Silicon Valley’s “megacommute” even worse than L.A
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
I live in San Mateo and work in the south bay. By car it takes me 35-40min (with no traffic) but with public transport it would be over 2h. After six there isn't even any option available to go back home. No surprise that so many people choose a car to commute.
And this says nothing of "comfort", which along with Time, is a rare commodity for working people. I'm not sitting on a rough seat crammed next to 5 other people for 2 hours. I'll take my car, with its 8-way adjustable seat, climate control and cup holders, thank-you-very-much. I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.
And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month. A car lease, insurance, and gas per month would be about $600. I will happily pay $200 more per month for the massively increased mobility and comfort that a car provides. The value proposition for public transit really sucks.
However if you can easily find pictures of Amsterdam in the 1970s where the streets look just as crammed with cars as any other city of that time. What happened is that people decided this wasn't working at all and they simply made a choice and they made a change to their spending priorities. Anyone can do this. All that is needed is the political will to make it a priority.
Amsterdam has average temps (in F) from the mid 30's to the mid 60's[0]. That's prime bike weather. That's pretty much in line with San Francisco, which is a good city for biking. Even Manhattan and Brooklyn have reasonably overall pleasant weather for biking.
But compare SF to somewhere like Washington, DC, or Austin, TX. For 3-4 months of the year, DC feels like a swamp. Same with Austin. It's much more preferable to use public transit or drive than bike in that weather.
Credit where credit is due, I stole most of my ideas about this from [0]. It's a non-prestigious contrarian blog that's easy to mock, but he seems to be correct on the merits about cities.
[0] http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/072008.html
Public transit is not resilient to these things. Our streetcars shut down in Toronto during heavy snowfall because they'll derail if the tracks aren't clear. Ice gets into the concrete supporting the tracks and they need to constantly be repaired because of that.
Asphalt roads are cheap and easy to maintain. Hell, you don't even need asphalt, cars are perfectly capable of driving on dirt or gravel. You can drive a car on shitty, broken asphalt, but you can't drive a train on broken tracks. There is a resiliency to road and cars that public transit just doesn't have.
When's the last time you took the car to work rather than the bus because a hurricane hit your area? Last time you looked out the window, saw a tornado and said, "Looks like I'm driving to work today, honey, and not taking the bus."?
Ice storm? You better be a cardiologist needing to get to the hospital to do life-saving surgery if you're driving in that. Because the world doesn't need you in the office writing yet-another-javascript-framework that badly.
Heat wave? Okay, ya got me there. Take the air-conditioned car instead of the bicycle.
They also have weather patterns that generally match ours. Sure, not tornadoes afaik, but that's not a huge chunk of damage to the US either. Public transit is resistant to those things. They have snow, ice, and other cold-weather issues over there as well and somehow seem to get along just fine.
And car's resiliency comes at an unsustainable cost. Not only is it environmentally unsustainable, it's not even population-density sustainable. Sure, there are big empty areas of land where it wouldn't make sense to put public transportation, just like in Europe. But that doesn't mean we should ignore the areas where it does make sense to implement it, just like in Europe.
None of these problems are really unique to the US.
Seriously, Most of Europe is further north than Maine.
Copenhagen and Amsterdam - 2 big cycling/transit cities get plenty of snow and rain.
U.S. wrt transit is "special" because we don't spend money to get a functioning system.
Most journeys are short distance, however. The article describes commuting, where the distances should be comparable between North America and Europe.
Even in an urban area with transit, most US cities have forced desegregation which means kids are scattered all over and economies built around cars. I could take public transit to work (30-40 minutes vs 10 in a car), but have to travel to the other side of the city to get to my kids school (15m by car, 60 by transit). Oh and even in an urban area, the nearest supermarket is a 20 minute walk.
My relatives in Europe walk 5 blocks to school, have decent local shopping options, etc.
Using a car in the US isn't that expensive, but offers a dramatic level of flexibility and freedom. I'm not limited to working in my city's central business district or forced to miss most of my kids school events.
All of the slow-moving elderly I see on the buses around Seattle would like to have a word with you.
I'll take my car, with its 8-way adjustable seat, climate control and cup holders, thank-you-very-much.
I tried it for a few weeks when I got tired of riding the bus. Jaguar S-Type, leather, walnut on the dash, about as nice as one's going to get.
I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.
To each their own. After two weeks of sitting on the 520 bridge staring at the bumper in front of me, I said "fuck this" and went back to the bus. You already said time was a "rare commodity" for working people, yet you'll sit in traffic while I sit on the bus making a bug fix or reading a book?
And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month.
Yoiks. $100 for me to ride the bus, versus $200-$300/month just for parking in downtown Seattle. That doesn't include gas or the $50K Jaguar. Again, though, for me it had nothing to do with money spent.
But we all have our limits. Currently I ride the motorcycle to work (a different destination from above), which allows HOV lane usage, which whittles my commute down to 30 minutes and I park in front of the building. And my ride to work is a motorcycle, which is a plus in my book. Versus 90 minutes on the bus, a transfer, and the bus doesn't drop me anywhere near the building.
But if you're one of the hundreds of thousands of other people in a major metro who don't fall into those categories, you'd probably appreciate the option to not have to obtain a personal vehicle or use it exclusively for your commute, errands, a night on the town, etc.... and the best part is that for all the remaining people who do drive, every person who takes transit is one less person contributing to traffic congestion!
