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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

What kind of house had you been dreaming of? I live in SF, and even here $3M goes an awfully freaking long way.

I'm in Santa Barbara, CA. Good friend of mine just bought a shithole 3-2 1300sqft for $2.2m. $3M doesn't go very far considering 30 years ago it was retirement status almost anywhere.

I don’t get it, at this point you move to Baja or Portugal (for similar climate) and live like a king without ever having to work again (unless you want to). Or a cheaper east coast state if you wanna stay in the US on the coast and have access to to all the same fast food and Walmarts.

How does medical care factor in to your plans? Do those places have equivalent access to care if you stay in or around the main cities?

Even something like living in the countryside domestically would worry me (that is, longer times between calling for help and it arriving, then time to be transported to a medical centre or hospital, and then probably getting transported to the city anyway for access to advanced medical care).

Spain and Portugal have excellent, affordable healthcare (part time resident).

You know life expectancy in Portugal is higher than in California, right?

Ye I really don't understand why people don't take their money and run more often. And like, run a convince store somewhere off.

I'm one of those people who took "the money and [ran]"

I'm a digital nomad and have been traveling full time for 7 years now. It's great, it's a good balance of work/life balance but one thing you slowly start to notice is when you leave your country, no matter if you learn the language or how much integrate yourself into that country, you will always be an outsider to the majority in that country.

As an american you will always be a Yankee, Farang or Gringo and will carry the weight of the US collective.

That stops when you actually fix yourself somewhere and become part of the community.

Being a nomad is basically asking to start from scratch everywhere you go.

As a neurodiverse offspring of a biracial marriage, I’m starting to feel more and more like an outsider in my home state. Though I’d likely feel it much more if I left now, to your point.

I could retire on 3 million right now.

Here's a $2M 4-3 2279sqft very-nice-looking home in Santa Barbara:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5436-Agana-Dr-Santa-Barba...

offtopic, but I love comparing realtor glamour shots HDR'd out the wazoo with StreetView

https://maps.app.goo.gl/2aEXsdH9hU3o4SZw5 (winter, March 2012)

Aside to the offtopic: I'm surprised the google street view footage is 13 years old.

It launched in 2007, so approaching twenty years:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Street_View

I meant and left out a key word; "most recent". Whoops!

I'm used to seeing yearly or every-other-year streetview updates for locations I look at regularly.

That said, might be mixing up my broader impression with the interval of satellite photo updates in the google earth history. (but my bay area neighborhood does indeed have streetview history updating every year or so; obviously this is probably on the high end given proximity to tech companies...)

that's not a glamour shot, that's just a sunny day. the dirty little secret of the southern california coast is it is cloudy more than half the time. west la, downright depressing. they call it "the marine layer", i call it cloudy as fuck.

Ya that’s completely false lol. Lots of reasons to criticize LA, being cloudy isn’t one of them

https://wrcc.dri.edu/cgi-bin/clilcd.pl?ca23174

Still not bad

so much space lost to cars...

You're making his point.

4br in only 2k sqft? For 2M? Please...

I'm not saying the prices are reasonable.

I'm saying $2.2M for a "shithole 1300sqft" doesn't make sense when you can pay $2M for a nice 2279sqft.

Sorry, but this reads like you contradicting yourself.

~"Not saying X, but... X."

My first sentence is saying "I'm not saying the prices are reasonable."

How does my second sentence say the prices are reasonable? My second sentence is saying chasebank's friend did something that doesn't make sense. It's not saying the housing market in Santa Barbara is reasonable.

>for a nice 2279sqft.

Are you intentionally ignoring you said "nice" for what most would consider to be a source of ridicule (4BR SFH in 2k sqft). BTW, you haven't made an argument about real estate differences. The smaller home might be a better deal.

And you're using a turn of phrase that is the opposite of your apparent intent.

>most would consider to be a source of ridicule (4BR SFH in 2k sqft)

I don't think most people would consider it a source of ridicule. (BTW, you omitted 279sqft.) In all the places I see discussing it online, I see tons of people saying 2279 sqft is a normal or even large size for 4BR, and only 1 person saying it's small[1-6].

The average bedroom size in the US is 132 sqft. The average master bedroom size is 224 sqft[7]. Even if we go with 224, with 4 of those, that's 896 sqft used by bedrooms, and 2279-896 = 1383sqft for non-bedroom stuff. I don't see why that's so bad.

