San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

bloomberg.com

274 pointsraus22516 comments

It's hard to overstate the impact this is going to have on San Francisco, long-term. As Technology becomes the most important industry in America, a well-governed San Francisco could have positioned itself as the next NYC. The hub where all of tech gathers, the same way all of finance gathered in Wall St. Replace the 70 year old 2-storey homes with Manhattan style apartment buildings, and rent in San Francisco would have remained very reasonable, despite the rapid economic growth. This would have prevented exactly this problem where tech workers are forced to disperse to other mini-hubs, due to lack of capacity in San Francisco.

20 years on, San Francisco could have become what New York City is today. One of the top 5 cities in the world, and the undisputed hub where all of technology resides. Instead, it's on track to be just another major city, in the same league as countless others like Chicago/Seattle/Boston.

I have to say... I'm already nervous in my 3 story building when there is a earthquake. I'd be even more nervous around buildings, when I know the ground is basically sand.

Taller, flexible buildings are much better at distributing shock waves.

Right, but you can't build those everywhere. There are chunks of the city that are landfill (old ships, gravestones, etc) which are seismically unfit to hold a large building, even with pilings.

As a kid, my wife grew up always wanting to live in the Marina. Now, you couldn't pay her to spend a night there because of the landfill.

Modern mid rise and skyscrapers are actually safer in earthquakes than the Victoria homes of San Francisco. If our housing consisted of modern housing our city would suffer way less damages than what will happen today if the big one hits.

For evidence of this, just look at where all the damage was during the '89 earthquake: the Marina district, not the skyscrapers.

The french quarter in new orleans is also probably less safe than modern buildings, but I wouldn't want to see it torn down just because rents would be cheaper.

SF does need to build, badly, but I'm wary of the term NIMBY-ism. It is descriptive, but I think it invites false equivalence. There are degrees of NIMBY. I actually think that some of the burbs, like walnut creek or mountain view (especially the latter) have engaged in genuinely shocking levels of refusal to build housing. Mountain view's NIMBYism is especially objectionable since it actually green lighted the corporate construction that brings many new workers to the area, while almost with the same stroke of the pen banned new housing around those places of business. There's NIMBYism, and then there's actually generating the problems that you push out to other neighborhoods.

I'm always a little bummed to read statements by people who, probably out of frustration that I largely share, start to disparage SF's architectural and cultural heritage. It is absolutely possible to grow, dramatically, without tearing down some of the oldest neighborhoods west of the mississippi.

SF has a lot of beautiful historic architecture, but also absolutely endless rows of bland, ugly, and tightly packed 2-story houses ("houses"). You could build over a quarter of the city and lose nothing.

But no one wants to live in the Sunset. You can build out there all you want. The weather is crummy and it takes an hour to get downtown on the bus.

That's why it's mostly brothels and growhouses (exaggeration).

A quick Zillow perusal showing 2BRs going for around $3.5-4k per month would seem to suggest that plenty of people are willing to live there (not me though).

Sadly, these are multi-family homes in a single family home. It's a lot of 7-8 people (multi-generation) families under one roof. Not stereotyping, that's the demographic. It's also why you get a lot of growhouses and brothels out there. Immigrant families almost never call the police.

!00% agree that a lot of the suburban communities are worse than SF, but SF still has a shocking amount of unwillingness to build given that it's a large city.

This is a question that interests me. I'm actually not sure that SF has more resistance to building than other cities once you consider that "SF" vs the general bay area is an artifact of an unusual way of managing municipal borders.

Keep in mind, what I'm saying here is a thesis, not a conclusion.

SF is city that ranges from very high density to middle density, with a few expensive and relatively suburban neighborhoods west of twin peaks and/or near the coast (St Francis Wood, Forest Hill, Seacliff, etc)… It has also had a relatively stable population density for over 50 years, and in some of these neighborhoods considerably longer than that.

SF is also a relatively small geographical area that is a different municipality from the nearby cities. In many (most?) cities in the US, sections of SF and Oakland/Berkeley would be the urban core of a larger city, but those suburbs and even exurbs wouldn't be considered different cities in the same region, they would be part of the same municipality. As a result, construction in the hinterlands that doesn't count as growth within "San Francisco" does count in growth in a place like Seattle, where the "city" of Seattle encompasses a much larger geographical area.

So, hear me out - while SF can be excessively preservation minded, think about how people would react if you tried to bulldoze not just the French Quarter in New Orleans, but the garden district, Bayou St John, or even some of the shotgun houses in less famous districts. What would happen if you tried to tear down historic houses in Philadelphia or Boston, or replace entire city blocks of 100+ year old houses or apartments with modern high rises?

My thesis (again, not a conclusion, I'd need to see the data) is that if you identify regions similar to SF - medium density neighborhoods that have existed in this form for 60-100 years, it is very difficult to tear things down and build greater density in many places outside SF. I wouldn't be surprised if it's especially difficult in SF, but I suspect this would be a difference in degree, that SF would have an unusually strong preservation instinct, but that you'd find strong, similar preservation instincts in many other comparable regions - but that these similarities are not evident because we aren't comparing similar geographical regions, again because of the oddity of municipal boundaries in SF (which are a large contributor to the NIMBYism problem, to be sure).

I assume you're concerned about floods in New Orleans. The French Quarter is actually pretty safe compared to a lot of other nearby areas. It was build on the old flood plains and so it's on higher ground than a lot of the city and surrounding Parishes.

Sadly, the fermosan termites will take out the French Quarter before any flood does.

>Mountain view's NIMBYism is especially objectionable since it actually green lighted the corporate construction that brings many new workers to the area, while almost with the same stroke of the pen banned new housing around those places of business.

This is out of date, and has been for a while. The voters of Mountain View responded to the housing crisis by voting in a much more pro-housing city council. There are now over 10,000 units planned for North Bayshore (the area around the Google and LinkedIn campuses):

http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2016/03/03/council-oks-plans-fo...

As a long-time resident and voter in Mountain View, it's exasperating to have people so fixated on the NIMBY narrative that they ignore the significant steps the city and voters have and are taking to address the housing crisis. Regardless of what Matt Yglesias said, or that article from the Washington Post said, the votes of the Mountain View citizenry, and the resulting choices of the City Council, should make it clear that we're not a bunch of anti-density NIMBYs.

Fair enough, I'll check out the link.

I would argue that a taller building would actually be safer in an earthquake, given that for a taller building you'll need pilings driven down to bedrock in order to support the weight of the structure. Also, taller buildings receive more attention from safety inspectors and the like.

A new 50-story apartment building is far more likely to survive an earthquake without damage than a 3-story apartment built in the '70s or '80s (even with retrofitting).

I hate this train of thought; you can have tall builds and be safe even in earthquake-prone areas. I spent a month in Tokyo in 2015 and experienced at least three pretty good shakes. Once I was in the apartment on the 9th floor of a tall building. The swaying was very disconcerting and scary, but I think it's wrong to believe that you can't build tall in earthquake-prone areas. Tokyo has tall buildings and gets hit with earthquakes often.

Why is extreme population and industry concentration such a great thing? Yes, there are certain virtues to the concentration of talent and energy which happens in major cities generally--but I'm unconvinced that doing some Singapore-style 20-year plan to transform San Francisco into a western Manhattan is either necessary or desirable.

Technological mecca would translate into a technological hegemony, even larger than today.

It's not necessarily great. But for a variety of reasons, the momentum has been in SF's favor as the world's dominant technology hub.

We might wonder what will happen this momentum is deflected. Technical talent will disperse, and we'll end up with a more distributed workforce? Or will it simply concentrate somewhere else?

Right now, the Bay Area is in an extremely enviable position: it has a high concentration of extremely profitable companies; it has a high concentration of highly skilled workers; it has a high concentration of wealth; and, except for housing, it's a desirable place to live.

The Bay Area's residents and local governments oshould be able to leverage these positive factors to maintain the strong economy while making the area a better place to live for skilled workers who want to set down roots and raise families. Of course, it's more likely that nothing will happen and living conditions will become less and less sustainable.

Or a thousand seeds will be scattered to bloom in "out of the way places," creating employment and value for towns and cities all over the world.

Of course, that might not be in the Bay Area's interest but they seem to be voting firmly against it already.

"But for a variety of reasons, the momentum has been in SF's favor as the world's dominant technology hub."

I know this is ancient history, but I keep having to remind folks that the fetish for locating tech companies in SF didn't start until the late 1990s. Then it crashed, and didn't pick up again until the mid/late 'aughts.

Viewed dispassionately, the "momentum" of SF as a technology hub looks more like a fad that happens at the peak of VC consumer investment cycles.

There's no need for that. Build a little bit up in a lot of places, and you'll start meeting the demand. In a few places, you can build up more, but look at, say, Paris. The density doesn't come from massive skyscrapers, but by being fairly dense all over.

Also: SF's refusal to build is having repercussions elsewhere, like here in Oregon where there is a steady stream of people who can't afford a house for their family in the bay area. In turn, they're pricing out people here, and so on.

Also, there's nothing 'extreme' about the population density of San Francisco. Density in Paris is 21,000/km^2 and in SF, 7,124/km^2

I agree, in a way, since I really want to see the bay area engage in meaningful construction (along with expanding BART and other types of public transportation).

But if SF's refusal to build is having repercussions in Oregon, and all SF needs to do is build… well, then shouldn't Portland be able to solve its problems by doing the same thing?

Or has NIMBYism morphed into NIMSOTPNW (not in my section of the pacific northwest)?

It's a countrywide problem. Portland has some serious NIMBY issues of its own. For instance:

http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2016/03/charlie...

It'd probably be best if it were fixed in several places at once. For instance, Bend is a town of 80K people, and it could (and should) add a bunch of density. But if all that just goes to soaking up 1000's of "refugees" from California, it's not as effective as it could have been. In other words, California can produce many more people looking for a cheaper, better place than Bend can hope to absorb, so it'd be nice if the Bay Area fixed some of its own mess, as well as Portland, Seattle, Austin, Boulder etc...

One of the problems is the lack of city governments and wealthy homeowners here to think beyond just SF. The Bay Area as a whole, from San Francisco to Oakland to San Jose, should work together to solve the housing and infrastructural issues we have here. It's not even just SF that needs to build. The entire Bay needs to pitch in, from San Jose to Novato. (https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/zprpe/the_actual_o...)

This is true. My sister is a civil engineer on the SMART train - supposed to have been light rail from Fishermans Wharf all the way to Santa Rosa. The Golden Gate Bridge actually has a railway line below it that hasn't been used. But the train will only go to Larkspur ferry because Marin disallowed it.

Even then, it's not going to make it to Larkspur until later, phase 1 only makes it to downtown San Rafael (but there's supposed to be a free bus from there to take you to the ferry).

As someone who lives in Santa Rosa, having something that connected directly to SF or BART from up here would be awesome (even if not really feasible). My brother lives here as well and he commutes to the Embarcadero for work. I'm not jealous, I already have no time. An extended commute would be the end of me.

From Santa Rosa? That's, like, Morgan Hill to SF commute levels of craziness.

Yeah, about the same total distance, but I think there's generally less traffic coming from the north. In any case, he just has to make it to Larkspur, as the ferry takes him directly to work. Needless to say, he's eagerly awaiting the SMART train.

Oh, my bad, thought he was crossing the bridge. My BIL goes from Corte Madera to San Bruno and I think it's just eye-poppingly insane to have to cross the bridge AND drive through SF. The traffic north of CM on the way up to Santa Rosa is simply insane, so adding the bridge to that would be killer. The ferry makes it work.

Would love to read more about this un-used railway line. Big fan of the GGB and its history

It doesn't exist.

> The Golden Gate Bridge actually has a railway line below it that hasn't been used.

No it doesn't. You might have some memories crossed, but there's definitely no railway.

The Bay Bridge OTOH did have a railway(Key System rail) for some time after it opened. Ripped up in the mid-century turn away from streetcars, thus we now have only car traffic on both decks.

"a well-governed San Francisco could have positioned itself as the next NYC. The hub where all of tech gathers, the same way all of finance gathered in Wall St. Replace the 70 year old 2-storey homes with Manhattan style apartment buildings, and rent in San Francisco would have remained very reasonable, despite the rapid economic growth. This would have prevented exactly this problem where tech workers are forced to disperse to other mini-hubs, due to lack of capacity in San Francisco."

...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere. The cost of living here is the invisible hand of the market showing you that you're making a mistake by locating your company in the bay area. Yet the dominant techno-nerd narrative continues to be that the bay area has somehow made a mistake in not anticipating the bizarre fetish that global wealth has developed for local real estate since the early 1990s.

It's insane that an industry of otherwise-intelligent people insists on cramming itself onto a tiny peninsula with seismic development challenges, and I chuckle every time someone draws the comparison to New York, which has seven times the land area, a capable and efficient transit system that has been developed over more than a century...and one of the highest costs of living in the world. Development is not a panacea.

I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros, where you can't get a good meal after 9:30. Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence.

I've thought about that, but as far as I can tell, it means about $10-$15k of equipment and a dedicated work room. I need a mobile-connected "smart" whiteboard for every team member, a good microphone, webcam, speakers, a separate computer + monitor devoted to video conferencing, and a team that is geographically dispersed rather than partially-colocated.

...and hopefully, everyone has first class redundant internet, something not guaranteed across the nation.

I'm not suggesting that you have to have a distributed team -- though, you certainly can, and $10-$15k is trivial compared to the economic penalty of hiring good engineers in SF.

I'm just saying: consider locating your company somewhere else. There are great engineers all over the world, and most of your customers are not here.

They aren't in the valley for customer nor for techies, but for easy vc money access brought by locally connections. For now.

Well, that's an aspect of it. But there's a heaping helping of cargo-cult superstition, too. For example, ask an entrepreneur to consider locating their office in Oakland: it's becoming more "acceptable" now that Uber has committed to a huge space over there, but a year or two ago, I had people telling me that locating in Oakland was the equivalent of wanting your company to die. For being a 20-minute BART ride from downtown SF. People have lost their minds.

Also, of course, few around here believe that there are good programmers outside of the city. Mostly, though, I think it's about 20-somethings who want to feel like they've made it because they're running a startup in the most expensive city in the country.

The cult is powerful, for such a group of disruptive, innovative thinkers.

The difference in competitive salary for me between SF and PDX (where I live) is ~$70k.

Which you have to pay yearly, not as a one-time discounted cost. In fact even down at the very, very low-end of tech-related jobs (~$50k in PDX) the difference between SF and PDX is ~$18k.

There is literally no shape of tech-oriented business you could operate where having to spend only $15k per employee when they're onboarded isn't a net financial benefit compared to having to pay SF-area competitive salaries for the same positions.

The only hard requirements are a good headset and decent Internet. And when I say "decent," I don't mean "fabulous." I worked remote for five years, three time zones away from headquarters, and never even thought of getting a mobile-connected smart whiteboard. It might have been nifty, but it's by no means a requirement.

The main requirement is that everyone communicate over the same channels. No planning sessions at the watercooler. Take it back to your desk and have the conversation in Slack instead.

I hope that by "mobile-connected smart whiteboard for every team member" you mean "laptop or tablet with touchscreen, and a stylus".

You shouldn't need most of the rest of that, either. Make sure everyone has a 2nd monitor, and you'll need to buy a $30 webcam if they don't already have laptops. I wouldn't worry about the headset, either - cell phone headsets or earpods generally work fine and most everyone has a decent one nowadays. Wait for the folks who want something nicer to ask for one.

Cheap internet is fine. I worked from home with rock bottom residential service, the cheapest they would give me, and my connectivity was fantastic, better than anything I've ever had from an office. The secret is that nobody's on the Internet from home during the day, so you've got infrastructure that was meant to handle the whole world watching Netflix at 8pm more-or-less to yourself.

This is assuming a distributed team. mind. They have a tendency to self-assemble. Partial co-location is where things get messy and you start needing to worry about smart whiteboards and fancy videoconferencing equipment and all that crap. All that's really for is to make it an eensy bit more likely that the co-located folks will be willing to collaborate with the remote folks rather than forming a clique and forgetting that the rest of the team exists.

By the parent comment, I was assuming a distributed team.

Speaking from far-too-much experience, partially colocated teams are a productivity suck.

But I really do mean a fully distributed team needs a way to properly sketch things out. One of the biggest weaknesses I've seen is that people get limited by the equipment. So long as that's a separate piece of equipment from your video conferencing, it should be fine.

Yea, with partial co-location you need to budget at least 25% of your person-hours to hostage negotiations and koombeya meetings about people's hurt feelings.

0/10, would not try again.

Funny story... A lot of places have more reliable internet than the bay area.

Funny you mentioned not being able to get a good meal after 9:30pm. That was the most frustrating thing about being in San Francisco for me. I hated that the whole bay seemed to shut down @10pm - almost as if everybody has to wake up the next morning to work another 12 hour day to pay the insane rent.....

Don't get me started. You get inured to it after a while, but every time I travel outside of SF, I remember what it's like to live in a real city.

I moved here because it had a pleasant climate and (once had) a vibrant art/culture scene that provided ~80% of what you could get in bigger cities, at a discount. It was a city, but with a higher quality of life. For that, you might be willing give up some things.

