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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Even if you like San Francisco on balance, it's hard not to ask yourself if you like it so much that you're OK with paying for some of the most expensive housing in the country when you don't have a reason you have to be there.

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This is not a strategy for everyone, but I definitely pay less in SF than I would in most cities because I know people willing to live with me long-term (and split rent) here. Generally it's easier in SF to find a roommate who is high-earning and willing to split an apartment or house compared to other cities, where similar people would just pay a little more to get their own place.

in our city, my partner and I bought a house entirely for 5.5 years of what we were paying in rent. Now just 2 of our rent payments cover annual tax and insurance.

any locally optimized strategy within the overall context of renting is still a failing proposition imo.

Splitting rent among roommates is not specific to San Francisco, it's common to cities with expensive housing. LA, Miami, NYC, San Diego, etc. all have high proportions of adults living with roommates (https://porch.com/advice/cities-whose-residents-likely-live-...).

Having roommates certainly helps save money, but it remains true that you and your roommates are paying for some of the most expensive housing in the country.

You (and those like you) have informally recreated boarding houses. It’s a shame that Single Room Occupancy is basically illegal to build in any major US city: most cities require building “single family units” that must have their own bathroom(s), kitchen and bedroom(s).

It would be nice if people who are OK sharing common spaces were able to have housing built specifically with them in mind.

I can probably get why it was banned (if abused, it can be horrible) but it is extremely common way of living, especially for young people without families in expensive places - so one would think the government would stop pretending it's not happening at some point...

For cities in general there's much more to do compared to low density areas. Restaurants, entertainment, other people. All of this within a decent traveling distance.

Sure. Cities lend themselves to different sorts of activities and have different pros and cons than do rural areas. Personally I get all the city stuff I want in short visits. I can see a play in a large city that is an hour drive away without living there.

That's fine but the parent implied it was objectively worse than living elsewhere

I think the parent was me :-) I actually like SF but some of the most expensive housing in the country is a high bar if you don't either have enough money that it's a non-issue or have to live there for employment or other reasons. There are many cities with solid city activities that aren't SF.

I'm aware there are options. It's subjective

Sure, but most who leave SF will choose a smaller metro area, not a rural area. What I have found in my time in the Bay Area is a general ignorance of how many smaller metro areas have developed more vibrant urban centers over the past 10 years. The people from these cities who went home for the first time in a decade are finding surprisingly livable metros waiting for them, closer to aging family.

A lot of smaller cities have developed gentrified cores. Mind you, these cores can be pretty small. You may have a relative handful of restaurants and bars you like and they may lack some of the cultural amenities of a larger city. But I know a couple who just sold their presumably very appreciated house in a major metro and moved somewhere smaller.

I've definitely thought about finally leaving the Bay Area, previously I'd written off a lot of places because I want to be close to the coast and I love the relatively mild weather. More recently I ended up talking with a park ranger about life out here (he's from Truckee). He was real attracted to the Oregon coast but aghast at the white supremacy issues that are still ripe up there. There's always a catch.

Now? Politics and infrastructure put me off of huge chunks of the country (especially Texas and Florida). I don't really care if Austin is a vibrant metro area when the state government is trying to ensure women have subhuman status at most even if they've got to gut our judicial system to do it. Small town Texas? Absolutely fucking not, doubly so if I actually wanted to raise a family. Then again the Bay Area is my home.

Yes, you’re certainly wrestling with a different circumstance than many others, if not most, if you’re from the area.

For someone from a place most people from the Bay Area would never deign to visit, I’m more than happy to go back and do the hard work to make it better. Work politicians and voters in California are incapable and unwilling to do.

What does being "woke" have to do with this situation?

I think you replied to the wrong person because neither I nor the parent said anything about "woke."

You said "Work politicians and..." I thought you meant woke because otherwise the sentence doesn't make sense

I understand your confusion. You can mentally insert "which" or "that" between "Work" and "politicians" to make sense of it. Making that its own sentence was probably a mistake on my part for this audience. My statement is politically neutral. Not sure which angle you're coming from, but I'm not interested in that discussion. It's not helping anyone in the community I grew up in.

I think one thing that keeps me in the Bay Area is economic opportunity, although it remains to be seen how larger macro-economic forces will effect this.

For the last decade though, if you write code in the Bay Area, there is just this massive backstop of companies looking to hire. I've lived here since 2011 and worked for all of 3 startups that entire time, so this isn't so much about job hopping. Instead, because of all the competition for talent in the area you get to enjoy a degree of job security, high pay, and benefits that are pretty nice. It is also a major relief to know that if your company does have to let you go for whatever reason or you just get sick of the work you are doing and want to quit, there are a ton of other places hiring.

With remote work I imagine being physically close to the Bay Area is less of a requirement, but it seems like there is some amount of drive to get people back into offices, so we will see how long that remains viable.

This is really the main reason I stay in the Bay Area, I moved out to the Greater East Bay a few years back and was able to find a nice house in a nice enough area for a reasonable price.

Having easy access to so many employers provides a peace of mind and an implicit pile of leverage that's pretty great.

Like it or not, SF has the most vibrant tech community than anywhere else.

I live an hour away, and I make the painful, tedious drive up in rush-hour traffic at least once a week to meet up with some group or another in person. The alternative is the dreary, sleep-inducing vendor teleconferences that double as "meetups" on the Peninsula.

I'm strongly considering ditching the Peninsula and moving to SF for better networking and more diverse hangouts and career opportunities.

This is both the good and bad of living in area like the Bay. I'd find the idea of going in an evening a week with a tedious drive to do work-related stuff tedious at best.

The alternative is moving to the city, which is what I am strongly considering.

Not a lot of places in the USA where you can take transit, walk around and be close to the beach and the mountains while having a garden and some space :)

It sounds like you are saying that if you move from SF to another city cost of living expenses will drop dramatically.

Well they can. If I move to another popular place like Manhattan they probably won't go down much. But it's reasonable to ask, if you don't have a work-related reason to live in a place, whether it's good value based on your priorities. The answer may be "Yes!" for SF for some people. But it may also be "No."

Yes, this is famously true, with SF's cost of living (especially but not only housing) being some of the very highest in the nation. Getting out of California helps even more.

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