>BTW, you haven't made an argument about real estate differences. The smaller home might be a better deal.

chasebank described it has a "shithole". So I assumed the real estate was bad. If chasebank was describing a house on a super valuable piece of land, chasebank should have mentioned that. It would be an important piece of information that would completely undermine chasebank's point. It would be misleading for chasebank to leave out that information, so I assumed chasebank didn't do that. Anyway, the real estate of the one I linked to seemed fine to me.

[1] https://www.familyhomeplans.com/4-bed-3-bath-house-plans-hom...

[2] https://www.coohom.com/article/how-many-square-feet-in-a-4-b...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/HousingUK/comments/vq293z/after_gen...

[4] https://www.quora.com/How-many-square-feet-is-a-4-bedroom-ho...

[5] https://houseplanfloorplan.quora.com/How-big-is-a-typical-4-...

[6] https://www.coohom.com/article/how-many-square-feet-in-a-4-b...

[7] https://www.crddesignbuild.com/blog/average-bedroom-size/

Either you're acting in bad faith or have a language issue.

For the latter, isn't it odd how you cherrypick and dismiss?

1. Spuriously apply national averages (including a UK forum!!! LOL) to a way above average zip code

2. And conveniently dismiss another HNer's conclusion because they...didn't provide a fact needed for an argument that YOU are trying to make and could research yourself? This is unreal.

>"Yeah, even though I didn't ask, the defendent didn't tell me they were innocent or not, so I will dismiss further review and assume they're guilty."

I'm not cherrypicking. Those are all the top results that Google gave me. I didn't omit any.

You said "what most would consider to be a source of ridicule (4BR SFH in 2k sqft)". You didn't say that it would only be a source of ridicule in certain zip codes.

Whose conclusion am I dismissing? chasebank's? I think chasebank's conclusion is that housing is too expensive. I agree with chasebank there. I'm not dismissing that.

Going full pedant, the more pertinent issue with the house you posted upthread is that it's 8 miles from downtown and outside Santa Barbara city limits. No one in Santa Barbara would consider it a "Santa Barbara" house. Despite the zip code allowing use of "Santa Barbara" on the address, it's in "Noleta", the less expensive unincorporated suburban area between Goleta and Santa Barbara.

Shithole is probably overstating it, but $2.2m doesn't get you much in more expensive Santa Barbara neighborhoods. Here's a 3/1 1000sq foot house that sold for $2.2 in June that better represents what the parent comment was referring to:

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2430-Mesa-School-Ln-Santa...

A 4BR 2k+ sqft house in any of the good neighborhoods in Santa Barbara ( Mesa, San Roque, Riviera, Mission Canyon, Samarkand) would easily be closer to $2.5-3 million.

For example: 1900sqft for $2.6: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2818-Valencia-Dr-Santa-Ba...

2100sqft for $2.7: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/3117-Calle-Noguera-Santa-...

800sq ft for $1.6: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/512-E-Islay-St-Santa-Barb...

Thanks for the info! Yeah, I didn't realize the different neighborhoods.

That first one you linked to must be priced based on building something new there. The Zillow listing even has pictures of plans for a new house.

Here's a 2270sqft 3BR3B for $1.9M that I think is actually in Santa Barbara (looks like the edge of Riviera), although it doesn't really have a yard: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/533-Conejo-Rd-Santa-Barba...

Agreed that first link is priced on the lot being extra large, I intended to put in this one: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/307-La-Marina-Santa-Barba...

That Conejo rd listing is less expensive mostly due to fire/landslide risk and the elementary school district.

>didn't realize the different neighborhoods

How ironic that you now backtrack when someone else makes my point. You did no research, made a spurious claim, then doubled down.

Your original comment was "You're making his point. 4br in only 2k sqft? For 2M? Please..."

That's not the same point as sblocal123's point.

Regarding the real estate location point, yes, you and caminante made the same point. caminante made the point convincingly and you didn't. There's nothing ironic about me changing my mind when someone makes a point convincingly.

Oh dear.

You've embarrassed yourself.

His stupid idea to buy in a place that has gotten more expensive than almost anywhere in the country.

