You don't mention your income, but presuming you're in tech, you may well find that the bay area offers not quite the discretionary percentage, but far more in left over after rent etc. in total. There is a reason people move here.
That's more than double the median income in SF.
Irrelevant. I wasn't trying to optimize for % gain over median income in SF. I was trying to optimize for moderate improvement in overall quality of life compared to what I have now.
So assuming you were making ~200k, doubling that to 400k, it was still impossible to make your standard of living? I find that hard to believe.
But I also built a model that put a lot of guesses about intangibles into numbers. It passed sanity checks when reviewed by several peers, but I could just have a bad model. Who knows.
In CA, you would pay well over $2MM for that same house anywhere within an hour’s drive in rush hour from either SF or Silicon Valley. Anywhere north of Sunnyvale, that house will run you a minimum of $3 million.
Then I moved to Washington State. No state income tax, but comparable sales and property taxes. Much less regulation at every level of government.
The savings in income tax alone paid for my rent, until I bought a house. The house I bought is in an extremely high quality neighborhood. School ratings are almost maxed out. Professional or entrepreneurial neighbors. Responsive government services.
My home costs less than a condo in south San Jose. I pay about half the Bay Area rate for full time childcare. Gas is significantly cheaper. 5 dozen eggs at Costco cost $6-8.
Life is good. No one is dying in the streets. If anything, people are thriving and have hope to create a better future.
It is not until I experienced the totality of difference between Silicon Valley and another west coast city (in my case Tacoma and its suburbs, though I suspect Portland is similar) that I groked the suffering inflicted by CA politics.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
The OP couldn't give specifics, can you? Because otherwise we could just point to different population sizes and city history and state size as the reason your experience differs.
I can appreciate the desire for more detail - I would likely ask for the same thing. Yet I decided to paint in broad strokes because I'm trying to illustrate the cumulative difference of all policies combined. You have two first world states, one with great services and affordable cost of living, the other with notoriously bad services (e.g. ranked 44th in k12 education) and widely lamented cost of living. I think it is worth trying to figure out the differences. It might turn out that those difference are caused by simple demographic factors, which would be very sad and fatalistic, or it might turn out that political decisions have influenced the direction of society.
As a basic example, consider waste management in SF. The impact of SF instituting a mandatory composting program, which likely requires full-time headcount (with near term salaries and half-century long pensions) to monitor garbage bins, write citations, collect fines, inspect businesses, and carry out other enforcement and monitoring actions, might be small given the wealth and population of the city. But what is the impact when combined with a thousand other similarly small policies?
I don't think population differences is fatalistic, I think it just means a sharper analysis is required than "why don't we try how Portland does it?" Hence the existence of states at all, at least originally. I'm not opposed to the idea that Portland's strategy is better than SF's, I just don't want to fall into the trap of assuming differences between quality of life are blamed on arbitrary things that may not at all be relevant. Maybe demographic differences are one of those arbitrary things!
Picking the given case specifically, thus I would immediately ask "what is the environmental impact? Maybe it's worth the cost?"
I don't have the data on hand. I had asked my questions hoping perhaps you did have specific policies etc that were working better in Portland that I could start researching but again it's fine if you don't, this is all in service of me learning more so anything you can teach me I am grateful for.
One that seems to have actually worked was the ban on plastic bags.
Care to get specific?