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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

It's really hard to beat living and working in San Francisco. Having lived here a few years I find costs highly overstated for single people.

e.g. some costs:

Studio in Lower Haight (water + trash included): $2100/month Utilities: $50 Monthly Muni: $81

Groceries are no more expensive than anywhere else. Eating out is similar vs other cities I've been to, and if anything the quality of the food is better here at the mid price range.

If I lived in a smaller or mid-sized city there's a good chance I would have to get a car, so any savings in terms of rent would just go to owning and maintaining a car.

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I live in a medium sized city in Wisconsin (~100k population) and my costs are:

- $850 for rent for a 2 bedroom 1200sqft apartment

- ~$70 for utilities (i have free heat so it's less in the winter and more in the summer)

and if i still had the car i previously had, my only expense would be gas (~$100/mo) and the minor maintenance it needed, which was less than $1000/yr (i tracked everything each year i had it). I bought a newer car recently and am financing it. I pay $350/mo on it and gas is closer to $200/mo for it but that's still well within the over $1000 difference in living costs.

I think you vastly understate just how insane $2100/mo for rent is, and overstate how much it costs to own a car. If $1k a month in savings isn't enough to own/maintain a car and that's a problem for you, you need a car that doesn't cost over $1k a month to own.

Paying an extra $1.5k per month on rent isn't insane when it gets you $50 or $100k additional annual salary.

$1.5k is generous...it's more like $500-$1k maybe. I'm lucky to have my own place in SF but most people have roommates because SF rentals is mostly houses, but if you lived nearly anywhere else you'd almost certainly find your own place and not scramble to find a roommate.

So you go from paying $2k/month with roommates to maybe $1.5k/month without. Not a huge difference.

Not having roommates is 100% worth not saving a whole ton of money to me.

Fuck having roommates.

I think people in SF have normalized having roommates as adults. It's possible to find your own place, for sure, but you're going to pay at least $3500/month then for something decent unless you get a studio like me, which there are very few.

I think you may be right about normalizing roommates, which is a horrifying thought. Roommates aren't even OK in college. Past college, I can't see how it would be willingly endured. It's barely above being homeless. Being in a SRO, even the tiny cage-like ones of East Asia, would be superior.

Having a place of your own, shared only with desired family, is fundamental to being an independent adult. Ideally you should even own the land.

Here's a hot take: having roommates is actually better than living alone if they're the right roommates. (I know many people will disagree with this.)

Sure if they're great roommates it could be worth it.

But I feel like if you have roommates for financial reasons, you generally don't get the choice.

Generally speaking true, but what happens when you deduct state taxes, in a place like either California or New York. Suddenly the budget seems just about right and nothing too extravagant to write home about

What happens is you still come out way ahead. I'd dearly love to get out of the bay area, but even as a relatively low paid government contractor it's very hard to find an interesting job elsewhere that leaves more money in my pocket.

You may come out way ahead if non-local expenses are a large portion of your budget. Everybody else loses.

I'm out of the bay area, at a government contractor, with an interesting job. I can afford a huge family, currently with 14 people in the household supported on one income. Life is just easier where the houses are affordable.

I don't know what you'd consider an interesting job or what you'd qualify for, but how seriously have you looked? People can have a bias that stops them: if you allow that the interesting jobs exist, then you have to seriously consider them and ultimately act by moving, but that is a lot to think about and a lot of bother, so therefore there aren't any interesting jobs elsewhere.

Yeah it's really the startup lotto ticket. I "won" at one company, and it's big enough to justify any increase in CoL I paid to live here.

If you just want to work at the Big G then might as well move to Seattle with lower CoL and no state income tax.

But if you're purely remote you're banking that extra money

True, but most people don't have the option of Bay Area salary outside the Bay Area.

It's certainly possible I've become numb to the idea of paying $2k+ a month in rent, but as far as I'm aware this is the cost of a typical 1 bedroom in LA or Seattle and cost of a smaller studio in NYC.

The difference is the salary you can command in SF is well above the difference in cost.

1k is a studio in Seattle if you're lucky, more like 1200-1500. 1Br start in this range too.

LA, yes.

NYC, nope.

Much of my extended family is from the Bay Area, mostly circa the North end of the Golden Gate Bridge. My experience is that food is meaningfully more expensive in the Bay Area, whether eating out or eating in.

Transport does cost me more. I estimate my vehicle's ongoing TCO amounts to ~$250/month (purchase, registration, gas, repairs, insurance, etc.). (It's also worth noting that having a lower monthly TCO for a vehicle than me is possible. The math on an acquaintance's used vehicle brings TCO to ~ $150/month barring major repairs, with him driving more than me.) And of course if you have a fancier car it's more expensive.

So far as "housing costs" go, my total home costs (homeowners insurance, utilities, property taxes, internet, etc.) are less than half yours even treating my mortgage payment/home equity as a total loss. Which is to say cost of living is drastically more expensive in the Bay Area.

