn in order to live by the same set of standards as he or she does in the current city.

A person earning $39,000 per year in Houston should earn $60,315.96 per year in Boston, according to the calculator.  It also calculated that housing will cost about 134 percent more in Boston than in Houston; groceries will cost about 51 percent more, utilities about 20 percent more, transportation about 15 percent more, and healthcare about 31 percent more.

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