And thus we are left to renting out a baby boomer's garden shack for the cost of a mortgage.
How do we fix this?
People used to move to cities for the opportunities. Now it's increasingly difficult to do so. For lots of reasons we need to make it possible for people to move to the cities and thrive.
Pretty much every scenario seems to be "optimized" to have techies paying 30-50% of their monthly income to housing. You can't really win, but you can attempt to maximize the real dollar amount you end up left over with with each month. Working remotely is "cheating the system" and is therefore largely disallowed, or "work from home" is allowed only to quell some degree of outrage. Literally the industry that invented video chat doesn't [want to] understand how to use it to work remotely.
That's exactly what would happen in a normal market.
If so, fuck that!
However, the long term fix I think should be that UC should stop annually increasing the number of students it accepts to UC Berkeley. I know this probably would never happen - but I don't see another solution. Why not benefit another aspiring area of California? Berkeley will not grow so where will the students go?
Similarly, if the Bay area has decided it doesn't want to grow upwards, then there should be more incentive to grow outwards. There should be a cap on the amount of office space growth in any given city unless housing grows equally... again I doubt this will happen. But I think it would be smart. People go where the money is, then comes the infrastructure, then comes other small businesses, etc.
That will both provide money for local schools and force the increase in efficient usage of land.
That's difficult in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...
It's almost funny how bad that law is for young people.
Boomers weren't the politically-dominant generation at the time Prop 13 was passed. I know people like to pretend all of history is divided between "Boomers" and "Millennials", but at the time of Prop 13, leading edge Boomers were in their late 20s and trailing edge Boomers were tweens. It's less accurate to say that Prop 13 was voted in by Boomers than to say Trump was elected by Millennials.
Prop 13 was voted in largely by the “Silent” and “Greatest” generations. Insofar as Prop 13 is unfair to young people, Boomers were the first young people that were on the recieving end of the unfairness.
I own a 2,000 square foot home with spacious city lot for 1/3 of that shed.
The Bay Area is cool if you bought a house in 1996. Now? You're crazy.