Transit options benefit everyone. Your comment reads like you don't support transit options because they don't suit your particular tastes - I suggest you instead consider advocating for transit to make life better for both yourself and your community, regardless of whether you personally use transit or not.
I'd be fine making that shift if the public transit deployed today were actually good enough to be a like-for-like replacement of car ownership. It isn't unless you live in very expensive conveniently located neighborhoods.
You say:
> should push people to public transit by eliminating parking and closing (some) streets to vehicle traffic because density leads to bus routes and bicycles are intimidated by cars. That's not an option so much as a mandatory shift
I say society should stop giving away publicly owned real estate to the narrow segment of people who want to make driving their lifestyle choice.
I would prefer that the parking lots be replaced with something more economically valuable. For example,
1. stores
2. apartments
3. office space.
Take a look at Louisville's "award winning" parking crater: http://brokensidewalk.com/2016/parking-crater/?utm_content=b...
What is the economic value of so much real estate devoted to machine storage? --- < $0 ( because it takes away from the economic value of surrounding businesses )
If someone wants to drive then they can pay for the privilege.
In the meantime, the rest of society should spend the money saved to make the automobile a museum curiosity.
You'll notice that affordability is emphatically not a feature of high-rise, parking-starved, conveniently located urban neighborhoods.
The economic value of parking is in the thousands of dollars per person per month not spent on rent to be within walking distance, and the free time not sacrificed to low-speed transportation.
The people who drive to those stores from ~20 miles around would not necessarily have any money left to spend once they are forced to find homes within 2 or 3, or no will to visit them once transit times from affordable neighborhoods increase from ~15 minutes by freeway to ~90 by bicycle.
Despite the environmental benefits, living within walking distance of downtown offices and amenities is the most ostentatious and fiscally wasteful choice modern humans seem to be proud of making.
What we need to STOP doing is humoring the notion that spending big on urban rent is somehow more virtuous than an equivalently priced vacation or designer handbag, and especially that public policy ought to increase the pressure to spend ever-increasing proportions of income on land value.
You want to kill cars, find a suitable replacement. Paying more for less housing, living with roommates, or multiplying commute times are not acceptable approaches. Bedroom communities around actually good (fast, frequent, reliable, comfortable) commuter rail systems are a lot more compelling. Getting the rent differential between city center and suburb down below the threshold of TCO on a basic car would help too.
Average cost per year to own a car is $9000 per the AAA website.
Car storage has its own cost to cities - because parking lots generate no /little property taxes or sales tax.
Many Americans disagree about the value of walkability. ( https://www.houselogic.com/save-money-add-value/save-on-util...) :
> If you’re able to walk instead of drive to the store for a gallon of milk, you and your neighborhood home values may benefit from the exercise. A 2009 study sponsored by CEOs for Cities, a national consortium of civic and business leaders, found that homes in neighborhoods with good walkability are more valuable than similar homes in neighborhoods where residents have to drive to get to amenities.
> Walkability adds anywhere from $4,000 to $34,000 to home values, according to the study. The bigger, more urban the city (think San Francisco or Chicago), the bigger the boost in home prices walkability adds. Neighborhoods in cities with less dense populations like Tucson, Ariz., or Fresno, Calif., have the smallest boost in home prices from being walkable.
> The availability of public transportation also played a role. The higher home values tended to show up in walkable neighborhoods near good public transportation where people could live without an automobile.
You're making my argument for me. Housing costs a great deal more in walkable and transit-friendly areas. Equivalently, car-friendliness lowers housing costs.
I could drive a new BMW for less than it would take to upgrade from East Bay suburbia to an equivalent apartment within walking distance of my downtown SF office (~$2500/mo up to $4500/mo). But both of those choices would be equally and severely irresponsible from a personal finance perspective.
We should be running as far away as possible from policy intended to push people to spend even more on housing.
The car lets me live where housing is cheap(er), while still getting to work and accomplishing day-to-day tasks reasonably quickly. You propose to take that option away and force me to spend that extra $2000/mo, downgrade to a worse apartment, or spend more of my already-scarce free time commuting.
"Average" car costs are weighted upwards by new SUVs and luxury cars. It does not hurt very much to drive a boring reliable Japanese compact as a personal daily driver, everything beyond that is choice.
Two examples: The last time I was in San Francisco, I wanted to stop and eat. I drove around in ever-widening circles seeking a place to park, then gave up and drove away. That business lost out. On another day, across the bay in Freemont I think, I stopped at a place that had free parking right outside the door. They got my business.
In fact studies have shown devoting vast expanses of land to parking is economically bad. See : Stroup "The high cost of Free parking" and the http://www.strongtowns.org/ .
Also refer to the New York City data about removing parking in order to create a more bike/ped friendly neighborhood.
Most patrons to a business live local to that business. Your example of being willing to drive all the way from San Francisco to Fremont demonstrates this point well. You are not the normal example.
Wrt the business that did not get your business.... they may not have even noticed because they had more than enough local patrons.
On the day in San Francisco, I finally found a place to park in some super-rich residential area miles away from where I had started. At that point I parked, but only to rest and assess the situation. I think I then said "screw this" and went back to my hotel in South San Francisco. I probably ate cold food at the hotel, purchased from a supermarket.