I can cry that my dream flat in London is more expensive than I expected 30 years ago but that just shows how stupid I’ve been the last 30 years

I have to ask, if they have access to get a loan of $2.2m then the friend could likely save for 5-7 years and just retire someplace cheap. Like, spending that much seems wild given the implied access to straight cash.

But you can always sell the house later if you want to retire somewhere cheaper. It’s not like you losing the money forever.

You do have to pay interest taxes and maintenance, whether that exceeds the rent for an equivalent property is another question.

Yeah but let's keep the ponzi going people!

Yeah they been printing alot of $

anything within 45 minutes of your office in palo alto (where you are mandated to show up 5 days a week). this will get you a 1300sqft piece of shit built in 1964 with asbestos and lead paint and lead pipes and a cracked foundation (also some dipshit realtor had them paint all the original wood beams and paneling inside gloss white and replace the original wood and slate floors with grey vinyl) from some baby boomer forklift driver or mailman who paid 40k for it (you will pay 40k per year in property taxes for it), all for the privilege of “only” spending an hour of your life a day commuting so you can sit in your assigned area of your open concept office with noise canceling headphones on zoom meetings for 4 hours a day surrounded by other people on zoom meetings who also just expended a collective 5000 man hours and countless CO2 emissions to be there.

Every now and then I dream about how much more money I'd be making if I lived in the Bay Area, but then I read something like this and realize that earning ~half as much working remotely from a cheaper (at least when I bought) city maybe isn't so bad.

They are greatly exaggerating. One tangible advantage to living somewhere expensive with higher salaries is that anything you can buy online is effectively that much cheaper. An iPhone costs the same in Arkansas as in San Jose, so you'd end up working many more hours to buy one in AR than in CA, on average.

Yes, housing is more expensive. A lot more. Everything else is way cheaper.

Services are also more expensive because the person performing the service must pay the high rents, too.

Not proportionally more, in my experience, and surely not for people moving here for the kinds of jobs we’re talking about.

Thank you, so many people like to go about cost-of-living and pretending things are equal because of that, but the vast majority of goods people buy are not priced that way, and in truly remote places the cost of goods actually go up. The land or housing might be cheap, but pretty much everything else costs the same, so the lower paying job still hurts.

I would say the vast majority of spending is affected by COL, since it’s all incorporating price of labor. Maybe not the majority of goods but that’s often a smaller part of spending.

I will say though that travel is the main one that’s obviously independent of where you live (at least mostly). So that’s kind of nice.

The trick is to rent cheap and live like a college student in SF/bay area while young, save aggressively, invest intelligently, then move somewhere comfortable but more affordable (CO's front range is lovely) for your 30s/40s.

Just watch you don't get overly acclimated to the weather, or you'll end up with a single-digit number of cities in the world you find comfortable

I'm so so so glad I didn't spend my twenties working and saving.

I've lived a thousand lives, spent most of the time as true quality time with people I love, and I still have a few years left in this decade of my life.

And I'm still further ahead, financially speaking, than >99% of other people my age. (To those asking, I tripled down on life after getting a remote job.)

The one year I spent 9-5 in an office as a traditional SWE was by far the quickest and least eventful year of my life. Also probably the saddest.

I'm very glad I just said "no" and walked away and simply lived. It was absolutely worth the risk. I would never trade these years for the ability to buy a house in the Bay Area suburbs.

I probably will be able to do that anyways, if I want to, even though I don't.

I forgot to factor in the time/quality of life cost of dealing with snow, winter heating, shoveling drive/roof, driving and driving risk.

Or you could spend half that in the heart of SF and have a nice place in a decent neighborhood: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1265-Union-St-San-Francis...

It's not that it's cheap here, not by any measure, but it's not nearly so dire as y'all want to claim.

With $3MM you could just stop working and live in many other nice enough places without ever having to work again.

Buying a $3M house does not mean they have $3M cash

They haven't really "bought" it then though no?

Except you’re a wage slave and your American Nightmare comes with a mortgage, your sizable interest payments are likely funding the retirement income of a boomer too (along with bankers too, they always get a cut)

3% of 3 million is 90k which sounds better than it actually is as you need to pay for health insurance.

Plenty of people live in any city with less than that, but it is below the average income in many nice counties in the US.

90K is still 50% above the median income, not to mention the fact that you have twice as much as time available and using just a small amount of that can be used to cut costs significantly in other areas. It is more effectively a $150K income if we add in the median wage from the job you aren't doing.