That's no longer true. I don't know how new people rationalize the costs here, except as an "investment" into something else -- their career, real estate, whatever.

It's because everyone in SF seems to be a morning person. In my building everyone (except me) is asleep by 10pm. In NYC things are only getting started at 10.

Definitely this, it's ridiculous how early stuff closes around here and how early people go out. Moving from Mexico it was a big shock.

This doesn't square with my perception of SV programmers always mentioning staying late to hack on their startup. Do they actually mean that they got there at 6AM, so staying until 5PM is "late?"

I don't think that it's all hackers. Without mentioning the neighborhood (because this borders on stereotype, and these things usually devolve into an x vs. x neighborhood discussion), I live in a neighborhood where people mostly hold non-technical titles like "marketing manager" and "product manager".

And they've all worked out, shopped for groceries, had breakfast, etc. before 9am.

Engineers might stay up until 2am, but they stay up until 2am at home because nobody else is bugging them. If they eat, it's gonna be cheap stuff or frozen trader joes food from the freezer, more time efficient.

... and it's exhuasting to adjust to when business trips take me from SF to NYC. I usually add two hours to whatever normal evening meetup time I'd suggest in SF when I make plans with my NYC friends.

The only way I could handle my old SF boss expecting people in the office by 7:30 was by being based in Dublin and only making the occasional trip to SF.

Even then, the jetlag only made it work for a week or two.

I guess I always end up in the wrong parts of NYC because I kept finding that all the restaurants closed at 10pm (during the week, at least)... say, in Chelsea.

Chelsea doesn't have the best food options. You could go south to Meatpacking which is a bit better but I'd just walk east. Flatiron / Union Square has tons of food options that are open late plus solid bars. Walk even further to the East Village and you're golden, there's like two twenty-four hour restaurants within a block's radius of each other.

Perhaps part of the reason is the massive wealth gap between the tech migrants (tech workers) and the local population. It causes a lot of friction between locals and the new migrants. The lower earners are being forced out of the city and they probably make a up a large chunk of the service workers.

The public transit system shuts off by 12 AM - 1PM, and most service workers would likely have to live outside of the city, as well as most people coming into SF to work. The city is forced to shutoff at a certain time because of the transit situation, even if not for any other reasons.

> Perhaps part of the reason is the massive wealth gap between the tech migrants (tech workers) and the local population. It causes a lot of friction between locals and the new migrants. The lower earners are being forced out of the city and they probably make a up a large chunk of the service workers.

The current disparity certainly causes plenty of concerning issues, though SF's early closing has been a thing since at least 2007 when I first lived there, at which point cost of living was somewhat reasonable.

I find it to be one of the mysteries of bay area. I don't understand how a city this size can manage to have nothing open after 10 pm. Is there a reason to this? Surely it can't be all shop owners getting to gather and saying ok let's all close shop at 10..

I don't know if it's true for SF, but some cities have noise ordinances that pretty much shut everything down by a certain time.

As others have noted, people who have the sorts of jobs that put them behind a register can't afford to live in SF, and public transportation shuts down at midnight or so. If you were working a restaurant it would have to close by 10:00 so you had time to clean up with a little buffer to make sure you were on the last train.

But you can. The Brazen Head in the Marina, Thai Noodle on Haight and a bunch of places in North Beach will happily serve till 1 AM or later and at a quality that doesn't even compare with fast food. In fact since I've moved to SF, going on ten years now, I've found pretty much most of the rest of the country (NYC and LA excepted) to be quiet a sad food desert.

The fact that everything closed so early blew me away, when I moved there. Compared to the middle of nowhere WV it made zero sense. Even the grocery stores closed by midnight in SF.

In WV, you can find food at most places until 12-1am 7 days a week. And the major local grocery is a Walmart, which is open 24 hours.

Last Easter I had no clue nothing would be open, and didn't prepare for that. So I just had some crap picked up at a gas station to hold me over until the next day. It's a really bizarre situation compared to most other metros, but even compared to a bunch of small towns.

This is one of the strangest things about the Bay for sure. It is like a stereotype of a sleepy little town this way. I stay in Oakland now, and there is one cafe (within bike riding distance for me) that is open to midnight.

I still to this day argue that by a significant margin, the best thing about living in Vegas was the everything goes 24-hour lifestyle where you can literally do or eat anything you want 24/365.

I wouldn't argue against that being the best thing Vegas has going for it.

Cheap housing, cheap decent food options, access to all-you-can-eat-entertainment, relative proximity to SoCal/beach all factor in as well. But the Summer is miserable (IMO) and the people here just don't give a crap about life, so it can be pretty draining to live in Vegas as well.

>...and the people here just don't give a crap about life

Yes and to finish my OP thought, I would argue that this was without a doubt the worse of it as well.

What do you mean "Don't give a crap about life"?

I mean I grew up in Southern California. Now I live in Vegas. I go to the grocery store and I have to be on full alert to make sure I don't hit some random pedestrian who decides for the fifth time in the day to play Russian roulette by stepping into the middle of the street to cross without even looking up to see if anyone is noticing. At the grocery store, people are walking around like zombies in pajamas that they seem to have been wearing for the past three days straight. I leave the grocery store and load up my car, then I push my empty cart to the cart collection bin. When I get back to my car someone else is loading up their car, with their cart behind my car. I get in my car and wait to finish and when they do, they leave their cart behind my car and drive away. Not to mention the very sad sacks who spend all their time and money in the casinos.

The people here are poor, and my perception is that they don't have much hope and/or desire to affect any kind of change in their life. They just seem not to give a crap.

I don't live in a nice part of town, and I suppose it could just be culture shock for me personally having moved from Irvine to Not-Summerlin, Vegas, but that's my perception.

Yes for sure someone like you should head to Summerlin.

I'm in Vegas. A lot of people here are passionate about their community and their personal projects. I'm not sure what you're talking abou the "not giving a crap about life." Just browse our Meetup page: http://www.meetup.com/cities/us/nv/las_vegas/ If you missed those kinds of people then maybe there was a problem with the way you approached Vegas.

Not maybe.

In my case, definitely.

Thanks for the clarification.

Where in Vegas do you live/shop/drive?

I just moved downtown actually. I work here, I hang out here, etc. My commute is like 3 minutes in a car. A nice 30 min walk if I want.

Just so long as you ignore the colossal waste of water and other resources needed to run a city in the middle of a desert with no real reason to exist.

The water gets recycled, eventually.

Everything closing at 9PM is pretty much par for the course here in Vancouver, another city with the skyrocketing cost-of-living thing going on. I wonder if there's a correlation. Maybe everyone is rich enough to pay delivery services or maids or something to get their shopping done while they're at work, so there's no demand for 24-hour businesses?

Then again, another thing with Vancouver (that I think I've heard said a bit about SF, but less-so) is that there's no night life. The bars close at midnight. (Actually, you can't even get a license to operate a "bar" here; you have to build a sit-down restaurant in order to serve alcohol.) I wonder if the correlation is actually between this sort of Victorian-era teetotaling "healthy living" sensibility, and the sort of generalized NIMBYism that prevents highrises from deflating housing pressure.

I think that reasonable (For the employees) grocery hours are more of a Canadian thing, rather then a skyrocketing cost-of-living one. Businesses in Victoria, Kamloops, etc close up around the same time.

It might also be that for restaurants and retail the employees have been so completely priced out of living in the area that many of them have a 2+ hour commute with all the limitations that entails (quitting time determined by transit availability, etc.).

Vancouver anecdote; bars are not night life. I visited for two weeks and discovered a local music festival (music waste), befriended random folks at parks (parks were everywhere, and people actually used them!). East Van seemed to have a lively night life on par with SF/LA, people hosting live bands in their loft, avant-garde burlesque theater, house parties etc. It sounded like there was a lively festival scene in BC too, and not just electronic, stuff like the Peppermill Festival http://www.peppermillrecords.com/. Quantity of cultural hubs in Van might not be as expansive as other major cities, but the quality certainly sprouts up. That city seems more suited for people who enjoy nature though.

Really sad to hear that Vancouver and San Francisco are plagued by real estate siphoning out all the potential of what those cities could be. Feudalism seems to be a trend everywhere though.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-14/millennial...

Vancouver parks close for the night, usually at dusk or 10pm

They have the parties at home in east van because it is impossible to get a permit and/or a suitable venue for most events. There are very few venues for hosting parties and virtually no practice areas for bands. I've been to a number of events that were held in death-trap condemned buildings. I've even been locked in one illegally because someone called an ambulance and they didn't want to "blow their cover" so nobody could enter or exit for 30min while my friend waited outside in a back alley. Much prefer other cities where I can just go to a normal bar and not deal with entrapment issues.

Where are you going? Seriously. Put a little effort in.

BART really doesn't run late enough (Caltrain to the South Bay as well) to support suburbanites coming into SF to drink at night.

A major factor in this is that the transit services largely die off at 1am in Vancouver. So for any workers at stores or restaurants they simply can't afford to go home after a certain point. The late night bus service is not good enough, take for example the N19. It is full of all the bar kids at 1am. You don't want to take that bus unless you're drunk.

I think you're onto something with the Victorian "healthy living" bit. There is some hypocrisy as well: the way Vancouverites talk down about alcohol drinkers or tobacco smokers all the time but meanwhile promote the pot trade and never talk about the rampant heroin problem in that city.

Sounds like they're not too different from us Californians after all.

Err, well, bars which hold a primary liquor license in Vancouver can operate until 2 AM. Many do, but after 1:00 AM a majority of the night life leaves and you're left with a couple of awesome regulars, someone passed out on a table who you have to help get home, and staff from other restaurants which close earlier.

All the great things that Vancouver has to offer happen in the day or afternoon. The only thing I'm sad about is the Jazz Cellar closing down. RIP Ross Taggart.

Where in WV?

I can't find food after 10pm.

Lewisburg, it means getting fast food or going to a tavern, but the choices are more than I had in the peninsula.

Morgantown also has late hours in my experience, though you might have to walk to High St.

The Irish Pub?

That's one of them, though the food after 10 is a little more iffy. Sometimes there's pizza and bread from the bakery brought over for the pub's patrons.

I'm there fairly frequently.

The Asylum serves regular bar food til about 11 I think. Still later than what I was seeing in SF.

Since you know of it, if you're ever around and would like to grab a pint feel frre to send me an email at james@jimminy.me

Greetings from another WV refugee. Austin by way of Elkview. I have tons of relatives from Greenbrier County.

Safeway is open near 24/7, some close at ~midnight, but that's pretty good. There are also tons of little convenience stores/bodegas that stay open relatively late.

That said, nightlife closing at 2AM is a plus and a minus. I kind of like there being a defined end to the evening, I'd rather not stay out too too late and this way I don't have to be the party pooper :)

Since you're on HN I assume you're doing some kind of software or technical work. What's the market like for that in WV. My family's from Man, a little dot in Logan county.

The market is complete crap. I'm back for what was supposed to be temporary, plan was to go to Dallas, but I have attachments here so don't want to go.

I've spent 8 months looking for a technical position. The only interviews I've managed to get are in Roanoke/Blacksburg, VA. Every interview I've had (not many because the market is dry), either drastically undercuts my experience (one company tried to write down my experience below the length of my last job) or otherwise offers a very meager salary, 30-50% lower than even the cost of living adjusted figure from my last job where I was living SoMa.

Also due to infrastructure, and partially the company who marked down my experience because they don't consider remote experience, I'm no longer interested in remote positions.

> I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros where you can't get a good meal after 9:30.

This one took me by surprise when I visited SF for the first time five years ago. I thought it would be booming with activity just like NYC, so I thought nothing of trying to find food when I arrived at ~11pm.

NOTHING. Nothing was open.

It must be a huge bummer to live in a city with NYC prices without that (very important --- to me) NYC perk.

Aren't most major problems also major opportunities?

Has nobody started a great 24/7 food delivery service bringing overpriced food to tech workers on demand?

NYC is really the outlier. Not that I'm typically out eating late in the city but what you describe isn't all that different in Boston/Cambridge (and Cambridge bars closed at midnight until relatively recently). And, last time I got into downtown Chicago late (11pm or so) on a business trip, the only food available near the hotel was takeout delivery from some pizza place.

That's a major over exaggeration and you know it. Name any neighborhood in the city, and I'll give you at least one place open until midnight.

You probably couldn't see anything open from your hotel in Union Square or SOMA, but it's there. Just open foursquare or Yelp.

I worked at Yelp, and I've lived here for nearly a decade, and I'm here to tell you: there are maybe ten decent restaurants open in all of SF at midnight. On a good day. You're screwed on a Monday night.

Even if we lower the standard to include fast food and/or greasy post-drunk food, the number jumps to perhaps 30, on a weekend night. So there might be a late-night restaurant in every neighborhood, but there's definitely no more than one. If you want something good, you need to eat before 9.

Great, now even Yelp employees think that they're food critics.

Also, get off your high horse for implying that a greasy spoon can't be good or have high standards.

NYC is not that different. The only things open 24hrs are bodegas and diners, which serve shitty food. Even the Whole Foods in Union Square, the busiest in the nation, closes at 11pm, which is later than the grocery stores in suburban TX. I guess bars can stay open late.

As someone who routinely worked quite late in NYC, that's just not accurate.

I routinely had good meals at 10pm or 11pm at night. Never once did I eat at a diner.

Lots of restaurants stay open later in NYC, and then there are plenty of gastropubs serving great food even later.

Used to be out real late and always got food. Pizza at 4am for a dollar, chicken gyros from the halal carts, chinatown restaurants.

Its not just about the stuff in your neighborhood.

In NYC at 4am, I could Seemless any meal/quantity I wanted!

In Seattle, I can only get pizza past 2am.

You can find bunches of places in lower Manhattan (for example) that serve good food and are open til 2 or 3am or 24 hours.

Completely agree with you. The whole point of software and the internet is to destroy boundaries and borders, especially physical ones.

Companies neither have to have physical offices nor do they have to be located in the Bay Area. And unfortunately culture dictates that an office is always necessary and that you need to locate your tech company in the Bay Area for dubious reasons like fundraising (which should only take a small portion of the operation of your company anyways), hiring (good engineers might come here if they agree with the lifestyle, and the job opportunities, but that doesn't mean jobs should come here because good engineers are here), or synergy (the belief that the physical proximity to other tech firms may help your company. Only applicable to certain markets at best).

Ha, yeah this makes me laugh. Startups that run completely on virtual machines in the cloud and their mission is to disrupt industry X but all of this can only be done from an open plan office space in SOMA.

Oh the irony of Slack opening up a bunch of offices around the world.

Beautiful SOMA.. where your ultra expensive, tiny office comes complete with a group of crack heads sleeping in tents in front of your office doors. If you need some light pre-lunch entertainment watch them drunkenly shout profanities at each other, at you, or sometimes at the sky.

Even the crack heads in SF are high class though. Where else do you see homeless people sleeping in $250 REI tents?

> Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence.

Sorry, but this is flawed logic.

Tech, more than seemingly any other industry I can think of, has a winner-takes-all model of success. Given this, starting a tech company anywhere other than where the overwhelming majority of the most capable employees live is virtually suicide. And this seems to pan out in the data as well — Twitter, Square, Uber, Google, Facebook, Reddit, AirBnB, Apple, Oracle, Box, Palantir, Pinterest, Lyft, Stripe, CloudFlare… not that these are all of tech, but finding even a fraction of these anywhere (other than perhaps New York) is a stretch.

Given that, it's patently worth it to pay the extra cost per employee, when the relative value of each employee to the company ends up being so high compared to other industries.

This is not to say you can't build a strong tech company in other parts of the US, but you're stacking the odds against you by doing so.

You missed the point, parent commenter is saying that communication technology should enable you to build a successful tech company with a geographically distributed team.

Parent commenter claimed that "the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence". I argued against that, and in my opinion the available data appears to back me up on this.

Communication technology hasn't so far enabled, at least in the general case, geographically-distributed tech companies – otherwise we would be seeing an increasing trend of successful tech companies headquartered elsewhere. I don't think we are. Put another way, whatever advantage is conferred upon SF by physically housing an outsized share of tech workers is clearly giving it a competitive advantage that other locations have yet to overcome.

Yeah, my personal theory on this is that the short to medium term success of tech startups is mostly based on factors and advantages other than product quality and technical excellence.

Having a distributed tech team is not hard, but most startups aren't distributed because the VCs aren't distributed. They want face to face meetings.

Surely the fact that a huge portion of startups start in SF could account for the fact that a huge portion of winners came from SF? You're also biased because you're paying more attention to startups in SF - the Bay area doesn't even come up with half of the big startups, and yet you failed to name a single one from anywhere else.

A quick scan of Fortune's unicorn list* shows 12 out of the top 25 are from outside of California, and two of the Cali ones are LA, bringing SF down to 11 (after generously counting Palo Alto in SF, because I assume you meant the Bay Area). Without numbers on how many startups are started in various places, I'm not sure what these numbers mean, but it doesn't obviously favor your winner-takes-all argument.

* http://fortune.com/unicorns/

Of the top 25, only two American companies are not in the Bay Area, and one of those is still in California.