On a different day in San Francisco, just a few years ago, I thought I'd try the public transportation. Silly me, that doesn't work either! I ended up walking from the bottom of the California line up to Russian Hill. Afterward, I tried to take a tram/streetcar thing. This being July 4, a day when public transportation is particularly sensible, they shut it down near the crowds who might want it. Of course! WTF SFO. I walked all the way back, then down into the subway station. I get on the train that runs south along the east side, I think the J train. This goes up to street level. It's dark and my cell phone battery is dying. Unlike the T in Boston since at least 1993, this train fails to have: a voice-over for the stops, an overhead text display for the stops, or big lighted signs at the stops. Boston had/has all that, but San Francisco has none of it even 2 decades later. Also, the train doesn't actually stop unless there is a person waiting, so you can't count stops to know where you are. It's GPS or screw you. I get off, walk too far to the "connecting" bus stop, and wait for the last bus. Oh, the sign didn't make it clear that you aren't supposed to wait at the bus shelter. The bus goes by on the other side of the street. So then walk several more miles, cut through Glenn Canyon in the dark, and finally back to the car parked at Turquoise Way.
Obviously, the car doesn't work, but neither does the public transportation. It seems I'm expected to hike up and down all those hills like it's 1849. My knees are too old for that, and my kids are too young for that.
Is this a joke? Car travel works for healthy people who are ~20–60 years old with a stable income.
For everyone else – children, teenagers, elderly people, the disabled, the poor, etc. – cars are terrible. The lack of other transportation options is perhaps the biggest reason that living in car-centric suburbs is hell for teenagers; they end up entirely dependent.
Go take a bus in a city and you’ll see a huge variety of people riding.
> You won't convince a salesman to carry a projector, screen, and a box of pamphlets on the bus and train.
This would not be strange in Manhattan. You couldn't convince the salesman to waste his Time, which is a rare commodity for working people as you say, driving a car which would be slower than taking the subway.
> I'd rather sit and wait in traffic in my car than stand outside in the rain or snow waiting for a bus.
Subways avoid this problem. They're also expensive, but there's easier solutions -- bus and outdoor train shelters (which obviously protect from rain/snow) are sometimes heated in the northeast for this reason too.
Also, dealing with rain/snow is pretty easy and pleasant if you just dress right. The prevalance of cars in this country means many people never learn to dress right because they can get away with never spending more than 60 seconds outside, the brief space between the car and the building door.
> And on top of that, transit for me would be about $400/month.
Here it's $100 a month.
> I'm not sitting on a rough seat crammed next to 5 other people for 2 hours.
A lot of people find dealing with repetitive constant stop and go traffic but having a comfy seat to be a crappy tradeoff compared to having less space but freeing your mind to read, doze, whatever. There are crowded an uncrowded systems and lines.
Go try some good transit, then tell me what you think.
There are currently 6 crimes per every 100,000 miles on Muni (http://sfgov.org/scorecards/crimes-muni). If you commute 5 miles per day, that's 12,500 miles in a decade. I work near Civic Center, a dangerous area, so I assume it's probably 3x more dangerous than average so the equivalent of 37,000 miles. So each decade I ride transit, I'd be victim of over 2 police reported crimes.
I know plenty of people who are terrified of driving in the same way some posters here are terrified of urban crime. It all comes down to what environments you're used to. If you're used to driving down a freeway, you'll routinize and minimize the risk of being in a collision. If you're used to city life, you'll routinize and minimize the risk of being mugged.
Also, once again, transit does not have to mean high crime. You're describing crappy transit systems. So let's improve those.
Given the numbers from the previous post, you should get into 0.02 crashes per decade.
You are about 2.5x more likely to die per mile driven on a city vs highway (http://freakonomics.com/2010/01/29/the-irony-of-road-fear/). Assuming the same ratio for crashes, you'd expect to get into 0.05 crashes per decade.
As a rough estimate, you'd expect to be a victim of a crime on the SF Muni about 40x more often than being in a car crash.
Very unlikely, but sure why not
Nevertheless, we're still for some reason comparing to a terrible transit system, the SF Muni. As usual, if you compare car driving to a terrible transit system, you conclude transit sucks.
NYC's transit system used to have terrible crime rates decades ago, but is much safer than the SF Muni poster describes. Many transit systems outside of the US are even better.
Never mind the fact that it is transportation. Being unprotected in a city is threatening. Walking counts. Sitting in a park counts.
Note that city and non-city have different political behavior. The people are different. Many people will simply never feel safe in a city environment. Private cars mitigate that somewhat.
Why do you say mass transit is a non starter for kids?
She loves it and I love the time with her and not worrying about parking, accidents, etc.
Do you seriously think every old person in e.g. New York City owns a car to get around? Have you ever been to New York City?
this would make roads much less clogged so those who really need (and pay for it) should go on their own. it's very real added value that helps environment, increases happiness, cuts times and so on. what (local) government should do is to motivate people/orgs with some monetary subsidies.
I'm coming from Boston where we have a solid subway system and I massively prefer using that over driving.
I mean sure, I would prefer to be in the back of my private car, but given the choice between the stress of driving, and the stress of reading somewhere crowded? I will pay extra to get the time reading, and I will deal with the crowds for a discount.
The monetary equation won't balance, if you are neutral on driving vs reading preferences, until we start requiring reasonable liability insurance minimums, and until I can get housing and my employer can get office space without paying for parking.
The true costs of driving in silicon valley are dominated by parking and by the unfunded liability inherent to the activity.
