The salaries here are higher, but the housing prices are much, much higher. I live in Redwood City, which is a decent-but-not-amazing part of the Bay Area. A 1500-sq ft home is about $1.7m here. In Palo Alto, it would be closer to $2.5m-$3m. In a place like Portland, that same home would be $400k. The problem is that salaries here are 100% higher, but house prices are 300%-600% higher. And housing is most people's biggest expense. It's very tempting to move to a place like Portland, and either take a lower paying job, work remotely for an SF job, or even fly in for an SF job for a few days every week.
All of this feels completely untenable and unsustainable, and yet it sustains because there are enough affluent people that want to live here that their demand outstrips supply, and local city governments are criminally conservative when it comes to building more housing.
You gotta do what every other long-term San Francisco resident did: Get a nice 2-3BR rent controlled apartment, then slowly become the sole tenant as roommates come and go. In 5-7 years time, the place will be way below market rate and you'll be ready to start a family. Then just shake your head and shrug your shoulders when newcomers complain how expensive it is.
*Yes, there's some sarcasm in there, but this is what San Franciscans have done since the 70's.
I like to comment on how my next door neighbor's rent (here in SF) is under $300/month. He moved when in many years ago when the rent was $85/month. I pay just over $1600 for the same 250 square foot layout.
I’m in this boat - 6 years in sf and my rent already seems so cheap by comparison. Any move I make now is. Move out the Bay Area. It is a pretty nasty choice. We have a nice house, but we either have to upend our life or stay put. Our rent is not cheap, but with the way rents have gone up, we can’t even downsize to a 2 bedroom unit to save money. So, we have 2 tenants in 3 bedrooms and rent control.
Until the landlord exploits some obscure rent control loophole where they can evict the entire building and start over at market value. I think they have to do major construction or demolish some % of the place. Can anyone confirm?
A $30k/year rent difference requires ~$48k more income to cover (at 40% marginal tax rates). My guess is that the 100% salary jump is more than enough to cover the housing increase (probably handles all COL difference), making SF more favorable, especially if you don't want a very large home or are quite senior.
Except then you're always at the mercy of a landlord who can raise your rental rates, and you won't be building any equity. There's no rent control on the Peninsula. I know people who have gotten a $600/month rent increase and been totally screwed. Whereas owners benefit from Prop 13 which is basically rent control for owners- their property taxes never go up.
I agree and disagree. In most areas, I think it's true that other asset classes outperform real estate. One challenge in the Bay Area is that housing has been going up faster than non-housing investments. For example, I just checked the house next door to me on Trulia, and it's up 6X in 20 years. That's an almost 10% annual rate of return. So in fact if you don't own a house, you're probably falling even further behind from your house-owning peers. At least in this area.
You're under-stating the return. Unlike other investments you can leverage the house with a mortgage. Assuming you put only 20% down you're making 50%/year gains.
Except every year you are paying about 6% of the purchase price in principal and interest and property tax (plus maintenance and water), so the math isn't quite that simple.
So you're saying if you buy a house, you will be making incredible gains. If not, then you will be making gains at least as good as everywhere else. Sounds like win-win to me.
There are very few assets that return 10% annually for 20 years. It's impossible to know what will happen in the next 20 years, but owning a house in the Bay Area for the last few decades would have been a much better investment than paying a little less for rent and investing what's left over.
6x in 20years is lower return than stock shares in most of the employers that have been driving up housing prices (for obvious reasons -- those companies' growth are funding the housing price gains)
It is normally a Bad Idea to invest heavily in your employer due to the Putting All Your Eggs In One Basket principle. If anything happens, you lose your job and investments.
However, the house is leveraged. At 20% down any gains in house equity represent five times the same percentage gain in an unleveraged investment. If you put 200k down on a 1m house and the house appreciates to 1.1m, then that 10% gain in equity is a 50% gain on what you actually invested. Of course losses will be magnified too.
Relatively low interest rates (locked in for 30 years), tax deductible mortgage interest (some) and prop13 make ownership still economically beneficial even if you don't assume massive appreciation. This assumes you stay at least 5 years due to large transaction costs. Obviously you have expenses associated with ownership and some opportunity costs due to not investing the down payment but from all the math I've done if you want to stay and you can swing a 1.5M house it makes sense to buy.
> Relatively low interest rates (locked in for 30 years), tax deductible mortgage interest (some) and prop13 make ownership still economically beneficial even if you don't assume massive appreciation.
Good point, it certainly depends on how you do your model. Accurately predicting the housing market appreciation and your investment rate of return is challenging. Also, renting vs. buying have different risks (monetary and otherwise).
> The salaries here are higher, but the housing prices are much, much higher.
I'm Australian so YMMV, but six months ago I took a 25% pay cut to move out of Sydney to somewhere with lower housing costs and a shorter commute. I'm never going back.
I co-run a small co-working space and we've had a couple of tenants join who were relocating from the East coast of Australia to Adelaide for similar reasons.
Haha Adelaide is for religious dorks! You should definitely live somewhere cool like Melbourne and Sydney [1]
[1] Please don't mention Adelaide publicly. Coopers beer, the fringe festival, great weather, great wine, housing for families that's close to town, and beaches where you can be the only person for miles. I want to buy a house there and demand will drive pricing up.
If you can create new tech in Australia at all, with the lack of investment opportunities and government support, you can probably do it from Adelaide. If you're into fixing existing stuff then yes stick to the big cities.
Same problem in NYC. Fortunately, we have relatively cheaper and desirable suburbs within 60 - 90 minutes upstate, on Long Island, northern NJ, and southern CT. (Hence the expression "tri-state area"). People commuting to higher paying jobs in the city are a significant - probably crucial - part of the economy of those places, and what keeps the housing prices rising, even though they are affordable for people making a commute time / space trade-off. I'm not familiar with the Bay Area. You don't have some equivalent communities?
We do. I used to live in Pleasant Hill which is east of SF and about an hour by BART to SF, and housing is far less expensive.
Now I live in Morgan Hill which is a great place for families. I drive in to SJ, about 45 minutes in rush hour each way. Caltrain is an option as well, although it takes longer. A nice, newer 2k square foot house runs about $1mm so not “cheap”, but 50-70% less expensive than most of the peninsula.
My unscientific opinion is that the Bay Area skews younger (for people on HN who are bummed about housing) and most young people don’t like the ‘burbs. Anything outside the Real Bay Area (bounded on the north by SF, east by Oakland and south by SJ) is out of the running for a lot of people.
Imagine what Manhattan would be like if you didn't have the option of renting in Brooklyn or Queens. That's roughly what the situation in San Francisco is like.
We call ours Berkeley and Oakland. It only works if you commute to San Francisco, but plenty of people do it. (As an amusing sidenote San Francisco was jealous of the NYC merging and tried to annex Oakland: https://www.google.com/amp/s/hoodline.relaymedia.com/amp/201...)
The housing prices are increasing all throughout the bay area of course. Unlike NY however there are not great train connections to Silicon Valley; there is BART to SF and nice areas around Bart stations have also seen substantial appreciation.
Coming back to the Bay Area after a decade in London, the difference is shocking, and it feels difficult to call the Caltrain "perfectly feasible". Coming into on a Sunday afternoon, I had to transfer at Millbrae. It was almost a 2-hour wait for the next train, with literally zero amenities at the station. Just multistory parking lots, surrounded by surface parking lots, surrounded by 8-lane roads, surrounded by freeways.
Utterly dysfunctional and dismal. I don't doubt that the land is appreciating there, but why can't it be put to better uses?
It's commuter rail, not an alternative for tourists.
I agree that the Millbrae station is terrible! That's due to BART - most of the other stations up and down that line are in the downtowns of Burlingame, San Mateo, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Mountain View, etc. All of those towns predate the automobile, and are certainly rail-friendly.
Coincidentally, all of those rail-friendly suburbs I mentioned are the NIMBY anti-density insane-housing-price places lamented elsewhere in the thread!
Are you suggesting no one goes to work at the weekend, or that no one who goes during the week goes to the city at the weekend?
Outside the USA, public transport may run a little less often on a Saturday or Sunday, but it's still useful for people to use for shopping, going out and so on.
For example, in Copenhagen the trains run every 10 minutes rather than five, and the rural trains are every 60 minutes on a Sunday, rather than 20. I think the metro is the same at the weekend as during the week.
Certainly not suggesting that - in fact, I ride this particular rail on the weekend every few months. It's never crowded on the weekend, except before and after baseball games.
It runs roughly every hour (with a few additional express trains) on the weekend, very similar to the rural trains you describe in Denmark.
My point is that you can't just show up at a commuter rail station and complain that you have to wait a while at a bare-bones platform. It's built for people who take it at the same time every day, commonly driving to the station.
The CalTrain seems to run about once an hour at the weekend, but there are gaps — there's no train at 13:XX, 16:XX, 19:XX or 22:XX. It's just 30km from San Francisco, and Milbrae has a population of about 21,000.
The "Lokaltoger" on Zealand run every half hour on Saturdays, and every hour on Sundays, with the stations at 40-70km from Copenhagen. The settlements are mostly around 1-2 thousand people, although here we can include children and the elderly as potential users as it's not expected to drive to the stations.
If I use public transport every day during the week, then when going to similar places at the weekend I will certainly complain if the trains are infrequent.
I'd say far from perfectly feasible. I looked at the prospect of commuting from South Bay into San Francisco. In isolation a "Baby Bullet" sounds feasible, (45-60 mins), but there are only so many of those, and they of course don't drop you at the door of your office. So the end result looked something like showing up to the station at 7 AM to get on a standing room only train, then needing to cobble together the rest of your commute via bike/rent-a-scooter/Uber whatever to show up anywhere reasonably close to 9. Then doing the reverse on the way back!
Reality check, a 1500 sqft house sold for $400k will be in an awful school district at least 45mins from downtown. You're probably looking at closer to $600k for anything decent especially if you have kids.
