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Comment by kcorbitt | Hacker News Reader

This analysis may be reasonable as far as it goes, but it can still make financial sense for someone to live and work in the Bay Area. I recently took a new job near San Francisco paying ~$160k. Living cheaply, our actual consumption for my family of 3 is about ~50k a year. (Yes, this is possible -- and life can still be enjoyable if you like spending time in nature/other inexpensive activities.) After taxes, that leaves me $50-60k a year to invest/save for retirement.

Compare that with a salary of $105k in inexpensive Salt Lake City, which is where my second-choice offer was. After taxes and consumption for a similar lifestyle, I'd be saving somewhere around $30-40k/year, a substantial decrease. Not to mention the fact that if the startup that made that offer went under, it would be much harder to find another interesting job with similar compensation in Salt Lake than San Francisco.

I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term, but in the early stages of my career I can accumulate a lot more savings and also grow my skills faster by living here than probably anywhere else in the world.

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That's a tough argument to make that SF beats SLC in net savings.

You should try living with your family in a house with a backyard, it's quite enjoyable and could be pretty cheap over time if you see any appreciation.

Secondly there are a lot more taxes on a lot more things in SF, are you factoring that in?

Also I'd bet you are worth more than 105k in SLC if you looked around longer.

I love SF and it's great to live there for many reasons, but I don't think "cheaper than utah" is one of them.

Same with Seattle. Houses going for 300-500k, Salaries 110k+, minimum. I really don't think it's true either for my region.

If you love the startup world, hard to beat SF.

Not much left in Seattle under 500k. The market is pushing the prices even higher.

South Seattle, West Seattle and some parts of North Seattle are still fairly affordable, for an engineer at least.

>You should try living with your family in a house with a backyard, it's quite enjoyable and could be pretty cheap over time if you see any appreciation.

You should try living in a cabin in the woods. Way cheaper plus you get fit from chopping up firewood for the winter. Obviously only a fool would live in a city in Utah when they could live in rural Alaska for cheaper!

"You should try living in a cabin in the woods."

This isn't even close to a reasonable retort.

It is if you have a preference for urban environments and your choice is between SF/NYC/London/etc and Salt Lake City, where it feels like every other street is as wide as the average block in another city.

To each their own of course.

Well, in SLC you are about an hour drive away from arguably the best skiing on the planet.

To each their own of course.:-)

To be fair, SF is far closer to and more practical for good skiing than London or NYC.

And yes, living in the Bay Area, I miss (from Switzerland) skiing being an hour's drive away. It's all relative...

Outside SF proper, the SV urban design is as bad as in Utah.

Appropriate username :)

I spent most of my time in Eden and Ogden so I don't know anything about SLC's urban design beyond my impression of the sprawl from brief visits. Personally, I think terrible urban design is the norm in the US (in no small part to suburban sprawl) and SF/Bay Area are easily some of the worst offenders in my limited experience. I can't really think of any well designed cities in California because the vast majority are parts of huge metropolitan areas where everything is so spread out that you end up driving through five or more different towns each with their own geographies and philosophies on urban design just on your daily commute.

I think I'm heavily biased though, because most of the old cities in Europe seem to me to be far better despite their chaotic growth over many centuries.

Although, interestingly, the SLC design predates cars: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/plat-of-zion/

If Brigham Young could foresee how cars would abuse the design, he would have laid out Salt Lake City like Paris or maybe like Kyoto.

Alas, President Young had long since exhausted his outrageously lavish budget of divine providence just getting to Utah.

Yes, terrible urban design and bad infrastructure and bad policy is pervasive in the USA.

You can just look at neighboring Mexico with 1/6th the per capita income and correspondingly lower public budgets where transportation, urban maintenance, and quality of city life are routinely better. And not just relatively better: Mexican cities (outside the shady border region) are nicer than American cities to live in. If you could put a typical neighborhood from Puebla or Guadalajara or León or Mexico City into Dallas or Los Angeles or San Jose or Atlanta, it would be the best, nicest neighborhood in the city.