So what if this is the case? Moving 20% of the moving population in 2% of the vehicle-volume almost quadruples the capacity for everyone else.
I don't buy your assertion in the large (most regions with effective pubic transport seem to move a roughly representative population of users -- including wealthy people). My point is that it could be true in the Bay Area (which is more spread out than your typical big city) but still not refute the need for mass transport.
But even in San Francisco, unless you're going inbound/outbound the crosstown commutes are horrible. Try getting from Ingleside to Richmond, or Richmond to Dog Patch in a reasonable time frame --impossible. They are all less than 7 miles as the crow flies, but try getting to and fro with public transit that takes less than an hour for what amounts to roughly 5miles...
The transit system in SF is based on the assumption people are going to and from "downtown" and does not accommodate other commute streams.
Paris: 55,673 ppl/sq mi
New York City: 27,016.3 ppl/sq mi
San Francisco: 17,179.2 ppl/sq mi
Zurich: 12,000 ppl/sq mi
Vienna: 11,205 ppl/sq mi
San Bruno: 7,505.0 ppl/sq mi
Mountain View: 6,034.8 ppl/sq mi
San Jose: 5,256.2 ppl/sq mi
Cupertino 5,179.1 ppl/sq mi
Menlo Park: 3,271.3 ppl/sq mi
For instance your figure for Paris is only the actual city of Paris, which doesn't include its own suburbs: it's really just the center. The subway extends a fair bit beyond the actual city boundaries. As an example "La Défense", the business district of Paris, isn't even inside Paris.
So of course it's very dense. The equivalent for NYC would be Manhattan without the 4 boroughs. Maybe even a subset of Manhattan.
The density of the Paris Urban area--which is about 1/6 the size of the Paris Metro area but about 20x the area of the "City"--is about 10,000/sq. mi. (10m people in about 1,000 sq. mi.
If San José replaced all its single family houses with 3–5 story apartment buildings, the density would increase 5x.
They exist and they tend to be eyesores hidden behind trees. The tell-tale sign is the parking found underneath the living level exemplified with non-structural walls. So yes, it's even worse than I stated. Land is grossly underutilized for a city the size of sanctus iosephus. We can blame proper suburbs like MTV, Sunnyvale, &c, but S. Joe takes the cake. It's a city, at least on paper, and should act like one.
(Not that the other parts of San Jose are any better.)
As an historical note, the key planner/city manager from San Jose came from the Los Angeles area - Hamann ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._P._Hamann ). For twenty years (1950-1969), he did his best to make San Jose a sprawling city that sucked up as much of Santa Clara county as he could make happen.
There is a lot of books on what makes city good place to live this days on. I found it fascinating (as SWE).
For example, a city can zone land to be high density residential but that doesn't necessarily mean that people who live there will sell their low density houses so that they can be redeveloped.
A high density area can "want" a public transit station, but the transit authority may not have the funds, or the motivation to give them a station. And there is no means for a city government for "force" them to.
Instead, we're left with the "master plan" system which is a living document that the city government maintains which expresses a "vision" of what the city would like (their plans) and the city council signs up to help make it real when there is something within their powers to do to help it.[1]
A previous example of how hard that can be is the "Coyote Valley" area in South San Jose that was going to be "anchored" in part by large campuses of big employers (Cisco was the headline client). But the dot com crash hit and Cisco never moved in.
A current example is the new Apple "spaceship" campus in Cupertino which is to far away from the train station and in a set of roads that don't easily feed or drain to the 280 interstate. [1] And part of that is the problem in Sunnyvale, the plan says one thing, and when councilmembers have voted to help implement it, it has irritated citizens who didn't realize that was what the plan said.
It would help a lot if the Caltrain would be improved with more rides and less street crossings. Then there should be more buses bringing people to the Caltrain.
For example, this 2013 article describes how the VTA 22 El Camino route becomes completely full of homeless people during the overnight hours: http://www.mercurynews.com/2013/10/31/homeless-turn-overnigh...
San Francisco might be the only place in the world where that is a big challenge in public transport.
(I am not saying that really isn't a problem in SF, but for whatever reasons, the problem doesn't exist elsewhere.)
It hurts a lot more when you come for people's parking spaces if they still need cars for everything except commuting.
e.g. Utah tried this and it seems to work on many levels:
And a lot of places are "built out", so there isn't really room to expand roads, or it is very expensive.
The American model seems to have such narrow and badly paved sidewalks that no one uses them, so then you need wider streets to cater for the combined use by pedestrians, cyclists and cars.
I grew up in suburban Dallas, and there were sidewalks everywhere. The only neighborhoods I saw without sidewalks were older neighborhoods that always creeped me out when I was little... I always got the impression that they were dilapidated.
Here's an example from a neighborhood right near where I grew up: https://goo.gl/maps/qGSvbk4HdAM2
And even the six-lane arterials have sidewalks here: https://goo.gl/maps/DUR8mdVQysu and https://goo.gl/maps/hZ4dL3yj8F32
And for completeness, a sidewalk-less street in a nearby neighborhood: https://goo.gl/maps/TnQ8bogKttL2 -- that whole area just looks old, and the neighborhood gave me the creeps when I was a kid
I would definitely change the order from
road | sidewalk | lawn
road | lawn | sidewalk
http://homeguides.sfgate.com/sidewalks-considered-homeowners...