> It's very tempting to move to a place like Portland, and either take a lower paying job, ...
OTOH, as long as you can sell your house for at least as much as it cost you, that money's not lost. There's something to be said for a few years' of Silicon Valley salary, then pulling up stakes and moving somewhere more reasonable. Best of all is to draw a Silicon Valley salary while actually living somewhere else, but I'm not supposed to talk about that. ;)
Build more housing where? Belmont? Woodside? Atherton? The Bay itself?
I loved my time in Redwood City, more housing would certainly not make it better.
If you live in a nice house, the idea of a huge apartment complex next door would not be remotely appealing. That's the only way you can "build more" in the vast majority of the City/Peninsula. I don't blame them one bit.
The public transit is the problem. Too many fiefdoms - Amtrak, Caltrain, VTA, ACE, bart, muni. If Bart served all those corridors instead, the South Bay as far as hollister would be reasonable to commute from. Plus the eastern towns.
I live in SF. I am very, very tired of the homeless tents everywhere, dirty needles everywhere, and suspicious feces everywhere. The amount of bums living outside is unacceptable - this is perhaps the dirtiest city I have ever been to.
All they need to do is build some state institutions to provide care, but if you that NIMBYism is bad when it comes to housing, just wait until someone brings up that type of project. People are okay with just pretending they are doing everything they can, just as long as it stays mostly out of sight and the money is quietly spent. LA county spends a billion a year with little to show. Homelessness is 99% of the time a mental problem and no one wants to do anything about it
Here's the problem with CA-brand NIMBYism: it's coupled with faux-bleeding-heart-ism.
We could have a state initiative to build Club Med for homeless people in the Central Valley, far away from anyone who could complain, and the same people who would complain if we put that facility in Hunters Point due to their NIMBYism would complain if we put it outside of SF because that would be "mean" due to displacing the homeless people (many of whom used to have residences in SF).
build Club Med for homeless people in the Central Valley
Heck, homeless wouldn't use a nice, new facility in SF that was set up in 2015 in advance of the Super Bowl because is wasn't within easy access of usual gathering haunts.
>Yet the shelter is in such high demand that it has a waiting list 150 people long, all of whom were skipped over to relocate those who were moved to make way for Super Bowl visitors.
It’s not out of sight, not by a long shot - GP’s comments are not hyperbole. IMO the problem is people think it’s a simple home affordability issue when it’s like you said a mental health issue.
I think the term “homeless” does a grave disservice to that population, the term itself implies that it’s the home that’s a problem and not the zillions of underlying causes.
All they need to do is build some state institutions to provide care
You cannot institutionalize somebody against their will without legal adjudication (proving risk of harm to self and or others), since court rulings in the 1970s.
That's not true, not until USA becomes a totalitarian country that can intitutionalize people against their will. Homeless people come to SF for the same reason yuppies do --- for the great weather. People who don't want help can't be helped.
> I am very, very tired of the homeless tents everywhere
Let's be careful about confusing our frustrations with something that is wrong or illegal. Frustrating me isn't wrong and it isn't illegal; my frustrations aren't evidence of either - they are, in fact, irrelevant to those questions.
More importantly, many people and groups frustrate me, sometimes to a great extent. Political leaders stand out, as do many in tech; comments on HN sometimes frustrate me. Bigots frustrate me and cause great harm, IMO. I sometimes frustrate others. Why doesn't the state act against those people? Why doesn't it act against me? The state shouldn't act because we all have rights; it doesn't act because the people in this paragraph have political power. As a result, we all have to accommodate each other
Homeless people do not have power. They don't have political representatives who can insist on their priorities - who in fact must insist to keep their jobs - even when others don't like them, which is perhaps the only important meaning of power. If law enforcement acts illegally or excessively toward them, they can't protect themselves. And in the courts, they have no lawyers, and judges and juries give them no credibility and don't take their pleas seriously.
The great sin of government is the powerful abusing the powerless, the strong abusing the weak. It's long been a problem in the U.S. too; minorities, for example, could be publicly murdered or lynched and nobody would act; laws clearly abusing the minority, such as voting rights laws, can be implemented and they are powerless to stop it. I think we should be very careful to not let our frustrations drive us and repeat that grave error.
So if the purpose of your comment is to point out that the homeless tents are not illegal, you are incorrect. The tents are illegal.
But my frustration, as you can see by my comments elsewhere in this thread, are grounded in that a city of such wealth and technological progress cannot take care of it's lowest citizens.
Aside from the odd choice of perspective - have you considered that the homeless may be infringing on others rights as well? The right to an unobstructed sidewalk? The right to feel safe in my neighborhood? The right to not have to watch out for needles when I visit my nearest Muni station (Van Ness)?
Legality, while an important factor, is not the end of the discussion. Helping freed slaves was once illegal, using an extreme example. Legality depends on who is powerful, referring back to the GP.
> odd choice of perspective
Who says it's odd? Why would that be relevant? Is it odd to you because it isn't your perspective? It isn't the perspective you expect to see in this community? Is it good or bad to have 'odd' perspectives?
> the homeless may be infringing on others rights as well? The right to an unobstructed sidewalk? The right to feel safe in my neighborhood? The right to not have to watch out for needles when I visit my nearest Muni station (Van Ness)?
None of those things are really rights. Mostly, they are frustrations, and that's my point: I'm not saying people shouldn't come to accommodations with each other. I'm saying that frustrations of the powerful are not a basis of rights or of imposing on the powerless.
Imagine your homeless neighbors had a representative negotiating with you and your housed neighbors on an equal basis. How would you work it out? Has anyone asked your homeless neighbors what they need or want?
> purpose of your comment ...
That purpose is a creation of the parent, not me (the author of the GP). I'm going to stick with the words on the page.
I don't see how the parent adds to the conversation or says anything important about the accuracy of the GP. If the conversation was a contest between googlemike and me then we might need a referee to make sure we played fair. But it's not; we're just trying to advance ours (and hopefully others') knowledge a little.
Would it be better if I anticipated every possible response and addressed it in my GGGP comment? Uhhh ... probably not; that would be a very long comment and I don't have time for it. Sorry if that makes the thread confusing, but while suboptimal, I don't think it's hard to follow.
IMO your right to not have to fear needles, to feel safe in your neighboorhood and have an unobstructed sidewalk is trumped by the right of these people to survive. Even more important their right to live in dignity, which they are obviously not.
I consider the right to live in and be treated with dignity the utmost important one.
Nobody is saying these people need to be destroyed. Not jumping to some extreme dystopian conclusion would help with the actual discussion. And if you're going to be ranking the importance of rights, how is the right to live in dignity more important than the right to survive?
As a visitor of San Fran ... it's homeless population is a shock to the system and a very unpleasant one. Though they say thats just San Fran for ya? Crazy housing prices and an insane homeless population. What's the good thing about living there when here on the East coast like in PA or Baltimore suburbs that doesnt exist, housing costs are way lower, salaries in govt. IT are healthy and homelessness is not such epidemic... why do people want to live in San Fran who arent chasing the startup dream or living that dream? What's the allure?
But where would they go? Homelessness was a problem long before the tech industry sort of took over SF. The magnitude of the problem would require a massive political effort and innovation that is near impossible.
I'm more surprised by the fact that the tech industry chose SF of all the places in California.
There are lots of reasons why Silicon Valley became what it is today, but it seems that by far it is because William Shockley [0] was born there - "Shockley is the man who brought silicon to Silicon Valley."
Shockley was working at Bell Labs over in New Jersey on solid state electronics, and was jointly awarded the Noble Prize for the discovery of the transistor effect. When he moved back home, angry at how the invention of the transistor had been handled at Bell Labs, he took a number of researchers with him. Together they were one of the first startups in Stanford's new "Stanford Industrial Park", and the first to use silicon. Some of those researchers later started Fairchild Semiconductor, from which came many companies like Intel and AMD.
If you haven't heard of it yet, Stephen Fry has an excellent (if too brief!) podcast that goes through this and the history of other big advances in technology in great detail, called Stephen Fry's Great Leap Years.
SF wasn’t chosen by the tech industry. South Bay was. Most big Tech firms’ HQs are outside the city itself, precisely because of lower real estate costs.
The move to SF has been much more recent and mainly fueled by the desire of younger workers to live/work in more densely populated areas. And then most startups started basing out of SF proper to be closer to these workers (and appear “cool”) so now you have all the big startup successes based in the city proper.
The tech industry chose the (South) Bay because it was dirty cheap. A bunch of orchards and ugly factories, so they could build up their (silicon) factories etc. there.
I'm moving to the bay area from Baltimore for a lot of reasons. First, the salary increase means I'll be putting away more money every year, housing costs considered. Second, Baltimore is a mess. The roads are horrible and there is an insane amount of crime. Third, the weather is better and there are fewer bugs.
Baltimore is cheap, but I want to live somewhere that I can ride my bike without the fear of getting killed for it.
There's another great thing about the west coast that cheap houses can't get you- and it's a beautiful culture of outdoorsiness and insanely easy access to mountains, oceans, and desert within an hour or twos drive- this is true from Seattle to San Diego.
You can seriously go on a little mini vacation every weekend for almost no money. I suppose if money were no object - why would you choose to live elsewhere?
Same goes for Baltimore with mountains(Shenadoah, VA or mountains in central PA), beaches (MD, DE or NJ) and amusement parks all within 2 to 3 hour drive. Friends and I last weekend went hiking in PA (loop trail with 25 mid to large size waterfalls - Ricketts Glen) and after went to amusement park in the woods (Knoebels) for a few hours.
Cool you like the west .. it's just too expensive and socialistic for me. Independent voter here.