And that's not even bringing up the great cities of Europe at all. Because that would be completely unfair.

It's like the health care system: Even a great country does some things horribly wrong and suffers for it.

I went to Mexico city with my family about 10 years ago and it didn't seem as you describe. I remember looking out our car window and seeing huge expanses of what seemed like shacks. Many of the road were wide with seemingly no lane markings, and people making their own lanes. We were at one such intersection, and got pulled over by a corrupt cop who was on foot. Supposedly we came too close to one the of people who constantly surround our car whever we stop, trying to sell us stuff. The cop took my dad's driver's license and demanded 1000 pesos to give it back. My dad negotiated it down to 200 pesos. We went to a hotel specifically chosen because it looked modern and had wifi. The pool was normal sized, but only had 1 foot of water, and it was green.

What were you doing in a car in Mexico City? First time I drove there, it had me shell shocked for months.

Next time, get out on foot and see the city. You can't see anything from a car. [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r83MF9BRZA&feature=youtu.be

> SF/NYC/London/etc and Salt Lake City, where it feels like every other street is as wide as the average block in another city.

Funny you mention that because I make the same comparison with London vis-a-vis SF.

Why are you acting like I said Utah was better? I said there are many reasons to live in SF.

The point is I don't agree with the conclusion a family can save more living in SF.

As great as SF is for some people with a young family not having a house with a backyard is a big deal.

Regarding your final incorrect assumption, yes I would love living in a cabin in the woods and chopping firewood.

While we'll probably end up in a house with a yard eventually, I don't feel a pressing need for that lifestyle at the moment.

I am factoring in taxes and cost of living. The difference doesn't make up for the $55k wage gap. It's possible that I could have done better than $105k if I had looked harder, but based on how much my friends in that area make I doubt it. My salary in the Bay Area also has a lot more headroom to continue growing.

The calculus worked out better for SF in my case because I'm saving most of my income either way. If I wanted a higher-consumption lifestyle (big house, two cars, lots of eating out etc.) then a lower-income lower-COL area might have been a better deal overall. But I'm at a stage where I don't mind "sacrificing" a bit for a better future. And honestly, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice anyway -- my wife and I are still living a lot better than we were until recently as university students, and enjoying every day. There's no reason why consumption has to scale with income!

> While we'll probably end up in a house with a yard eventually

How, might I ask? Assuming $1.5M for a townhouse or a house in the Bay Area, Google's mortgage calculator says ~7k monthly in payments. At $160k and 25% tax, you're left w/ 10k/mo; you'd be spending 70% of your income on housing, not counting maintenance. You'd need to make a significant downpayment (which even then, IDK if it helps, since I've seen housing easily range to more than $2M+, and I feel like I'm lowballing it (ha!) at $1.5M) or have your partner also pull a decent income, no?

(I've never bought a house, so please, feel free to inform me, b/c from where I'm standing, it's incredibly daunting.)

> I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term

You can live in a similar house with great schools in the east bay for 800k so that's about $4000 payment, very doable to live comfortably and even save up a bit making $160k/year.

Heck, rather than spend that much on a home in the city, a house in a rural northern state will only run you around 100K, maybe 200K for something newer. The remote work dream.

You can make money in one place, save it, then spend it somewhere else. This is why people in nice but cheap places are so afraid of Californians.

What do you mean saying "This is why people in nice but cheap places are so afraid of Californians."?

In much of the west coast, and near western state, local housing prices are often driven up by Californians leaving the state with either lots of savings and/or equity cashed out from the house they just sold. So there has historically been a lot of anti-Californian backlash in places like Seattle and Portland, whose house markets haven't always been hot in their own right.

Imagine you live in a place where the average salary is $50k, but it's a nice place, and often people will move to your place from somewhere where the average salary was $200k. Economically, it is difficult to compete with those people for things that are already scarce (housing).