For an area with less than 2% of the country's population, that is overwhelmingly dominant. I'm not sure if you could have underscored my point any more succinctly.

Somehow you've managed to miscount the numbers, misrepresent your wrong numbers, and miss the point all at once.

The point is that you still have contributed no idea of what portion of startups are starting in SF. If 95% of startups come out of SF but only 80% of winners do, it still has an overwhelming majority but is by the numbers a terrible place to start a startup.

Of the top 25 international, only about half are American, so stop pretending the denominator is 25 if you've decided that international companies for some reason don't count. There are 2 in LA, one in Boston, and 1 in NYC (what list are you looking at?), giving the Bay Area something like 2/3 of American companies, and about 1/3 of all.

>or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere

If people really figure out how to consistently develop any kind of software remotely, with any team size and with average programmers, a lot of programming jobs will move away from high living cost areas, as happened with manufacturing jobs.

If you're in the US, where software developer salaries are much higher than most of the rest of the world (even on developed countries average programmers don't earn 6 figures), you'll be probably be on the losing side.

...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere.

This is a false alternative, since it's not something SF government can do.

The idea that in-fill development could have possibly made a drastic change in rents in San Francisco is genuinely crazy. I see people making that claim all the time, and it's madness, guys. Even if literally every density-increasing project was rubber-stamped with zero money or time cost, how many housing units do you think that this city could possibly have added in the last fifteen years?

Unless you're proposing eminent-domaining people out of their houses to be handed over to for-profit developers (and man, that's a mess, and it's still super-expensive), you aren't going to be replacing too many blocks of two-storey homes with high rises, and you're also quickly going to saturate the ability of local developers to build out giant skyscraper projects -- like, how much slack do you think that there possibly was in the construction industry?

And as soon as we step away from literally insane levels of accommodation to a pattern of in-fill development and recognize that, rightly or wrongly, in-fill development is not wildly popular and you can't just strong-arm an entire city into an unpopular policy, the realistic amount of new development that you could get in SF is, you know, maybe twice as much development as we actually did get.

Which might've shaved 5% off the rents or so.

The mayors office or some development chief said it would take 100K units to make a dent. That was late 2014 I think.

We all know those would be luxury units, but it would add 20K below-market, so there's that.

As always, I stand ready to let them bring a bulldozer to their favorite Mission block as long as I can bring one to Palo Alto and Atherton.

For some reason, people just see that as a cray-cray demand...

>The idea that in-fill development could have possibly made a drastic change in rents in San Francisco is genuinely crazy.

this meme has reached seattle as well.

In a system where it's easy to build new housing, you don't need eminent domain. The developer simply buys two-storey homes for much more than they're worth as houses.

You also don't need to limit yourself to the existing local developers with political connections. Construction workers from all over the world could move here, just like software people do.

It's not easy to buy up entire blocks of houses. You get hold-outs, either people who understand that they're in a position to block a potentially lucrative deal and get a big payout, or just people who have a sentimental attachment to their homes or whatever.

The idea that there's a lot of elasticity to the construction trade is also naïve. Construction workers from "all over the world" can't move here -- we have an immigration process, and it's not one that's favorable to construction workers. We are also in an area that is itself not very conducive to living on a construction worker's salary.

And also, who are these developers who are so eager to build high-rise housing in a market that is stipulated to have affordable rents? It's a big capital investment to build a modern skyscraper, especially if there's a construction crunch, especially if you have to do things like buy out large areas without the benefit of government coercion, especially if there are similar projects going up across the city to compete with you. Housing is not typically a highly profitable use of real estate to begin with, and San Francisco is also a city that is not very landlord friendly.

This dream of in-fill development being a simple cure-all to San Francisco's housing ills like most "one simple trick to fix all your problems" -- click bait, not a real solution.

None of this is to say that SF shouldn't have in-fill (it should), or that SF shouldn't reduce barriers to development (it should). But be realistic. Unless you rewrite everything about SF back 50 years, it's not going to dramatically change everything about this city overnight.

> Construction workers from "all over the world" can't move here -- we have an immigration process, and it's not one that's favorable to construction workers.

Process, shmawsess.

Look what actually happened during the real estate bubble years: a large number of laborers just simply came to California from foreign countries to build houses and condos.

A large number of these workers went to California when they felt like it and left when the bubble burst. The government was scarcely able to impose anything resembling a "process."

> it's not going to dramatically change everything about this city overnight.

Your post I responded to talked about 15 years, not overnight. I absolutely think SF could have been transformed with a different policy if starting in 2001.

Even without any immigrants, there are an enormous amount of construction workers among our 300 million US citizens.

The idea that it's so incredibly hard to build a lot of housing over 15 years is disproven by the many successful big cities that actually do it.

> This dream of in-fill development being a simple cure-all to San Francisco's housing ills

Again, nobody is talking about a simple cure-all in three easy $19.95 payments.

NYC adds more capacity in a year than SF adds in a decade.

You don't need eminent domain to build high rises. Developers can easily make very compelling offers to those currently in small houses to get them to move.

Well, NYC is also 10x bigger than SF.

This article http://newyorkyimby.com/2015/01/the-yimby-report-2014-adds-a... suggests that in 2014, NYC added 44.8k units and in 2013 it added 22.9k units -- call it an average of 34k units.

This article http://sf.curbed.com/2015/7/16/9939720/sf-is-set-to-add-more... suggests that SF is adding about 3.6k units per year right now.

And NYC is 10x the population of SF. So. Sounds like they're expanding at around the same rate. (NYC is only 6.2x the land area of SF).

I don't think it's crazy. There's already over 60,000 units in the development pipeline: http://www.socketsite.com/archives/2016/02/a-record-62000-un...

This timeline is measured in decades, but imagine if San Francisco was easier to get permits to build?

Large swaths of the city are built under their _currently allowed_ zoned height (there was a map that went around, I wish I could find it). Add a few stories to some existing buildings, build on empty/underutilized lots, reduce parking requirements, legalize in-law units, add in the affordable housing bonus program...you'd be talking about tens of thousands of units.

I do agree there is a strong argument that this wouldn't be enough (Bay Area-wide coordination is necessary), but it would slow the rate of increase. For example, after an apartment building boom, Seattle rents are now decreasing: http://cityobservatory.org/in-some-cities-the-housing-constr...

That's implausible: San Francisco is overbuilt to the extent that green areas are sparse, though those which exist are decent, rather than distributed throughout the city. That contrasts in the extreme with the other cities you mentioned, and matters to many people.

You don't need to build on any green areas to double the housing capacity of SF.

Compared to actual dense cities in the world, SF is nearly empty.

The majority of SF is two story suburbs (and as the song goes, they are made out of ticky-tacky). Height wise, it is underbuilt, and that's why SF has such a low population density despite every piece of land being covered in these rickety little bungalows. The bungalow owners fight tooth and nail against denser multistory construction because they realize that the housing crunch is the only possible way that their shacks can have such high prices.

SF has 1/4 of the population density of Manhattan, the city it is often compared to, and about 1/6 of the densest city in the world (Manila in the Philippines). I wonder where all those extra people are being put if SF has capped out?

> and rent in San Francisco would have remained very reasonable, despite the rapid economic growth.

Nah. Manhattan is a really, really expensive (not as expensive as SF, though, on the average) city to live in. SF rents would have dropped, but not enough to cover the influx of people coming in. Rent prices probably would've dropped in other areas of the Bay though.

Manhattan also has a lot more demand and benefits than SF.

NYC also offers plenty of compelling options in other boroughs that are simultaneously cheaper and more convenient than their SF equivalents.

If high-rise development solved the problem of high rents, then why is Manhatten so expensive?

Thought experiment: Let's say we do massive high density development in SF. A bunch of people move in, but now that SF is denser it's more desirable, so demand has increased as well, which drives rents right back up. Now we're stuck where we were before: high rents.

Having said that, I still support high density development because I think it leads to better living (and is better for the environment usually). I just am not optimistic that it will actually lower rents.

The trick isn't to simply build up SF. Build up Oakland. Build up San Jose- have you seen our downtown? Build up on the Peninsula- (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5032555). Build it up so the Bay becomes a true tri-city area, then a city of its own, from Santa Rosa to Hollister.

Manhattan has twice the people in half the space, and costs less.

Just imagine how ludicrous rents in Manhattan would be if the buildings were all 50% their current height.

Prices depend on two things: Supply and Demand.

When you ask why Manhattan is expensive even with increased supply, you ignore demand.

The theory that increased density in itself drives up the value of housing is popular among anti-housing activists. I've never heard an economist who believes it.

If true, it would be an incredibly simple way to generate enormous amounts of money to simply building super dense neighborhoods. Since I don't see anyone getting rich off that, I have strong doubts about that model.

Why would people move in just because you built a whole bunch of housing? There's an entire rust belt standing half-empty.

People don't move to where they can find expensive housing - people move to where they can find good jobs. Doubling SF housing wouldn't double the number of good jobs there.

Thought experiment: What do you think doubling the number of high paying jobs do to SF rent? Or, alternatively, halving the available housing?

Boston is not "just another city..." It is possibly the best educated metropolitan area in the world.

"Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, come out on top — attracting more than twice as many citations per paper as the global average."

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101020/full/467906a.html

Oh, but it's not the center for social/mobile/web companies so it isn't really tech that matters ;-)

> 20 years on, San Francisco could have become what New York City is today.

Hilarious. No. Absolutely not. To even compare the cities on this level is an insult to what New York is and how it came about.

San Francisco is a dinky little town compared to New York, the population is comfortably under a million people. It will take another hundred years of perfect planning and growth to catch up to where NYC is today.

Instead SF has chosen to make it's existing home owners and landlords very rich.

Democracy in action!

luckily, software doesn't need to be all in one area...

Why in God's name would San Francisco want to become New York?

I am a fan of neither, but they are completely different cities.

It's not enough to build housing. You also need infrastructure (roads, pipes, electricity, etc). You can't scale an already-built city like SF, also very prone to earthquakes, at this speed. Your proposal has no realistic basis.

Lots of naysayers on HN, but I left SF last year and moved to Austin. I have zero regrets.

In SF, my 1 bedroom, 650 square foot apartment in SOMA went from $2,600 to $3,200 over 3 years.

In Austin, my salary went down $10k to $120k/yr. My 2 bedroom, 1,100 square foot apartment is $1,150/mo.

The tech scene here isn't as vibrant as SF, but there's still plenty of great meet ups.

All in all, yes there are some things I miss about SF, but the benefit of having way more cash month to month outweigh the negatives.

Edit: Clarity.

Also no state income tax in TX, I believe.

Yup.

From Bankrate.com - Seven U.S. states currently don't have an income tax: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming. And residents of New Hampshire and Tennessee are also spared from handing over an extra chunk of their paycheck on April 15, though they do pay tax on dividends and income from investments.

It's similarly worth noting that CA has the highest income tax rates of any state in the nation for most individuals.

For instance, for incomes between around $51k and $263k the rate is 9.30%. My state's rate is 4.25%, which is closer to not having a tax at all.

As a guy from Europe I don't know much about the US tax system. If somebody mentions he earns $120k, I assume that's gross salary? What does he usually end up with net? From what I understand it depends on the state. Is that 4.25% you talk about the only tax there is?

There's also federal tax, which is around 25%. You then pay state tax on top. I moved to the US from the UK, and the total tax is roughly the same.

The major tax difference in the UK from my understanding is the 20% standard VAT, which is obviously much higher than any sales tax in the US.

Yes there's no VAT in the US but when you add up all the "soft taxes" - toll roads, hotel tax, unemployment tax(unique in that you pay tax on money have already paid tax on) not to mention the other quasi/hidden taxes and fees like the following: gas tax, cell phone tax, electricity and natural gas, cable tv and alcohol the lack of a VAT in the US doesn't account for much.

Please see the various links I found below, in case you're not aware of comparable taxes in the UK. In addition, my state doesn't have toll roads (only a few major bridges are tolled) or congestion charges like parts of London. Your point on unemployment tax is duly taken, however.

Gas tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax#United_Kingdom

EDIT: To put that into perspective, the tax in the UK of "£2.19 per U.S. gallon" is far more than a gallon of gas costs most Americans right now. In addition, there's a 20% VAT on the gas price AND the duty, so Britons are being taxed at 20% on that duty.

VAT applies to hotels: "The exceptions are the UK and Slovakia where VAT stands at 20% for all goods and services including hotel accommodation" (https://www.instituteofhospitality.org/Publications/Insight_...)

Toll roads: https://www.gov.uk/uk-toll-roads

Electricity tax on certain usage levels: "The Climate Change Levy is a p/kWh tax on certain electricity use. Exempt supplies include domestic supplies and supplies using less than the de minimis threshold of 1,000 kWh / month" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_billing_in_the_UK)

TV licencing fee that I seem to always hear British taxpayers complaining about: "Since 1 April 2010 the annual licence fee has been £145.50 for colour and £49.00 for black and white." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...)

Alcohol and tobacco taxes: https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-shopping/alcohol-tobacco

Well federal can be as high as 28%. The US likes to point at various "socialist" countries in Europe but when you talk to someone from the UK or some of the Nordic countries you realize the difference is nominal. The difference is that you get health care and affordable university for those taxes on the other side of the Atlantic.

paycheckcity.com calculates $120k pre tax as giving 85k in Texas or 74.8k in Calif after deductions.

Oh no. You have state tax, federal tax, FICA. Some places might also have a city tax as well(New York City), then you have sales tax. Then there all the other nickle and dime soft taxes that you are dinged with. The US pays insane taxes. This is a good resource if you are curious:

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/taxes/how-much-do-americans-...

No, it's not. Federal tax takes a big chunk and then there's paying in to things like medicare and social security. For example, I work in Los Angeles and make 100k pre-tax. Last year my net just over 65k.

4.25% in payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare), federal income taxes range based on how much you make and how big your family is. Large family making little, 0%; Single making $120k, your highest marginal rate is 28% but it will average out to an effective rate around 17% in my experience. State taxes range from 0% in Texas to what the other posts say about California.

Payroll taxes are 7.65% until social security cuts out, not 4.25%.

Taxes are roughly 50% for someone making 120k. Maybe closer to 45% when its all said and done. There's state income taxes, federal income, Medicare and social security, sales tax, property tax, real estate taxes, and then special taxes on stuff like gas, guns, phone bills, hotels and car rentals, airplane tickets, etc.

For all our complaints about how evil taxes are we sure have a whole lot of them!

If you are normal. If you're particularly rich then it'll be different because the majority of your assets aren't from income and there's all kinds of loopholes. If you're particularly poor taxes will be significantly lower but the threshold is pretty low... The poverty line for a family of 4 is shockingly low.

Gotta love New Hampshire. Also no sales tax, too. Property taxes are high, but not outrageously more so than in neighboring areas of Maine and Massachusetts - which additionally have sizable income taxes and sales taxes.

I saved nearly $500 a month in taxes moving from Maine to New Hampshire, staying in the same job.

Sorry if this is off-topic (and maybe a bit personal), but as a recent graduate, I'm not sure what I would do with all that extra money. What do you (or most people) generally spend it on? I make less than that, but if I didn't have student loans, I wouldn't know what to do with it besides leave it in the bank.

> leave it in the bank

cha-ching

That and invest.

I'm not the original poster, but I'll tell you what I've done in the past which has worked fairly well. I put as much as I'm allowed to into an IRA for retirement and into my spouse's IRA, too. I max out the matching amount on my 401k. (Those 2 things alone ensure that I'm putting away 10-15% for retirement.) I do some additional short to medium-term investment in the stock market. Nothing too risky, but enough to hopefully beat inflation.

I also bought a few expensive toys that I really wanted (nice high-end camera, for example) and take regular vacations to nice spots.

I started giving to charity, too. I also decided to do something closer to home and helped a relative with their student debt. I started taking some of the free time I have and that nice camera to do photography for a local charity.

If you're not already married, you should be using it to date. College is hands-down the best place to find a significant other. Once you've graduated, the social life you took for granted quickly fades away and finding people to spend time with and then actually spending time with them becomes vastly more difficult. If you're a cisgendered male, it can be absolutely brutal. Cisgendered female, much less so but still a problem. One of the few things that makes it easier is the willingness to be generous.

Leaving it in the bank is an excellent option. You've got two main things to save for, a down payment for a house and your wedding. Better still is a balanced and sane investment portfolio, but leaving it in the bank is better than a bad portfolio, so take some time to learn how investing works if you choose to go that route.

And if you're not cisgendered it can be even worse...

What are some smart dating strategies for a straight white male new grad in the Bay Area with 6 digits of disposable income? Dating market seems extremely competitive here.

> What are some smart dating strategies for a straight white male new grad in the Bay Area with 6 digits of disposable income?

Spend the money on a plane ticket to somewhere with women?

I wouldn't recommend this approach. A relationship is built out of time spent physically present with a person, trying to hack this by building a relationship with less time spent before marriage, or by substituting time spent in presence that is not physical, makes for a weak bond that will likely break after a few years of marriage, particularly if one or both of you have poor social skills.