"Crazy housing prices and an insane homeless population"
Those are two facets of the same issue which is a demand much higher than the supply. SF has one of the best tech scenes in the world (to the point where it becomes stomach-churningly nauseating), and it's also just a hip metropolitan city with other thriving non-tech scenes.
Los Angeles and San Diego aren't far behind. Prop 13 pretty much guarantees the whole state to be fucked for a long time. Since 60% of the state either has a mortgage or owns their home outright, good luck convincing them to vote to over turn it.
The New York, Canadian, Australian, and English housing markets are showing signs that Q/E asset price inflation is over. But with Prop 13, outside of a HUGE global depression, it's hard to imagine prices dropping to reality.
I recently finished Thomas Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Basically he says that the typical capital/income split is 700%, meaning assets are worth 7 times global output, meaning houses are usually worth 7 times median household income.
That's about the ratio you see everywhere in the world outside of the United States. Even in the priciest markets in the US like SF and LA, that rate hardly exceeds 300%. If anything, that book convinced me that unless we change our tax policies substantially, house prices are going to get MUCH MUCH worse.
I hope I'm wrong. But the book had 300 years of economic history to make me think the US post WW2 was under strange economic conditions that never existed anywhere else on the planet at any other time. Things aren't necessarily getting worse. They're just returning to normal ]=
I believe a link to a group of people who want the city to build a ton of housing (including public housing for the indigent) would be more appropriate. Controlling rent will do nothing for homeless people, and will make their plight even worse.
As I said elsewhere the term “homeless” is a bit of a misnomer that describes the ultimate consequence of a ton of underlying illnesses that result in eventual (actual) homelessness. Mental illness (I file addiction under that umbrella) is the root cause that should be treated.
Those people dumping needles on SF sidewalks won’t get magically well by handing them the key to an apartment. We need to treat the whole problem.
Ok, go tell those boards this. Heck, make your own board. Grab a bunch of your friends, co-workers, etc. Attend, participate, make your voices heard. Democracy only works if you do.
Out of curiosity, where in the city are you living? I see them around but I don't think they've ever bothered me. Usually when I hear that the city needs to do something about the homelessness problem, I assume they mean help FOR them, not for us.
I thought Phnom Penh was overall a much cleaner city than SF... Lots of people and haphazardness in PP, but mostly cleanish. I’d agree with your statement based on where I’ve been too. Also poor doesn’t always equate to "squalor".
Unacceptable in that people shouldn't be living outside, on city streets. Unacceptable that there there is such a lack of mental health care, support, and facilities available to these people. Unacceptable that the city seems to have no solutions or plans in place. Unacceptable that the politicians live in Pacific Heights away from where the majority of the problems are so they are not affected by them like the actual citizens of the city. My exhaustion is not one of observation, I am exhausted that a modern, high tech, wealthy city looks like this.
Also don't overlook the public health crisis that it creates. Feces, urine, needles, and other human excrement openly getting kicked up into the air we breathe and thriving on the surfaces we come into contact with on a daily basis is terrible for EVERYONE. It's completely unacceptable to have to encourage that kind of environment.
Homeless people aren't just a danger to themselves. They are disproportionately a danger to everyone around them.
In the current situation, everyone on every side of the issue loses - there are no winners. Something needs to change.
Is there any evidence of public health consequences, much less a crisis. This argument looks suspiciously like the rationalizations long made for people to discriminate against those they feel uncomfortable around.
Absolutely not. Getting rid of human waste is one of the most important issues in developing countries precisely because of the public health effects it has: transmitting pathogens, contaminating water supplies etc. It isn't hard to see that being the case in an Urban area like SF, especially since the density of people is so much greater.
I know why human waste is dangerous. I asked if there is evidence that there is such a problem in SF, and if there is evidence of that problem being a health "crisis". So far, no evidence is cited in this thread - which certainly doesn't mean there isn't any.
It does seem like the ideal talking point - it's disgusting, a bit frightening, and thus shifts readers from reason to a strong emotional reaction. Let's try to shift back. If there's evidence of a problem, it absolutely should be addressed.
Basic public sanitation measures, including isolating human waste from open air spaces, is the most significant factor to increased average lifespan than medical technology. Reverse that in even just one of the legs of basic sanitation and you invite in a host of (in America) extraordinarily expensive pathogenic consequences. Expensive to treat and expensive to prophylactically ward off after an outbreak starts.
Like code defects, it is magnitudes cheaper to fix earlier in the development pipeline.
No problem. To your comments below about class warfare, unequal societies and corruption. I think the homeless here are both of the vulnerable, drug addicted, mentally unwell kind that have been abandoned by society, but there is also a whole cadre of their homeless peers that is mentally far healthier and preys on the others - chop shops, black market economies of drugs and prostitution, etc. That being said, a city should not be this dirty and unsafe. Families of all classes and backgrounds should feel safe walking around city streets at all hours of the day, which is far from the case today.
Not really... the homeless by choice types are tweakers who move to SF to intentionally live on the streets and have easy access to cheap and plentiful drugs. SF basically created hamsterdam, and addicts from all over the country flock here so they can get high and enjoy life on the streets with impunity.
The street denizens in SF building encampments, shitting on the sidewalk, breaking into cars to get their fix and blatantly operating chop shops aren't hard up people who are just down on their luck and between jobs... these types move here to specifically live on the streets and get high all the time.
Yes. We need a two part solution. For the first part, the city should offer all the medical (mental and physical) care they could want, as well as any help they may need to get off the street. For the other part, the city needs to arrest and prosecute those who do are clearly mentally stable and just enjoying a drug filled vagabond life on the city streets.
What about individuals who prefer tent dwelling and regular work (paid and volunteer) but eschew both illegal drug use and unemployment?
I have a tent I could call a home but am not entirely comfortable crashing wherever I can, although generally I like being outside as much as possible. Tent dwelling is also historically well-respected, hard housing being the niche of farmers and royalty. I'd go as far to say that if people in tents aren't safe it's not a good neighborhood, because tents are fragile. They're also not garbage: some of them are fireproof and UV resistant with two or three shells. And, if you've never built housing, I can tell you: it is a huge chore for hundreds of people, including chemical workers, lumberjacks, metalworkers, and coal miners.
Why not build a Black Rock City where the Burn never stops? If cities sponsored that niche, the gig economy would ramp up to "unstoppable machine" instantly. Sociologically, there's not much difference between a tent city at a festival and an apartment building with a range of incomes, in terms of deviancy and community struggles. From a housing and urban development perspective, some of the new textiles are better and more sustainable than industrial construction.
> Why not build a Black Rock City where the Burn never stops?
You know, that would actually be a fascinating thing to see. I doubt it will ever happen given how litigious our society is, but that seems preferable to what we're doing now. San Francisco spends about $250 million on homeless services[1], but you'd never know from walking around. You could probably fund a non-stop Burn with that; the budget for a 65,000 person burn for a week is 37 million[2]. You'd have fewer people and less overhead so I think it would work.
How coordinated was it though? I also think part of the solution is to provide something more appealing to the mentally ill homeless and the lifestyle-homeless. There is a lot of space an hour or two from most major cities that could be used in a project like this.
Something of a commune, heavily staffed with mental health professionals and with very attentive services (medical, cleaning, garbage). Encourage the more willing to undertake/share those roles. Make it feel somewhat self-organised and free.
Run a very loose "street school" - open-air where possible, 1-2 hours a day, variety of interesting topics. (I'm surprised they don't try doing that in SF.)
Burners are mandated to be self-sufficient and leave no trace; only chemical toilets are provided. If that ethic was practiced by this population, there would be many more options.
It’s amazing that in a such a demonstrably corrupt and unequal society as America in 2018, that people cling to these insane narratives about the most vulnerable people in society.
I guess if you’re going to side with the rich in this ongoing class war, this is the kind of stuff you have to tell yourself to sleep at night.
Me as in a working, tax paying, citizen? What if all the working, tax paying citizens left - what would we have then? I do not find your comment or attitude constructive.
back in the late 90s, I started a web site in my dorm room in NC and sold it less than a year later to a dotcom in SF. I moved out there in 1999. Lived through the first market crash, web 2.0, and the 2008 recession.
The bay area was so much fun during those years. The excitement of web startups, and the creative types of people it attracted. And it felt like everyone was in it together.
I don't know exactly when the Bay area started becoming "techbro", but basically what it's become is the new "NYC". The bros who would normally go into finance, have gone into startups. You have the investment banking mentality in the bay area now, and it doesn't feel like everyone is in it together anymore. It feels like one big competition.
Anyways, I left 4 years ago, and everytime I visit, I'm so glad I don't live there anymore.
Moved to NYC after nearly a decade in SF (partially overlapping with the OP). I feel like it's unfair to call SF the "new New York": New York definitely cares about money, but it allows room for lots of different things. It's a far more functional city in every possible dimension, because it accepts (in fact, adores) what it is.
IMO, SF stopped being fun not because of the "finance bros", per se, but because the place just never wanted to be a big city. Fundamentally, San Francisco is a gorgeous little seaside town on a too-small peninsula, which valued counterculture and artistic expression. So it was fun to be here for a while when the "startup industry" was a few crazy people doing things against the grain, but it's a different story when those crazy people turned into armies of bland corporate CEOs, hiring armies of rich yuppies to "disrupt" the world in identical ways.
Oh come on. Public transport and Culture, sure. But at least admit that there are a TON more parks and outdoor recreation options (which are easily accessible) in SF than in NYC :)
I'm in Charlotte, NC now. This city is not on the radar of most tech folks, and it's way under-rated. Everyone thinks there's no culture here, it's just chain restaurants and hicks. Granted, it's changed a lot in the past 2-3 years, so people still haven't realized it's actually a rad city and very affordable.
