Nearly half of Bay Area residents say they want to leave

Sydney and Melbourne seem to be the only Australian cities with a substantial tech presence.

Now I live in Morgan Hill which is a great place for families. I drive in to SJ, about 45 minutes in rush hour each way. Caltrain is an option as well, although it takes longer. A nice, newer 2k square foot house runs about $1mm so not “cheap”, but 50-70% less expensive than most of the peninsula.

My unscientific opinion is that the Bay Area skews younger (for people on HN who are bummed about housing) and most young people don’t like the ‘burbs. Anything outside the Real Bay Area (bounded on the north by SF, east by Oakland and south by SJ) is out of the running for a lot of people.

The street denizens in SF building encampments, shitting on the sidewalk, breaking into cars to get their fix and blatantly operating chop shops aren't hard up people who are just down on their luck and between jobs... these types move here to specifically live on the streets and get high all the time.

The New York, Canadian, Australian, and English housing markets are showing signs that Q/E asset price inflation is over. But with Prop 13, outside of a HUGE global depression, it's hard to imagine prices dropping to reality.

I recently finished Thomas Picketty's Capital in the 21st Century. Basically he says that the typical capital/income split is 700%, meaning assets are worth 7 times global output, meaning houses are usually worth 7 times median household income.

That's about the ratio you see everywhere in the world outside of the United States. Even in the priciest markets in the US like SF and LA, that rate hardly exceeds 300%. If anything, that book convinced me that unless we change our tax policies substantially, house prices are going to get MUCH MUCH worse.

I hope I'm wrong. But the book had 300 years of economic history to make me think the US post WW2 was under strange economic conditions that never existed anywhere else on the planet at any other time. Things aren't necessarily getting worse. They're just returning to normal ]=

We could have a state initiative to build Club Med for homeless people in the Central Valley, far away from anyone who could complain, and the same people who would complain if we put that facility in Hunters Point due to their NIMBYism would complain if we put it outside of SF because that would be "mean" due to displacing the homeless people (many of whom used to have residences in SF).

I think the term “homeless” does a grave disservice to that population, the term itself implies that it’s the home that’s a problem and not the zillions of underlying causes.

  All they need to do is build some state institutions to provide care

I'm more surprised by the fact that the tech industry chose SF of all the places in California.

Baltimore is cheap, but I want to live somewhere that I can ride my bike without the fear of getting killed for it.

Those are two facets of the same issue which is a demand much higher than the supply. SF has one of the best tech scenes in the world (to the point where it becomes stomach-churningly nauseating), and it's also just a hip metropolitan city with other thriving non-tech scenes.

But my frustration, as you can see by my comments elsewhere in this thread, are grounded in that a city of such wealth and technological progress cannot take care of it's lowest citizens.

Aside from the odd choice of perspective - have you considered that the homeless may be infringing on others rights as well? The right to an unobstructed sidewalk? The right to feel safe in my neighborhood? The right to not have to watch out for needles when I visit my nearest Muni station (Van Ness)?

Pity it doesn't have the good parts of NYC, like decent public transit, Broadway, Central Park etc.

IMO, SF stopped being fun not because of the "finance bros", per se, but because the place just never wanted to be a big city. Fundamentally, San Francisco is a gorgeous little seaside town on a too-small peninsula, which valued counterculture and artistic expression. So it was fun to be here for a while when the "startup industry" was a few crazy people doing things against the grain, but it's a different story when those crazy people turned into armies of bland corporate CEOs, hiring armies of rich yuppies to "disrupt" the world in identical ways.

If a company is covering your move, you'll be more likely to hire movers rather than rent a U-Haul.

>The cost to rent a 26-foot U-Haul truck — big enough to move a three- to four-bedroom home — out of San Francisco headed to Las Vegas reached as high as $2,085 for four days. To rent the same truck going in the opposite direction is only a fraction of that cost — $132.

Courtesy of Hide.me free VPN. I'm in London but set it to Singapore.

Not to say the Bay Area is perfect, but I don't have to be continually fighting issues of life and death as much here compared to some other places in the country. My main gripe is the cost of living, but basically nowhere else in the country marks as many checkboxes for me as the Bay Area (and even cost of living is muted by my drastically increased income compared to anywhere else).

Yogi Berra

Having traveled to both LA and SF briefly (from Sydney) my impression was that LA was much more sprawled and car-centric than SF. I really like cycling and public transport so I think I would struggle with LA.

Does the method of getting around have a role in which cities you prefer?

Also, why do there seem to be lots of people impersonating others in the Bay Area? I don't think I've ever met someone like that in Sydney - at least never realised.

That doesn't sound insane to you?

California per capita income in 2010-2014 was $30,441. Median household income for the same period: $61,933.

So, no, most Californians cannot readily afford that kind of rent for just a room, not an apartment. And California is ranked 9th in the US for median family income. In most states, that is an even more mind-boggling figure.