Grand Jct Colorado. Full of California retirees.

It's rare to be worth a lot more than $105k in SLC; wages are pretty low and deep specific expertise isn't often bought so much as grown in house. Especially with a startup.

If you're looking at $105k in SLC, you should be asking for $225k+ in SF by my experience.

We did the calculation between $125k in SF and $45k in SLC a decade ago and SLC came out well ahead for a family of four.

I think SLC salaries vary a lot by technology too. There's a lot of developers I know in that range here that would be around 135 in SF. Completely agreed on how much better of a value it is here though.

As a newly graduated Site Reliability Engineer who's working in the Bay Area. I'm living and working in Sunnyvale, my expenses are way lower than expected, I was able to get a house a 20 minute bike away from work. I get a free caltrain pass, so I really don't need a car. I think the "cost of living" adjustment here is unfair. Sure, living in SF proper can cost you upwards of 8k-9k a month but there are MUCH more reasonable apartments where most of the tech jobs are in the South Bay area.

Simple COL adjustment factors give you a baseline, but they don't really work reliably beyond straightforward apples-to-apples comparisons. It probably works pretty well for comparing house/condo and transportation choices between one suburban location and another where rents are modest and you need a car.

But doing a naive COL comparison between, say, Manhattan and Columbus, Ohio just isn't going to capture the lifestyle differences and tradeoffs.

Do you have a family and rent your own place or do you share accommodation? That is a huge factor. I have single friends who pay $600 rent as opposed to me paying $3000.

I cannot even imagine what kind of lifestyle would result in spending 8K a month in SF. I live in SF spending 4K a month for 2 people

What's your commute like? My friend that moved there who tries to convince me to move out there, has a 2hr one way commute. How many sq feet is your living space for you and your family?

My commute is a 15-minute walk, or 5-minute bike ride. :) I chose the apartment based on proximity to work -- could have saved $100-200/mo with a longer commute, but the savings would have been more than eaten up by the gas/car maintenance costs and I hate commuting. I still own a car, but don't use it to get to work.

We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). We'll have to upgrade when my baby outgrows his large walk-in closet, but it fits our needs fine for now.

> We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo).

Whoa, that's almost double the estimated mortgage for the 5 bedroom houses with an acre of land my family has been looking at purchasing.

I'll never move to the SF Bay Area. I encourage others not to, either. Get the companies there to open up to remote employees instead.

Yes. Urban areas are typically more expensive than rural areas. Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink.

>Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living

What do you mean?

Tax deductibility of mortgage interest is essentially renters subsidising homeowners.

Some countries in Europe do it, and the EU is not happy with it. I'm personally grateful they're shoving the repeal of this tax deductibility down the member nations' throats (very very controversial measure). Homeowners have a stranglehold on politics because renters don't vote enough :(

That may be true (although there are tax deductions for renting in some places). However, people own property in cities and rent outside of cities so I'm not sure how relevant it is to the subsidy comment.

(Which presumably is some variant of the oil/cars/roads claim because cities can apparently somehow exist in isolation of everything surrounding them.)

This is a good point. In retrospect, I think you are right, and I didn't understand what op meant.

There is huge cash flow to rural areas. The problem is the same infrastructure is cheaper when shared among large groups. You need more road per person when people have 80 acres vs 0.5 acres.

Further, things like farm subsides, rural health care, and even poverty programs are just huge money sinks.

IMO, it's important to separate things that must be in rural areas vs. things that are more expensive because they are in rural areas.

It is easy to pick on rural subsidies when you have enough food to eat. It is to everyone's advantage to ensure that there is more than enough food so that in the worst case years nobody starves to death.

How best to ensure that is debatable. However don't knock the rural subsidies unless you have a better plan to ensure that even in drought years there is enough to eat.

Producing 2x the food we need is reasonable for some value of reasonable. But, we so far that point it's a bad joke.

If you want an efficient solution, zero meat subsides. A physical food bank with ultimate year reserve. Minor edibale plant subsidy, and nothing else.

