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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> I suppose you put quotes around "market rates" as a form of sarcasm, but aside from rent-controlled units, all housing rents at the equilibrium market rate determined by supply and demand. If someone jacks up the price of older apartments and is still able to find tenants, all that proves is that those apartments had been rented out at a price below the market rate before now. The market rate is quite simply the amount people are willing to pay.

Hence, my quotes around "market rate". The tech industry can afford to keep pouring salaries into employee pockets, therefore, tech workers will always be able to price out non-tech workers seeking affordable rents in the bay area.

You will never be able to outbuild what Facebook, Google, and the like can pay their workers. Zoning is not the issue, a slanted labor market is. And the tech labor market will continue to soak up whatever housing comes onto the market.

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The Seattle and Denver metros are managing to keep a lower deficit of available housing than the SF Bay Area.

The high salaries of developers in the Bay Area are a reaction to that feedback loop. The companies you listed offer lower salaries to workers outside of the Bay Area, using what they call Prevailing Market Rate to determine pay bands.

I don't really understand why Apple, Facebook, Google, et al. spend so much money on hiring in the Bay Area instead of hiring aggressively outside of it in cheaper regions. Are they benefiting from the network effect anymore? I can understand startups needing to be close to VC funding sources, but how does it benefit the larger players?

Quite a few of the best software engineers in the world live in the Bay Area and do not want to leave, and the larger players want to hire them. They could hire engineers elsewhere for a lot less money, but they want to hire these specific engineers, and are willing to pay what it takes.

> Quite a few of the best software engineers in the world live in the Bay Area and do not want to leave, and the larger players want to hire them. They could hire engineers elsewhere for a lot less money, but they want to hire these specific engineers, and are willing to pay what it takes.

Unless its more financially advantageous to train new engineers then keep paying the ones in SFBA? 7 billion people? Its not like only the brilliant ones are in SF.

It doesn't quite work like that... being a brilliant engineer isn't a matter of "training". And because of the attraction factor, yes, a lot of the brilliant ones end up in the bay area. For years the only place to do cutting edge tech was here, and it's pulled them in, from far away. Out of the country even.

So more than you think in fact.

None of the big software companies have remote development cultures, and most don't even have serious offices away from HQ. You can work for Google or Facebook away from SFBA, in a couple of smaller satellite offices, but it'll limit the kinds of things you can work on.

None of those companies are going to restructure their engineering cultures just to relieve housing pressure in SF. Just like the rest of the mainstream, they probably see the problem in SF as one of artificially limited supply, not demand.

You will never be able to outbuild what Facebook, Google, and the like can pay their workers.

NYC 1921-1929 (prior modern zoning): "The total of 658,780 new dwellings averaged 73,198 units per year, a figure ... In the most prolific year, 1927, 94,367 dwellings were built"

https://books.google.com/books?id=AS1bGTRSggYC&pg=PA122&lpg=...

"You will never be able to outbuild what Facebook, Google, and the like can pay their workers."

Heh. Okay, let's not even try.

Am I stopping you? Is anyone stopping you from trying? Get funding. Attempt to community organize renters. Attempt to sway public opinion and zoning commissions. You waste the next 5-10 years of your life spinning your wheels. Me? I've got more productive ways to spend my life then trying to live in a specific region. The world is a huge place.

>You will never be able to outbuild what Facebook, Google, and the like can pay their workers.

"Never" is a long time. Mature companies don't continue with gangbuster growth, and eventually company management has to look around for savings. San Francisco isn't immune to what happened to the rust belt cities.

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