All figures from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incom...

1. Most state representatives need to please the NIMBY if they hope to state elected

2. If the government does lay out a plan, it is easy enough to override with a ballot initiative.

Also, what passes for “liberal” these days is basically George W. Bush’s politics. There’s not really a liberal political organization anymore.

In a sense, they're both right (?). As a current resident of Berkeley, I have only seen in the last few years the construction of new apartment buildings which are un-affordable to the majority of the student and local populations; I'm talking about ~4k in rent for a 2 bedroom apartment.

I guess my point is that yeah, it can be done (buying a place in San Francisco and doing well). The problem is that newcomers (and especially younger people) see a job offer from FlashyCo (Uber, Twitter, Salesforce, etc) as a meal ticket good for living the ultra good life (fancy car, fancy new apartment, etc). When they look at what it costs, they get upset and dejected. Many people today feel that they should be well on the path to Easy Street by their mid to late 20's. Traditionally that hasn't been the case at all. Wage earning really doesn't pick up until your late 30's to early 40's. But tech screws with all of that. Huge acquisitions, instant wealth, engineers over 40 age discrimination, etc. So in some sense people do feel helpless when they're living with 8 people at age 30 (protip folks: get a 1-2BR in a less hip area).

The targets for most people i know are usually achievable in <10 years.

Pray to god that it's enough to at least not fall into complete ruin and destitution from an illness or unforeseen layoff. I think most people now, like myself, have practically zero social or financial support beyond what you can save for yourself anymore.

But yes, the math is heavily weighted in the favor of places like Seattle with still bearable costs of living but with competitive software labor markets.

edit: unfortunately we also have a very regressive tax system which makes it easier for developers.

I suspect the vast majority of the income gain is due to Washington lacking a state income tax. e.g. a single eng pulling $200k is paying $15k/year ($1300/month) in CA state income taxes and $0 for WA State.

The tax code changes for this year only make it more true.

I was stationed at Fort Hood in Killeen, TX another lifetime ago as an army infantry recruit in the late 2000's. I know all about living in central Texas as a person of color. Unfortunately red states have become a complete no go zone for me to even consider living in 2018.

But, I think, for a lot of people, a lot of their spending is nonlocal (e.g. internet shopping) or at least on price-standardized goods, and so is not tied to cost-of-living.

Let's say that in SV, you'd be making 400k, and—after spending on cost-of-living—keeping 10% as "pocket money." Well, that's 40k.

Now let's say that in Austin, you'd be making 100k, and keeping 30% as pocket money. That's 30k.

40k buys more iPhones (or whatever else you might want) than 30k. 40k is also more money to send back home to your family in India or wherever, than 30k is. It's smaller in relative terms, but what does that matter when it's still larger in absolute terms?

(Certainly, there's a lifestyle where spending on priced-to-cost-of-living goods can expand to consume all available salary. For example, if your goal in life is to throw extravagant parties with delicious food, then that food is going to cost less in Austin, so–even with 10k less in the budget—you can afford to throw more parties, and invite more people. But I feel like HN types are the least likely to have this kind of spending profile.)

2) Unparalleled liquidity and depth to the job market for engineering in SFBA. There is a universe of jobs here that pay engineers better than the $140k quoted by Hired.

For most people, i actually expect the best game to play would be to acquire a large amount of bay-area level equity compensation, then move for the same company to somewhere else and ride it out :)

Of course, Atlanta might still win that on cost of living, but it's a more reasonable comparison.

[1] "It's not supply.": https://twitter.com/JaneKim/status/573509389342019584

[2] "Data shows housing price go up & down with average wage not demand.": https://twitter.com/janekim/status/573510846233640960

[3] https://www.vox.com/cities-and-urbanism/2018/2/23/17011154/s...

You’ll save a higher percent and absolute amount of money working in the bay.

Of course, the issue is that not everyone earns $300K+ per year. Unless you make it into a senior role at a tech company by the time you want to have kids, living a ‘normal’ life in the Bay will be hard. Even doctors and dentists will struggle. I completely understand why people would want to leave. I expect they will. The Bay Area is great, but America is an amazing, beautiful place, and fine food / coffee / culture has spread far beyond the streets of SF these days.

That’s not to mention job security. With some exceptions, in many low CoL areas you’re looking at a sizable gap between jobs simply because the market isn’t as big, and worse, you might end up having to settle for a less than great option or find yourself locked in somewhere for far longer than you’d prefer. Out here, if you’re decent at all this is not an issue... many of us here can easily walk from one job straight into the next, should that be necessary.

I might move somewhere more cheap and quiet eventually, but it’ll be once I’ve saved up enough that I’m not beholden to any particular company and I’ve found something that it wouldn’t bother me to be doing for many years. For now, the demand and pace of the SF Bay Area is just too much to give up.