I actually like chain restaurants and hicks (dead serious - I have a tractor, 11 acres, horses, a goat, some cats, and a couple of guns to keep it all safe), so that'd be a selling point for me. I live in Grand Rapids, MI, and I'm afraid that our chain restaurant and redneck culture is being destroyed by an influx of people over the past few years. Hope the same doesn't happen to Charlotte. Downside is that here in GR tech jobs are kind of scarce, which is true of a lot of places that still have somewhat rural communities within commuting distance.
EDIT - 'To keep it all safe' ... really means safe from wild animals. If you keep a hobby farm, you know where I'm coming from :).
I don't have a hobby farm and I'm not in the US. What wild animals are a threat in that situation? Bears? Or do you also mean as a threat to gardens - deer, etc?
Thanks. We don't really have a raccoon-equivalent in Australia. Possums are annoying (noisy, steal fruit, get in the roof, etc) but not dangerous. Dingoes generally don't make it into populated areas and foxes mostly traumatise chickens who typically have well-protected coops.
Any advice for finding a job in that area? The HN "who's hiring" page doesn't have too much in NC, and other job sites seem to show mostly finance and consulting companies.
Depends on what you're looking for. Charlotte is 90% finance-related jobs (I used to work there myself). I live in the Raleigh/Durham area, and it has a decent amount of engineering opportunities, especially in biotech.
It's not the Bay Area, but it's pretty comfortable.
The tech startup scene is small, but very friendly and open. There's a few incubators. Check out meetup.com, it's pretty tech/startup heavy in Charlotte, see if there's something that catches your eye.
Basically, it's a place that attracts the very smart people who are only wanting to make lots of money. It used to be these people would go into investment banking when finance/oil companies ruled the world, now it's tech companies.
It's not only money that drives these people, but also ego/prestige. I did my undergrad in finance - during that time, most of my peers looked down on my interest in technology. At one point, one of my friends (who is an investment banker now) even told me to stop having a "poor person's mentality".
Of course, many of these same people jumped into the tech industry (if such a thing exists) as soon as it became "prestigious". Although they have only a very shallow interest in actual tech, they've brought that same superiority complex with them.
I've legitimately overheard someone say in a SF cafe: "I couldn't be a doctor...it doesn't change the world enough and you don't actually earn that much." facepalm
I’ve never framed “change the world” as an ego drive but that really does make a lot of sense.
I honestly don’t think outcomes were that important for the folks who were in the industry in the 80’s and early 90’s. “No one became a billionaire back then” is something I’ve been told a few times.
I’m face palming so hard my hand is embedded in my face st the last one. Especially since surgeons earn 500k+ so even leaving aside the tremendous difference you can make in a person’s life as a doctor, that comment is just completely ignorant.
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US version:
> Usually, U-Haul truck rentals are advertised at an affordable sticker price, comfortably in the three-digit range. But a trend out of northern California is pushing that sticker price as high as $2,000, and moving Californians to disbelief.
>The cost to rent a 26-foot U-Haul truck — big enough to move a three- to four-bedroom home — out of San Francisco headed to Las Vegas reached as high as $2,085 for four days. To rent the same truck going in the opposite direction is only a fraction of that cost — $132.
Courtesy of Hide.me free VPN. I'm in London but set it to Singapore.
I've posted this before but that is a meaningless statistic. You want to know how much is spent per person kept out of homelessness (or for some other services). Lets say we could spend an extra 10M to house the last 4999 of the hypothetical 5000 total homeless. Now we are spending an astronomical 10M per a single homeless person, clearly ludicrous but its simply that the metric is wrong. We are actually spending 2000 per person who isn't becoming homeless in this toy scenario, real life is obviously more complicated.
Most homeless persons in California qualify for Medi-Cal. They run into other problems however, which the ACA premise wouldn't solve (only traditional universal healthcare would), so they get stuck using free clinics.
Would a basic income (often spoken of as about $12k/y) cover housing in the area they're currently frequenting? If not, what will that realistically change?
> Bay Area home prices have been climbing for six years, setting another record in April, when the median sale price hit $850,000 — up 13 percent from a year ago, according to real estate data firm CoreLogic. Rents are soaring too, and workers are forced to move farther away to find affordable housing and commute on already crowded Bay Area roads and freeways to get to their jobs.
Citation is provided for purchase prices, but not rents. I can't find any market where inflation-adjusted rents are not at most flat-lined, if not lower over the last 2 years:
I just moved here and it seems like it lacks a tenth of the soul Los Angeles has, which would make sense if we priced out everyone that brought soul to the city. The food isn't nearly as good. The music scene isn't half as good. Traffic is nearly as shitty as LA. The LGBTQ community seems to have largely been priced out. You can't find affordable housing near where all the action is happening whereas studio apartments in Hollywood can easily be found for ~$1k. A significant number of people are pretending to be other people without a very good understanding of the people they are pretending to be (it's as if aliens came to the Bay and tried to impersonate the one dimensional people they see on TV) (at least in LA when people are fake, their archetype is someone they've met and their impersonation is a lot closer to the reference material).
The only thing that might be better is: you're a hell of a lot closer to nature and it's a lot safer (I wouldn't be comfortable walking around LA past 1AM).
Ive lived in Tijuana (Mexico), near Juarez (Mexico), near Bern (Switzerland), 29 Palms (California), and Los Angeles and traveled all over western Europe and I have yet to find a place as homogenously boring and fake as the Bay Area. With the exception of Juarez I'd choose any of those places over the Bay.
I don't mean to be insulting (I'm really just upset at myself for moving to such an over priced boring place) but saying you're the only one in tech that likes living in San Francisco is like complaining that you are the only one who enjoys Mcdonalds; it's for good reason.
Having traveled to both LA and SF briefly (from Sydney) my impression was that LA was much more sprawled and car-centric than SF. I really like cycling and public transport so I think I would struggle with LA.
Does the method of getting around have a role in which cities you prefer?
Also, why do there seem to be lots of people impersonating others in the Bay Area? I don't think I've ever met someone like that in Sydney - at least never realised.
This is exactly what I am talking about and proved my point. It's no where near as bad as you are describing. It may not be for you and what you are looking for but describing anyone who enjoys the Bay Area as someone who really just likes McDonalds but doesn't know better is ridiculous.
I live in the East Bay. My wife and I share a nice 1brdm apartment, its small but in a good area. Yes its expensive but California is honestly amazing. Mountains, oceans, forests, there is so much to explore. Also the bay area weather is great so I can bike to work every day (except when there are giant fires). Probably the biggest benefit is that both my wife and I can work in our specialized fields and if we want to switch jobs we don't have to move like we did last time when we lived in small town Eastern Washington.
I really miss the quiet cheap town but for now I'm pretty happy. If you surveyed me I still might say I want to leave but don't really have plans/better options. Nothings perfect but the bay area is pretty good.
It's the contrarian dynamic: people are motivated to post objections to what they disagree with or dislike. Then other people are motivated by those comments to comment the reverse way, i.e. to object to the objections.
It's the same for many other things on Hacker News. Where it seems like everyone is dissatisfied with higher education, or the federal government, or the evil large tech companies.
It's unfortunate because it leads to the impression of a "strong negativity bias", which is true in a Cunningham's law sense but gets complicated because people also negate the negativity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16677130. It's quite typical for top comments to be objections of the form "I can't believe the comments here are so negative!"
Another. Plenty of things aren't great about SF and the Bay Area, but on balance I really love it and am raising my family here. For all those people making comparisons to NYC in the 80s or 90s, it sounds like you just weren't living there then, or you would know the differences.
Agreed - I grew up near NYC, and now live in the Bay Area. IMO, the quality of life is much better in the Bay Area, although I don't like the fake niceness you see around sometimes. Around NYC I have to be a lot more vigilant for people acting like tough guys, and I saw/experience & heard of a lot more racism there. Just a few years ago visiting NYC, I almost got run over in Manhattan despite having very clearly the right of way with the would-be assailant yelling "Run you the fuck over" right as he drove behind turning.
Not to say the Bay Area is perfect, but I don't have to be continually fighting issues of life and death as much here compared to some other places in the country. My main gripe is the cost of living, but basically nowhere else in the country marks as many checkboxes for me as the Bay Area (and even cost of living is muted by my drastically increased income compared to anywhere else).
Glad, I found another one. Reading Hacker News I thought everyone is sick of living here, while at work we have no trouble relocating people. I love the Bay Area and after living over 5 years in Europe and US made it my home
I lived in the Bay Area for five years, and I'm so glad I got out. On paper, the area should operate very similarly to New York City: good public transit, relatively active building, and a variety of neighborhoods and places to live that are relatively safe.
In reality, it's effectively impossible to get around in the bay area deprived of housing with no new building, no solution to public transit (good luck getting the peninsula towns to allow for BART to expand there), and from what I've read the property crime rates are higher than NYC in the 90s.
Of course, New York has its own problems, and the Subway is rapidly degrading. With that, local politics in the Bay Area are out of control, and it seems there's no real easy solution to the political clusterfuck of the various towns. Individuals can only really vote with their feet: move out. There are plenty of other attractive towns for tech.
Another option is to heavily support the YIMBY party. I don't live there anymore but would be interested in moving back if the NIMBY crap could finally be turned around.
> On paper, the area should operate very similarly to New York City
I think you're mistaken.
On paper, NYC has a land area of just under 303 square miles. The nine-county SFBA is around 7000 square miles. I'm pretty sure it's also unique as a city in other ways.
I don't understand something: you have a super "liberal" government at most levels in the Bay Area, no? Why haven't they relaxed zoning or funded public housing to defuse the housing issue?
California is much more mixed than people think, it’s more like 55/45 liberal/conservative than the raging liberal monoculture other parts of the country portray it as.
Also, what passes for “liberal” these days is basically George W.
Bush’s politics. There’s not really a liberal political organization anymore.
IMO, new housing isn't a partisan issue (since both sides dislike it). Liberals will say it only benefits wealthy developers. And Conservatives will lament the requirement of affordable units.
