$1,790 a month and 'no cooking' allowed: Welcome to renting in the Bay Area | Hacker News Reader

$1,790 a month and 'no cooking' allowed: Welcome to renting in the Bay Area

sfgate.com

50 pointsvector_spaces40 comments

My first 18 months in the Bay Area were in a $1600 spare room with no cooking allowed. My mental and physical health both tanked. Things are better now, but when the time comes to leave my current job, I want out. The cons severely outweigh the pros if (like me) you are starting from next-to-nothing, have no family to keep you here, and you don't find your personal identity through your job. I would recommend working literally anywhere else.

It definitely takes it's toll, I had a one bedroom near "Oracle Park" and while I can't complain about it's quality or location, you knowingly paid for it. 8 Years ago It was around $3500 and I was frustrated and decided to get out, I looked up the price now, around $6k. It's just crazy.

Then there was the process of getting the place, Print out credit score in advance, show up on the spot (hoping to get in on the early rental showing, prior to the publicized showing) and be prepared to put down 1st and last months rent and 1 month deposit then and there.

It's simply not feasible for most americans to do that. Even the tech-oriented jobs aren't all paying the crazy rates you read about. The fact that the Department of Housing and Urban Development now states that $82k a year puts a single person in "Low Income" is just preposterous. As ahead of the curve as the city likes to project itself on social issues, it has a lot of do as I say not as I do attitudes among the NIMBY crowd.

I think it's turned it into a situation of in your early 20's, go to SF/Bay and experience it, then in your thirties start looking elsewhere for quality of life.

When I was in the military this is how our barracks were. They closed the on base kitchen and gave us a food stipend instead. Our rooms were the size of a large bedroom, shared with 2 people and we had a mini fridge and a microwave in the room.

Still managed to get pretty big working out and eating a diet that consisted of meats you could microwave (a lot of precooked sausage and can chili haha), we definitely didn't make SF money so there wasn't a lot of eating out.

Some of these are AirBnb superhosts (multiple renters sharing). They want to avoid low ratings due to:

- strong food smells

- dirty pots and pans, spills

- poor sharing behavior

There may also be safety/insurance/lawsuit concerns. And less profit due to appliance/plumbing repairs.

Man, Silicon Valley really is the sweat shop of the IT world. Why anyone would strive to go live and work there, is beyond me.

...you don't _have_ to rent a $1800 room.

Seriously - the Bay Area is expensive, but you can still rent an entire 3br house in the south bay for $2500 or less (within a few miles of Apple HQ, even). With a couple roommates, that's under $1000/each, and you can cook all you want.

Not everyone lives in SF.

I spend $2.7k a month and I don't even live in SF!

Toronto feels ya...

https://www.blogto.com/real-estate-toronto/2018/10/what-2200...

When I first moved to the area with a friend I rented a fifth wheel trailer in the back of some guy's yard in Morgan Hill and my friend rented the shed outside (but he had a futon, electricity, a little heater, his computer...)

That was what we could afford at the time, until stuff took off.

I am so glad I did it though. The area is a lot better fit for me than Western PA although you give up a lot of freedoms. Definitely can't walk outside and shoot guns in your back yard :)

Pretty much I pay to be around other smart people.

I'm not sure any location in the world with a high concentration of a valuable talent/skill will have cheap living expenses.

It's incredibly sad.

When I first moved to the Bay Area a decade ago, there were many houses made up of artists, musicians, anarchists, and punks that held poetry readings, music shows, fed people (via Food Not Bombs or similar efforts, or just by simply cooking food on regular days and offering it to anyone who happened to swing by), supported people who were struggling (Needle Exchange, mental health support groups, survivor groups), or even provided a temporary place to sleep to strangers in return for abiding by a code of conduct and doing some chores or paying some (truly) nominal fee.

Those places, some of which had been around since the dotcom days and had effectively become local institutions, quickly started disappearing as landlords started aggressively serving eviction notices. One notable example that comes to mind was Hellarity [0] -- Hellarity was somewhat exceptional as it was a squat, where most of the houses I'm thinking of weren't. But it was a pretty special place nonetheless.