I emphasize social skills because, like Vitamin D, the hacker lifestyle leads us to be deficient in such a vital resource. We should be supplementing our lifestyle with lots of activities that force us to interact with other people in ways we're not used to. I've been going to the same bar for the last 8 years. It's often painful, I still don't really fit in, but it's been crucial for helping me develop my sense of self.

Another good place to frequent is coffee shops, but good neighborhood coffee shops are quite rare. Starbucks doesn't really do the trick, something about the atmosphere discourages the kinds of spontaneous casual community that you really need to develop social skills.

This is a funny comment, but it's also better advice than it might seem, for reasons Jon Birger describes in Date-onomics: http://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/19/briefly-noted-date-onomics...

As programmers, keepers of the dark arts -- like the monks of the mountains -- we're expected to lead a celibate life.

</sarcasm>

In a competitive market, customers become discerning. This means you have to put more time and effort into marketing, R&D and UX testing.

Luckily for the intrepid, giving the market something it hasn't seen yet isn't terribly difficult.

Develop some social skills. Best place to do this is a bar. As you get good it can double as your dating pool.

As long as it is obvious to females that you are straight then dating in the bay is easy. Easier than a lot of other places.

Hit the gym and go to shows.

What kind of shows?

The kind people go to. It doesn't matter. Whatever you like. Or if you don't like that then just walk around the downtown areas of any of the bay cities. Hang out at sidewalk cafes. Go to farmers markets.

Invest it or save it and avoid debt. You will thank yourself later. If it makes sense to, consider buying a primary residence, but don't spend too much on a car, or eating out, or anything like that. Make sure you have some nice toys and are generally not wanting, but also make sure to max out your 401k and then some.

Give it time, you'll manage to think of something.

Save/invest the money so that one day you won't have to work anymore and can do the things that you would do if you didn't have to make a living.

It's really easy to spend more money if you have it.

If you don't want to think too much about investing, you could invest in a target retirement date fund, e.g. VTTSX (2060)[0], and let it grow for a few decades.

[0] https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundIntExt=I...

Save, travel, and go on dates!

Tesla, Oculus Rift, gaming rigs, comic books. Dating too, I guess.

This. Get a Tesla! And travel...

$18,000 per year in your 401k, $5500 in an IRA, $3350 in an HSA. That's $26,850 right off the bat. All tax free. Then max out your student loans and save up for the down payment on a house. Then date and find a spouse with a similar mindset about money. You'll be able to retire (literally never do work you don't want to do ever again) in 15-20 years easily if you keep your spending under control.

If you max out your 401k contribution ($18,000 if you're under 50) you can also contribute to an IRA (Roth or traditional) but your contribution will not reduce your taxable income.

The two aren't related. If you max out a traditional 401k and your income is low enough that you can take the traditional IRA deduction as well. Though that deduction phases out by $71k/year, which in our field is relatively low.

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

Thought that might be interesting, it was to me (came upon it on HN).

I save it, I don't want to work in an office for the rest of my life! Great opportunity to max out your 401(k) and Roth IRA.

You save and invest.

> Sorry if this is off-topic (and maybe a bit personal), but as a recent graduate, I'm not sure what I would do with all that extra money. What do you (or most people) generally spend it on? I make less than that, but if I didn't have student loans, I wouldn't know what to do with it besides leave it in the bank.

Saving it (in an index fund rather than a bank) is an excellent thing to do with it. Keep living like a college student (or even a fair bit better than that), and save the rest, and you'll be able to retire in your mid-to-late 30s.

Resist the inclination to expand your expenses to match your income; it doesn't actually make you any happier, long-term. (Many different studies have confirmed this: increasing your level of spending tends to give you a short-term burst of happiness followed by a return to the baseline; it doesn't permanently raise your baseline.)

You don't necessarily have to retire early. If you prefer, keep working past that point as long as you're enjoying yourself. You'll be able to have a lot more flexibility in your work, and later in your career you'll be well into the territory of "start your own charitable foundation" or "don't bother raising a series A".

I guess the argument against your move would be potential future earnings. If you top out at your current salary, you made the right choice. But if you continue on an upward trajectory, what do you think the top money (as an employee) could possibly be in Austin? Now compare that to the Bay. I'd guess it's not even close, no?

Would the potential future earnings be sufficient to purchase a home in SF? That's comparable to what he or she could get in Austin?

It matters on when. Austin is one of the fastest growing cities in the US for this exact reason. Its having a HUGE impact on the price of housing. What I bought in 2009 is now worth double (good for me, bad for new buyers).

We have shit transportation infrastructure & the housing market is (for us) insane.

All this Austin talk...seriously, the tech scene in Texas has moved on to Dallas...the actual highest growth city in the U.S. Many people from Austin have already come here.

In what part of town did you find a 2br for $1,150?

I'm in the process of moving to Sacramento from San Jose. My wife and I sat down and looked at what made us happy and we decided that living in Silicon Valley was not high on our list.

I'm tired of the costs and crowding. The cost of living is about 30% lower and housing is significantly lower.

I'm managing my career by working for a San Francisco company and working remotely. I'll commute in once a week, which is still less commuting than I was doing in the bay area. I'll have a house instead of a condo. I'll have a nicer/larger place. I'll have plenty of things to do (though things still close early). I'll be closer to my family. I'll be able to support my wife when she goes back to school.

I'm looking forward to it.

Plus, your proximity to Tahoe skiing is to die for!

Just curious: How did you manage to transfer your Bay Area salary to Austin? I would imagine that $120K is a ridiculous amount there. How did you even ask for it with a straight face? Are you making 2X all of your co-workers or something?

HIRED indicates it's not unreasonable at all: http://get.hired.com/rs/348-IPO-044/images/Hired-State-of-Sa...

Wow, I stand corrected. Maybe I need to start looking at Austin...

I work in Austin, and can confirm that $120k is not ridiculous.

That's very interesting. Thanks for posting that.

I'm in Dallas and I just hired multiple people at around 120k each. 120k is very reasonable here. 60k is entry level here...you might be able to get away with 50... 200k+ isn't uncommon either. There is a stupid amount of money here in tech... Not as much VC money, but startups and small businesses actually making rev. (Not social 'pre revenue' apps made by kids) thrive here.

Plus you don't have state taxes in Texas. I don't know if Austin has city tax but I doubt it.

Where did you move to in Austin with 1,100 square foot for $1,150 / month?

I am in downtown Austin. My rent is just shy of double that and I only have a 500 or so square foot apartment. I have a hard time believing you moved to something comparable to SOMA.

I'm going to guess you live either more North or South of downtown and have to commute if you work or want to get downtown. Which I think many would agree is not even close to comparable of living in SOMA. Also, if memory serves BART is far superior and actually a legitimate means of transportation. Our transportation situation here in Austin is a bit of a joke unless you live directly downtown.

Not the OP, but I live less than four miles north of downtown Austin and my rent is $800. I have two roommates and we have a 2000 square feet backyard. I wake up every morning to bird's chirping outside my window. It's amazing.

4 miles North is definitely not downtown Austin and to me might as well be in Oklahoma, haha. I enjoy being directly in the middle of everything, not having to commute, and no car. I'd much rather pay double, live in a smaller area, in the middle of everything. The last thing I want is a yard, again. Different strokes or something like that, right?

You should come visit Dallas. The tech scene has blown up here, I'd say bigger than Austin now.

I live in a high rise in SF and pay $4400 for a one bedroom. Although it sounds expensive but it's like $800 more than the least expensive place we could find near this place but it's a well built apartment with lots of amenities.

I thought about moving out of SF but I don't have any social connection outside of San Francisco. Plus weather is very nice here and there are lots of diverse cultural events happening in San Francisco. Add very thick job market on top of it. I was able to interview 50 companies when I was looking for a new job.

I'm saying I, as a case study is paying this rent because of reasons and I'm well aware how much more it is compared to other cities. There are 600 apartments in this high rise and out unit is one of cheapest ones. Most of units are having residents, so there are people who pay those rents.

I don't know why I'm getting downvoted! Don't you want to hear WHY people paying those rents or you want to believe everybody paying those rents are just plain stupid?!

Markets are smart!

You shouldn't be getting downvoted because it's interesting to hear from someone paying relatively high rent. I'm in a similar situation in that I live somewhere where buying a place is out of reach, but I have too much attachment to the area to go live somewhere cheaper.

Up-voted, Are average SF rents that high? Boston is probably less than half that cost, with salaries comparable to the west coast and similar cultural events and excellent public and private schools. Weather is not that great though. Genuinely asking - So what makes SF so worth it, that it justifies its high cost of living? in comparison to other top class states, is it just the weather?

jobs. You can be a half-assed engineer here and be employed; if you're good, you have dozens of choices of place to work. Whenever I ponder leaving (and I'm a data scientist, so more specialized) I look around at cities like Salt Lake or Denver or other places close to good skiing and see like 3 employers. Total. What happens if I don't like my job / my boss changes / whatever? I'd probably have to move. It's just a ton of risk for the employee.

And not just jobs, but other people who do the same thing that you can learn from. And full stack: from the people building javascript libs to new programming languages (swift, rust) to chips (Apple, Intel, hardware startups), etc.

Proximity to the outdoors. If you want great surfing, hiking, skiing (well, ex the drought years), climbing, camping, etc -- it's here. And the state is dry, so no mosquitos or flies. ie it's much more enjoyable to be outside than in the midwest. It's fun to be outside 340+ days/year.

Non-competes are invalid by state law. And this isn't a theoretical problem; I had a job offer withdrawn in NY because the new employer's counsel determined they were covered by then-current employers non-compete contract and they didn't want the hassle.

People who view quitting their jobs and starting companies as merely modestly crazy/risky, instead of something only a lunatic would do.

Oh, and as for your average rents: yes. You can get cheaper rents, but at the price of shitty public transport, a terrible commute, and a lack of local services where you live. Which is particularly punishing if you don't own a car. sf as a city is run by worthless idiots who decided to play city, so big pieces of it have terrible (unreliable, slow, unsafe, etc) public transport (yet it manages to be some of the most expensive transit in the nation as the cherry on top). Plus there are 3 public transport systems that essentially were built independently and operate without any coordination, two of which only serve pieces of the city (muni, bart, caltrain). And until the age of uber a taxi system that specialized in shitting on their customers. Because where, besides sf, would a taxi that actually comes be worth paying a 50% premium ala uber when it debuted? So yeah, wildly incompetent city government.

thanks but I find none of those unique to SF, you can get the same in other top cities. I don't know about Denver but in Boston/NY you have tons of good job opportunities, excellent engineering and scientific community with top firms/startups and excellent eng, business, and med schools. Close proximity to outdoors (New Hamshire, Maine).

No doubt there are more startups/jobs in SF but at the same time it seems that its very exaggerated.

I don't know about Boston, but Maine is not in any sense close to nyc. I think the difference is distance. In sf, world class skiing is 3 hours away; the beach is 20 minutes in much of the city; great hiking is across the bridge in Marin or south along 1, well under an hour away. It's not a trip; enjoying the outdoors takes an afternoon. I have an acquaintance who works near the presidio and surfs over lunch. When I lived in Manhattan, you could definitely get to the outdoors, but it wasn't anything like this close.

As for jobs, I disagree. see eg:

machine learning, nyc: 1 responsive ad (plus ads for jobs in sfbay, nonresponsive android stuff) http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/sof?query=machine+learn...

same search, sf: 10-15? http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof?query=machine+learnin...

indeed has similar ratios.

As for jobs in general, if you're a good js or rails engineer with a reasonable network of friends / former coworkers, starting now at 6pm Tuesday night you could have interviews on Friday, maybe even on Thursday. And start a new job next week. I believe there's a qualitative difference.

How many jobs if I'm getting close to 50? :-)

on the peninsula, plenty; in sf, work for a larger company or at least not for yc-aged / early 20s founders and you'll do ok

my oldest coworker, and this was at a < 10 person startup, was not a founder and was a line level search engineer and over 65.

You should check out Boston. Tons of tech jobs and way closer to skiing. When I studied in Cambridge we were only 2 hours away from skiing at Waterville, door to door even on weekends with "thick" traffic. There's a reason so many skiers are "Massholes." That quick jaunt up I-93 is fantastic.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Harvard+University,+Cambridg...

Also my dorm in Boston to Sunday River which is a huge ski area in upper Maine was just about 3 hours.

If techies are pushing away others from San Francisco, then why they do not elect better city government that would fix things for them?

The answer is a small book, but

1 - there aren't that many techies in sf;

2 - many people don't vote;

3 - sf has a huge set of entrenched laws that would have to be overthrown, plus relatively dysfunctional state government (see, eg, proposition system)

4 - some of this genuinely isn't sf's fault, but rather the entire peninsula dumping their housing problems on sf and san jose. See eg mountain view approving 2-3 million ft2 of new office space and maybe potentially possibly pondering allowing a couple thousand new homes. They're gonna study it. And then there's environmental review. Ground will not be broken before 2025 is my guess. Meanwhile, where the hell are all those employees gonna live? Not in mv.

5 - sf is a spendthrift city, and it needs techies. Besides all the jobs supported indirectly, sf has a 1.4% payroll tax (well, it's complicated, but 1.1 - 1.4%).

> some of this genuinely isn't sf's fault, but rather the entire peninsula dumping their housing problems on sf and san jose.

Many more people commute into SF than out of it, about 150K net daily: http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/commute-patterns.

I think you greatly exaggerate the health of the SF tech job market, but no matter how good or bad it is, I agree that it's consistently 3-5X better than the rest of the country. That's essentially why I increased my cost of living by about 4X moving here from Florida. Here, if you lose your job, at least you have a chance of finding something else. In most of the USA, if you lose your job, you're moving your family to another state or at least another town.

Thing is, salaries aren't comparable. My first job out in the bay area paid almost twice what I was offered by companies in the Metro Boston area.

Tech companies in downtown, cambridge pay pretty well. If your talking about metro west then I'm not sure. Twice would be too much, I highly doubt bay area pays 200k base on average.

Well, all I can really say is that among my friends who I've spoken with about this, those of us out in the bay area are making (including stock and bonuses) about 40% more than those who work in tech in metro Boston. It's more than enough to compensate for the higher cost of living.

That is a bit surprising. I think I have an expensive Condo in San Diego, and your rent on a one bedroom is still $1400 more than my 2 bedroom condo off of Balboa Park, 2 minutes from Downtown and 10 minutes from the beach.

Location is everything. Where you live is the 'outskirts' compared to where they are..

Why not move to oakland or similar? Rent is like half in the nice areas, and even less in the not so nice areas.

Life's too short to spend any more of it in Oakland than necessary.

Your comment is rude, unnecessary, and funny.

Yes, keep up the propaganda! It keeps Rockridge nice and pleasant for the rest of us!

Because I don't want to commute. 2 hours a day worths more than $2000/mo to me. -----

It's more like 1 hr a day on a train if you're close to a bart station. It's closer than living in the sunset for most jobs!

> It's more like 1 hr a day on a train if you're close to a bart station.

My commute currently takes 4 minutes. Any longer than 10 and I'd start searching for a closer place to live

A quick search suggests that the closest home for sale near our corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley would be a 16-24 minute commute, list price $1M. Or 25-40 minutes for $600k.

Assuming you commute 5 days a week, twice a day, multiply your commute by 10 to get the time per week, or ~480 to get the time per year. A one hour commute is 480 hours a year, or 20 full days (or 80 8-hour periods).

Proper mindset

You can always drink on the ferries.

Totally offtopic: most appropriate comment considering your handle.

Why do tech people insist on living in luxury, brand-new hotels err high rise buildings in SF? Do they think that's what it is to "make it?" There are much, much nicer places to live in SF rather than SOMA or Market St. Most of the city doesn't live there; you should branch out and see more of the city rather than just living super close to work.

Crazy to think, but these other neighborhoods are nicer and cheaper to live in. Don't fall prey to paying the "tech tax" of SOMA.

I pay about that for rent - it's the most I've ever paid for housing by a long shot, and it regularly freaks me out. I just can't get used to it. The thing that gets me is that I'm barely paying the property taxes on the place I rent. The landlord isn't gouging me.

It's just the way it is here. Housing is so expensive because everyone wants to be here, and for good reason. This is the most thriving technical community in the entire world. We live different lifestyles as a result. It's not better or worse, just different.

It seems like there are a fair amount of people who come for 2-3 years and then go back to wherever it is that they came from, but I think the amount of people who actually leave the bay area for tech jobs in Seattle/Portland/LA is pretty slim. I'm sure it happens, but if there's an exodus happening I for one am completely unaware of it.

Really - "This is the most thriving technical community in the entire world"? I'm calling BS. Have you been to New York City recently? Rents for a 1 bedroom are nowhere near that. Lets talk about that community - there are meetups? Wow. You can go to a meetup on any night of the week in New York or Austin. Besides that explain "the community"? Oh you go out and drink craft beers after work? You can do that anywhere.

Whats this different lifestyle of which you speak? Dodging panhandlers on Market Street? Stepping over human excrement? Using Uber b/c the city in which you have chosen to piss away your money doesn't provide decent mass transit for most?

People like you perpetuate some myth that you have to pay $4500 a month if you want to work in tech. Nonsense.

