Relocating from San Francisco to Seattle: cost comparison | Hacker News Reader

Relocating from San Francisco to Seattle: cost comparison

wolframalpha.com

120 pointsvtail75 comments

Weather.

I'm a Californian who grew up in a "sunny" California city, and I've been living in Seattle for the last year. I've also spent a lot of time in San Francisco in my lifetime.

I, miss, the, sun. Every time I go back to California and visit family/friends, I start to realize how depressed I am up in the Pacific North West. I've had more that one person recommend that I take Vitamin D supplements, which is supposed to make me feel better.

The moral of my own personal story is... I'm moving back to California. I need sun. I'll pay a premium for the mental health of myself and my children.

How many days of sun are there in San Francisco compared to Seattle? If you had to live in a place with awesome tech scenes but with no sun, you might as well choose Seattle... it's cheaper.

I've had a coworker who used to work at Microsoft say the same thing. She liked Seattle, but when it came down to not seeing the sun from Nov-Mar in Seattle vs. not seeing a cloud in the sky from May-Oct in Silicon Valley, it was a pretty easy choice.

I'm curious how both compare to Portland, which has been a popular destination for burnt-out Bay Area hackers of late. I've heard it's somewhere in-between. The one time I visited it was nice and sunny, but then again, it was August.

I'm also wondering how they compare to the east coast. I was born & raised in the Boston area, which has a reputation for terrible weather. But Boston is highly seasonal: you get to May, when you have wonderful 70-degrees sunny days, and think "This is what I shoveled all winter for." I almost think that's nicer than the Bay Area, where you get inured to the nice weather after a while and start to take it for granted.

You don't really start to see more sun until you hit southern Oregon. Medford is dryer than the rest of western Oregon or Washington.

Here's a precipitation map of the western US: http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/pcpn/westus_precip.gif

That little bit of yellow in the south of Oregon is the Rogue River valley. Portland is pretty much about as wet as Seattle.

Of course, once you get over the Cascades, it's a different story, but the cities over there tend to be smaller and less important.

I grew up in Oregon, and what I really can't stand is just how gray it is all the time. There are many days when it's not raining that hard, but just a drizzle here and there all day long, with no sun, and it gets pretty depressing.

Living in various places in Washington, whenever there is a sunny day, I don't want to work. I just want to go outside all day because I haven't had a sunny day in weeks and won't have another one for weeks either. In eastern Washington summers though, it stays sunny for days or weeks, and I get over it. (Though working in a dark cubicle across the room from the nearest window all summer was depressing.)

Yeah, when I was working in Portland, in the summer I felt a strong urge to tell everyone to go to hell and go enjoy the sunshine while it lasted. Summers there are beautiful - not too hot, not humid, and everything is beautiful and green.

I grew up in Berkeley and lived in the Bay Area until I was 27. I moved to Seattle 13 years ago and have no plans to return. I don't miss the weather at all, in fact I enjoy the generally cooler summer and actually having some variation (I lived in Boston for a year and actually like having more defined seasons, but the cold and heat did get to me.)

Anyway, I can't ever see myself moving back to CA. The cost of living is definitely better, I find people much less self absorbed up here, and I love the scenery. The latter is probably the biggest factor, it's so incredibly beautiful up here I couldn't bear to leave the trees, mountains and islands.

For me, it's the opposite. Moving down to the Bay Area from Washington/Idaho, the amount of sun here is maddening. Seems like an unending summer of days exactly like the previous.

I'm like that when I visit CA. CA has no weather. No seasons. Just sun. It's ok for a week or 2, but after a while for me it's like spending a year at Disneyland. Starts to wear a bit thin. It gets tiring. I get sleepy.

Trust me: if you ever have to choose between no variation in crappy weather, and no variation in wonderful weather, you should choose wonderful. Disneyland is better than Mordor.

I'm not one of these people who thinks rain is crappy weather. Rain can be awesome. For me, variation is the main thing.