Standing room on public transit is much worse than driving, IMO.
The good news is that China is working on it:
http://www.china.org.cn/business/2016-11/01/content_39610565...
Why don't you look at a train schedule in the US and tell me how many trains go 200 mph. Hint: zero! Most trains average less than 50 mph.
As for a bus, you aren't going to drive it at 70 through the streets of LA or Manhattan. In fact, it's probably going to be tough getting it to 60 in this traffic:
http://www.mercurynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/sjm-co...
A maglev carries 200-300 people? Your average bus holds 50?
Heck, most of the freeway HOV lanes are full of corporate bus routes during rush hour anyway...
That said, public transit is indeed slow, but it's mostly available in the area if you absolutely must take it. It covers a lot more than I think you're giving it credit for based on your choice of workplace and specific area of living though.
For example try to get from parts of Sunnyvale to Google.
As extreme as the shortage of housing is the shortage of childcare. 150 person waitlists for 50 kid day-cares are common.
Yeah, I know people who have literally planned their pregnancies around expected childcare availability. As in, they make sure they can have a spot lined up quickly before they even start trying to get pregnant.
We used to be one of the cheapest cities in the country, and while we're still cheap compared to California, the gap has noticeably narrowed.
(edit: I've also heard of Californians moving here who make an offer for well above the asking price, just to make sure they get it, which contributes to the skyrocketing prices)
Maybe that's all Californians know. It's normal out here. I put in an offer on a home that received 45 other written offers, 1/4 of them all-cash and above asking price. If you're financing, you need to go much higher than 25% above asking. It's insanity. Then we go move to different parts of the country and forget that you don't need that aggressive approach everywhere.
My family moved from CA to the Seattle area in the '90s and people complained about the same damn things.
The other day I was talking to my Dad about this, after I sent him an article saying that the average price of a house in Seattle (or maybe King County) hit about $600,000, but in SF / SV it was $1.2 million. He observed that Seattle-area prices were also half of Bay Area prices twenty years ago, and that it's pretty funny that the ratio has remained about the same.
Combine the inflow of new residents with the existing stressed road system and city & county council inaction on mass transit, and traffic is ugly. It can take me 35-40 minutes to go 8.5 miles some days.
Here's a problem...
Two of them have tenants, one is sitting empty.
So as the technology folks from other cities move into these newly labeled "tech hubs" they'll drive the rent up because the costs seem so much lower than they actually are. It's a hard concept for some reason to grasp that they can pay $1500/month for a 1 bedroom in other tech cities that's $2800/month in SV/SF. However, what they don't realize is that it used to be $1100/month but landlords take advantage of the fact that $400/more/month is not an issue for someone coming from SF/SV
- Several are just plain rich, one of them was the son of a very wealthy man and then worked for a startup that actually took off
- One went into the armed forces for six years and saved up enough money to buy a house in our hometown (because where he wanted to live was too expensive)
- Couples who have high earning jobs but are drowning in student loan debt (a dentist and a doctor, in my case)
The rest of my friends are renting. I know maybe...seven people under the age of 35 who are paying mortgages.
I'm sure most millennials would buy a house or own a car if they could. But the reality is that straight up many cannot. It's not necessarily a matter of "drive".
Speaking as a so-called "millennial", when it comes to home ownership, this is completely wrong and downright insulting.
I would love to own a place instead of paying rent. Except, guess what? The smallest down payment possible for a flat anywhere close to where I live is roughly equal to my annual gross salary. And that'd be for the smallest, hole-in-the-wall flat that would likely be a money pit of necessary repairs.
Yes, I could move to a less-expensive state, but that'd require a massive upheaval in my life, not to mention the fact that a different job in that area would pay a much lower salary after COLA.
Oh, and also, if you're working in tech? You're in for a surprise when you try to get a mortgage. If you're in your 20s and working a six-figure salary, in a competitive real estate market like SF and NYC, you'll be expected to pay an even larger downpayment due to the "volatility" of your employment and annual earnings. (ie, you're employed at-will with a short employment history in an industry known for rapid change, so they want more of their money up front).
It's not that millennials don't want to own these things, it's that they see them as out of reach. It's an uncomfortable economic reality that gets abstracted into "kids these days just want different things" like they're hoarding stockpiles of money and refusing to spend it unless the thing-makers read their minds.
Air con dies? Open a service request, get it fixed for free. Microwave stops working? Open a service request, get it fixed for free. Water pressure in the shower drops to nothing? Open a service request, get it fixed for free.
Also, I don't have to do any groundskeeping. I don't have to mow a lawn or trim plants. If there's a hailstorm, I don't have to lift a finger or pay one red cent to replace the roof.
Oh, and since our summers can be terrible, I get access to a swimming pool at no extra charge (technically, it's not free, but my rent is certainly cheaper than the cost of a down payment on a house + monthly mortgage payments + cost of installing a swimming pool), and they even maintain the pool for me..
"The drop in homeownership is largely due to a delay in homebuying by the millennials, who have the lowest ownership rate of their age group in history. Millennials are not only burdened by student loan debt, but they have also delayed life choices like marriage and parenthood, which are the primary drivers of homeownership. "
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/28/millennials-cause-homeownersh...
Can Millennials Afford The American Dream?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerrizane/2016/01/24/will-millen...
I'm a highschool dropout who has no familial support. If I can do it so can someone with a college degree and better access to opportunities as long as they are willing to make the same sacrifices.