I live in SF and 100% agree with you. There's nothing in SF that you can't find in some other place. I do like living here, but I don't see myself living here longer than a few years.

If I had to start my own tech company, I would probably have the exec team here (because of VCs, really, that's the only reason, not a "tech thriving community") and build my team in EU, maybe Berlin.

We're currently hiring at my job and it's getting harder and harder to get high quality candidates.

Maybe build your hypothetical tech team in Montreal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11424876

Perhaps if you are an engineer this perspective entirely makes sense, but if you're an investor, entrepreneur, or in any other occupation where 'the ecosystem' matters, you'll find that nothing compares to the Bay Area.

This isn't about going to a meetup or going out for craft beer, it's about access to resources behind closed (unlocked) doors.

But listen, I used to live in New York and there's a lot there too – just less, and a different vibe. The decision between living in New York or San Francisco should really come down to your particular interests.

I totally agree with this sentiment. This is what I am debating now. I do think that San Fran area can do better by at least making the surrounding areas AMAZING rather than trying to make San Francisco proper happen now. I think working around the initial problem could end up having a positive effect on San Francisco proper. Smaller towns and suburbs should be easier to upgrade than a larger one.

The hope implicit in this conversation is that founders and funders might hear the disgruntlement of the engineers, and send some of their money and efforts to other cities, to do a little to grow an ecosystem elsewhere. It's a vain hope dependent on deaf ears, as much as the "build, baby, build!" plea to zoning boards or "stop grifting your tenants" to landlords, but it still needs to be made. Someone's gotta give, and it can't just always be the tech workers and aspirant homebuyers and renters and all those with less power in these asymmetrical relationships.

> People like you perpetuate some myth that you have to pay $4500 a month if you want to work in tech. Nonsense.

This is a little harsh and I doubt what the OP was saying. If someone interprets it like you suggested that is their problem. I don't see the implication that you NEED to live in SV to work in tech.

I don't think anyone claims that you can't find thriving tech communities outside of SV, but the reality that OP put forth is undeniably true. SV is where the most money is. SV is where most of the talent goes. SV churns out its own home grown talent through 2 of the best schools in the world. Did the automative industry all move to NY & Austin? No. They moved to SV (not exclusively, but I'm sure you've seen the map of automative companies moving in to SV).

Hollywood isn't the only place you can make movies and SV isn't the only place you can make software or start software based companies... but how are you going to deny that they are the most thriving communities in the world respectively?

That is what the OP said. I was quoting him. Where is the harshness?

Really the auto industry moved to SV? I'm pretty sure they are all in Detroit still, but I guess that doesn't count because its not Tesla? Who I don't believe moved there but actually started there.

Funny that you should mention Hollywood because Hollywood isn't thriving in Los Angeles, California any more and hasn't for some time. Hollywood is in Vancouver, New Orleans, and Atlanta now. So much so that there's a push in Sacramento to try to get it back.

Also interesting that you bring up "the most money" as testament to how much its thriving. You need to get paid a much higher salary in order to live in a place that is "thriving" and as a result are able to take home and substantially less.

Incidentally salaries in NYC are on par with those in SV and the rent is significantly cheaper.

Yeah, exactly to your point, Cadillac _did_ just move to Manhattan.

I don't agree with the amount of vitriol in your comment, but I agree with the overall sentiment.

I feel like tech workers in San Francisco are fully bought-in to the "this is the best and only place to be if you're in tech" idea. So much so that they can't quite see that the grass is just as green on the other side, so to speak. You have to be fully bought-in to it, there's no other way you would be able to justify the cost of living there.

I'm curious about the different lifestyles- I live in Seattle and there's startups and meetups and hacker spaces all over the damn place, with decent public transportation, awesome coffee and beer and restaurants and anything else you could want. Maybe not as many conferences, but they're a quick flight away if you really want to go.

I'm curious if you've lived in the Bay Area for any length of time.

I used to live in Boston (which at the time was the #2 tech scene in the country, but has probably been eclipsed by Seattle/NYC/Austin by now). There were startups and meetups and hacker spaces as well, including a number of famous ones.

The Bay Area is a huge difference in degree. The difference is that you had to find the "tech scene" in Boston, while in Silicon Valley, tech is the scene. If you go out for coffee, nearly everybody in the coffeeshop will be working on some tech startup. If you sit down at a restaurant, there's a good chance that the table next to you will have a group of engineers from some large tech company, or an investor being pitched by an entrepreneur, or a group of friends planning a startup. If you go to a random party - even ones thrown by non-techies - half the people there will work in tech.

> "in Silicon Valley, tech is the scene. If you go out for coffee, nearly everybody in the coffeeshop will be working on some tech startup. If you sit down at a restaurant, there's a good chance that the table next to you will have a group of engineers from some large tech company, or an investor being pitched by an entrepreneur, or a group of friends planning a startup. If you go to a random party - even ones thrown by non-techies - half the people there will work in tech."

Half sounds like an underestimate, probably more like 80%.

All of the above is why I left the Bay Area. I love tech, but geez. It's like loving chocolate and living in a chocolate house eating chocolate for every meal. I got about 6 months into that before a switch flipped and it became the most aggravating, insufferable thing ever.

but is it a good thing? even if you're an engineer.

Its a good thing if you are a well rounded human being and an engineer. There is no shortage of opportunities for an engineer in NYC - Google, Facebook, Spotify, Twitter, Etsy, Thoughtworks, Pivotal Labs and on and on on. Yes, you can be an engineer and meet people who do other things with their professional lives.

Oh, I wasn't talking about NYC. It was regarding 'tech is the scene' description. Sounds like a hell and I'm an engineer.

I did it for two years; it became my own little personal idea of hell. Never going back.

Ha. Yeah. I went to a tech talk that an ex-Tumblr engineer gave, he left New York and Tumblr for a job in SV with Facebook. He was talking about his new home and said something to the effect that "it was really strange to be in line at the grocery store and here the people in back of him talking about Redis." Ha ha ha.

"while in Silicon Valley, tech is the scene." Yes that about sums up a monoculture for me.

Contrast this with a city like New York where you also have publishing, finance, advertising as well as solid tech.

> If you go out for coffee, nearly everybody in the coffeeshop will be working on some tech startup. If you sit down at a restaurant, there's a good chance that the table next to you will have a group of engineers from some large tech company, or an investor being pitched by an entrepreneur, or a group of friends planning a startup. If you go to a random party - even ones thrown by non-techies - half the people there will work in tech.

What you describe is an unbearable nightmare.

Depends who you are and what you want, like most things in life.

It was great for my first couple years here, when I really wanted to go deep into the field and learn all I could. I had my "become a well-rounded person" phase in college, so by my 20s I was happy to specialize deeply. It was less great for years 3-5, when I ended up meeting and marrying a non-techie. It's been good again for me now, founding a startup, because of the huge number of potential customers everywhere. There's a huge difference between an abundance mentality vs. a scarcity mentality that having a large number of customers/employees/investors nearby creates.

>I feel like tech workers in San Francisco are fully bought-in to the "this is the best and only place to be if you're in tech" idea. So much so that they can't quite see that the grass is just as green on the other side, so to speak. You have to be fully bought-in to it, there's no other way you would be able to justify the cost of living there.

man, it is freedom. Freedom of employment in this case. At any moment i can leave current employer and get another job. I'm not afraid about layoffs or pissing off my manager. Until you taste the freedom, it is hard to explain it. The same way like explaining general freedom that we still have some amount of here in the US to the people back in my old country.

>not afraid ... pissing off my manager.

to make clear closely related point - being free from fear makes for better employees than otherwise as such employees have an option of calling waste/stupidity/etc when they see it.

How free it is depends on the times. In 2000, the dot-com bubble collapsed. This spilled over a little into Fortune 500 companies, but not as much as it affected startups and tech companies. I left my dot-com in New York and went to work at an investment bank. A lot of people I know in the Bay area were in tougher straits - some who had moved there left. Sometimes there are advantages to a city being dependent on one industry, sometimes there are disadvantages.

Vitriol really? Because I said "BS"? It certainly wasn't meant to be vitriolic, I didn't think there was anything abusive in my post. Exasperation? Yes. Cynicism. Ditto.

Well... the poster suggesting your vitriol does go by the name "Tranquil".

If you must know, dismissive phrases such as, "people like you", isn't a mature way to strengthen a counter argument.

Funny. Fair enough. I could have articulated that better. To the OP, I'm sorry it wasn't meant to be mean.

Funny. Fair enough. I could have articulated that better. To the OP I apologize, it wasn't meant to be mean.

I live in oakland, which is like living in beacon hill in seattle if your commute was driving to microsoft. Rent for me is only a few hundred dollars a month more, and I get paid better in the bay then I would working in seattle. You can also get 1 bedroom apartments close to palo alto caltrain for about $2500, which is a fairly premium place to live. There are many places in the bay area where the rent isn't $4500 for a 1 bedroom, and your a fool if you go rent those places.

The price for newcomers is far higher than the price for people who lived here 5 years ago.

I lived in NYC and frequented it's tech scene for about a year, ending mid-2013. Unless it's more-or-less quintupled in the last three years, there's no comparison.

The first python meetup I went to in SF (back in 2013) had 300 spots and a waitlist that I doubt got cleared. The NYC meetups I went to managed maybe 80 RSVPs and a couple dozen who actually showed up.

Once you get to anything more specialized than a programming language meetup, it's basically non-existent anywhere else in the country, but the bay area will still manage an active user group.

I really wish this weren't the case, and I really resisted moving here. I had every expectation I'd hate it and the city has more than lived down to expectations (easily higher rent and worse crime than NYC - or least the tech enclaves of NYC where I spent my time - by healthy margins). It is absurd and frankly unjustifiable how densely tech is concentrated here. But that it is so isn't really debatable.

So a meetup with 24 new people to network with wasn't enough for you? It's better to have meetup that you can't attend because there's a waitlist? How is that better?

So far all I hear is density. Is density of tech workers the arbiter by which you just how good a "scene", I will take quality any day. Are all of them awesome, engaging, friendly and social and supportive?

I did make the Python meetup and several since; it's not like the waitlist was thousands long. It was just longer than what I gauged as the no-show rate.

The Python meetup was striking to me because it was closer to the scale of a PyCon than any meetup I'd seen. The actual meetup I attend more often is SFPUG, the local PostgreSQL group, which is more in the neighborhood of 20-40 attendees, once or twice a month. In NYC, if there is an active group around the particular corner of tech you inhabit, you're lucky to get decent meetup a quarter.

And quality is what pushed me to move here, despite my expectations, in the first place. Simply put, all of the very best developers I knew from my hometown (in Charlotte, before my stint in New York) had moved here. There were two in particular I'll always owe for having opened my eyes to how little I knew; I work maybe eight blocks away from one of them, the other I ran into out-of-the-blue at the aforementioned Python meetup, three days after I landed at SFO.

I've been working with people who make me very aware that I'm not the smartest person in the room (by their expertise, not their attitudes) for 30 months now. I do hate to say this, but it is why I didn't stick around in the end - in NYC, I really, really missed that.

"This is the most thriving technical community in the entire world"?

Together with SV and the rest of the Bay Area, yes. You really can't compare the sheer size (multiplied by grey matter density) with any other place in the world.

Congrats on your meetups.

What we do here is not go to meetups because you don't have to. Another commenter captured it better than I can. It's everywhere. It's just a huge sense of excitement. It's the jobs, the energy.

I don't live in SF, I live on the Peninsula. I don't go to meetups or bars or participate in "the scene". I just live my life, but I'm surrounded by tech and I love it. I first started working in tech in Seattle and moved to the Bay Area a dozen years ago, and I just love it. shrug

If it doesn't work for you, fine, don't live here. I'm quite happy. I find pay scales with costs. For a working-from-an-office job, I'm able to pay the bills and the mortgage and save up faster than I think I could anywhere else. Obviously you can always find an employer and then swing some deal where they let you live in Kansas and keep the same pay and hope you never lose your job, but in terms of the average in-person office jobs, I think it can't be beat.

You hear people outside major tech areas saying things like "man, I could never afford to live there." You know what you never hear people in high cost of living areas say? "Man, I can't afford to get out."

You can always afford to get out, but you might not be able to afford to get back in. I'm not on a Mr Money Moustache plan to retire at age 23, but I think the economics basically work.

You quoted just a piece of it.

> This is the most thriving technical community in the entire world. We live different lifestyles as a result. It's not better or worse, just different.

I've been all over, including New York. I didn't appreciate Silicon Valley for what it is until I moved here.

Do you have to pay that kind of money to work in tech? Not at all. You don't even have to pay that kind of money to work in tech in the bay area. There are plenty of commuting options and there are plenty of tech communities all over the US.

What's different? I would counter with What's not different? I've been here a year and I have had conversations with founders of Netflix, Instagram, Uber, GreatSchools, and twenty others that you probably haven't heard of. I also met one of the guys who invented ethernet. I'm not particularly social or particularly important. In southern CA, I was isolated - I had a few friends who really understood what I did for work. Here, most people I meet do. I went to a small conference a few weeks ago and had engineers from Adobe sit with me until I had a working implementation of software that included their CreativeSDK. I have never had that kind of experience at a conference. My elementary school kids have a maker studio at their school where they have 3d printers, programmable robots, sewing machines, and all kinds of other cool things. My middle school kid has photoshop and web design classes as part of her curriculum. They have carts full of laptops, iPads, etc. that they pull into classrooms as needed, and other classrooms that are completely teched out. There are plenty of downsides that go with all the great things. I have to think three times about whether I take my family out for dinner because the cost of eating out is like the cost of housing - it just doesn't make sense to me. There are communities of people nearby who live out of motor homes parked on the street. There are dangerous areas that you have to watch out for. On a given day driving the kids through Golden Gate Park might result in running into a pack of naked bike riders. I have to warn all the out of town visitors about the tenderloin.

It's not better. It's different. Just like NY is different. You can live there for years without needing a car. You can see the best shows with the best artists. I imagine living there you meet all kinds of interesting people. But as far as tech community goes, nothing compares to Silicon Valley.

I choose to pay more in rent because it gives my family access to great schools, it means that I don't lose family time to driving time and it means I can participate in what's going on locally, which is usually pretty awesome. It's a premium, but for me and my family I just wouldn't be able to make it work adding in a big commute. For many people it doesn't make sense.

I could have a bigger house and less financial pressure living just about anywhere else. I made more money outside the bay area. But here I'm with my people and while I used to love my kids' old schools, the ones I have access to now are a world apart. Up until I moved here, I didn't even know there was a community of "my people".

Silicon Valley schools seem to be a particular type of pressure cooker for certain types of kids. Do you notice/worry about this at all? The same could be said of high performing schools in other areas of the country too I guess, but there is just so much energy and ambition in the Bay Area, sometimes it seems to be one notch up on the intensity scale than anywhere else.

I do. The CDC came out to the High School because the suicide rate was so high.

As a parent, I have decided to completely pull back academic pressure. In fact, I regularly talk to my kids about the fact that it's OK to not be academic superstars. They are thriving at this level, but I won't hesitate to move if it changes once we get to high school. I want my kids to have opportunities I didn't. It's not so important that I'm willing to risk their health or happiness.

Our school district has a policy against too much homework, but that goes away with honors level high school classes. I was very surprised at their lack of homework compared to what we are used to, but oddly enough it's making for happier kids that are doing about the same as far as learning and retention. I have good kids though - and it's not a parenting thing. They are just better at being good kids than I ever was.

Rents are where they are because of state and local governmental policy. I beg you to go out and find a real estate investor to talk to.

In any city in the world with a functioning open market for land use, there are compelling profit opportunities in high-density high-rises, economy box living pods with beige walls, high-end glass condos with verandahs, and everything in between.

Prices do not have to do with the Bay Area's beauty. The draw is economic. And if policies do not moderate, it is a draw which can go away as quickly as it arrived.

The prices are directly a result of the Bay Area's beauty. The whole reason the prices are so high is that the city has been absolute in its refusal to let people build giant hideous skyscrapers that would block the view of the bay. Those same ugly monstrosities would provide hundreds of apartments and dig the city out of its ridiculous housing shortage.

Rents are high because demand is high and supply is low. Demand is high because there are lots of jobs there. Supply is low because the city refuses to allow high density development. It's a great deal for the people who already own homes and are planning to move out. They can sell their homes for a fortune and live like a king somewhere else.

I don't know how true this is. Have you seen the amount of new construction going on in SF? Soma, Mission Bay, Indian Basin, thats all new. I doubt it's going to drive rents down in any way however.

Really? It doesn't have anything to do with an industry that recently moved in and started shovelling money around like it came out of the back end of a barnyard animal?

This is the result of people trying to get rich quick by simply having stuff rather than producing and maintaining stuff. I don't know what the answer is. I do think that San Francisco is poorly planned out based on my observations last year when I visited to see if I could live there. There is no mass transit system on the scale of NYC or one that's even trying to be. Everything seems really spread out. I felt like you needed a car to really be able to adequately take advantage of the area. I'm not really a fan of expensive rents and car culture. I also noticed people cheering when Twitter announced layoffs. I didn't leave with the impression the community had adequately benefited from the tech industry being in the area. The people I spoke with felt that the tech industry takes away but doesn't give back to the community.