Nationwide, the US median income for full-time workers is over 62k without considering benefits, but many areas are well above that.

That is a tenancy in common 2 bedroom apartment not a house. Shared ownership of a 100+ year old building with "leased" parking 2 blocks away. Not exactly the home ownership dream.

I own one unit in a 2-unit condo built in the 1910s in SF. It’s pretty fucking dreamy if you ask me.

different strokes for different folks. I can't fucking stand hearing every breath of every neighbor in a 100yr old SF house and having to tiptoe at all times so as not to upset the other tenents

I am almost never aware of my upstairs neighbors, through two pairs of them, including a dog and a baby.

Then click around to find something more your liking. There are a lot of places for sale for under $3M that aren’t exactly a tent under a bridge.

Luckily you can live in a city and then later sell that appartment and buy another house in the sticks that is the dream.

That too for $1.5 million. 99% of Americans would picture a mansion when they think of a $1.5 million home.

Hey now, around 15% of the population live in CA or NY so I think your estimate is too high

Redwood City is 20 mins from Palo Alto and has a lot of houses for $1-1.5M. $3M means you are paying extra for something optional. It’s not the minimum requirement.

Lots of people are paying millions extra just to live up winding roads on a hill, where the commute is longer, and you need a geotechnical engineer to design your patio.

Redwood City has terrible schools (relatively) and many people consider excellent schools for their kids as hard requirement.

School quality in the Bay Area is a red queen’s race, and a pressure cooker environment is not good for the kids. Apparently the solution is grade-separating Caltrain.

it’s more like 30-50 min with traffic

30 mins - possible with traffic, especially to a far corner of Palo Alto.

50 mins - what on earth? Take the train. Even a bicycle would be faster.

And here I thought I had it bad when houses went from 400k to 800k for the same house pre- vs post-pandemic in Raleigh, NC.

I remember being a young junior engineer, my manager had just bought a nice house in the good part of town (Charleston, SC) for about 350k. We had a good “be smart with your money and this could be you too in 5 years” conversation. I think by the time I was ready to buy that house had jumped to 600k valuation, these days it’s close to $1M in valuation.

Only way to get a nice house for 300k now is to work remote in some podunk town for a big city salary.

The median income in the Bay Area is around 120-180k. You aren’t buying a 3m house for that, so how is it all those people somehow survive?

Some anecdotal data points from a guy who lived in the Bay Area when poor people could afford Redwood City and just returned from a family event.

1. The neighborhood I grew up in in San Jose has 3, 4, or even 5 cars in front of every house. My working thesis is that despite being small, these are multi-generational homes, probably with the notional homeowners being the ones that were living there back in the mid-80s.

2. My aunt lives in a much nicer part of San Jose in the house that her husband inherited from his parents. Many of the other neighborhood homeowners are in the same situation, although there has been some flipping going on.

3. Three more boomers at the family event are all living in inherited houses, including one couple that has a pair of houses that they each inherited from their respective parents. They're not renting out the surplus, but instead have turned both into animal rescue sites.

All of these folks are grandfathered in to extremely low Prop 13 property taxes.

This a wonderful summary of the unfair dystopia that is the Bay Area real estate market.

I would also add, the forklift driver who bought the house for 40k in 1971, by state law (Proposition 13), is still paying 1971 valuation property taxes and contributing essentially nothing to local school funding, funding which is mostly covered by you according to a "new guy has to hold the bag" type scheme. In a state obsessed with fairness, a most unfair policy.

Should you wish to modify the property, conventional area wisdom is to just do so unpermitted. Boomers don't like construction because it increases supply and they want no supply, only demand, home price go brrrr. Environmentalists don't like construction because the more nature the better. Others don't like construction because they make it their business to set the vibe of the area as static and frozen. These political interests culminate in a construction permitting process that basically autorejects everything, paradoxically increasing public danger because everyone now does everything unpermitted.

Even the famously wealthy Steve Jobs ran afoul of it and couldn't buy his way out. He had a property he wanted to modify but they wouldn't let him touch it at all. So he just let it sit and rot to make a point. Ultimately the government agreed his plan was better than a rotting house.

You should have bought in when Prop 13 went into effect, you’d only be paying $3k in property taxes today instead of $40k.

Or inherit the Prop 13 rate from your parents.