In a sense, they're both right (?). As a current resident of Berkeley, I have only seen in the last few years the construction of new apartment buildings which are un-affordable to the majority of the student and local populations; I'm talking about ~4k in rent for a 2 bedroom apartment.
> 1. Most state representatives need to please the NIMBY if they hope to state elected
NIMBYism is primarily a regional issue, even in California. There are lots of state representatives from districts in which constituents primarily care about other things. Having a jobs-to-housing ratio that is far out of balance is not at the top of the minds of voters from Fresno.
> 2. If the government does lay out a plan, it is easy enough to override with a ballot initiative.
As is said, "all politics is local" -- and I am sure if a plan for new housing was made, the first people to complain will be the tax-paying, voting residents nearby.
It is. AB 2923 (forcing cities to allow housing on BART land) passed easily just last week, for example, despite opposition from every involved municipality.
Sure, in that the state can set limits on what cities can or cannot do. That's what Scott Wiener's various bills have done in the realm of housing, for example.
Hmm a room in a shared house in mountain view, 10-15 min bike to work along a forest trail, can be rented for $1200-1500. Restaurants are about 30% more expensive than elsewhere, but that's still a tiny amount in absolute terms. Most other expenses here are not that different from other cities. And the jobs pay a little better, and there's more choice of good companies. I really don't understand why SV is considered over priced - unless you want your own house of course.
Given that the rule of thumb is that housing should be about a third of your income, you are talking about needing $3600-$4500 income a month. That's $43200 to $54000 annually minimum. And you are talking about just renting a room, not getting a place to yourself. That basically means staying single, or at least childless. It isn't a situation conducive to having a family.
California per capita income in 2010-2014 was $30,441. Median household income for the same period: $61,933.
So, no, most Californians cannot readily afford that kind of rent for just a room, not an apartment. And California is ranked 9th in the US for median family income. In most states, that is an even more mind-boggling figure.
While true, I find that data lacking. Unfortunately, those statistics aren't broken down by area.
No, most Californians cannot really afford to live in San Francisco Bay Area. And most Illinois residents can't afford to buy a place in Chicago. And most New York residents can't afford to buy a place in New York City.
This likely extends to other states too... Arizona has a per capita income of $20k and Phoenix rent is about $1000 for an apartment. So, nope, average person in Arizona can't stay in Phoenix. Missouri is right after arizona and also at $20k per capita... and rentals in Saint Louis aren't that much less.
San Francisco is at 45.6%. San Jose is 46.3%. That puts San Francisco at #317 when sorted by cost burden percent. San Hose is at #281. That's a long way from Iowa City (62.1%) at #5 (#2 in the list for severely burdened renter share at 43.0% meaning 43% of the rentals spend more than 50% of their income on the rental). For that matter, Redding is at 61.1% (#9) and Fresno is at 47.5% (#24).
This isn't a uniquely bay area problem... and the bay area is in much better shape than Flint Michigan (#66) at 53.6%.
If you are talking strictly rentals, my impression is that some places in San Francisco are rent controlled. So some of the cost burden difference figure is likely accounted for by rent control in some places. If you are talking housing burden, California tax laws intentionally advantage long time owners and we're specifically designed to help homeowners stay in their house. This actively harms people new to the area and also tends to freeze people in place.
I lived in Fairfield, California at one time (as a military wife). My husband got a very high COLA for being there. I am well aware that there are many ways to skin this cat.
But none of that in any way suggests to me that $1200-$1500 for a room in a shared house constitutes affordable housing.
Most months, I support a family of three on around $1200-$1600/month income. My income is portable. I left California to get off the street. And it aggravates me when well heeled professionals on HN poo poo the idea that the Bay Area has a housing crisis. There are endless articles about the issue posted to HN about this issue. They vary from articles about the deepening issue of homelessness to the YIMBY movement by well paid young professionals who can't find housing that meets their needs (and more).
Yes, I know all the rebuttals: "Homeless people are just a bunch of crazies and junkies who can't make their life work. Thus homelessness has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the West Coast only has about 30 affordable homes* for every 100 needy families" and "Well, you aren't supposed to be able to buy a house in your twenties. It takes time to ramp up to that, never mind how much young professionals make these days."
I've heard it and I can't believe anyone can see the parade of endless articles about the housing crisis and spout such blatant nonsense. From where I sit, Housing Crisis Denial should be a meme just as much as Climate Change Denial is and should be basically lumped in with Flat Earthers for how utterly illogical it is.
You're right. But I was talking from a perspective of a recent CS grad who is choosing between a good job in SV and a good job elsewhere. I'm sorry, I should have clarified. I thought (I guess incorrectly) that this was the primary demographic of HN.
For such a person, the higher total comp in SV, plus the selection of interesting things to work on, would easily outweigh the extra living expense. I doubt a recent grad would mind sharing a house.
But once you're ready to settle down and need your own place, SV may be hard to justify, unless you have a super successful career.
You are basically correct. That is a large portion of the demographic here.
I'm kind of "the token poor person" and "the token woman" here. Which doesn't mean I am the only one of either category, but I tend to be remembered.
There are lots of problems with speaking publicly on the internet as if you think you are speaking to some private club of similarly well heeled professionals. I'm not really up for trying to detail that. I get enough crap off of people for things like failing to hide my gender and socioeconomic status.
Suffice it to say, it's generally a good idea to go ahead and state the qualifications you have in mind when posting publicly on the internet, regardless of whom you assume the majority demographic to be.
Yeah, sorry, I did forget to qualify my statements that apply only to a specific demographic. Now that I think about it, I don't even know what fraction of HN readers, and of SV residents it represents. Might be a lot smaller than I expected.
For $1200-1500 you can buy a house in most of the country and not have to share it. Most jobs aren't a 10-15 min bike ride from MV either. You've also ignored CA's high tax rates.
A room in a house in a Toronto suburb is not $1500/month, no where close. Even close to downtown looks like its less than $1000/month. While Toronto isn't cheap and is certainly getting more expensive its not bay area expensive (yet).
I just moved from SF to South Lake Tahoe. There is a (very) nascent awesome group of people attempting to stabilize the economy, bring (and keep) talent and economic growth local, and they're nice people with integrity as a value.
And it's considerably less expensive. If you're a software engineer who loves the outdoors, dogs, good beer, and amazing weather, check it out. DM me if you'd like to learn more.
I thought SLT would be a great place for a SW ecosystem due to rising Bay Area costs back in the seemingly-quaint time of 2012. Glad to see some folks are making it happen.
That oversimplifies the issue. If you live in the Bay Area, and you're rich (one possibility being you bought your home 10+ years ago), it can be a great place to live.
If you're not rich, or you don't own your own home, your quality of life probably sucks. You likely have a horrible commute and still end up paying the bulk of your income to your housing.
Eh I bought my place 8 years ago, and I wasn't rich when I did it. I lived in a not-crazy expensive apartment on the edge of the Tenderloin (good side of California but close enough to keep the rent cheap). I was in that apartment for 8 years before buying a place. I got paid OK, but not baller. I worked for some startups that paid very low and sometimes missed paychecks.
I guess my point is that yeah, it can be done (buying a place in San Francisco and doing well). The problem is that newcomers (and especially younger people) see a job offer from FlashyCo (Uber, Twitter, Salesforce, etc) as a meal ticket good for living the ultra good life (fancy car, fancy new apartment, etc). When they look at what it costs, they get upset and dejected. Many people today feel that they should be well on the path to Easy Street by their mid to late 20's. Traditionally that hasn't been the case at all. Wage earning really doesn't pick up until your late 30's to early 40's. But tech screws with all of that. Huge acquisitions, instant wealth, engineers over 40 age discrimination, etc. So in some sense people do feel helpless when they're living with 8 people at age 30 (protip folks: get a 1-2BR in a less hip area).
Yeah I wouldn't say a man in his 20's was expected to "provide" for a young family in urban areas. Maybe in the burbs with a rented home or a smaller apartment, but not white picket fence typical Americana. Then again, 10 and 15 year mortgages were the norm back then...
The point, though, is that if you aren't rich, SF is a pretty bad place to be, and there are a lot of other places where those on a middle/lower-middle income can have a great quality of life.
* Is the population dropping given all this negativity?
My guess: No! Else, property prices and/or rent would've dropped as well.
=> This survey is just plain "complaining". Not actual action. OR the number of people who move in outnumber those who move out.
* Yeah, been there done that. I moved to Austin for 2-3 years only to realize how much better Bay Area is regarding engineering talent, jobs you can find, outdoor activities you can do, school options for kids etc. Back in Bay Area now. Happy owner of a home since '13.
It’s a miserable hell hole where I make twice as much money as would be possible anywhere else on earth. So long as that’s the case, I can’t logically move anywhere else or do anything for fear of regret, missing opportunity, and going broke. I think that’s what keeps a lot of people here.
I make $250k total compensation in Atlanta, and the mortgage on my 2,000 sqft 2bd/ba condo in the city (and on the Beltline) is $2000/mo. I can run or bike to work, or, if I need to drive, it only takes 15 minutes. I work on exciting tech, and I'm not at all stressed.
Atlanta has great food, amazing music, and is in the middle of a forest. (Google "Atlanta forest"!) There are so many places to hike and swim, it's glorious.
The culture is so diverse here. We're a music capital, the new Hollywood, and major finance hub. We have a lot of really cool non-engineers to hang out with and date. (Nothing wrong with engineers! But there are a lot of different types here to mingle with.)
Also, we have real barbecue. You can't get that outside the Southeast. :P
Move here and help change our electorate. :)
Cons:
- Though we have four full seasons, no one knows how to drive in the snow in the rare event we get any. Our summers are hot and humid (only a problem if you don't like that), and our springs have a ton of pollen - seriously, more than you can imagine (Atlanta is a forest).
- We lack decent public transit. But living within the city makes most commutes negligible. The Beltline (Google it) helps a lot too. The city is ramping up to spend more on transit, though.