Urban areas generate more tax revenue and receive less benefits per capita than suburban and rural areas. Here's an article about a study confirming this phenomenon in Indiana: http://www.ibj.com/articles/15690-study-urban-tax-money-subs...

I would note that's specifically Indiana tax distribution within the state and the outflow vs. inflow delta is relatively small (single digits).

That said, it was well documented in the last election that red states receive net money from (typically more urban) blue states. However, it's rather a leap to go from there to cities subsidize. There are also a lot of costs with supporting cities and some of those rural costs are needed to support things like a nationwide transportation system.

Sure because a lot of those areas are poor. Surely, we're not talking about making it even harder to live in a rural area?

Many things necessary (or common) for living in suburban and rural places is subsidized through taxes, flat-rate costs of goods/services, and several other means. I'll give a few examples:

* Internet, electricity, or cable costs significantly more to provide to people living in single family homes with distant neighbors than it does to provide to residents of a highrise apartment building. The consumers, however, pay the same price. The highrise apartment dwellers subsidize the cost of the rural homeowner.

* The postal service. One postal worker in NYC can walk a few blocks, and deliver more mail than one postal worker in a small rural town who must drive 10s of miles to complete the same task.

* Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit.

* Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction.

* Government backed home loans and home loan interest tax deductions. Owning a home in large cities is often cost-prohibitive, so urban dwellers do not often receive these tax breaks that suburban and rural residents receive.

* Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident.

(edit): I wanted to add a book recommendation for anyone interested in this stuff. It's called Happy City by Charles Montgomery. It speaks to the history of suburban America, and explains why suburban cities are the way they are.

It's worth pointing out that, in some of those points, even "urban" and "suburban" communities are net-negative in their infrastructure planning. Let's not lay into rural areas but not insolvent municipalities. More details about these issues at https://www.strongtowns.org/.

> * Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit.

There is in fact a federal fuel tax, in addition to state fuel taxes. There is no direct gasoline subsidy.

Some people argue that the tax deductions and structures used by drilling companies are a kind of subsidy, but that's debatable and most of them make sense.

> * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction.

Rural roads are also less trafficked, meaning they last much longer and don't require multiple lanes.

> * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident.

In most rural areas, there is no water service. You get a well put in. The cost of water infrastructure is zero.

The larger argument that infrastructure is cheaper when population density is higher is, of course, trivially true. The general maligning of rural living, much of which is baseless, just bothers me. The idea that rural living is unsustainable is just silly - we got along quite well before massive megacities ever existed; if anything is unsustainable, it's the total population. Fortunately, in general, and throughout history, cities are population sinks - human reproduction falls below replacement rate in cities.

>The larger argument that infrastructure is cheaper when population density is higher is, of course, trivially true.

I'm not sure even that is trivially true. Infrastructure projects in dense cities (which is what most people are talking about here when they say "cities") can be extremely expensive. See Boston Big Dig, Manhattan Second Avenue Subway, etc. Yes, they serve a lot of people. Cheap they ain't.

Extremely expensive but used by millions a day. The reason they are expensive is because so many people are already there, and construction has to limit impact to very significant economic activity that must still go on while the work is done. "Ya we could do it cheaper if we just cut off traffic for a couple of years, we'd save a few billion at the cost of a hundred billion in lost opportunity."

> The idea that rural living is unsustainable is just silly - we got along quite well before massive megacities ever existed

Yes. When we were living agrarian lifestyles. That way of life is as sustainable as it is rare.

That is a very simplistic analysis.

1. Infrastructure is incredibly expensive in dense urban areas.

A road/rail tunnel can cost upwards of $100 million per mile (a few projects have run at close to $1 billion per mile).

Likewise buying back land to add an extra lane to a road can run into hundreds of millions of $$$.

Infrastructure like electricity is indeed more expensive for rural areas but often cheaper for low-medium density cities - overhead power lines are 5-10x cheaper than underground lines.