I voted against prop 13, but now I like it living in a house in Westchester for 44 years.

There’s some restrictions on this now though. It’s not as great as it was before.

I think you just illegally accessed my brain…

I don't think of it this way often, but damn am I glad I left the bay area

I can’t help but miss it, even though I desperately needed to get out too.

I miss knowing where the darkest place is for 50 miles in all directions. I never got to bike highway 1 from SF to Big Sur. My boyfriend and I would have an easier time finding jobs there. There’s better roads for car enthusiasts.

There was a lot of depressing tech saturation in the Bay Area, but there’s still good pockets of the pre-software culture around there if you’re willing to live towards the edges and look for the weirdness.

5 plus years on, all that I really miss consistently is some of the food options there. Everything else you can get elsewhere, for cheaper, and in a lot of cases better. And I know I can't go back to my food options there because half the restaurants I used to like are gone and the other half have changed ownership

Are you the kind of person who refuses to go to the east bay or live next to middle class Asian Americans or Latinos? Because there are plenty of nice places for 3m 45 minutes from Palo Alto. Arguably you could get a house on the south side of the city and be 45 minutes from downtown PA by car or Caltrain.

Pitching a 45 minute commute as as something as acceptable for $3 million is insane. It has nothing to do with class. That’s a shit life driving that every day.

I do a minimum of 2 hours a day. I think people in this particular conversation might be just a little divorced from reality.

I've spent all my working life in jobs with the rule that the commute should not be more than 30 minutes by bike. I'm now 62, and that's one life choice I've never regretted.

So? My point is that’s a miserable life to put up with when you can afford a $3 million dollar home.

8% of your waking life going to and from work without getting paid for it is dumb

I honestly don't have a lot of options. I've got bills to pay.

That’s my point. A commute like that is not a sign of luxury

i live in RWC

And those who live in Silicon Valley are the supposed winners.

It just doesn't stack up. This world is cooked. The steak used to be medium rare once upon a time, but now it's pure charcoal.

All of this

$3m cash will get you a house that you have to still pay $60k-$100k a year to stay in property tax and maintanence

Property tax rate in SF caps at 1.38%, which would be ~$40,000/year. How are you spending $60,000/year, every year, on maintenance and insurance? Are you saving up for a new solid gold roof for every decade?

My average has been around $30k/yr but my house is worth well under $3m so I could see it being closer to $60k. I do include some remodeling in that figure, but things wear out and you aren’t going to want to live with a decrepit interior in your $3m house…

$3m mortgage as well

$3M is this 2,240 sq ft home on a 5k sq ft lot in San Mateo, and as far as house amenities/quality, this is pretty unimpressive.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/221-Woodbridge-Cir-San-Ma...

One block from the freeway, no less.

Convenient for the commute.

for a standalone house in my area (lakeside near Zurich, Switzerland) you'd pay way more than 3M... apartments go for 2+.

Intrest rates for morgages in Switzerland are around 1% and for tax reasons most people only pay off a third of their property. The payments are very managable, as long as you have the downpayment. You can't fully compare this with a similar price in the US where interest rates are much higher and people pay off the full morgage.

You can pay off your mortgage if you want to. I know several people who did or set it up like that.

However then your interest rate is not 1%. The best I've seen is 30 year fixed, where you pay off your house is 2.5%.

I'm paying 0.65% right now, thanks to SARON going to 0.

It just does not make financial sense to pay it off even if could.

Couldn't you just not live "lakeside"?

of course that's an option. then you can get a house for a measly 2 million! public transport will only take an hour or more from there .. :)

my wife doesn't drive and we wanted to have access to good public schools and good transportation. this is not a given if you go more rural. The postbus goes maybe every hour or so.

the lakeside communities near Zurich are great and all of our friends live in one of them (on the same side of the lake of course). not living here would have severe effects on my wife's and our kids' social lives.

Maybe OP wants a house in atherton next to andreessen.

I'm guessing it's a very select group of people who want a house next to Andreessen...

If I had to, I would pay just to live away from that select group.

This is the cheapest house in Atherton at this moment

$4.888

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/86-Rittenhouse-Ave-Athert...

$3m is a pretty decent down payment for that.

My point was that you could grind for 20 years and get $1 million payout. Or even a multi million dollar payout. And your reward is that you have to keep on grinding for the rest of your life.

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