I don't want to glorify these houses too much since there were issues as there inevitably will be with any large, mostly unstructured group of people. There was plenty of shady and unsavory stuff going on.

What's sad to me is the loss of diversity of human experiences, and the loss of the resources offered in spaces like this. The loss of these inordinately impacts lower income people. People escaping abusive situations. People who aren't on tech salaries or benefits. People who don't have health insurance at all.

Also: a friend of mine who rents space in an art studio in Berkeley that dozens of artists work out of was telling me that the space was just sold, and it's becoming increasingly clear the new owners aren't interested in keeping it as an art studio.

The Bay Area kind of bums me out, to say the least.

[0]: https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/03/07/18708901.php

'No cooking' is a phrase with a lot of ins and outs. 'Heating' is only 'cooking' if the food isn't pre-cooked.

This has just created a premium category for places that allows you to cook.

Things have just got crazier in rental market in Silicon Valley.

https://www.redfin.com/blog/february-2019-housing-market-tra...

Looks like home prices are down 8% since last year in SF. Maybe things will get better soon

Hopefully but probably not.. Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, and maybe palantir and Robinhood down the peninsula are going to have IPOs in the next year.. that's a lot of millionaires.

Sweet, you mean there's going to be a ton of studios and 1 bedroom apartments coming onto the market then?

No, now that they are millionaires, they will be able to afford a studio or one bedroom apartment. So that supply will shrink.

What the heck how could you even have a decent diet without cooking...

When I was in my early 20s living on my own in the 'big city' for the first time, eating a healthy diet didn't exactly make the top 10 list of my concerns.

Dissolve the vitamin pills into the ramen noodle soup?

And thus, Soylent was born

This should be illegal.

Why? Someone probably really wants to live there, if they're willing to pay that much to do it.

Someone also wants to rent out their kids as child labor, and someone will want to hire that kid. Doesn’t mean it should be allowed.

You cannot really be comparing housing without a kitchen in a large city like San Francisco to selling a person, right?

Kids don't have the same level of rights as adults to enter contracts to work. We do it because we accept that child labor damages education potential.

I'm an adult, if I never cook because I like to eat out, shouldn't that be my choice? Who am I hurting by choosing not to cook?

Somebodies also want all kinds of things that make society worse. That doesn't mean we should allow or worse encourage them.

The idea of what's good at large is what differentiates a society from a bunch of people that just happen to share a country and a legal code.

While we're making overly dramatic distinctions, a legal code that actually means something is what separates a free people from totalitarian 'society'.

How does choosing not to cook make society worse? That's basically the same line of argument used to shut down gay marriage or other non-conventional lifestyles.

Who am I hurting by choosing to eat out every day?

I never use my kitchen, why should I have to have one?

Because it's not all about you.

Plus "no cooking allowed" is not about having or not having a kitchen.

Well I admit that I lean libertarian, but I'm curious why you think it would be beneficial to society to constrain choice in this manner. Presumably if units without a kitchen were illegal, then the prices would just be higher to account for kitchens.

Laws are what caused this problem in the first place. Government in the area has messed up the free market, and this is the result. Source: https://youtu.be/yiXjiJ5GSoM

Then don't move there.

I have an anegdotal explanation of "no cooking" but don't lynch me. The is a major representation of South Asians (Pakistan, India, Bangladesh) among IT folks. They're infamous for poor sanitation and hygiene standards. Heavy use of spices, the smell of them biting into every fabric in the apartment, yellow stains of curcuma all over the place. Then cherry on the top - eating with hands while not washing them neither before, nor after the meal. I shared personally kitchen space with them during university times and that cured me for good from South Asian cuisine.

I don’t see a reason the landlord should care about eating with your hands, it doesn’t affect the state of the apartment.

Food, fat, spice marks and stains everywhere.

What do you think happens to door handles that are used with unwashed hands after eating?

Eating withoout washing hands is a huge taboo in south asia. I am sure students are not representative of the whole population.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com