I really like not hearing my neighbors parties or seeing random weirdos hanging out in the hallways.
To each their own. Nothing in the city really excites me. Quite frankly I find the noise and bustle annoying.
Isn't it more the lack of spare cash for those, especially the large deposits required for housing?
so the concept of paying $200-500/more a month for leasing an apartment isn't as cumbersome as it was for the past generation
I think you underestimate the extent to which people have looked at the mortgage costs and would love to own a house if they could afford to.
Anyone can save a deposit given enough time, affording the monthly mortgage payments is the challenge.
There's a demographic difference, for example I'm constantly being asked by members of the prior generation why I don't own two cars and how we possibly cope. Actually I have no interested in owning any cars at all but one is necessary.
The same goes for housing - why don't you buy? Because I don't need to...
Now, we millennials do care a lot about housing but only to the extent that the previous generation has made it unaffordable.
Affording monthly mortgage payments is easy. Actually having enough cash in the bank to make a down payment, and having a high enough income for a long enough period of time to convince a bank to underwrite your mortgage is the hard part.
> No, it's not a spare cash problem. The modern world is full of credit.
For people in their 30s and 40s who already have a credit history, yes. For people who turned 18 after 2008, it's dramatically harder.
After 2008, banks were terrified of providing lines of credit (such as credit cards) to people who didn't have a credit history. Since the fastest way to building a strong credit history is to have prior credit, this quickly becomes a self-perpetuating problem. I had many friends who found it literally impossible to get a credit card as recently as 2010 or 2011, despite having high incomes, because they couldn't prove their creditworthiness.
Banks have since recovered somewhat from this fear, so it's no longer quite as difficult to get credit cards, but the same fear exists to getting a mortgage. And even before 2008, banks were always particularly hesitant to extend mortgages to young people due to the extra perceived risk.
I'm sure a generation of young people who watched their parents go into crippling debt has made people wary of credit.
> Anyone can save a deposit given enough time, affording the monthly mortgage payments is the challenge.
Funny, I can handle the mortgage, but not the down payment (even with $100K+ in the bank).
Bullshit. We own less stuff than our predecessors because
1) College costs quite a bit more minimum wage labor-hours than it used to.
2) Entry level work pays quite a bit less (in real terms) than it used to.
3) When we do find good jobs, they're in the urban parts of expensive metros where parking is a luxury good and starter homes cost 3-6x the homes we were raised in.
Attributing the artifacts of having less purchasing power to a character flaw instead of, you know, less purchasing power is not helpful.
Just because a property value increased steadily in the past 15-30 years doesn't mean it will continue to increase in the 15-30 years.
There are lots of cities where prices stopped moving and some where prices went going down compared to the past 5-10 years. Buying a place is far from risk free.
Miami, LA, NYC, Dallas/Fort Worth, and Chicago to a lesser extent, all have thriving economies without being tech-centric. This fallacy that SF has some special magic nowhere else has economically speaking needs to die already. Please don't bring your Bay Area problems elsewhere (becoming a wage slave to afford a million dollar single family home, overflowing poverty in one of the richest parts of the world, displacing non-tech residents through housing costs).
Yes, not everyone a sexy startup, but stable growing business or just huge, established.
Fully agree on the BART extension, Livermore at least.
[0] https://www.redfin.com/city/17151/CA/San-Francisco/filter/mi...
I believe that Software Engineer can find 1m$ in 30 years.
Oh, and with the other 80% as a loan, there's a requirement that the payments aren't over 40% of your income, so a $1.2M loan at 3.92% for 30 years means you need to make more than $170k/year. You're right that lots of good software devs make that, but this is a crazy amount above the area median. And that's the lowest end $1.5M from the $1.5-3M range for a 3br in those areas. Hyperbole is not quite the way to spin it.
http://www.sfyimby.org/endorsements-nov-2016 Is a good pro-housing voter guide for San Franciscans.
On that note, you'll see that traffic/commute is worse than L.A. in many cities. I think L.A. just gets the publicity but there are a lot of people around the country suffering in silence.
[1] https://www.census.gov/hhes/commuting/files/2012/Paper-Poste...
If you look at urban design & public transport it's amazing how well it works despite all obstacles.
Public transport doesn't make sense in low population density areas and wide road make the distances even bigger. I mean, some US cities managed to realize a car-utopia Houston with 11 lane highway or Phoenix. The question is, does it make sense?
I'm surprised that no one tried to buy a shit lot of land and create a more-cityish city. In this context SFO is city with a city life, especially some older districts.
As it stands, apartments in high density areas are at an extreme premium over apartments in low density areas. Given little to no change in existing housing stock, the best thing we can do for affordability is expand the surface area it's reasonable to commute from, and that usually means freeways and parking.
Public transit actually can work well in low density: people in suburbs drive from a few miles around to a train station with ample parking, and then take the train into the much more transit-oriented city. We need more of this.
A place like Houston or Phoenix is perfect for me. Actually, I live in suburban Dallas (and I work farther out in the suburbs), and I have no desire to move. Though it's possible I might have to move out of state next year, in which case I'm seriously looking at St. Paul, MN.
I mean, I am like you, that I would rather live in a smallish community where it's calm and everything over a city, but if you combine that feature with "there are people everywhere" then it is not that great.
It always felt more "town" than "suburb" - and certainly it's a river hop from "city".