But more pertinent to your comment, car ownership is not cheap, but the difference in housing costs between SF and elsewhere is massively more than the cost of operating a vehicle.

Likewise, if I wanted a 2 Bed/ 2 Bath place like mine or a similar flat in SF, I think it'd be more like $4k/month.

So while I do agree it's possible to live in SF for maybe less than you'd expect, it's still very expensive.

That last time I did the math on it, supposedly ~$85k where I am in Arizona was about equivalent to ~$120k in the SF Bay Area, but the SF Bay Area seemed like it'd have lower quality of life. (Though maybe going carless would help more than I think with QoL.) And in general there's sort of a pattern, where at every pay level SF Bay Area has to increase pay by more to match elsewhere for less.

Agree with all your points.

I call shenanigans on people who say the cost of food/eating out is similar in SF to other cities. Eating out in SF is much more expensive. While there is great food to be had there, there is just as much mediocre fare which you will still be charged an arm and a leg for. Also the lack of proper cooking space in a tiny apartment means that many will be tempted to eat out more often versus cooking for themselves.

Similarly, cost to run my vehicle is around ~$200 a month and provides me great freedom and flexibility to get around and take trips out of the city when I want to.

When comparing cost of housing, I notice people always compare the cost of a tiny apartment (usually with roommates) with the cost of a much nicer apartment/house to oneself in a LoC area. Rent a small studio or apartment with roommates and your rent cost in a LoC can get into the sub $300 range easily. I knew many people renting shared spaces for $100-150 while in college.

Live wherever you want (different strokes for different folks and all that) but I feel people in these discussions are often not being completely forthright in their comparisons.

I've crunched the numbers quite a few times, outside of a hotshot FAANG job it just doesn't make sense $$ wise compared to my salary/location now despite what many on HN insist. I'd have to downgrade my standard of living drastically for it to even begin to make sense.

One difference I have noticed is that in the midwest you can eat out and often spend less than $20 per person on the entire check. For even a mid range restaurant in the bay area, you are at $20 per person after food/drink (not including tax/tip). There are absolutely much better restaurants in SF compared to cities in say IL or WI. However, the prices are definitely higher in SF.

Agreed. Prices are way higher in SF for eating out. I don't mind if the place is legitimately better but even the crap and mediocre places will charge a ton.

I don't understand the logic by which people say that in smaller towns, you need a car. For me the exact opposite has been true: the larger the city, the more likely I am to need a car. In small cities everything is in walking distance, that's what small means. Big means things are far. Also, based on all the complaining about public traffic and congestion and whatnot, the larger the city, the more likely you are to be stuck in traffic..

As for the cost of owning and maintaining a car, I recently calculated that mine is about 300 eur/month, assuming I keep it for 5 years and sell or scrap it for 1000 eur. I'm likely to keep it longer (and/or sell for more), however, and that will bring the cost down.

By contrast, I'm paying 1045 eur/month for a 3BR apartment with sauna :-).

USA small towns != European small towns. Many small cities in the US have no walking infrastructure, horrible (unreliable, slow, etc.) public transportation, and are victims of sprawl.

Having just come off a trip to a handful of smaller European cities, if I lived there I would most likely just walk, bike, or maybe scooter everywhere.

Many small towns have downtowns with good walking infrastructure (though often in poor repair). The problem is almost everything has closed down because the strip of big box stores located out on the highway bypass on the edge of town attracted away all the customers.

However lots of people in those cities do in fact own cars.

Larger cities tend to be denser, which means that while, yes, there are things farther than in a small city, there are also more things accessible at the same distance.

Plus, that density makes it economical to support other alternatives besides car ownership or walking, like public transportation and delivery services. I once carried a foam mattress for 12km on the Brussels subway. In any small town I lived in, that would have required a car, even if the shop was half the distance away.

And small towns are more likely to be missing something entirely, which means you have to travel to another town, possibly much farther than crossing a big city.

Currently I live in a medium-sized city, 10m by train from a big one, and I find it to be a sweet spot :)

I feel like only someone from SF would find $2100 reasonable for a studio. To me that seems ludicrous in other cities. IME in Seattle, that's how much it would cost for a 2 BR apartment.

Additionally: 2100 * 12 = $25200. The general rule of thumb is don't spend more than 30% of your take home on housing. That means you need to make at _least_ $84000 dollars per year in take home. That hardly seems overstated. Would love to be proven wrong since I love the SF area and would love to live there. However, I cannot justify the costs because I do not make $84000 in take home.

Roughly how big a studio would that get you?

Based on a few minutes on padmapper, I'm guessing about 0sqft in Lower Haight. Certainly doable in the Tenderloin though.

It's decent sized. Maybe a little less than 500 sqft. Bright & does not feel claustrophobic. Honestly surprised it was this affordable when I first saw it over the summer.

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