A car won't help you much in SF. You can get to where you want to go, but not park there. People end up using Uber.

Coming from LA, whenever I visit SF I always use transit. With Google Maps on phone it works amazingly well, comparably to NYC MTA. I don't miss my car in SF at all.

Portland resident here. What this article doesn't cover, is now locals are victim of gentrification. Rent prices are almost 2x, out of state buyers are throwing all cash offers on houses, and overall housing supply is low... I'm sure the commercial market is just as bad.

Interesting times.

Having grown up in Portland, it's remarkable how quickly the housing prices have skyrocketed in less than 5 years.

When did San Francisco become the hot property? I know that the last time I was out there, about 2005, tech was still in the valley and SF proper was relatively low rent, bad neighborhoods, and no tech presence.

Does this industry (to the extent that you can call AirBNB, Uber, and Twitter the same industry) really act like a flock of grackles or starlings, descending on a place, eating everything, and moving on?

It seems to be full of people who want to be near art and "cool" people. Unfortunately tech doesn't find a way to pay those creators of culture anything. If anything, the focus is on finding ways to make everything free. So tech moves in, enjoys the presence of creative culture they refuse to fund, but ultimately inflates real estate so much they drive that creative culture away. Rinse and repeat.

If art and culture are so valuable to us why are those who create these things so poor? Why do people cringe at buying an album for $9 but then spend $11 on a coffee and a biscuit?

Because its not just any form of expression that people want.

The artists shouldn't have balked at taking a class in economics.

I'm not sure if a lot of the hip tech transplants want art. They just want the aesthetics.

I think what they want is culture, which is produced by people who love their communities and who don't work 90 hours a week so they have time to actually do it.

True, but isn't part of it that one thinks that on the $9 album, the marketing and media company folks gets $8.50 of $9.00

But there is also artistry in creating a coffee or dining experience, and hopefully that money spent on the meal and coffee goes more to the chef artist who prepared the meal, the architect artist who designed the space, and the line cook, waitress and dishwasher.

Tech isn't creative and artistic? Why is an "album" worth more than a graphics engine, drawing app or game?

If anything music is overvalued. I'm surprised we haven't automated Skrillex and all that house crap yet. ;-)

> Why is an "album" worth more than a graphics engine...

Why is a Picasso worth more than paint?

Because the introduction of GPU's didn't come until 30~ years ago ;-) also it's a single physical item. It's more of a collective piece than actual art, at least today.

One interesting explanation is that people seem to think (maybe rightly) that art and culture are cheapened by too much money. To be authentic, art and culture needs to be nearer to the struggling edges of society.

It's part of a nationwide(global?) urban renewal. Millenials and their successors are more likely to want to live in urban areas and stay single longer than their older counterparts.

This is causing rents to increase noticeably in nearly every major urban area. Couple that with relatively high pay for tech sector jobs that like to hire these younger folks and you get it even worse in SF, Seattle, etc.

Be careful of overgeneralizing from the subset of the population you interact with in tech. For example, according to this FiveThirtyEight piece from last year, the actual trend is that college-educated millennials are slightly more likely to move to a subset of dense cities. [1] In general, it's unclear how much of an overall urbanization trend there is.

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...

Seriously that was 11 years ago. Yes, a lot of things changed in 11 years.

That's my point. 11 years may seem like a long time to you, but it's really not.

I've seen quite a few people here wanting high-rise residential buildings in San Francisco to alleviate the high rents there. A skyscraper is at least 40 floors, according to wikipedia and one rule of thumb I've seen puts the construction time for them at 1 month per floor, from ground breaking to completion. That's about 4 years in construction, plus design and planning time, plus site acquisition. That's five, six years (more?), total, even in the most positive political atmosphere.

Someone who wanted to alleviate SF's high rents today, assuming you could do that by building high-rise apartment buildings, would had to have started at the height of the construction bust. That would be, I think, before San Francisco proper's tech boom, i.e. before there was a problem evident.

And if you started building one today,... Once upon a time, Intel planned to build a 10 story office building in downtown Austin. They stopped, with nothing but the structure of the building up, in 2001. The incomplete building was demolished in 2007.

Yep. The government and people of San Francisco and Silicon Valley could wake up tomorrow, all with the simultaneous revelation that OMG we need to build a massive amount of new housing and all the associated transportation and other infrastructure needed to support it. And you might start seeing the initial fruits in a decade.

Meanwhile, in the real world, if attitudes and policies were to start shifting, 15 to 20 years is probably a more realistic planning horizon.

In 2008 I moved out of Toronto and when I went back a few years later there were dozens of new high- and mid-rise buildings that had been built downtown. Telus Tower was built from 2007 to 2009, 32 stories. 120 Bremner is 30 stories, same time period. Cityplace has about two dozen high-rise residential towers that were all built in 2-3 years and are 30+ stories tall. It does not take 4 years to construct a highrise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CityPlace,_Toronto

Early adopters started moving in 2006 (remember the YScraper?). It really accelerated around 2010, when the economy started recovering. Prices started rising in earnest in the second half of 2011.

I know a number of people here who are praying for a tech crash so they can afford housing again.

Prices were already going up a lot in the dot com days.

Yeah, and then they went down in the dot-com crash, and then they went up again from 2005-2007, and then they went down again in 2009.

I moved to Mountain View in 2009. In late 2008 (as the crisis was hitting the stock market, but before landlords had realized it would affect them), a realtor was showing me around, and I asked about a swanky corporate apartment complex we drove by. "Oh, that's out of your price range - they charge $2000+/month." I ended up living there for $1400/month in 2009-2010, then they started jacking up the rent. When I left in 2013, they turned around and rented it for $2700/month.

And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the urban growth boundary or increasingly restrictive land-use regulations.

Metro (being the Portland area's multi-county regional government) voted last year to not expand the urban growth boundary. So the supply of single-family homes with yards is basically fixed, while demand is growing. Expect home prices to continue to grow (Portland's rate is top in the U.S.) as new housing construction continues to be constrained to dense multi-family structures for the next five years until Metro votes on UGB expansion again.

What rises with house prices - property taxes. Revenue for Metro. I am going to assume there's a non-negligible correlation.

Property tax revenue would rise with new construction as well.

Wow. Good point. No idea why I didn't consider this. :)

Not necessarily. The city decides what amount of revenue it wants to generate, then divides that amongst all properties based on accessed value. If in a year everyone's accessed value increases by the exact same amount, and the city doesn't increase the amount of total income they want to generate, no ones property taxes change.

Exactly. They cover one side of the coin ("we could never have afforded this in San Francisco!") but not the other side, the person actually LIVING in Portland at the time of the purchase, saying "we can't afford this!"

Same in Denver. Realtor told me 1/4 of properties don't make the MLS, they're bought with cash before they can get listed.

Boulder as well. A buddy of mine had a hell of a time getting a condo with a mortgage. They were all bought up in cash within a day or 2.

Somebody's busy setting up another housing bubble.

With cash? Dunno about that...

Possible. I was in Vegas the last housing bubble and investors were doing it there. Most were buying with ARMS but it got to the point only cash got you a quick sale.

Who are these people and where are they getting that kind of cash?

(Not OP, but know several people that do this sort of investing...)

It's a combination of

1.) Wealthy Asian businesspeople who are looking for a place to park some of the foreign reserves they own overseas.

2.) Hedge funds, investing institutional capital in relatively "safe" investments with guaranteed revenue streams.

3.) Corporate prop-trading desks, parking corporate profits in tax-advantaged long-term assets until its needed. Google, for example, is a major owner of affordable housing developments.

This is what often happens after a speculative bubble bursts: all the folks who invested based on irrational exuberance get cleaned out of the market, and then assets are transferred to other investors who are generally much more prudent, often using spare cash that was sitting on the sidelines. In this case, the assets just happen to be where everybody lives.

> 3.) Corporate prop-trading desks, parking corporate profits in tax-advantaged long-term assets until its needed. Google, for example, is a major owner of affordable housing developments.

Very interesting as Google will be expanding their offices in Boulder over the next few years. I believe they've broke ground on the campus here.

Came back to confirm that I have personal 2nd-party knowledge of your #1 happening all over Colorado. A wealth management friend of mine said she has multiple very wealthy foreign clients that want to diversify in what is seen as a safe investment, and who obviously purchase these properties with cash. Also, the cohort does seem to be disproportionately of Asian decent.

I have no inside knowledge, but I highly suspect many/most cash offers are not actually cash. It just means the financing is hidden from the seller. Nobody's waiting on approvals, the money is there and it's a done deal. That doesn't mean it's not on some kind of personal loan or some kind of asset-backed line of credit, just not one that's understood by the US real estate process.

Realtors alway say things like that, they're impossible to prove false and gives a sense of urgency. Realtors make money the more that houses change hands, and make money faster the faster they change hands.

Here's a tip for Denver real estate that just worked very well for my wife an myself (who are closing on a house this week): Do not use a buyer's agent (get real estate attorney to help you instead), and make your offer 2.5% lower than the asking price. When making the offer just say that since there is no buyer's agent commission to pay out from the funds at closing you are choosing to offer less. Don't worry if the listing agent gets mad at you for doing this since many of them also represent buyers. Use Redfin to get very up-to-date MLS data. Find something close to downtown in Denver proper. Do not believe the FUD about competing bids and way over asking price bids, as those stories are mostly crap perpetuated by agents who seek to gain from twitchy buyers making bad decisions. Good luck people.

Redfin offers partial buyer's commission refunds, as well. That way you still have a realtor to help you some if you're new to the area.

Redfin's realtors are generally pretty tech savvy as well - prefer email to phone, responsive to email, etc.

Thanks for that. I'm in Denver also looking to buy in the best future. Do you have a recommendation for a real estate attorney? My email is my username @gmail.com if you don't want to say publically.

Email sent. Good luck.

Austinite here. Analogous situation happening here, massive gentrification and home building, but still a sellers market.

I think there's a lot of luxury condo development going on in Austin, but actual homes? Even our existing home inventory has been hit hard by investors looking to set up STR2s with AirBnB. The properties they prize are the exact sort of starter homes first-time homebuyers are looking for. There was just an article recently on the dearth of 3/2 houses available.

I'm looking to buy a home soon so the recent municipal prohibition on STR2s gives me hope that the inventory will increase and allow some downward pressure on prices.

Same in Boston, especially South Boston and the Seaport area.

It's 2016, and people still think that if someone moves into your neighborhood, someone else has to move out.

Rising demand is great. It means people want to enjoy your neighborhood. You can either meet that demand by increasing supply, or you can restrict the demand, and let certain people be outpriced by the market.

Locals aren't victims of gentrification. They're victims of zoning laws and nimbyism.

Locals are also (usually anyway) the source of those. At least in Stockholm. Avoid building apartments for those less off because of "greenery". http://www.dn.se/sthlm/hyresgaster-stoppar-nya-grannar/

So consider a nice, quaint neighborhood. Person A lives there. Person B wants to live there too, because it is so nice.

Ok, let's say we double supply.

All the houses are now either twice as high, or half as big, or maybe the trees were cut down and the bushes ripped out to make room. There's twice as many people & everything therein. Is it still the same nice neighborhood?

Was it the same neighborhood when you moved there?

Things change, especially in the US.

"The immaculate conception theory of your neighborhood’s origins": http://cityobservatory.org/the-immaculate-conception-theory-...

And: if prices are going up that much, and you really want out, you can sell and move, to, say, Lakeview, Oregon.

Yes, things change. But I contest the notion that adding more housing to a neighborhood is a magic bullet that will make everyone happy.

Among many issues, the fundamental attractiveness of a particular neighborhood may be tied to low population density.

In which case ripping down the neighborhood and rebuilding makes neither resident Person A nor prospective buyer Person B happy.

No, it won't, but it'll lead to the population as a whole being better off because it will allow more people to live in a very productive area, as well as leaving an out (sell and move) for those who can't stomach the thought of denser housing.

Sooner or later, the US must confront the fact that not everyone can live in a single story ranch house with a big yard in an extremely desirable part of the country, without causing massive sprawl (LA).

And a significant slice of the tech industry must confront the fact that not everyone in that industry can or should cram themselves into a narrow peninsula and a handful of other, mostly coastal, cities.

It does appear that, despite the internet, being in the same place offers some advantages. I'm all for people spreading out to different cities, but realistically, the bay area is going to be the place to be in the US, for the foreseeable future.

I understand that people who buy into a neighborhood want that neighborhood to freeze in time and maintain for all eternity whatever character it had on the day they bought.

But we should be wholly unsympathetic to that view. It's a reasonable thing to wish for, but it's not a reasonable demand to give in to.

"It's a reasonable thing to wish for, but it's not a reasonable demand to give in to."

This is a brilliant sentiment, and a brilliant quote. It applies in so many conversations...

I just wanted to express my appreciation (and my intention of stealing this quote many times in the future!).

You're right, of course, but this sentiment amounts to little more than stomping your feet and wishing the world were different.

As long as there is high demand, you can either build more or expect higher prices and more sprawl. I get that people don't like those choices, but that's what's on the table.

High local prices can be addressed with "distributed sprawl". ie growth in other cities.

I think the problem with that logic is that the people at the 'top of the heap' - VC's, CEO's and the like are not the ones being priced out, mostly. Granted, a company might open an office somewhere else, but that's after it's already large and established.

So you're kicking the marginal (in the economic sense) people out into marginal places where they have less access to what made the original area such a great place to have a job.

maybe, i have neither a moral stance nor suggested solution for that. Seems to me that is a trait of capitalism/market economies; those who can pay the most get what they want.

Yes, but the reason things cost more is because we are restricting supply through regulation. That's not to say that all the regulation should be repealed, but you can't examine the problem in a vacuum and expect useful information. It truly does come down to supply and demand.

Artificially restricting housing supply through SF-like approval processes is not capitalism, and rent control is a band aid. It is laws that highly favors the incumbents that already live there. Even if we determined who should be allowed to live here with some other mechanism than money we would still be housing supply constrained.

I agree that there are tons of things at play distorting markets.

Or you can do neither. It's not like the false dichotomy you're presenting is true.

Not in a free market. If demand is high, and supply doesn't raise to meet it, then prices will increase unless artificially suppressed.

Rent control could do that for rent, but has its own problems. As for owners, how do you tell someone they aren't allowed to sell their house for what someone else is willing to pay them?

If you do neither, are you implying that the third option would just be to tell would-be tennants to go look elsewhere because your neighborhood is full and you're not going to price out the people currently living there?

Sounds like it would work, until you realize most of the buildings are owned by landlords who want to cash in and get as much money as they can with the property they've invested in. They don't particularly care who is living in the property, just that somebody is there and that they're getting paid.

My position is exactly that the dichotomy isn't a false one.

Very dense neighborhoods can still be quaint with trees and bushes. This census tract is around twice as dense as San Francisco: https://goo.gl/maps/d2rQ7wc6Tc12

Thanks for that link for a visual comparison. It actually looks cleaner, too! And perfectly pleasant to live in.

And Paris -- one of the most beautiful and quaint cities -- has three times the population density of San Francisco.

Let's say your city has a massive homeless population, and increasing rents are making it difficult for long-time residents to make a living. Now make the buildings twice as high - it's a lot nicer now, isn't it?

>It's 2016, and people still think that if someone moves into your neighborhood, someone else has to move out.

How does this work in your head? When the new homes are being built, where do the people who were living on the land they're being built on go?

They go into higher-density buildings, just like everybody else. That, or nothing changes and they get priced out. Those are the options.

So projects, then.

No. Replace a single story ranch house with, say, a duplex. Or a single story duplex with a quadplex. It can be pretty incremental.

http://missingmiddlehousing.com/

That's a glib response, but I do want to bring attention to how often this discussion generates such glib responses. If it's not, "so, projects, then" it's "so, you want San Francisco to look like Manhattan, then?" or some equivalent.

Notice how these responses do absolutely nothing to address the issue. They exist only to express dissatisfaction with realistic options.

Again, you can either build to meet demand or expect higher prices. Those are the options.

> Again, you can either build to meet demand or expect higher prices. Those are the options.

Or enact preferential laws, or use vandalism in order to drive demand down, or make newcomers feel unsafe or unwelcome.

Those alternatives are not entirely rational, nor necessarily effective- but they are human nature, and not that rare.

Except higher-density buildings still equally price people out. There's no such thing as new urban apartments/condos that are cheaper than the houses they replaced.

A 500k house never gets torn down to become 3 400k condos. It becomes 3 600-800+k condos.

We should build more, because we need it. But "build more" can't be the only tool to lower prices, because simple observation shows us that it doesn't work.

You can't judge pricing in a market that's very restrictive. Sprinkling a few higher density buildings in area with rapidly growing demand isn't going to be enough to lower prices.

What about markets with no restrictions. Because this same behavior is seen there too, even in small cities in the south or Midwest. Even in cities that let developers do anything they want, anytime they want to.

Its very likely that a newer apartment would be priced higher than an older apartment. But that doesn't mean new apartments don't have an aggregate effect on the prices of other apartments.

http://cityobservatory.org/in-some-cities-the-housing-constr...