It helps that I have a friend who moved to Minneapolis after college (I think he specifically lives in St. Louis Park), and he's been trying to convince me that I should move there if I need to leave Texas. So I started looking at the demographics of the area, and St. Paul's 15% Asian population jumped out at me.
By the way, St. Paul isn't the only place on my short list. Another one is the San Gabriel Valley in SoCal (Monterey Park, Alhambra, etc.), but a big turn-off to that area is the high cost of living.
Honestly I have no idea what the solution is. Build more lanes on the highway and more people will choose to commute, quickly using those new lanes up.
Jesus, man. That's time you don't get back. I'd factor that into your salary, take the difference off, and move somewhere sane.
Even public transit systems have to go suffer rush hours !
Capacity of a transit system be it public or individual will never match the load.
If the employers only ask the employees to come in 2 days a week or only when necessary, there should be a significant improvement in the situation. This could be even tried as an experiment for a while to see how it plays out.
I have been commuting in London for about 7 years now and I cry when I see how much the commute costs me and the sub-par service that I have to deal with on the services feeding into the main hub I have to get to to be able to use the tube.
The tube service itself is not so bad but I cannot afford to live inside the zones where I only have to use TFL services.
The best solution is for the companies in SV (or other major employment nerve centers) to realise that making all of your employees commute everyday into work is the root cause.
Just chiming in here with this example since I have had the chance to use the VTA for about a month and I have first hand experience of a well established transit system i.e. London.
I personally loved the VTA trams since very few people used them even in rush hour, they always travel at ground or above ground level (underground travel does get a bit depressing for me), effective air conditioning (never experienced a fart-attack although my time spent on VTA is very little), always get a seat and there's "free" Wifi.
Most local coworkers who I knew there were driving and they were driving in early and leaving early to avoid the back up on 101 or the 280 routes.
That's what I do on my commute on the public transport system even. But if everybody managed to learn that trick, then it's the same situation in the end.
The other day, I worked from home... Made coffee, and was coding away at 8am. By noon, I had a ton of work done. That never happens on a commute day.
$2400 is not getting you into a 2 bedroom in any nice / "managed" building in Boston. Thats the going rate for a 1bed in the nice high-rises. So your in a small apt complex or converted house (duplex,triplex, etc.)
1. Minimum to park a car in the city every day is $250-$300 / month. Realistically $350+
2. Even living inside the "128" loop(so minimum500K house) , expect 45-90 minute commute (snow, rain).
OR you can use the train
1. Commuter Rail passes are expensive, $250-$350 a month (add some parking money to park at the commuter rail station ($1-$5 a day).
2. Hope the train runs on time and fits into your schedule (they run on the 30 minutes or on the hour)
3. Takes the same amount of time as driving (45-90 minutes easy).
Boston has many of the same problems as SF (housing, commutes), its just been that way for longer and people are used to it.
On the note of a "nice/managed building", you're right that I live in a smaller setup. Having previously lived in one of the luxury high-rises, I find my current apartment and management preferable even before considering the differences in rent.
Granted it's for a 4-600 sq ft place...
It's hard to get out of the "expensive zone" as easily in the Bay area--partly because of geography and partly because it's not just SF and a number of inner suburbs that are sky-high (as is the Boston metro area out to Concord or so) but the whole of Silicon Valley.
Exurban-rural town. I don't know exactly what the real estate prices are these days as I've had my place for a long time but I'm guessing $300K or so would get you a decent house.
I didn't find any houses that were to my liking in the $300k range in towns with good school districts, but once you go into the $400-500k range there is good stuff. Either way, you get so much more for your money than if you bought closer to Boston.
I imagine you're right about real estate prices. My house is sufficiently "quirky" albeit on a nice and large plot of land that what I see on Zillow probably isn't representative (and Zillow has some details wrong anyway). I'm also not sure our schools qualify as "good" although I have no personal experience.
That's interesting. Times have definitely changed, but I'm not one for city living so "metro west" suits me just fine.
And I guess I should qualify my real estate remark by saying I was looking for houses close to the pike, which drives up the price.
Details:
12 mile commute
40 minutes by ebike, every day
25 minutes by car, best day
50 minutes by car, average day
1 hour 40 minutes by car, average day
Two things that discourage people from commuting by bike that would still apply to ebikes:
You get really wet in the rain.
You get injured in a typical collision with a car.
Two specific issues with ebikes:
They're rather expensive compared to a bike, and even compared to some used cars.
I see a risk that they could someday become regulated and licensed as mopeds.
Also, one very simple answer is that the Bay Bridge isn't passable on anything short of a 250cc motorcycle and won't be until 2018.
Main draw is that e-bikes are usable on bike paths and through parks. You feel like a kid again by taking "shortcuts".
I know which way the HN crowd leans, but I feel compelled to point out that while pro-transit folks may feel comfortable being ideologically "correct", in practice this has just not worked out in the US and any argument about why sounds like someone hammering a bell upon which is inscribed "no true scotsman".
Either there's been a multi-decade cabal holding the entire country in its grip and preventing us from leaping into our beautiful public transportation future... Or Americans just do not want it, kicking and screaming about sustainability to the contrary.