Where do you live? Portola Valley, for example, is pretty bleak. Expensive though.

Here's some data, fwiw: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/online/ccd/pctposrank.tx...

Looks like SF is about 66% sunny, while Seattle is 43%. I imagine the bigger contrast is Seattle vs. Silicon Valley or East Bay, though, since SF itself isn't all that sunny (especially the western parts; I'd be surprised if the Sunset District were any sunnier than Seattle).

That chart doesn't take into account the difference in latitude, it gets dark pretty early up here in Seattle, and while it stays light later in the summer, it is more than some people can bear.

Having grown up in Norway and currently living in Sweden I have to say I find the short summer evenings in the southern part of the world really jarring. I cannot get used to it being pitch black outside by (what feels like) mid-afternoon during the summer.

The same thing happened to me the first time I was in in Hawaii. I was sitting by the beach and I wondered "why on earth are they lighting tiki torches in the middle of the day?"

The sun just fell out of the sky around ten minutes later. Very jarring indeed.

May I suggest Colorado? Cost of living in SF is 30% more than even the most expensive city (Boulder, ignoring resort towns).

Yeah, it can get cold, but the winters are orders of magnitude nicer than the midwest or northeast.

Conversation with friend from Seattle:

Him: "It's funny that San Franciscans say they live in the Northwest." Me: "Really? What do people in Seattle call the area San Francisco is in?" Him: "The tropics."

Fair enough as long as you aren't talking about the small sliver of coastline running along the western half of SF. A marathon is held there every summer. I ran it once, on streets that were wet with fog, in a nice cool (mid 50's) mist. It was 80+ in Berkeley that day, and 90+ in Sonoma.

When you drive up the peninsula along 280 on a hot summer day, you see an amazing wave of fog rolling over the mountains. You hit it, and within 5 minutes, you've turned the air conditioner off and the heater on. It's no exaggeration to say that 30-40 degree temperature changes are common over the span of about 3 miles.

And on skyline, near the coast in pacifica, it actually feels hazardous to drive it's so hard to see.

Take a weekend and check out Central or Eastern Washington. Lots of sun here, though not much of a tech startup scene.

As a transplant from Seattle to LA, give me sunshine any day! LA gets 283 sunny days/year, and now I tend to forget what rain and clouds even look and feel like. So what if the total cost of living is higher by a solid percentage. You can be a helluva lot more productive if you don't want to jump off the Aurora bridge every day because the darkness is triggering major depression around whatever else is going on in your life. Paying for sunshine is absolutely essential for some people(like me), it's not even a personal choice.

If you've ever lived through the awful annual Seattle blackout between November and May, where you might see 20 minutes of sunshine per day(they even have a word for it: "sunbreaks"), then you'll have directly experienced what I'm talking about.

Curiously, I would point out this entire SF vs Seattle debate reveals a great example of how we disproportionally compare risk vs. reward in human psychology. Given two equivalent choices, the one that cause us to lose more in order to gain more is perceived as being the "bad choice"—our brains want to gain more immediately. Taking the big risk in Manhattan, SF or LA means you have a shot to get paid far, far higher than anywhere else, just because of how capital pools in urban cores.

Conventional wisdom says to go to a smaller city and enjoy a lower cost of living. That is the optimal choice if you have certainty that you won't be getting those high paying jobs in dense urban cores. But if you think you might? I would say it makes more sense, both economically and in terms of overall well-being, to "go big"—go to the biggest place you can and aim as high as you can.

I agree with your conclusion, but it is industry specific. I'd argue that in the tech industry, LA vs. Seattle is basically a wash in terms of career ceiling. Silicon Valley on the other hand...

I'd like to put in a good word for Portland (no sales tax, great food):

http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+san+franc...

Also one of the most bike-friendly cities in the US.

I originally wanted to move there but there doesn't seem to be many jobs. :( Correct me if I'm wrong.

"There don't seem to be many jobs"

Well done, sir, well done.