250k is exceptional for Atlanta. It's the norm for the Bay Area (for a BigTechCo mid career engineer). An apples-to-apples comparison would probably be more like 400k in the Bay Area vs 250k in Atlanta.
Of course, Atlanta might still win that on cost of living, but it's a more reasonable comparison.
$250K total compensation for Atlanta tech companies is exceedingly rare. They price in all those nice things you mention in attempts to reduce wages. Often that’s why they chose to locate in Atlanta.
Walk into any tech company office in SF right now and ask whether they desperately need to find engineers. 99% of the time you will get a resounding YES. The shortage of engineers is not a myth. Most Satellite engineering offices are meant to find those engineers; not to simply save labor costs.
I think the shortage is a huge myth. Companies want more cheap engineers, because they use the engineers more like they are office furniture to look pretty and serve as fancy headcount for an acquisition or new funding round. Only a few of them are expected to know how to build anything.
What I see in the market right now is wage suppression at almost any cost for the vast majority of jobs, and then a huge jump up in wages for those few specialized roles where actual productivity is required.
I want to say this in the nicest way possible: I absolutely think you are 100% wrong about both the company's desire for new engineers and the competency of the engineers being hired.
It seems like data about salary trends, relative hiring of less experienced or younger quantiles of the candidate population, and company behaviors that could be motivated by wage arbitrage could possibly resolve our disagreement.
Do you agree? If we had data about these things it would shed light on whether employers are motivated to get talent because talent is productive vs. motivated for some other means by which companies are profiting from headcount?
> Do you agree? If we had data about these things it would shed light on whether employers are motivated to get talent because talent is productive vs. motivated for some other means by which companies are profiting from headcount?
Absolutely I would agree if the data indicated that. My opinion is admittedly based on anecdata, even if the people I've spoken with is somewhat large and limited to engineers in Tech companies.
This really is the sweet spot for software engineers right now IMO. I'm doing the same in Colorado and making about the same as you in both salary and equity comp. Quick bike ride to work, housing is expensive but still attainable out here and I can literally walk to the mountains from my apartment.
I grew up in the Bay Area and have zero desire to return.
My question as well. If it’s “I got $50k worth of RSUs last year and now they are worth $150k”, that not earning $250k per year, that $150k plus a good bonus year.
At least for software, Seattle pays just as well and with a much lower cost of living, giving tech workers the highest discretionary income in the country[0]. Per the study, it is $1500-2000/month higher than San Francisco. Anecdotally, this matches my experience.
Agreed; I've seen many engineers in my company moving to Seattle for this reason. While it lacks the Bay Area's startup scene, you still have very good options with large companies. Other costs some may consider are weather and culture.
I suspect the vast majority of the income gain is due to Washington lacking a state income tax. e.g. a single eng pulling $200k is paying $15k/year ($1300/month) in CA state income taxes and $0 for WA State.
The tax code changes for this year only make it more true.
But yes, the math is heavily weighted in the favor of places like Seattle with still bearable costs of living but with competitive software labor markets.
edit: unfortunately we also have a very regressive tax system which makes it easier for developers.
It is no secret. Just that most folks in the bay area don’t want live with the dreary weather there. I know several folks from here who couldn’t last one full year.
I've lived in SF for a while... I would say it's better than every other city in the US... definitely not miserable:
1. Best weather, never too cold or too hot.
2. Can walk everywhere in the city, never need to own a car. Transportation here does suck, but it's still better than every other US city except NYC.
3. Have all the services, restaurants, trendy stuff to do if you want.
4. ~$250k base salaries prevent stress with buffer/retirement savings.
5. People who want to accomplish something move here. I haven't found another city with as many driven people as SF. That's exciting for me, but can also be exhausting sometimes.
Every time I try moving away I always move back. Missed out on buying a house here, but the salary and life quality make up for it for now.
Agreed on all of your points. I've lived primarily in Miami and Atlanta. After being in SF for a couple of years I only wish I had moved here sooner. The weather is a huge factor for me, and the geographical beauty of the west coast is unparalleled in my opinion. I would possibly consider other cities such as Denver/Boulder, or Portland, but I'll definitely never move back to the southeast.
I’m probably making 4-8 times less than you, but still living very well. Paying $700 for a 50m2 flat with pool and gym. I eat out several times a week and can travel anywhere in the world once a year. And still saving half of my income.
What everyone in the Bay Area with a decent income does: live a life of complete luxury but pretend like you are middle class because somone else makes more than you. Eat out for every meal. Never do manual labor of any kind—press a few buttons for laundry, food, handyman services, or transportation. Have “the best” TV, stereo, and home appliances. Or have children drive them around in strollers that cost more than an old used car. Subscribe to services for everything: diapers, vinyl, beauty products, clothing. Go out drinking and spend more money than a median income family spends on groceries in week.
When parking costs more than a car payment, it’s cheaper to pay others to drive you around for the few trips not convenient on a bike or public transit. The splurge is being able to drive yourself.
As a renter, you’re not allowed to work on your home and probably don’t have access to a washer/dryer. There are laundromats, but your cargo-hauling capabilities are severely limited, so unless it’s nearby you’re paying for cargo hauling one way or the other.
Since transportation-with-cargo is such a clusterfuck and the local retail skews heavily upscale to afford the exorbitant commercial rents, getting most consumer goods delivered makes complete sense.
No argument on the cost of going out so frequently, but cooking for one isn’t necessarily cheaper than takeout, depending on your local grocery stores. (Yes, you can be deliberate about picking cheap meals to cook).
Living in San Francisco imposes different problems and different constraints than living in typical American suburbia; choices that would be exorbitant in one place can be efficient in the other.
Agreed dense cities shift trade-offs, but as some notes:
> As a renter, you’re not allowed to work on your home and probably don’t have access to a washer/dryer
Only in the lowest end places is this true. (it's been true once for me exactly once out of 6 places I've rented in SF) Most software eng can afford to rent places with at least shared laundry.
> Since transportation-with-cargo is such a clusterfuck and the local retail skews heavily upscale to afford the exorbitant commercial rents, getting most consumer goods delivered makes complete sense.
And it saves time as well. Even in suburbia I don't want to go to the grocery store when Amazon can deliver items for me.
I've been in the bay area 18 years now. I am a software engineer for a major company. My life is far simpler than this. I almost never eat meals out, I do all my own grocery shopping and cooking. I don't own a car because my needs are simple (public transit / walk to grocery store, company shuttle, and Uber for weekends) so I guess the comment OP got that right. I live in a one bedroom apartment that I clean myself. Is this unusual? All my friends seem to be in similar situations.
This kind of lifestyle is possible anywhere with high inequality. All you need is for other people to be willing to work for so little that you can pay them to do stuff you don't want to do. Attaining this lifestyle can often be easier in developing countries than it is in developed countries because inequality is often higher in developing countries.
Not anymore! Ever since we tricked millennials into thinking that "flexibility" and "side hustle" is more important than a steady paycheck and benefits, you too can pay people a non-living wage to deliver your takeout!
No one tricked anyone. Automation, globalization, increased efficiency, and doubling of the labor supply by adding women reduced the price of labor, aka wages and all the gains went to capital owners.
My original comment was a bit of satire aimed at the so-called gig economy and the companies that make money by exploiting contract workers through marketing themselves as hipster cool, e.g. uber, postmates, taskrabbit, etc.
Actual middle class life: eat out once a week, if that. At least 50% manual labor. Maybe cable TV and a Netflix account. Someone in the house does laundry. Handyman services are not outsourced unless they require a professional. Used everything. Definitely no budget for luxury subscription services.
Typical middle class life is nothing like what I mentioned above. Nothing. Anyone who's ever been middle class or known someone who was actually middle class—that is something with a median income—would know this.
There is this tendency to use relevancy to say to somehow equate someone in the top 10% with the middle class. It's just bullshit.
Pray to god that it's enough to at least not fall into complete ruin and destitution from an illness or unforeseen layoff. I think most people now, like myself, have practically zero social or financial support beyond what you can save for yourself anymore.
Probably do the same thing my friends working the oil fields did: work hard, save as much money as possible, and move when done. Like programming, their skills translate fine outside the boom area.
Have you looked into remote work? If you are sufficiently senior and produce top-notch work, there are plenty of places that will let you work remotely at SFBA pay. For the cost of living in the Bay Area, you could have a condo in Telluride, or a nice house in a state like Montana or Idaho. Where I live (small-ish town Kansas), you would have a really tough time finding a house with a house payment as high as the typical rent on a San Francisco 2BR. You could have a beautiful, huge spread with a kitchen full of commercial-grade gear and a spa for a bathroom for that money out here.
The problem with remote work is that you are incredibly dependent on your current employer. If your job disappears for some reason you will have a pretty hard time finding comparable work again. If you live in the Bay area or probably about major tech hub chances are you might find another job by just walking down the street and drinking coffee in the right place.
I have a friend whose employer let her be remote, so she and her husband moved to Austin and bought a gorgeous house, dependent on her bay area salary. 8 months go by, employer changed their mind, didn't want remote workers any more. Gave her the option to come back, she was pregnant and they liked their big house, so they said no, thinking she would have no problem finding remote work.
6 months later she's still unemployed, considering giving up her career and just being a stay at home mom. They'll sell their austin house and downsize.
Point is: remote workers are always the first to get let go, and the income is not dependable.
Try getting one :) Remote job listing also means that there is an entire world of competition out there, much of which makes less than half of SFBA dev wages.
The parent said at SF Bay Area pay. The easiest way to get that is start in Bay Area, do a great job and then move. Once you've moved and want a new remote job with that salary it's much harder.
That assumes that all money is valued relative to cost of living.
But, I think, for a lot of people, a lot of their spending is nonlocal (e.g. internet shopping) or at least on price-standardized goods, and so is not tied to cost-of-living.
