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Comment by deathanatos | Hacker News Reader

> 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.)

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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.

> 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.

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