I know this doesn't add anything; and I shouldn't be meta commenting. But that was very funny! Almost spat out my tea.

Compared to SF, or even Seattle? Obviously not even close. There are jobs though if you're set on being there, not to mention the possibility of (tele)commuting.

Fantastic beer too.

And a great music scene...

OK, Wolfram Alpha kicks ass.

Here's the most interesting part:

| San Francisco, California | Seattle, Washington total sales tax rate | 9.5% | 9.5%

When people from California tell me it must be nice to live in a state like Washington, that doesn't have a state income tax, I like to torture them by pointing out that the lack of a state income tax is made up for by a high sales tax. Then they ask what the sales tax is, and I tell them.

There are too many variables involved to compare a couple of types of taxes and call it a day. For instance, property taxes are another large component of the total tax burden.

California's total state and local tax burden in 2008 was 10.5%[1], which ranks 6th among the 50 states. Washington's was 8.9%[2], for a rank of 35.

[1] http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/443.html

[2] http://www.taxfoundation.org/taxdata/show/486.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_State...

"At 8.25%, California has the highest state sales tax, which can total up to 10.75% with local sales tax included."

"Washington has a 6.5% statewide sales tax."

What am I missing???

The point is that although our sales tax is high in Washington, partly because we do not have in income tax, it's still not as high as California, which DOES have an income tax--and a pretty hefty income tax at that.

Hence when we tell Californians that not having an income tax is not as great as it sounds because it means we pay an outrageously high sales tax, and then they realize that our outrageously high sales tax is lower than theirs, it is funny.

No ones pays as low as 6.5% here, though, because there are county and local taxes. The state is divided into a bunch of small regions for tax purposes (about 2.6 million locations), roughly corresponding to zip+5 regions, not not exactly. I've got a database giving the rate in each of these locations.

Checking that database, the minimum actual sales tax is 7%, the maximum is 9.5%, and the average (giving equal weight to each location) is 8.6%.

Here are all the rates, and how many locations have each rate:

  +---------+----------+
  | rate    | count(*) |
  +---------+----------+
  | 0.07000 |    22526 |
  | 0.07500 |    12404 |
  | 0.07600 |    38365 |
  | 0.07700 |   172606 |
  | 0.07800 |   258871 |
  | 0.07900 |   174886 |
  | 0.08000 |    65948 |
  | 0.08100 |   118239 |
  | 0.08200 |   148568 |
  | 0.08300 |    43973 |
  | 0.08400 |   115138 |
  | 0.08500 |   131129 |
  | 0.08600 |   224180 |
  | 0.08700 |   210720 |
  | 0.09200 |    41020 |
  | 0.09300 |   282441 |
  | 0.09500 |   622649 |
  +---------+----------+

Ahh, thanks. I was missing the irony. :-D

King County also levies a sales tax.

I think it's the most useful thing that I've seen WA do so far. I just wish it worked for Canadian cities.

Actual cost of living calculators give better results than this. This one tells you how much your disposable income would change by keeping the percentile of your current salary constant: http://swz.salary.com/costoflivingwizard/layoutscripts/coll_...

(Hint: Move to Austin.)

Too bad it's not working for Canadian cities.

Also doesn't seem to take into account income and capgains tax rates; for a single person making >120k that is a substantial cost savings on its own.

It doesn't actually seem to take the salary you put in into account at all: it gives the same 24% cheaper for $30,000 salary and $120,000 salary, even though the ratios of expenses shouldn't be the same for those two cases. At the very least, the weightings should change: someone who makes $20,000 is probably spending more than 12% on groceries, while someone who makes $10m is probably not spending 12% on groceries (or 10% on utilities). And the ratio of housing prices isn't constant across all types of housing, either.

No, I'm pretty sure that means it's being stupid.

It gives exactly 24% less regardless of what salaries you put in and not changing the "% of total" or anything. That means that it's figuring out the difference in average cost of living first, and then just reduces the salary you gave by 24% to get the equivalent.