Let's say that in SV, you'd be making 400k, and—after spending on cost-of-living—keeping 10% as "pocket money." Well, that's 40k.
Now let's say that in Austin, you'd be making 100k, and keeping 30% as pocket money. That's 30k.
40k buys more iPhones (or whatever else you might want) than 30k. 40k is also more money to send back home to your family in India or wherever, than 30k is. It's smaller in relative terms, but what does that matter when it's still larger in absolute terms?
(Certainly, there's a lifestyle where spending on priced-to-cost-of-living goods can expand to consume all available salary. For example, if your goal in life is to throw extravagant parties with delicious food, then that food is going to cost less in Austin, so–even with 10k less in the budget—you can afford to throw more parties, and invite more people. But I feel like HN types are the least likely to have this kind of spending profile.)
The point is that those few thousand represent outliers. How many engineers work in the Valley or in the US? 400K puts you in the vaunted top 1% for the entire country.
Nope. 400K would make you an at least one, maybe two standard deviation outlier. Get a grip! Sure, these salaries probably exist, but they are super rare. Every HN salary thread, these people crawl out of the woodwork to tell you that their brother's girlfriend's cousin's roommate makes $400K at Google, so therefore that's a "normal tech salary". It's a legendary HN trope at this point. These people are quoting outlier salaries at outlier companies.
If you want some numbers with actual sources, the median software engineer salary for a software engineer in the bay area is around $110-125K, according to Glassdoor[1] and Payscale[2]. You can argue about their methodology, but it's better than the usual "anecdote = average" logic that these HN salary experts employ. Even if equity added an additional 100% of salary (which I have never seen in my life) we're not even close to these oft-quoted $400K figures.
To you guys outside of SF. When you hear people throwing around these anonymously sourced salary figures you need to take them with an enormous grain of salt. These figures are fantasy land.
I don't know what to say, except that if you're relying on Glassdoor as an indication of L5 compensation at Google, you're making decisions based on bad information. And, yes, equity can be 50% or more of TC at those levels, which have salaries well above 110k.
If there's someone reading this who's interested in working at Google or Facebook but worry the compensation might be too low to live a good lifestyle in the Bay Area, ask actual people who work there for input instead of people who gawk in disbelief at these salaries.
No, a normal cost-of-living calculation assumes that you will spend a typical portion of your money on non-local things.
For the conversion to be wrong, you first need to show that your personal situation is far from the norm. For example, you could show that you are saving 80% of your income toward retirement, or that you insist on having a violinist play during a private at-home dinner every night.
So... are you that weird?
If you aren't so weird, then the cost-of-living calculation is correct.
100K is near entry level for tech salaries in Austin so there is absolutely no chance you would clear 400K at a similar job in the valley. You are living in a dream.
I was making up numbers. The actual average salaries are irrelevant to the argument that "absolute more-pocket-money is still absolute more-pocket-money."
It might not be true that SV is the place to go if you want the absolute most pocket money (or, again, money-to-send-home-to-your-family-in-another-country), but I'm pretty certain it is if you're willing to live out of your car.
The actual calculation of where you should live to get the most pocket money is probably available at any Effective Altruist forum. "Earning to give" and all that.
>When you factor in cost of living, you'd be making far more in Austin
I was stationed at Fort Hood in Killeen, TX another lifetime ago as an army infantry recruit in the late 2000's. I know all about living in central Texas as a person of color. Unfortunately red states have become a complete no go zone for me to even consider living in 2018.
I grew up and lived in Texas for 25 years in urban and rural areas. The confederate flag flies on cars, houses, college dorms/fraternity houses, inside of people's houses, moreso in rural but still everywhere in some measure. East Texas was probably the worst in terms of overt racism so it would be easy to miss unless the outdoor recreational opportunities there or driving to New Orleans was on your agenda.
I grew up in the South and presently live in the South and I think that this video is popular precisely because the sentiments expressed are contrary to the views of almost everyone in the African American community.
My stepfather is a 71 year old African American gentleman from New Orleans. He knows - and all of his friends and family know - that if you see the confederate flag up in front of a house or business, it means "Don't come here unless you want trouble".
Now of course this doesn't apply to every instance where the flag is flown - many people view it as a symbol of Southern Heritage. But it is completely ignorant to think that there aren't lots of people who fly it as a symbol of racial supremacy.
And historically it has meant much worse than that. My high school, Southside High School, in Fort Smith, AR was founded in 1963 - six years after the Little Rock Nine. The mascot was Johnny Rebel, a confederate soldier. During football games, we played Dixie as our fight song and before the 90's, waved the confederate flag at football games. In fact, the interior courtyard of the school was once one giant confederate flag. The practical (intended!) effect of all this was that for African American students living within our gerrymandered school district, the vast majority of them chose to go out-of-district to the other poorer high school. Through our mascot and the flag the local government had achieved de facto segregation without legal segregation, thus avoiding a showdown with the 101st Airborne.
Anyway, I don't know why I wrote this since probably no one will read it but I get really upset when I see something that smacks of Holocaust denial that applies to my native culture.
That guy's statement is clear that he purposely ignored the first ten words of my comment so even though we are supposed to give everyone the benefit of a doubt, the most charitable interpretation I can give is that they were just waiting for the opportunity to bait someone with that troll comment. It's like saying that one African American guy at all the Trump rallies who is obviously mentally unbalanced shows that African Americans support Trump.
This person is saying that their personal experience tells them they don't like Texas. You're telling them they don't know what they're talking about, but you haven't asked them anything about themselves or their experience. How could you possibly know what is good for them if you're not even willing to ask?
The equivalent would be saying that I met some racists in a trailer park in upstate New York so therefore New York City is obviously a backwards racist podunk town...
The problem is, people can make claims of racism, but you can't counter them or say they are exaggerated, so people think you live in some podunk racist state that's 100 years out of date and for the vast majority of people it's just not true.
Killeen is a military town in the middle of nowhere. It has a weird population. But the sibling comment that talks about people hanging Confederate flags isn't representative. California has nutters and boonies too.
San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and Austin are the fastest growing cities in the nation. TX has a larger minority population than it does other. If it was such a racist backwater I think my friends would say something about it, but I too get the impression that the level of racism is about the same as any other major city.
I don't mean to demean their experiences, but I also don't believe it's representative of a state that in 20 years is going to be as important as CA if it isn't already in various areas. If you were transported to a neighborhood in any of those cities, you'd have a hard time figuring out you weren't in NY< CA, or any other major state/city.
When people write off entire states because of politics, that's missing a lot of nuance. If you want to do that, you can also ignore Atlanta, at your own fault, which has as compelling a minority cultural boom as anywhere in the country. Someone needs to tell Don Glover to get the hell out of there.
It's just as offensive to natives of various places to hear their home stereotyped as it is for races to hear their race stereotyped.
I have problems with food. Gluten gives me sinus headaches so I don't eat it. There's no real research on celiacs and sinus headaches. All the time people disregard my experience, my ability to identify pain, my ability to objectively assess my reactions, and suggest that it is placebo or in my head. This has really made me aware when people disregard other people's experiences.
They didn't say all Texans are racist. Just that they experienced racism in Texas. It's the same, playing Overwatch is a drag because people are jerks. Not everyone who plays Overwatch is a jerk, but I experience it often while playing.
I'm just making to clear that though racism and Confederate flags are the first two comments in a thread about a state, that's not representative of the state as a whole, regardless of their unfortunate experience. Not to downplay it, I don't doubt it happened, at all. It's just not representative of the state.
If the top comment on this thread was "California is full of racists, anyway", you'd bet you'd get the same response.
Does that not fall under "immediately dismissing others experiences"?
The thing is, many of us are very aware of that past and will do anything to change it. But also consider that some of it isn't even our fault (my Dad came from Gary, Indiana by way of Illinois). I can't change the past, only acknowledge it, and what I'm telling you is it isn't 1970 here anymore, and many people need to give up stereotypes about places and people the same way they need to do about races.
2) Unparalleled liquidity and depth to the job market for engineering in SFBA. There is a universe of jobs here that pay engineers better than the $140k quoted by Hired.
Texas has its own list of issues including enforceable non-competes and employer claiming ownership of projects you do in your spare time. Don't move to Texas if you have aspirations of starting your company.
For most people, i actually expect the best game to play would be to acquire a large amount of bay-area level equity compensation, then move for the same company to somewhere else and ride it out :)
I may be wrong but twice seems a stretch. I have heard of companies for instance supposedly paying a 25% premium compared to somewhere like Denver. So say 100k in Denver is 125k in redwood City. Of that 25k you get to keep about 18k... So if rent is $1500 different that accounts for the delta.
I just did a long bike ride through the redwoods and along the ocean. Doesn't meet my definition of hellhole... I probably will leave if I ever want to buy a house but besides that the area has a lot to offer me at least.
I do have a problem that everyone not making 6 figures is being pushed out which is another reason I would go.
I do actually live here. Hence the mention of the things I like about it. I was just using nice round numbers as an estimate and trying to say cost of living matters but the #1 thing I pay for here vs another American city is rent. Groceries, gas, consumer goods, etc. do not differ enough to be worth factoring into the equation. I think the big ticket is buying a house. THAT feels really out of reach because I can't do the mental gymnastics to pay around $1000 a square foot...
I have and can say that Seattle and the Bay aren't anywhere near 2x, yet COL is considerably lower (particularly rent) and no state income tax. None of the offers I received would have netted me more money, in fact all of them would have been less money overall.
Citation. People throw around fantastical, ever-increasing numbers (250k, 400k, 500k, now a million) in these threads, but never any hard data. How many is “plenty”? I argue that it would be exceptionally few, if any.
I joined Facebook as a junior engineer a year before the IPO. After five years I was earning a touch over 500k as a senior developer and first-level manager.
