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?
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.
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.
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).
This isn't a black and white issue and it always disheartens me when people are so quick to trash the Bay Area.
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.
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.
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.
What do you mean?
* 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.
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.
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.
Yes. When we were living agrarian lifestyles. That way of life is as sustainable as it is rare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you want an efficient solution, zero meat subsides. A physical food bank with ultimate year reserve. Minor edibale plant subsidy, and nothing else.
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 :(
(Which presumably is some variant of the oil/cars/roads claim because cities can apparently somehow exist in isolation of everything surrounding them.)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 live in Florida, to boot. Real estate isn't exactly cheap here.
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.
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.