Yeah, not sure which you were referring to, but it should both factor in the different tax rates in the different states/cities and the fact that when you're at that lower equivalent salary (the 90k instead of the 120k), you're paying a lower effective tax rate because a higher % of your income is in the lower brackets.

A shorter move: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+san+fra...

The vast majority of the difference in that particular comparison is housing- which must apply to buying houses, because comparing rents certainly doesn't give 45% difference. So... this data is meaningless unless you own your house here and plan on buying there, from what I can tell, which probably excludes most of us.

Edit: OK, I'm finding some cheaper rents, but I think my main analysis stands.

There's also the fact that Washington has no state income tax; that's 10% in Seattle's favor that isn't even accounted for (I looked up ACCRA cost of living indices and they are after-tax).

Compare to New York, http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+san+fra....

Amazing how much more expensive living in New York is.

Anecdotally, I moved to NY from SF just over a year ago, and my cost of living went down quite a bit. I'm not in Manhattan, which is what that chart is for, but Brooklyn is at least as much 'city' as SF, plus Manhattan's just a short train ride away.

Downsides: not as pretty (though plenty pretty in its own way), worse weather (hotter in the summer, colder in the winter), people seem a bit more high-strung.

I've been thinking about moving to Houston. Imaging the difference if you had been in NYC:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+new+yor...

But then you'd be in Houston. NYC is expensive because people want to live there.

Houston has many pluses. Relatively cheap living is just one of them.

On the other hand, NYC is not for everyone and cost is only one reason.

If you only look at the central part of the city instead of the entire sprawling metro area, Houston isn't so bad.

I did the comp of Houston to San Francisco: 20 degrees over 4 months makes a big difference! I'm glad I like to sweat.

Ouch: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+seattle...

76% more in Manhattan. Housing is 164% more expensive.

As usual in WA, only works with that exact input. Give it any international city - silent fail.

It works for some of the bigger cities in the US though. I was comparing where I live now to where I lived before and it seemed pretty accurate.

Check out this accidental discovery, note how the graphs remain nearly parallel over years (!)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=violent+crime+in+seattl...

Weird coincidence?

I would expect the crime levels to sort of coincide over the nation. In fact, they don't: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=violent+crime+in+seattl... but it does seem that they do between these two cities. It is weird.

Here's something else: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=violent+crime+in+washin...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=violent+crime+in+washin...

Hypothesis: the country at large has a crime rate. In addition there is a magic variable which only affects cities, but affects all cities:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=violent+crime+in+san+fr...

Is "magic variable" the new street name for crack cocaine?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_epidemic_(United_States)

According to that very page, the crack epidemic is over.

Are drugs really the source of most crime? Kinda doubt that.

Crime is not zero sum.

Um, for some values of "parallel."

Ok, let's say they track each other.

Which is indeed a definition of "parallel", e.g. in definition 2 here: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/parallel

I'd love to see a list of 50 us cities or so with the lowest costs of living so i could pick one to move to.

Alas I searched "Cities in us with lower cost of living than washington dc" but wa didn't understand.

The largest reduction is in housing (45% less in Seattle). However, unless your goal in moving IS to save money, I bet that most people would pay the same -- either upgrade to a larger place or move to a more desirable part of town.

Also, note that housing costs are based on housing sale prices. Rent is definitely higher in San Francisco, but it does not always follow housing sale prices.

Dallas: http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+san+franc...

Dallas, Houston and Austin are super cheap with fairly big tech cultures. Austin might even be worth living in too.

huh? link gives me: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure how to compute an answer from your input"

How about where my investor is from:

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+san+fra...

A Microsoft recruiter sent me something very similar to this the spring before I graduated from college.

hmmm...this one's a little vaguer http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=relocating+from+portland+...

Edit: totally responding to the wrong post. Tabs are confusing. Sorry guys.

Wrong post?

Indeed. Tabs are confusing! :'(

Seattle could really use one of those Arizona-style harassment laws to keep Californian prop-13 refugees out.

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