The majority was from stock and significantly boosted by the rising price. If I stayed it would have decreased slightly over time due to the stock price levelling out.
If you achieved steady career progression at Facebook over the last four years (reach E5 level, a couple of promos) and not get fired them making 400k+ would be common. I’d hazard a guess that probably 50% of new hires achieve this. Base salary would be 200k and the rising stock price makes up the rest.
For what it’s worth I left the Bay Area and Facebook and cut my compensation by more than half to do so.
I'd have to assume a million includes stock compensation. Even executives don't make a million in cash base (eg. Alphabet's CFO makes $760K, chief legal officer makes $664K).
With stock compensation it's pretty easy because of the appreciation of company stocks. 5 years ago, Facebook was trading at $24/share. It now trades at $193/share, a roughly 8x increase. If your compensation package included $125K/year in RSUs - something eminently achievable even with just a few years of work experience - you're now making over a million a year as those stock grants vest.
And for purposes of comparing total compensation across regions, including stock appreciation like this is misleading. The value used should be the value of the stock at the time it was granted. that's effectively the intended compensation from the company. stock markets go up and down. especially using the past few years record bull market and including that as if the companies intended to pay that much is not going to help someone trying to compare total comp between regions.
Depends what the discussion is about. For someone deciding whether or not to move to the Bay Area, stock price appreciation should be excluded because you can't predict the future and if you could you'd be just as well off putting your cash into FB stock without working for them. For someone discussing the causes of Bay Area housing unaffordability it's very relevant, because having several thousand people earning a million a year who are all trying to buy up limited housing stock is going to seriously affect prices.
This discussion thread seems to be a mix of both, so...YMMV.
I know it sounds crazy, but it's not really crazy. People don't talk about it a lot, but it's not unlike commercial airline pilots making $300k a year. They extract their fair take from very profitable businesses.
Those numbers make working in tech feel like a modern day gold rush. I work as a programmer and don’t see anything near those amounts. I suspect most other programmers don’t either, even if they won’t admit it. Colleges and bootcamps selling overpriced training certainly won’t. Working in tech is beyond overhyped and it’s only going to get worse. I’m not talking about FAANG, I’m talking about everywhere else.
This is what passes for "data" here? Self-reported with zero verification. You're not capturing rank-and-file software engineers here, only those who have interesting enough situations to report. A spreadsheet like this is bound to skew ultra high.
You're not going to get a citation outside of somebody's anecdote about "someone they know at FB". I've addressed this common HN trope upthread[1]. It's like talking to a vacuum here.
Did not know that individual contributors in F/A/N/G were making this much. Are we talking Jeff Dean level outliers or does this apply in a wider setting?
I was making low 6 figures in Austin and my TC actually almost doubled when I moved to the Bay. I had multiple offers, all with similar compensation. Like another peer has said you should try interviewing and see what is offered before making these kinds of judgements.
Want to see more housing built in San Francisco, at all levels of the income spectrum, but you don't know which candidates and ballot measures are in line with that philosophy? See the YIMBY Action slate card:
The San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters has things to say about London Breed (http://www.theleaguesf.org/#london) and Jeff Sheehy (same page, scroll down).
There will always be organizations out there criticizing any candidate, but at the end of the day, Jane Kim doesn't believe the laws of supply and demand apply to San Francisco housing[1][2], while London Breed is the only candidate who supported SB-827[3].
The article led with direct measures of net population decrease and indirect measures such as the extreme asymmetry in the cost of moving trucks into/out of the Bay Area.
When one of my favorite bands did a reunion world tour they only played five shows in the states. Three were in SF, two in NY. I love the access to music and art that I have in the bay. My tastes are often far from mainstream and I was suffocating in various parts of the Midwest and upper south. The bay isn’t for everyone, but it’s definitely for me.
The undercurrent to this in my mind is that more of the middle class (and possibly upper middle) will move out. It actually already happening. The rich and uber rich will always continue to move in. If you have the means it is a great place to live. It was always more expensive place to live but not at the level it is now. In 10-20 years (pick a timeframe..) it will be all (or mostly) the rich and the diversity of this area will suffer. Coastal / bay area CA will always be desirable - it will just be unattainable as a permanent residence for those of normal means at the rate we are going.
Most people here are in the tech sector and probably(most here or many) are at the upper echelon of the industry in skill and salary. In that bubble I think it is harder to see what the average person here struggles with on a daily basis and why they are leaving... Or even what the average "techie" not making 250K+ experiences.
Not trying to detract from the criticism of cost of living, but the source of survey is interesting:
> This study was completed among a random sample of registered voters who responded to an email invitation to complete the survey.
Also, 58% of the respondents have been in the bay area for over 20 years. 75% of the respondents have been in the area for more than 10 years. Yet 71% of the respondents do not have children living in the household. So the majority of the respondents are not young newcomers to the area.
I suspect there is an overweight of people ready to retire and move out of the area. I have a neighbor who's just ready to do that. With more baby boomers retiring, I am not surprised to see more retirees looking to move out of the bay area in the sample population.
Bay area companies need to increase the salaries. It is becoming a struggle for even highly paid engineers to survive. If you are single income family with kids then you are barely surviving.
Is there a plan, or is this just never going to get fixed? The NYC subway reached a crisis point, so the MTA just put together a massive 10 year plan to fix it. Maybe it'll pan out, maybe it won't, but there's a plan and people recognize the problem. I haven't heard of anything like that for the Bay Area housing crisis. A booming economy and not enough housing should call for a massive infrastructure plan. Is there one?
Honest question? Why won't Cali govt just build 700 or so 40 floor buildings and rent them on zero profit. Something similar to Singapore. I think California's housing problem is bottleneck for its economic growth, an emergency.
Why is government being complacent if it was China you'd have skyscrapers going up like there is no tomorrow
Is there any data or research we can apply to this issue? For an HN thread, it's filled with a lot of unfounded claims and speculation. The last thing this kind of discussion needs is more speculation, which exposes us to rumors and to our own prejudices, and which diverts resources from the real problems (whatever they are).
Coming from a lawyer background, It's really interesting to me how similar a viewpoint i've started to see between bay area residents and my friends who worked at large law firms (no matter where they were).
(IE i just want to work here to make enough money to be able to comfortably go do what i want and get out).
Can someone please explain why it is so controversial to suggest that the Big Co's should slow down or stop their massive growth in the Bay Area? It's (relatively) easy for G/Amzn/etc to acquire and construct more buildings that employ tens of thousands, but there's no way (even with YIMBYism) to keep up with that influx.
Maybe this means some relief for people from here who have family here and don't work in tech. It was an awesome area before tech and can be again. It's OK if the spotlight wants to move to Austin or NYC or Seattle, but I don't see that happening no matter how much people articles say people say they want to move.
I feel deja Vu after reading this headline. I have been hearing how people will leave Bay Area and CA and we will collapse for the last 10 years, only for the opposite to happen.
yea I am curious ... what do the numbers (salary, take home, taxes, expenses etc.) look like, for say US vs. Canadian Residents ... are you actually better off working in the US?
The salary is large enough in Silicon Valley that you save significantly more. Of course those savings would not be enough to live and retire in the Bay Area unless you hit the jackpot with your stock options but they are more than enough to retire somewhere else and live very well.
Especially if your skills are both kind of a niche yet in demand and you’re good at what you do, your salary can jump surprisingly quickly here — enough that even while living well you’ll still come out on top compared to working in a midwestern city.
That’s not to mention job security. With some exceptions, in many low CoL areas you’re looking at a sizable gap between jobs simply because the market isn’t as big, and worse, you might end up having to settle for a less than great option or find yourself locked in somewhere for far longer than you’d prefer. Out here, if you’re decent at all this is not an issue... many of us here can easily walk from one job straight into the next, should that be necessary.
I might move somewhere more cheap and quiet eventually, but it’ll be once I’ve saved up enough that I’m not beholden to any particular company and I’ve found something that it wouldn’t bother me to be doing for many years. For now, the demand and pace of the SF Bay Area is just too much to give up.
It’s true, for people earning tech level salaries, the Bay Area is actually ‘affordable’ - see a comparison of earning and cost of living between SF and Kansas City here: https://ramenretirement.com/2018/05/14/cost-of-living/
You’ll save a higher percent and absolute amount of money working in the bay.
Of course, the issue is that not everyone earns $300K+ per year. Unless you make it into a senior role at a tech company by the time you want to have kids, living a ‘normal’ life in the Bay will be hard. Even doctors and dentists will struggle. I completely understand why people would want to leave. I expect they will. The Bay Area is great, but America is an amazing, beautiful place, and fine food / coffee / culture has spread far beyond the streets of SF these days.
There is good food and culture in almost any major metropolitan city in the US. Will you find a variety of Asian and Indian foods in other American cities? Probably not but the food is still good.
Seattle, Atlanta, Austin, Miami, etc. You really cannot got wrong with any of these cities.
The best markets for Canadian developers are Toronto and Vancouver, which are also notorious for their insane costs of living. Developer salaries in Toronto mostly cap out around ~150k CAD, with a lucky few able to make it into the low 200s. These are effectively starting salaries in the Bay Area.
Canadian friends work in US (SF/Seattle) for a few years, then come back to Canada to start a family.
In Canada, they get the benefit of "free healthcare / transit / education" + amazing house that can be paid almost cash thanks to the years in US banking up + back to their friends and family + "senior" level jobs thanks to their expertise learned at the top 5 tech company.
I get downvotes every time I say this but I'm going to keep doing it anyway:
If the only reason you're in the Bay Area is for work, if you have no other attachment to the culture or history or land here, do yourself and everyone else a favor and get out. You'll be happier and so will everyone else.
All of this feels completely untenable and unsustainable, and yet it sustains because there are enough affluent people that want to live here that their demand outstrips supply, and local city governments are criminally conservative when it comes to building more housing.