Zoning, basically. It makes density illegal in enough places that transit isn't terribly practical. It also makes even walking to a corner store something that is no longer an option in many new developments. If you'd like to read all about it, this book is very thorough:
If you'd like something a bit more tl;dr, these are good: http://amzn.to/2erOJXL http://amzn.to/2fyXrpG
Yes. With the complicity of states/feds/courts etc... who have allowed neighbors to run rampant over others' property rights to a degree that I think has lead to a number of terrible consequences.
It's hilarious to me to watch as well. I have co-workers constantly complaining about spending too much time in traffic. I spend just as much time in traffic as they do, but I don't mind because I'm on a bus. I'm usually reading a book, or working on my laptop, while they are just staring at cars in front of them. The answer is right in front of their faces, but "I need a car because of.... reasons" is too ingrained in our culture.
As a result of all these different forces I realized how challenging it is to not have some bad commutes. And in Sunnyvale we're in the midst of a debate started about choices the city council has made to allow more local housing to be developed. There are a lot of apartments and condos being built and some residents are complaining about traffic and change. It will be interesting to see if folks approve additional transit dollars.
If you spend 90 minutes driving from SF to Mountain View, traffic definitely makes it slower/worse than it would otherwise be, but it'd still be a 45 minute drive without traffic.
People may spend more time driving in SF/SV, but that's largely a factor of how far apart desirable housing and jobs are for many people. I wouldn't be surprised if traffic on the Peninsula made commutes 2-3x longer than they'd be without it, but in LA the factor's more like 6x.
It can take you over an hour to get from the off ramp to your terminal. Less than 1 mile.
people in the bay area loves chiding LA like this.
but you are quickly starting to understand first hand how exactly LA came to be the way it is. it was/is a mixture of extremely powerful political, economic, and social forces exerted over generations.
unfortunately SF/the bay is doing nothing to fix it -- at long last LA is building new housing, mixed-used real estate, and new light rail and other public transit very aggressively.
it will probably take the bay area another 2-3 decades to overcome the resistance, just like LA.
Even if I didn't, I would never leave because of the weather and activities.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to each their own.
Also...is there any chance your company is hiring Network Engineers? :)
Edit: For a better description of the problem with Rochester's weather, see GP's name.
You ARE in the industry.
For every programmer in Silicon Valley, there are x of us not in Silicon Valley. And there's probably little correlation between whether or not you're in Silicon Valley and the coolness and value of whatever you're building.
I love visiting but I can't imagine living there.
That basically sums up my feelings on the bay area too.
This sums up how I feel about NYC. I have family there, both my parents were originally from there, and I've had a good time every time I've visited, but I wouldn't want to actually live there. It's a great place for spending a weekend, but it's too noisy, crowded, and expensive to go about my day to day life there.
- A new BART station is set to open shortly, and,
- Across the street, a new single family housing development with 4,000 (yes, four thousand) new housing units is under construction [0],
- And, next door, Tesla will be building 500,000 Model 3s annually with 3,000 additional workers.
The AM commutes via I-680 / Pleasanton and I-880 / Oakland are already Hell on Earth. It's going to get much worse before it gets better.
1: https://www.redfin.com/CA/Fremont/47040-Havasu-St-94539/home...
Additional freeway lanes improve throughput, but don't remove congestion at peak: it will reduce the duration of congestion. If you want to handle peak traffic without congestion, you would have to build a lot more capacity than is reasonable (or significantly reduce demand).
Since demand for transit is increasing continuously (as more people move to the area), and supply of transit increases slowly and only in steps, it's no surprise that the new supply is quickly matched with demand. Lots of people would like to go places during rush hour, but the freeways are full for several hours, and Caltrain is too.
Our politicians have given up, no one even talks about making our transit system better. Total losers.
(12 miles)
I suspect that, in a democracy which places an emphasis on freedom of career choice, free rights of personal movement (from pretty much anywhere to pretty much anywhere else), essentially unregulated road and highway access, the high cost of infrastructure creation and maintenance, the high cost of government workers, combined with relatively strong individual property rights -- gridlock and skyrocketing housing costs are truly unavoidable.
> “If the economy tanks, then we won’t create jobs the way we used to, but nobody wants the economy to tank,” Hancock said. “We don’t really have a fix for this problem right now..."
An entire sprawling suburb could be served by a single station, with people taking self-driving taxi rides from their doorstep (timed to allow a short transfer) and then getting in another taxi to get to their destination. It would be almost as convenient, but people wouldn't be wasting tonnes of road space for the bulk of their journey.
A service like Uber (or possibly Google maps) could even offer integrated tickets for the whole journey.
SF has had a shortage of housing for decades, and it just gets worse and worse. Is there any point at which the NIMBYs will be defeated and zoning policy adjusted to allow real densification? Or is power stacked so much in their favor that it will never happen?
Don't think of it as a commute; thinking of it as blocking out two hours every day to play video games!
I used to walk to work around 2.5km, <30 minutes. Through a green neighbourhood, I think I've never appreciated it enough.
I regret that I didn't use that time to learn Japanese or something.
How do you get your stuff home from Costco? I mean there is delivery, but still.
About the people driving, I also found that there are tons of roads right off the main through fairs that are very very bike friendly, very little traffic and lots of bike lanes. I think you underestimate just how far you can get on a bike in a reasonable time. Like I said I commuted from Menlo park to Redwood city and to Freemont ( across the bay ) with no trouble whatsoever.
Can we pin any hopes on fully autonomous vehicles?
You mean like the rest of the world has already proven to be doable? What makes this area unique?