By The Numbers

Home sweet home

Janet Nguyen Apr 5, 2016

We’re glad you’ve endured Monday. Now, let’s kick start the rest of your week with some need-to-know numbers. 

Having nurses and doctors tend to you in your own home may be the future of health care. Marketplace’s Dan Gorenstein explores the growing “hospital-at-home” model as part of the latest installment in our “Secretary of the Future” series. In the series, we ask: If the next president were to appoint a Cabinet member to worry about future generations, what would be job one? Given the high costs of hospital care for many people, these home visits may be an economically viable solution. A growing body of research suggests that patients live longer and costs go down between 20 to 30 percent with this model, Gorenstein writes.

Overall it seems like a decent number of U.S. homeowners have an attachment to their current homes according to a new report from Bankrate. Twenty-eight percent of U.S. homeowners plan on renovating or sprucing up their houses in some way in the next 12 months. Why all the home improvement plans? It could be a “flag of surrender,” according to a finance professor from George Mason University. After the housing crisis, people gave up on the prospect of purchasing a big, fancy house. Renovations could be their way of making do with what they have.

Things are a bit different in San Francisco, though. Workers at tech firms in the northern California city are leaving the area with its $4,500 rents, Bloomberg reports. The CEO of the startup Hired Inc. told Bloomberg that many tech workers begin their careers in San Francisco “to boost salary and establish themselves,” later moving to less pricey areas. As a result, some companies are starting to open offices in lower-priced regions like Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles.

 

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