There is if you take a step down on the housing ladder. Replacing a 1BR with a 3BR that you share with 2 roommates will reduce your rent. So will replacing a 2BR duplex with a 2BR apartment, usually. So will replacing a 3BR with a 2BR and having the kids double-up.

...which explains a lot about why residents dislike this

simple observation shows us that it doesn't work

Quite the contrary. A pretty simple reductio proof demonstrates that more housing lowers prices. All you need is to imagine a market in which there is one more apartment available than there are people to rent it.

There's also a simple proof that renters have near-infinite demand flexibility, so the prices can't go up. So....

I actually regret making that comment. We should be suspicious of logic-based arguments about topics for which there is actual evidence. We already know what it looks like when supply outpaces demand, because there are housing markets all over the rust belt where that's the case.

No, quite the opposite. A 500k house becomes 12 $250k 1000sqft condos is the actual math in SFH -> highrise conversion.

Maybe in some other Bay Area, but not here. New construction in the SF Bay Area is almost always "luxury" townhouses and apartments.

I always snort at what people call luxury in the bay area. 'luxury' here is the honda civic equivalent of new housing elsewhere in the USA. This is luxury housing: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2793242/a-95million-...

I'm also surprised that you would still think the math does not apply. A 100 unit building taking up the space of 12 SFH $1.5mm homes will sell many more $800k 2 bedroom apartments comparing what houses and apartments sell for Build about 1000 of the buildings close to bart and muni tunnel stations and you would get 100'000 units for the price of 3000 SFH / in law units and a larger city budget to fund the new required transit system capacity.

That's why I put "luxury" in quotations. A "luxury" townhouse here is simply a very expensive tiny home, thrown together with cheap materials, faux-everything, bland interiors that look like generic hotel rooms, sometimes displaying a fake stone facade or arched entryway in an attempt to mimic class.

Some algorithms require additional temporary space. Other algorithms can modify a data structure in place. Some data structures are very loosely spaced in memory as it is, and adding existing nodes is just about using up more of the existing memory capacity.

Cities have been able to grow for centuries. The only thing stopping them from growing are zoning and restrictions prohibiting additional homes being built.

The tech industry in the Bay area has a large chunk of the population and a near infinite amount of money, and therefore near infinite political power. Blaming political systems seems a little...backward.

No it's not. Tech industry workers are minority and some of the NIMBYs are tech workers on top of that.

Exactly. What is always neglected in these conversations is that building housing is a process and it takes a long time.

Even if a city government has liberal attitudes toward development, it still takes years to create new supply. In the mean time the process is displacing people.

It seems like a lot of folks believe that things - people, places, stuff - are naturally meant to remain in one state forever? I get the anger at not being able to afford the place you live in any longer, but all these arguments seem to be built on an assumption that things shouldn't change. "Just ride the wave, bruh."

Gentrification makes housing more expensive in the short term. First order, that's good for landlords and bad for renters. Mixed for owner-occupiers - they have more wealth, but higher property taxes.

Not in California it isn't. Prop 13 limits property tax rates for owners.

Agreed. Was thinking of the Portland context.

Oregon passed Measure 5 in 1990, which is similar to California's prop 13.

Dear folks interested in Oregon, come to Eugene!

Grew up there. Still seems like it's struggling to put together much of a tech industry. More seems to be happening here in Bend in some ways, despite being a significantly smaller town. And the weather is way better over here too!

Fortunately the future is remote work. Local jobs don't matter nearly as much once you can work for anyone remotely.

In that case, Bend or Ashland or something else closer to more outdoor stuff is a better bet. Or Lakeview if you really want cheap housing.

I wonder if you can come up with any tangible evidence to back up your claim...

And then there's the breweries!

Are there any significant population centers in Oregon that don't have a good brewery or two?

Touché!

We're still recovering from the housing bubble bursting. When that happened a ton of developers went out of business and building came to a stand still. The market demand eventually caught up with the overbuilding from during the bubble and have passed it creating a shortage again while the developers get to building. It should level off again in a few years as long as the city doesn't make zoning mistakes.

The problem is that it's all very uneven. A lot of people would love to live in the bay area, or Portland, but not so many people want to live in Lakeview, Oregon. But building more housing in the Bay Area is very difficult due to NIMBY rules and regulations.

Also a Portland resident.

Portland now has the fastest growing real estate price increases in the country: http://content.kgw.com/photo/2016/03/29/s%20and%20p%20home%2...

This increase is not being matched by increasing salaries (they're increasing, but not at the same rate): http://koin.com/2016/03/31/report-portland-wages-not-keeping...

There are potential implications of this. Not just for people living here already, but for workers that may or may not be able to maintain mortgages at these rates if there's a contraction in the "tech" sector. I don't know how many people are weighing these decisions on a 10+ year timeline.

At the end of the day, I'm not sure how much of this is sustainable wealth. Portland got burned pretty badly in the 2000 crash, and really badly in the 2008 crash (at one point the unemployment rate was around 14%). History suggests it's a legitimate concern.

> locals are victim of gentrification

You say that as if gentrification is a bad thing.

I'm a contrarian voice here, but I strongly value my day-to-day encounters and connections with exceptional individuals who I cross paths with in daily life... moreso than the exorbitant cost-of-living in the area. The access to opportunities, collaborations, and community here is unparalleled (comparisons: Taipei, New York City, Boston, and London, all of which I've spent prolonged periods due to business).

Spend one weekend hiking in Yosemite, another working on a digital arts project in Oakland, and you still got plenty of bandwidth to sip your fancy coffees and swing by Stanford for some lectures and run into competent friends to solve some business problems for fun and profit... life is pretty damn good for work and play.

Caveat: Of course, this is coming from a position of privilege: that I spent both undergrad and grad in the area and have built up a strong base of connections here within the profession world and academia, and that the $10k-20k net salary optimization does not meaningfully affect my quality of life.

We've just setup a new office for our company (https://raygun.com) in Seattle. We have a small office in SF, but going to building a much larger one up here (we're HQ'd in Wellington, New Zealand)

Seattle locals complain a little about all the cranes across the skyline. I see it another way - Seattle is absolutely going to eat SF's lunch if it doesn't change.

You already have Microsoft, Boeing, etc here. Google, Facebook and Space X have now opened offices too. This city seems to be fully engaged handling that growth and how to capitalize on it. We've been receiving flyers about developing the transit system for the next 25 years. A far cry from the sassy (and painfully accurate) BART twitter account calling out the lack of investment in it.

I'm not saying it's perfect, but there's some real problems with the inelastic supply of housing in the SF/Bay Area.

Seattle locals complain a little about all the cranes across the skyline. I see it another way - Seattle is absolutely going to eat SF's lunch if it doesn't change.

One underestimated part of CA's success, though, is the fact that non-competes are illegal: http://asr.sagepub.com/content/76/5/695.short. If Washington State banned non-competes, it would have a really tremendous long-term advantage.

Yes, rents are high, but if you invest even a little bit of time you can find a fine residence in the Bay Area for a lot less than $4,500.

I rent a two bedroom house in Oakland for $2,200. My commute is not too much longer than it would be if I live in certain parts of San Francisco.

There's simply little advantage to living right in the heart of a major city.

You have to ask yourself:

"Instead of renting in a high-profile location, what else could I buy with an extra $24,000 a year?"

Yes, average rents are too high, but nobody says you have to pay the average rent.

There's a lot of room for expansion to the South as well – I pay $1,300 in Bayview.

Well you also have a significantly higher probability of getting shot when you live in Oakland. So there's always that.

It's not like the Mission, Tenderloin or SOMA are especially safe, either. In SF, as in Oakland, there are good spots and bad spots. I haven't felt unsafe in Lake Merritt, and my place is way nicer than what I got for the same price in Cole Valley. And the weather's better (it really is).

Depends which part of Oakland. Some parts of Oakland (eg. Rockridge, Temescal) are significantly nicer than SF. They aren't exactly cheap, but your safety : price ratio is significantly better than in say, the Mission.

They may appear nicer but when I read Yelp reviews in Rockridge and Temescal they occasionally mention the bars on the windows or robberies taking place which I've never seen in San Francisco. Not trying to say the average person will encounter problems but I do think even those areas have more crime than you'd think.

As someone who lived in Oakland and now has rent control in the Mission, I would say that my safety : price ratio is significantly higher here in SF after a relatively small period of time.

Wow, very surprised to see I got downvoted for sharing a perfectly valid anecdote after living in Oakland and San Francisco. I'm sorry if you feel differently but downvoting comments just because you don't agree with them is rather immature and only serves to limit discourse by discouraging people from sharing their opinions, experiences, and facts. I was polite in my response and even pointed out that the average person is unlikely to encounter problems.

Here are some further details for those who care about the facts:

1. This is a representative review for one Thai restaurant that I wanted to go to in Rockridge where I noticed many reviews mentioned them being robbed repeatedly and now the restaurant has to buzz customers through the door because of it (read the first review or search for "robbery"): http://www.yelp.com/biz/saysetha-thai-cuisine-oakland?hrid=u...

2. Here is a recent article about how middle class residents of many neighborhoods including Rockridge and Temescal have resorted to hiring private security forces due to the rampant crime problems: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/30/oakland-priv...

3. Here is an article describing why robbers like Rockridge and other "target rich" neighborhoods where it is easy to rob rich people and escape: http://patch.com/california/rockridge/why-robbers-like-rockr...

I wasn't the one who downvoted you.

You can keep believing that. It certainly keeps the rent on the Oakland side of the Bay a little cheaper than if everyone found out it's spacious, full of artists and great food, and has better weather.

What's the probability of being shot in Oakland in a year as a white male? Esp if you don't have any associations with crime yourself.

I lived in both good, bad and transitioning neighborhoods and I feel like people over estimate how much impact this will have on life.

Fact is, shit happens everywhere. Happens more often where there is density. You can be mugged in a good part of town (well because that's where people with money are at) and bad part of town. Before I moved back to NYC, my wife would regularly get harassed in SOMA on the street walking to her job.

Absolutely this. I have a two-bedroom apt. in Brooklyn that's the size of a small house. No roommate. I just like the space.

I pay the same amount as my cousin, who lives in Manhattan in a studio apt that's smaller than my guest bedroom/office.

At my current job in the financial district, the commute would be the same. Plus, I live in a historic neighborhood where there are houses with lawns and gardens and trees. And it reminds me of home in Texas.

NYC isn't as bad as SF, but it can be really awful if you insist on living in the most "happening" parts of town.

Did the same math for living in San Jose... With the price difference in rent, you could literally hire a private car plus driver to take you to-and-from the city every weekend.

The most insane part is the people who commute down to MTV (eg. Google) and only really get the benefit of the city on weekends anyway...

I've just come back from two weeks in the Bay area to see a bunch of friends and they all do that. Even though I find it insane as much you do, I understand. There are a few good reasons though, from our very European and biased point of view:

* No need to own car, or at least no need to drive everyday.

* For a spouse on a H-4 visa and who thus cannot work, living in the city makes things easier and a lot less boring.

* Mountain View / Sunnyvale / Palo Alto / ... have pretty sad downtown areas, they aren't bike/pedestrian friendly, and they make you live in purely residential areas.

So they end up spending $3~4000 on rent to live in SoMa and be close to their company shuttle lines or the Caltrain station. Some can work during the commute, some can't.

My friends in Berkeley have it better (much nicer residential areas, you can bike to your Bart station). But then of course you need a job in the city or in Oakland (and even though things have supposedly improved a lot, it still looked pretty sketchy to me).

Most of the big tech companies have Berkeley buses. You don't have to work in SF/Oakland if you live in Berkeley.

You're right but I've heard it typically takes about 1h30 door to door, that is beyond what I'd consider a reasonable commute.

Mountain View is expensive, and to many people, boring. SF is at least less likely to be the latter.

Remember also that Mountain View despises mixed use and refused to rezone areas currently designated commercial-only in order to let Google workers live near their jobs. Of course, it also would have meant people who bought in the 70's would have some tiny amount of competition for their asset.

I don't live in Mountain View; I was just using that commute as an example. (As mentioned, I'm in San Jose.)

I just strongly agree with many of the academic articles showing strong correlation between long commutes and unhappiness. By the time you factor in a 90-minute SF-MTV commute, you really don't get many benefits of the city on weekdays anyway...

I completely agree re: long commutes. But I also don't care for the suburbs, which is why I used to commute from Berkeley to my first job in the bay, in Newark.

Remember that commute mode can make a HUGE difference. Crawling along asphalt is probably about the least fun method.

I rode Bart counter-commute to Fremont and then a bicycle the last 4 miles. I will say, if you want to stick out as an oddball in that part of the bay taking Bart and riding a recumbent to work will do the trick. It wasn't a good culture fit, to say the least.

After that, I worked in El Segundo and lived in Santa Monica. My commute was 26 miles (round trip) of gorgeous beach bike riding, which took around 90-100 minutes a day door to door (recumbents are quick!) I was in the best shape of my life, and always loved seeing bonfires, beach goers, drum circles, and once a pod of dolphins jumping out of the water alongside me as I rode down a 12 foot wide strip of land by the Marina.

Anyway, just trying to point out that the calculation is complex and depends on the person.

>"There's simply little advantage to living right in the heart of a major city."

Depends on the city and what you're after.

Living in the centre of a city can bring lifestyle benefits, especially with fast and reliable public transport. Major cities with metro/subway networks can offer a massive playground of activities all without relying on cars. It might sound bizarre, but there's a certain freedom from moving through a city without using a car. In my experience cars rely on a fair amount of responsibility and effort, whereas public transport offers better opportunities to enjoy the journey.

In addition to that there's the social aspect. If you live close to where you work it's far easier to be social with your work colleagues after work. This can lead to a better sense if camaraderie with those you work with, especially if they live close to where you work too. Seeing as it's often the case that people work in the heart of a city rather than the suburbs, these are perks you're far more likely to get by living in the heart of a city.

There are certainly advantages to living further afield as well, but I hope you can agree the choice isn't one sided.

> There's simply little advantage to living right in the heart of a major city.

This is a very personal opinion, and can vary depending on one's interests and stage of life. Young single people benefit from being "where the action is" as they are near other young people doing the same thing and can pursue various social and romantic interests. People who aren't interested in those things for whatever reason have much less to gain from living in the heart of a major city.

i have a similar anecdote, when i arrived in the bay area in 2011, i was paying the exact same rent in east palo alto, when i left in 2015, my rent had gone up to $2,750. As my lease neared expiration, my landlord decided against renewing it and instead the house was sold because they were looking for a good exit.

i don't blame them, everyone has their reasons, but i want to caution you that while it's possible to find a good rental that works out for some period of time, it's not a long term assurance and being forced to move can make it difficult to acquire a place as favorable as the one you have with the combination of commute or rent or other intangibles you've grown accustomed to in your neighborhood. Or you may find one at the price, but it may take a much longer time than you have allotted, especially in this market where qualified renters are plentiful and willing (often out of necessity) to pay high rents for substandard properties.

I also asked myself the same question you did, but the conclusion i reached eventually involved me moving out of state last year. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Lots of people want to live in an urban setting. Build more urban neighborhoods, everywhere.

There's a lot of urban neighborhoods, even. Fund and found more startups in preexisting cities, all you VCs and entrepreneurs.

This is the answer. Deregulate housing/small businesse spaces/offices and let the market do its work. It's crazy the amount of regulation there is that pretty much dictates single family detached homes for large swaths of the country. Here in Bend, for instance, you must have a driveway with not one, but two parking spots. Land of the free indeed...

http://marketurbanism.com/

Also, this book, although it's pretty high level: http://amzn.to/1qsn2RD

I think this is one of the most important issues in this day and age. It's happening everywhere, and things need to change.

Edit: downvoters, care to actually state your opinions? I'm hardly a libertarian, and neither is Matt Yglesias, author of the aforementioned book. I don't think 'free markets' are the answer to all the world's problems. But I do think a more liberalized market would help housing a lot. These areas need more supply, and if you don't want LA style sprawl, the best way to do that is via density. And the best way to accomplish that is probably by letting the market work, within reason: I don't suppose I'd be in favor of allowing an outdoor thrash metal venue in the midst of an otherwise quiet neighborhood, but there are a lot of things you could add to make places more livable and walkable without cars.

"Here in Bend, for instance, you must have a driveway with not one, but two parking spots. Land of the free indeed..."

Where I live people don't leave any room for parking on their own property and all of the streets are completely jammed with cars, every inch. You don't hardly dare move your car if you've been able to find a spot.

Is that freer?

If you want more parking on your own property, feel free to build it. If you don't need it, you shouldn't have to.

Forcing everyone to build parking makes building more expensive (http://www.thestranger.com/news/feature/2015/07/29/22612207/...) and spread out (google "parking crater" for examples, e.g., http://www.gcpvd.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/parking-cris...) which makes it harder to walk, bike, and take public transportation, which causes more people to drive, which causes more need for parking.

Parking your car costs money. People should pay to use it if they need it, but the rest of us shouldn't have to. Right now, drivers are subsidized.

I'm sorry someone is forcing you to own a car, and forcing you not to pay a garage owner for somewhere to park it.