2. A lot of the subsidies for rural areas are actually to help businesses and farming and benefit the major cities.

E.g. Prices in our cities would increase enourmosly if we didn't have a good interstate highway system.

And gas subsidies mostly benefit trucking and farmers.

> Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink.

Rural areas produce, raise, and educate workers that end up working in cities. So small towns (and small countries, for that matter) make big investments in their children and they just move away. Cities don't grow solely due to birth rates, so they are only "sustainable" from a limited perspective.

The rural/urban split is a give-and-take relationship at least as complex as figuring out what an "equivalent Bay-area" salary would be.

I'm not so sure that's true. A not insignificant portion of those people move back out to rural (not suburban) areas to raise families, escape urban burnout, or because of evolving personal tastes. When they do, they often bring significantly more wealth back than they "cost" growing up because of the opportunities they had in the city. It seems that the life and death of a small town depends far more on economic factors like competition from globalization, or environmental fluctuations (droughts, hurricanes, etc). In the US many, if not most, big cities would easily grow from immigration alone.

Obviously cities depend on rural areas since it's far more economical to grow food on cheap plots of land than in steel hydroponic skyscrapers and few cities are built on top of vast fresh water reserves. However, not all rural areas are alike and the majority of the land in the US isnt fertile enough to sustain a competitive agricultural industry like in California, which produces far more of the nation's food and other natural resources than it's share of the population.

If you can get a 5 bedroom house on an acre of land for $1100/month where you're looking, then honestly real estate prices in pretty much any city are going to be a shock.

I said almost double, not exactly double. It comes up to about $1200 - $1600 depending on the property here.

I live in Florida, to boot. Real estate isn't exactly cheap here.

>Whoa, that's almost double the estimated mortgage for the 5 bedroom houses with an acre of land my family has been looking at purchasing.

Wow, I found a 20 bedroom house in rural Somalia that's half that price.

I'll never move to Florida and encourage others not to, either. Get the people there to move somewhere cheaper instead.

You're responding to a comment comparing San Francisco to other parts of the United States with all of the baseline luxuries that implies. Florida's GDP per capita is $38,497. In Somalia it's about $600.

I understand that you're making a point about quality of life, but there are no serious comparisons to be made between Somalia and Florida and it says a lot about the (erroneous) views of those in the Bay Area that comments like this one are pretty common on HN.

I mean, this is the fundamental crux of these CoL discussions: How much does the quality of your residence matter to you?

People try and mechanically translate equivalent lifestyles from place to place, but that's probably not the best way of analyzing things. Yes, if you choose to have a midwestern lifestyle in SF, it will be ludicrously expensive. However, you don't have to. If instead, you're able to replace the utility you'd get for a nice place with the activities/amenities SF has and a small town doesn't, the cost differential is not nearly as stark.

Obviously, some people do value a nice home much more than anything they could get from living in SF, and that's fine. But that's not everyone, which is important to keep in mind when understanding why people move to the bay (or big cities in general).

It's not about size or fanciness. Urban areas and housing have significant air, water, and noise pollution.

Right, and what the poster above you was saying is that people will sacrifice in that regard (or they simply don't care) to gain the benefits of living in an urban area like the culture, food, close proximity to bars and nightlife, etc.

This isn't a black and white issue and it always disheartens me when people are so quick to trash the Bay Area.

So, being one of those suburban family people, I'm curious. What is this "night life" you speak of, and do you actually enjoy it? Is it more theoretically enjoyable than actually enjoyable?

My understanding is probably pretty bad: You pay about a hundred dollars each for a baby sitter, a taxi, and admission to the venue. ($300 so far, will be $400) There is very loud music that prevents conversation and may damage your ears, and you don't get to skip songs that you hate. You can get drinks, like beer for $10 and a cup/glass/whatever of wine for $30. You are expected to dance, by yourself or rubbing on a stranger's crotch/rear, but not traditional. Maybe you just stand near the bar and drink. That's it; this is how city folk enjoy nightlife. On your way home you get mugged.

