As a Londoner, I find that hard to believe. London is a huge, diverse city with many industries other than tech, and the vast majority of London's population don't make anything close to an SF tech salary. If London was as expensive as SF then I know I wouldn't be able to afford to live here.
The reason we call it shit is because (before COVID) they're pretty much all pushed beyond capacity during the commuting hours, or practically all the time between the main tourist spots. Commuting in London is a truly hellish experience.
And that includes the commuter trains that are frequently delayed or cancelled while ticket prices increase above inflation every year.
The best thing that happened from covid is skipping the commute and saving the £300 a month it took to get to the office and back.
Whenever I looked at apartments online trying to find an equivalent lifestyle (30 minutes door to door commute, nearby parks and restauranta, 1 br 85 m^2 with good amenities) the rent always came out about the same as what I was paying ($1,840/month).
The difference being home in Oakland My hood was mostly single family homes with yards (and a few yuppy apartment complexes like mine). In London everything within that commute range seemed to be a concrete jungle, and I couldnt figure out how to find an equivalent neighborhood withot really going far away from the tech companies.
Whenever I visit london my dollar never seemed to stretch far and food / groceries / transit felt reallly spendy.
London pubtrans is clearly better than anywhere in the USA, that goes without sayyng, but was also more expensive (if I went to the office I think I paid $4 each way for the transbay bus, with a 5-10 minute walk on each end of my commute).
It’s a great city (except for the traffic. I would be terrified to ride a bicycle there), and one of my favorite things to do in life is smoke a spliff and walk down the camden locks trail.
The 30 minutes door to door commute is the problem if comparing, as London is huge. A 1 hour commute is closer to the norm. But a 1 hour commute on a train is very different to the same 1 hour if you're driving and can't spend a good chunk of it with your face in a book or watching Netflix or whatever.
In terms of housing, my current mortgage for a 3 bedroom terraced house with a garden in London is about USD $2k/month, but that does mean living further out from the centre than what you want.
For anyone moving to London, my tip is Croydon. It has an awful reputation which is mostly unearned (it's a very large borough, and very diverse, and it's reputation is pretty much down to scale and some small pockets of the most deprived parts of the borough), and so it's unreasonably cheap for how good transport links it has in to the centre. There are places in London I might prefer if money was no object, but money really would need to be no object, as up until maybe the 3-4 million pound range you'll get more for your money here than ost other places in town.
Working in London in 2007/8 it was common for senior developers to switch to contract work since it was fairly easy to at least double your salary that way (GBP 500/600 a day was about the going rate then IIRC.) At the time I remember traveling to the US and everything seeming very cheap at the 1.90 GBP/USD exchange rates pre Brexit and financial crash...
But even outside of the big tech companies, wages for software engineers are relatively higher in the US than the UK (90th percentile vs 75th) and the higher paid are paid more (2.6x the median at 90th percentile vs 2.0x the median.) If you compare median salaries / rents on pre Brexit and 2008 financial crash exchange rates SF and the Bay Area come out pretty similar.
Their engineer/other salary being the same as places further away. I assume there is a cost of residency allowance for other UK cities that have a premium.
If you move away, that residency allowance is adjusted to where you work from. Thus the technical salary is ~~flat.
After all this allowance is a pass through to the landlords. Those whose parents onw London center digs do very well.
I am not sure how property taxes are levied in the UK, but one would anticipare the Lords would have long since levelled that via head taxes that are levelled in some manner?
Any UK people care to weigh in here? "
Reformatting for readability, sorry aurizon my brain was struggling.
Other cities don't usually get similar supplements, even places like Cambridge where housing costs can be really high.
Property taxes are called "Council tax" here, they're probably the most regressive tax in England (the rest of the UK have slightly different rules). The amount of tax depends upon both the local area and the value of the property in 1991. Everyone who's house was work more than £320k in 1991 pays the same rate. This means in Kensington, London someone in a swanky 250 sq.m. £8million house pays £2473 per year...as does someone in a £million apartment on the next street. The person a few streets over in a grotty 20sq.m £300k studio will be paying £962 per year.