I don't know what point you're trying to make here. Everyone who lives there was free to put a driveway on their property, presumably, but just chose to deal with the hassle of tight street parking in exchange for more room for yard or house on their property. Allowing them this tradeoff is very much freer!

I'm not sure deregulation is actually the answer here. It's more that our municipalities have bought into car oriented design and have adopted a terrible philosophy and awful set of regulations.

We need to regulate good design that leads to compact and efficient communities instead.

My fear with less regulations is that while you could see taller, and denser buildings in some areas, you'd also open up the potential for an increase in sprawl, as lazy developers chasing profits would equally be allowed to build low density sprawl if there was an incentive to.

The local example of this is that in Metro Vancouver it is basically now impossible to build a typical suburban mall. No city will allow it because it's a terrible idea from an urban design and planning point of view. However, two malls have recently been built nonetheless! This happened because the developers found land near the airport and on First Nations land that was outside the jurisdiction of local government, and they could build whatever they wanted with little to no oversight.

> increase in sprawl

Deregulation within an urban growth boundary. I don't like sprawl either. Houston or LA are not my ideas of "the answer", although Houston does - apparently - get some deregulation right within the city as well.

I think you need deregulation of housing stock and increased public transit.

One of the reasons rents are getting up there is fewer people driving and not a ton of options on where to live if you don't. I'm in Boston and simple little stuff like an extension of the subway can't get off the ground due to mismanagement and lack of funding.

"They’ve increased 38 percent in Seattle, 12 percent in Austin and 6 percent in Phoenix."

The article names the usual suspects for engineer emigrants (Austin, Portland, strangely no mention of NYC or Raleigh RTP), but why are people moving to Phoenix? Isn't living in the less sexy areas of South Bay (Sunnyvale, Milpitas, South San Jose) pretty much on par with urban life in Phoenix?

http://www.zillow.com/phoenix-az/home-values/

http://www.zillow.com/sunnyvale-ca/home-values/

I wonder if the tech sprawl will force people to live further and further south. Coyote Valley, Morgan Hill, Gilroy?

Gilroy ... never again. That smell. Like someone boiled hades.

http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_27809931/traffic...

Do you somehow think those places are significantly cheaper than San Francisco? They're not.

... What?

Cost of living index compared to San Francisco according to WolframAlpha:

Seattle -20%

Phoenix -42%

Austin -43%

I have to say I was impressed to see that Manhattan is +29.6% to San Francisco. SF was certainly the most expensive place I've ever lived.

Possibly skewed because there's so much luxury housing in Manhattan? Anecdotally NYC has always been much cheaper for me than SF. You can still get one bedrooms for under 2k in the East Village and LES

Yeah, as someone running like hell from the Bay Area (to Manhattan), I think this is the key.

It's actually possible to get cheap, bad, but livable housing in NYC. It would be difficult to get a plot of floor with a roof over it of any quality at $2k in SF.

It's possible to get cheap, good, and liveable housing in NYC too. I just got a nice 1BR in the Bronx for $1525 that's in a great neighborhood and is less than a block from the express lines. As long as you're not in one of the top-10 trendy neighborhoods there are plenty of great apartments that are within 30-35 min of midtown.

No you can't. Those $1900 apartments of 2013 are now $2500+. But still, there are far more options in the NY metro including those with reasonable commutes. The Bay just seems like a big headache if you don't work near your home.

Austin cheaper than Phoenix???

Actually, they absolutely are. Cost of living in San Francisco is not even a comparison to any of those places. I live in Seattle in a kick-ass house in a great, walkable neighborhood for the same price that I paid for 650 sq ft apartment in Noe Valley 3 years ago.

Also funny: every time someone argues with this point, they'll put up a link to the most expensive condo in the hippest part of downtown Austin and say, "Look! Look, this apartment is $4000. Austin is expensive too!"

>but why are people moving to Phoenix? Isn't living in the less sexy areas of South Bay (Sunnyvale, Milpitas, South San Jose) pretty much on par with urban life in Phoenix?

No way. Phoenix is a wonderful place to live! The weather is beautiful! Forget that stuff you read about the heat; you'll get used to it. It's a dry heat!

Seriously, if you live in the Bay Area or Portland or Seattle, move to Phoenix! It's great! There's plenty of room for everyone there! They even have excellent public transit with the Light Rail!

Dry heat or not, it's still way too hot! I grew up in the desert and have absolutely no desire to ever live in one again.

Shut up! I'm trying to get people to free up some space in the west coast cities.

It's interesting that Seattle's rent has raised 38 percent, but I am left wondering if some of that is related to their ~37% minimum wage increase in the last year.

What possible connection could there be? Does minimum wage now change property values? Are all housing units in Seattle occupied by minimum wage workers? The average rent in Seattle for a one bedroom apartment is around $1600, which is around 100% of what a minimum wage worker made there two years ago - coincidence or no?

It's all just so interesting, I think?

No need for the snark, friend. Is it really that much of a stretch to think that minimum wage increases (more money in the hands of lower-income earners) semi-proportionately increases localized prices?

Do you truly think it's necessary that all houses in Seattle must be occupied by minimum wage workers in order for it to affect the cost of living?

It's a lot easier for people to see this argument with basic income than with minimum wage, but the signaling on property owners ends up being the same whether you know for certain all your tenants now have an extra $x in funds or just some of them might now be getting a raise to the new minimum wage. From the property manager perspective, suddenly they're getting more demand on units than they were previously, so they balance that by increasing rents. An increased minimum wage can play a part in that rise in demand even if no single person can afford an apartment on their own at minimum wage. For instance perhaps there's a group of 4 people cramped in one apartment, but now with all of them getting more money, they can afford to split off into two groups of 2. Until the landlord raises rents, anyway, because they aren't enough units for everyone to do that and building new units takes time.

Unlikely. Someone earning minimum wage couldn't live there anyways. The more likely culprit are the hordes of tech people moving into every nook and cranny.

King County property taxes have been steadily going up, that's a bigger factor than minimum wage. Even in the sprawl around Seattle, prices have gone up, but I hope they'll see a regression since the commuting situation is if anything worse than it was even just a few years ago especially on the Eastside with the 405 toll lanes.

Quality of life is probably similar but the cost of living is much lower.

At least SF still has the jobs and industry to drive the insane housing prices. Try somewhere like Vancouver where the prices are just as crazy but minus any connection to an actual economic or technological driver; there's zero industry left, zero investment, and a pervasive Stockholm syndrome where the entire city population convinces itself it's the 'best place on Earth.' It's turning into an epic ghost town of real estate speculators and low-rent TV post-production sweat shops with all the real tech talent draining to places like SF and NYC.

Yeah, the existence of Vancouver, London, and Hong Kong's housing markets make me feel grateful that at least SF isn't that bad.

It's worth mentioning: This isn't just causing people to flee. It's actively repelling people from moving there.

(Personally, I've turned down job offers for ~2x what I make now just so I don't have to endure today's rent prices, which I anticipate are only going to increase.)

If you're in SF and you want better access to talent, consider a distributed team instead of expecting everyone to move to SF.

Los Angeles got lumped in with other places in this article, but it completely misses the sprawl problem - you want to pay less? sure! Just sit in traffic!

>$569,500 in Los Angeles, Zillow data show.

If you want a decent quality of life without 1-2 hour one-way commutes and you work in tech, most likely you need to live either in Sillicon Beach (Santa Monica/Pacific Palisades to about Redondo) or Pasadena or Irvine areas. None of these are as cheap as $600k. Rents are catching up quickly as well.

If you are trading traffic for cheaper rent, Bay Area has those options too.

Fuck. And I thought paying $1k a month in Toronto was too much. I've been looking for work in cheaper cities like Hamilton or London literally because what I make versus what it takes to survive don't sit well with me - and never have.

Oh cool, another Toronto developer!! I never see a lot in HN. Are you working for a startup? Also, why Hamilton or London? Have you tried looking for jobs in the Kitchener / Waterloo area? There are a lot of nice startups there as well as established companies. My friend recently got a job there at a bank.

Working for a design firm handling all their development. Hamilton and London also have the same kind of start up communities that the KW has without the pretension of going to UW (I'm a college drop out). Also more expensive in KW than Hamilton. Plus n other reasons why I don't like Toronto and prefer smaller cities, etc.

Well Hamilton is pretty nice (from the little I've seen). I know there's stereotypes and what not for Hamilton as a whole but I've been there and it's great so if you are looking for cheaper rent I don't think you could go wrong. I've never been to London funny enough but I don't doubt it's a great place to live, a lot of hot girls apparently :-)

Anyways good luck on your search. I'm sure you will be able to find something since you are currently employed. Just gotta keep on plugging away.

Thanks for the encouragement! And London is decent, they really love their craft beer out there. I have a lot of friends and family out that way but I think Hamilton is where I'll end up.

As someone who lives in Toronto proper, $1k/month is ridiculously cheap unless you live in a basement apartment with possibly a roommate, depending on location.

What are the typical going rates for basement apartments downtown or close to downtown? An apartment from what I've seen is at the very least $1200 a month.

It varies quite a lot from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, and of course proximity to major public transport ingress/egress points.

I haven't looked recently, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anything below $1000/month that wasn't out in the middle of nowhere.

Also: beware. Some basement apartments aren't actually legal; make sure you sign a legitimate lease agreement, and get confirmation from the landlord that the unit is up to code with the housing board. Happened to a friend of mine not very long ago.

Roommate. Dovercourt.

So are there any tech hubs right now that aren't dealing with issues of rent increases, gentrifications, and growing pains?

Berlin definitely has gentrification issues. How's it doing in terms of rent increases?

The DMV area? Its rents are fairly consistent, gentrification is pretty slow-and-steady, and the only growing pain I see is poor transportation options. But DMV is full of established companies and government work, not trendy startups. If San Francisco's high rents are due to startup culture, you may find more average rents where the tech isn't trendy.

Sorry, but I've never heard of that acronym for a metro before. Where's the DMV?

Delaware, Maryland, Virginia

DC, Maryland, Virgina. Also known as the Washington metropolitan area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_metropolitan_area). Delaware doesn't have much of a tech sector.

I've heard Richmond, VA is a new hip city, but I'm unaware of tech being there.

Richmond is several hours away from the DMV metro area. It's... alright? But I wouldn't call it a metro area. It's more like a college town that has a foodie and music scene, and of course is chock full of history, being the national capital of the Confederacy and instrumental in providing support for the American Revolutionary War and later industrial power.

To me, DMV stands for Department of Motor Vehicles.

DelMarVa is the geographic peninsula east of Chesapeake Bay and west of Delaware Bay.

The ring of urban sprawl around the federal capital is "The DC Area". Unfortunately, "DC Metro" is the train system, and "DC Metropolis" is where Superman lives.

The only (well paying) tech jobs in Delaware would probably be working on internal systems for credit card companies in Wilmington. Possibly also registered agent software for CT or CSC, or some other business revolving around corporate registration and reporting.

I can't help thinking "Columbia Metropolis" would be a better name for the urban areas around the District of Columbia. But I don't have the authority to just change the names of things.

"But I don't have the authority to just change the names of things."

PING!

You do now! Go for it!

-- The Naming Fairy

No. At least, none that I'm aware of.

There are a number of cities that have significantly less of these problems. But that's primarily because they have other, different major problems that they are struggling with instead. (High violent crime, financial crisis, lack of employment or far-lower-than-average incomes, etc)

If only there were some way to collaborate with people sitting more than two feet away.

That's something of tautology in that pretty much everywhere that's a tech hub is booming almost by definition. (In some cases like the Bay area, largely driven by software tech. In other areas, driven by a combination of computer tech and other things such as finance and pharma.) And any area that's booming that I'm aware of is experiencing quite a bit of real estate appreciation even if it's often still modest by Bay area standards.

Try North Carolina, which has regrettably chosen to become a former tech hub.

You mean the Research Triangle?

Not what I hear from various co-workers complaining about the prices of buying or renting condos in downtown Raleigh.

He is referring to the anti LBGT antidiscrimination law just passed.

Oh sure. Which I was certainly aware of. Unbelievable.

None. But 'gentrification' in, say, Pittsburgh means houses in newly-hip neighborhoods that used to cost $50,000 are being renovated and sold for $250,000, instead of houses that use to cost $500,000 being renovated and sold for $2,000,000.

Cleveland wants to become one, but it's an uphill battle.

As someone who's very familiar with the tech scene in Cleveland. Get out, it's so incredibly dead end there.

Is there even a "scene" if there's just a few companies and a few developers? I mean, any city of any size has some tech companies and engineers, doesn't mean it's a scene.

FWIW I'm pretty happy at NASA GRC. If I wasn't though, Its true that I probably would have already left for Pittsburg or Chicago. I am one of those suckers that does like the midwest ultimately.

The ones that aren't growing. For example, Detroit.

Keep in mind that "tech hub" implies tech salaries. Shovel a big pile of money into an area and you will get inflation.

Boston seems pretty reasonable in terms of rent, and has pretty good tech community. With exceptional schools, which you have access to for eg. take courses at Harvard, attend events at MIT, MediaLab, or big tech firms like Google, fb etc. And its great if you have kids too as public schools are also highly rated.

if anyone is interested in solving the problem, im putting together a campaign for major housing reform through the ballot measure. email me greg@gregferenstein dot com

you should probably mention what state/city/whatever your ballot measure is intended for...

In the immediate sense, this is bad, long term one hopes, this will just accelerate the diffusion of technology centered companies away from the bay area and to the valleys and prairies and cities around the country, slowly transforming the economy as they spread out, or likely just spread out from these distant outposts.

Once the startups make it, rather than develop large campuses in the bay area they can expand elsewhere and take advantage of those workforces.

Many problems with this article.

"A software engineer in Austin earning $110,000 would need to make $195,000 in San Francisco to maintain the same quality of life"

Would they? They point out the median in the bay area is $118k, but there's no indication that the median in Austin is $110k; maybe they just pulled that number out of thin air?

They cite slowing tech employment growth in SF, but it seems clear that it's a result of near-0 tech unemployment.

They talk about the exodus "in the past year" as if it suddenly started happening; people have been bitching about the most recent cycle for years, but it's been going on for decades.

"They've become tech hubs in their own right in a way they weren't three to five years ago"

What?

"We bought a beautiful Craftsman home in an awesome neighborhood and that just would not have been possible in San Francisco."

I have no problem with people moving and displacing others, but you have to be clear that the reason you can afford that is bringing the fruits of a higher-cost-of-living area to a lower-cost-of-living one, not because it's inherently more affordable for people who actually (already) live there. In this case, he's .. moving his company? So I guess he's able to keep his pay the same (??).

This report lists $110k as median for Austin:

http://get.hired.com/rs/348-IPO-044/images/Hired-State-of-Sa...

I don't understand what you're pushing against. Do you dispute that an engineer's salary goes further in Austin than it does in San Francisco?

I assume it's based on this report, which has the same numbers: http://get.hired.com/rs/348-IPO-044/images/Hired-State-of-Sa...

The 110k vs 195k is just a comparison, not a statement of possibility.

The real question is "does an engineer of X qualities" make more or less after cost of living adjustments? eg: Maybe you could live well on 110k , but would only earn 95k, suddenly SF seems better.

People who are saying that you should be able to work on software from anywhere are underestimating the importance of IRL network effects.

As a software developer already living in Portland, I'm loving this. I have no quantitative proof, but it feels like, even as recent as 10 years ago, the high tech in the Portland area was very hardware oriented. These days it seems like there are more software startups, and more high profile software companies (Amazon, Google, Ebay) with offices in the area.

Another angle to this is cost of sending kids to schools (my kids are elementary school age). I support public schools and frequently volunteer to teach stress management programs in public high schools. However, few years back, to cut down on housing costs, I purchased a condo in "very low API score school district". When my kids were ready for school, we hesitated to send to public school and choose private school. Now, my wife and I are shocked with the costs and have been inconclusive on private school vs owning a house in "good" school district.

I learnt from others that in other parts of US, we get good schools and decent house at reasonable price in Seattle/Portland/Austin etc. But uprooting entire family looks extreme at this point and we don't have stomach to do it.

Curious, as to what others in similar situation are doing.

I keep saying it, and I'll keep on saying it..

Who is going to be the first to move? The capital or the talent?

One has to drive the other out. VC money isn't going as far as it used to, and talent has to increasingly eat more ramen just to live and keep the lights on in their company.

As soon as I have sufficient savings I plan to move to Texas. I will work for 30% less salary than paying 50% of my salary as rent for a completely worthless apartment that is not even being maintained properly.

I'm about ready to cry uncle. Maybe now tech companies will consider remote work. Everyone will be happier.

Careful what you wish for. If your job can be done from home, it can be done from India.

You can collaborate effectively with remote people a couple time zones away. India is much harder -- also much harder to periodically bring everyone together for a few days.

Working at hardware companies, you quickly realize the toll taken by having to deal with vendors in Shenzhen. Meetings at the extremities of the day on both sides of the Ocean isn't fun for anyone. Outsourcing your core development team, let alone QA or sysadmin, to Asia isn't a panacea.

That's a redhering. All the good Indians are inported.

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