I picture the awful experiences of high school dances, but very drunk and very expensive and you don't know anybody. It seems so empty. You're with people, yet in a certain way it seems lonely.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "the culture". It seems that there would be numerous cultures. If you meet a random person, the chance that they share your culture would be pretty low. This cuts down on empathy and creates misunderstandings. If you just like to gawk at other cultures, you'd do better to occasionally visit less-diluted places like Kyoto or rural Japan. You can also find American culture in many rural parts of the country.

We do have bars in suburbia, sadly, though I've never been to one. I don't think I'm missing anything...?

We also have food, not even counting the road kill. :-) Head over to Kentucky to experience a fried-brain sandwich. I guess you're implying that you actually get your meals at those places that charge tens or even hundreds of dollars per plate and then still expect tips? This too strikes me as odd and difficult to understand. You have to travel there. Most of those places won't let you eat barefoot, topless, or bottomless. Your kid screams and everybody gives you the hate-glare, or some other kid screams and you give them the hate-glare. The food contains ingredients that you wouldn't use. Maybe your allergies get ignored or your credit card gets stolen. You can't just relax in your own place, safe and secure and private. You can't pace around while you eat.

And here I am, like a schmuck, paying almost 11.5% of my gross income in rent, on a 3 bedr/2.5 bath freestanding house. I think I'd have to earn more than $360k to get even close to that in SF/SV.

About the only places a median-priced house is more affordable than where I am now, relative to median income, are Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, and selected places in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York.

And at the bottom of that home affordability list? San Jose. Anaheim, SF, LA, and SD round out the California contingent of places where the median income-earner does not make enough to afford to buy a median-priced home. The only other places in the US that can claim that are Naples, White Plains, and Honolulu.

Don't move more employees to California, people. Move more satellite offices to the Rust Belt. Before all those factories closed, the workers educated their kids for better jobs, but now there's f'kall for them to do. There's a broad talent pool there, not even close to depletion, just waiting for someone to rescue them from their restaurant websites, online insurance forms, and line-of-business CRUD apps. I would move back there in a second if there were more decent employers around.

A nice big detached house just isn't my priority, it's not something I want. In fact, they personally sicken me, is much rather have a more cozy apartment with one or two bedrooms. Oh, and nice weather and a thriving culture scene would be nice (yes, I live in California).

If companies followed your advice, they would lose way too many employees, it turns out many tech people at the high end value different things and know exactly what they are doing. We already know where the big house people are.

I presume from your tone that you are childless. "Cozy" gets really old, really quick when you have kids. And when they get larger, you really don't want them living right on top of you.

As someone living outside of California, I value 40 hour work weeks and my kids sleeping in a different room. Thriving culture is nice, but a decent public school district is better.

SV companies may not be losing employees now (other than to rampant poaching and job-hopping), but they certainly aren't attracting certain classes of employees for their on-site work. They can bring in the young singles who may be willing to work 80 hours a week and sleep in a broom closet for $1000/month. They can get the geniuses that can command the high salary that it takes to secure the sort of housing situation that the entire remainder of the continent takes for granted. They can't get the parents from middle America that think many SV tech employers are literally insane.

Everyone in the US, aside from those specific places I already mentioned, can currently afford to buy a 2 bedr/1 bath house or condo on an income that is considered just mediocre in their area. Those are not "big houses". Our version of living in a broom closet under the stairs is a 1 bedr/1 bath apartment or manufactured home at $500/month or less. (Our version of living in a van down by the river is still living in a van down by the river.) Even a five-bedroom house is not "big" if you have four kids in it, or plan to put that many in it.

If companies followed my advice, they would reduce their recruitment, labor, and facilities costs during their expansions. They wouldn't lose anyone unless they also decided to shut down offices in California.

> I presume from your tone that you are childless. "Cozy" gets really old, really quick when you have kids. And when they get larger, you really don't want them living right on top of you.

I have a child and big houses still disgust me. They really aren't necessary, and, at least for me, is not where I want to allocate more of my money to. Instead, I value living two blocks from where I work. To each their own.

> SV companies may not be losing employees now (other than to rampant poaching and job-hopping), but they certainly aren't attracting certain classes of employees for their on-site work.

We heard this 10 years ago and 20 years ago. Yes, and it is all intentional.

> They can't get the parents from middle America that think many SV tech employers are literally insane.

I have a nice 40 hour work week, it isn't anywhere near as you described. Also, I'm in LA, not SV.

> Even a five-bedroom house is not "big" if you have four kids in it, or plan to put that many in it.

If I ever plan to have four kids, then maybe a big house is reasonable. I have one kid, and anyways, we just moved from China, where the thought of a 5 bedroom house is considered very...American. In much of the world, people have much less than that, and everything goes along quite well.

> If companies followed my advice, they would reduce their recruitment, labor, and facilities costs during their expansions.

The employees they want aren't going to move to nowhere middle america. The problem is that, if their job falls through, they will have to move again to find another. Being in an area of critical mass, even if the cost of living is higher, has a big advantage that the next job will be in the same place also. You could argue that the critical mass could exist elsewhere, but the negative externalities would follow.

I've lived in many places in the USA: Tri-cities (middle of nowhere Washington State), Toledo, Vicksburg (nowhere Mississippi), Seattle, Salt Lake City, Austin, Boca Raton, Bay Area, now LA (not to mention Lausanne and Beijing outside of the USA). I prefer the urban to the the suburban, I understand why others might prefer suburban, but I don't think they are an overwhelming majority, especially in our industry.

It almost sounds like you're saying that people who don't like living urban aren't worth hiring. Everyone I know has been contacted by a recruiter for one of the major employers of software professionals, and for all but one of them, the requirement to relocate to the west coast has been an instant deal-breaker. We like living where home is, or at least the places that vaguely resemble home.

I'm suggesting that the people they can hire don't need to move to those places. They are already living there. As it is, people are moving away from there--wherever it may be, exactly--often to their own disadvantage, just because the local companies are not expanding their workforces, and the companies that are expanding are not moving in.

That's exactly why I have also had to move around between multiple metropolitan areas. If you can catch me before I leave a city, you can hire me much more cheaply than if I'm pulling up every last root to go to the employer that can offer me the best net savings rate in the state, or the region, or the country, or the world. I have already had to move several times to find adequately remunerative work, and it bounced me right out of the Rust Belt. I'd still move back for the right job.

Network effects are a bitch when you're out in the periphery. I'm not certain that the industry needs to have a nucleus at all. I am certainly bitter and salty that the nucleus that exists isn't anywhere near me.

> We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). We'll have to upgrade when my baby outgrows his large walk-in closet, but it fits our needs fine for now.

And there's the kicker. In SLC you could afford a real house for that much. It's good that you can save that much right now, though. Definitely going to pay off.

Yeah, a lot of dollars-and-cents comparisons kind of ignore lifestyle concerns.

You don't have to go to Utah to beat that. My mortgage on a SFH in Oakland is $2350/mo, I have 1800 sq ft and a garage and a big yard.

When did you buy? I don't think you'd be able to achieve that today except in the shady parts of Oakland.

Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina - 1800sqft, 2-car garage ~ $1410/mo. Salaries $100-140k

That's crazy. I pay $1,900 for a 800sqft in Brooklyn and I thought that was bad!

> We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment

I am barely willing to live by myself in a space of this size, let alone with spouse and children. For those that are, the bay area presents an opportunity to save some of the large salaries being offered. For those that are not, it's a deal-breaker.

Not OP, but I live 1.5 hours away from my job in south bay. I can stomach it for now but the commute is slowly killing me. Working in the Bay is really about balancing your rent with your willingness to commute. You can have a short commute if you're willing to live really close to your job, but those places (SF and/or south bay) tend to be very pricey. Although, south bay (Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale) is cheaper per sq ft. than SF since it's more suburban. It makes a lot of sense to get a job in south bay and get a house if you have a family. If you're younger and want to live somewhere more dense or cheaper, it's harder. If your job is in SF, you can live in Oakland/Berkeley (which is a good deal cheaper than SF), and as long as you and your job is near a BART station, your commute can be sub 30 minutes. Otherwise, you're out of luck, since it takes forever to get anywhere in the city by car/uber/bus. If your job is in south bay, the commute from Oakland/Berkeley is 1 hr+, approaching 2 hrs when traffic is really really bad. And you'll need a car or a corporate bus. You could also live in San Jose and take the train up, which is much faster, although I'm not so sure about the rent situation in San Jose. Last I checked, the rent was ~2.2-2.4k for a one-bedroom, which is actually about on par with both Oakland and south bay. Although for the same price in south bay or Fremont, you'll get more room, at the expense of living in a much more suburban area.

I'm sorry but your situation sounds like it simply doesn't apply to the average SF engineer.

For starters, your salary is about $30k more than the average SF salary.

You managed to find a decent sized 1 bedroom that is FAR below market rate in SF (~3500 to your 2200).

And although not as uncommon, it's still worth mentioning... You're married, and can share living expenses with another person. That means your already low rent of $2200 is even lower, compared to someone who might be single.

50k a year for a family of three? Sure, maybe if you are really, really frugal and live far south or east. But living in the city, you could barely pay rent + groceries with 50k a year for a family of three. We live relatively frugal and got a good deal for rent, but I'm pretty sure we are over 50k a year, even more now that we are a family of three and need to consider the outrageous prices of daycare. That last point is something I now miss a lot from my home country: professional (2+ years of technical/uni training) daycare at reasonable prices, even free depending on the area/your income.

Edit: I just saw that you live in the city. The rest of the argument still holds though.

I live in San Bruno, not SF. I agree that it would probably be very difficult to have a decent quality of life at our spending level living in SF proper. But we're just an 18-minute BART ride away from downtown when we want to go in.

> I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term

And that is the key. If you were looking at living in the Bay Area long term it would be a different story.

In SLC as a software engineer if you live reasonably frugally you can own a decent family home outright in under 7 years.

For me that opens up a whole new level of freedom.

> If you were looking at living in the Bay Area long term it would be a different story.

Agreed.

> In SLC as a software engineer if you live reasonably frugally you can own a decent family home outright in under 7 years.

Sure, and that's attractive. But by contrast, after 7 years here with a progressing career trajectory, I'd have enough money to buy a home in cash almost anywhere in the world. Given that we haven't decided where we want to settle down yet (I'm rather partial to Barcelona...) that cash is more valuable to me than a paid-off home in eg. Salt Lake.

To repeat a theme that I think we can all agree on: these decisions are highly personal and include a lot of tradeoffs, and will naturally look different to different people even in nominally similar situations.

The problem with the analysis is 'similar lifestyle' when compound interest is your friend. Living in a much nicer apartment in SLC has minimal extra costs as the gap from a large 1BR to 2BR in SLC might only be ~250$/month.

SF is a great place with dual income no kids. Less so 1 income and an infant. But, much worse when you have young kids. So, in just 3 years and possibly another kid, when it's going to be much harder to swing that tiny 1BR in SF without feeling really cramped.

Beyond actual savings amounts, one thing that was pointed out to me recently is that travel costs the same for everyone.

So if you like to travel, living in a high-cost/high-salary area can provide a major advantage for your endeavors.

How much are your housing costs? Except for people who got in with rent control, I see very few apartments that cost less than $2500, and that's for a single bedroom.

> ...our actual consumption for my family of 3..

> I don't plan on living in the Bay Area long-term...

Just my initial observations. I think these are incongruent

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