San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco

antirez.com

255 pointsbencevans255 comments

Eh. They can keep it.

• Average engineering salary in sf: 116K / year [1]

• Average rent for a one bedroom: $2,700 / month [2]

After taxes you're coming in around 72k / year - 32k / year for rent

You'll have roughly 40k to play with. That may sound like a lot but factor in food, health care, travel, energy, internet, phone, and numerous miscellaneous expenses and you'll be hard pressed to save anything over 10k a year. For me it would never work having 2k per month in student loans.

Also compare that to a place like D.C.

• Average engineering salary in D.C. : 105k / year [3]

• Average rent for a one bedroom: $1,392 / month [4]

After taxes you'll have around 68k / year - 17k / year for rent

That's 51,000 per year. About 11k more per year and a place that is significantly less expensive to live in. That can really make a difference and you may miss out on being in sf but you're in a large city with a healthy tech environment none the less.

1.) http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Software-Engineer-l-San-Franc...

2.)http://sfist.com/2013/03/07/map_average_rent_for_1br_in_san_...

3.) http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Software+Engineer&l1=Washing...

4.) http://www.apartmentratings.com/rate?a=MSAAvgRentalPrice&msa...

You are forgetting the weather.

DC winters: cold, snow, sometimes blizzard, have to scrape your car free from ice if you don't have indoor parking.

SF winters: sometimes you have to put in a jacket and sometimes it rains. That's it.

This is just one example of many. It's pointless to compare two cities on rent and cost of living alone. Now, if the extra 11k is worth the winter challenges to you then I'm happy. Personally, I'm unable to imagine myself going back to east coast weather ever again.

"...every day, hot and sunny, today, hot and sunny, tomorrow, hot and, for the rest of the... hot and sunny, every single day, hot and sunny. And they love it. "Isn't great, every day, hot and sunny?" What are you, a fucking lizard? Only reptiles feel that way about this kind of weather. I'm a mammal, I can afford coats, scarves, cappuccino and rosy cheeked women"

Bill Hicks

That's the thing though, on the peninsula it's NOT always hot and sunny. Sometimes it is, but mostly it's close to perfect weather. 70s, 80s. Sun.

That said though real estate there has gone absolutely berserk, not worth the weather.

Did Bill Hicks say this of SF ? LA ? California in general ?

Starting around San Mateo and going north from there through the city all the way to Sausalito (and probably beyond), there are numerous microclimates. It's not at all like the LA that I know.

he was saying it about Los Angeles, when making fun of LA types. He was performing (as he did nearly half his career) for a British audience.

in SF, summer is often colder than winter.

I've never lived in DC, but

  - presence of good chinese food
  - weather (even though I love winter weather, DC summers would not be worth it)
  - jobs (which companies have large presences in SF vs DC-area)

all conspire to make me completely incurious as to whether DC is "$11k/year" nicer than SF.

Exactly. SF is expensive, but it's going to take a hell of a lot more than ~$1k/month disposable income for me to give up what that amount buys me in quality of life — for, admittedly, my definitions of "quality of life"; YM, as always, MV.

DC, especially in the suburbs, also has very good Chinese food.

Ya, I think parent hasn't been to DC before.

And, as much as I hate DC, all kinds of other foods, including really great Ethiopian and Moroccan. But not good sushi (back when I lived there 7 years ago).

> in SF, summer is often colder than winter.

A common misconception, even among residents, easily debunked by paying attention or doing a quick Google search:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Climate

http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;q=san%20francisco

SF itself has even more fine-grained microclimates than the peninsula (which only has a few). I didn't (immediately) find out how the wikipedia climate numbers were assembled nor what weather station(s) weatherspark gets data from, but if it's a single weather station, the data gathered is nigh-useless.

weatherspark looks very nice btw, I'm going to go look if they have an android app.... seems there isn't one. oh well.

Is there any neighborhood that experiences higher average temperatures in the winter? I've spent most of my time in South Beach, FiDi, and Outer Sunset, and while I never kept records, it always seemed to me like each of those had a higher average temperatures in the (late) summer.

I suppose this outlook is related to where you grew up. To someone from the north, referring to DC as cold and snowy is preposterous. They had one bad year with snowfall a few years ago, but other than that winter they rarely even crack 10" in recent years, and even that usually comes over only a couple of days during infrequent storms. Their mean temperature is above freezing every month of the year.

On average in and around DC we see a blizzard every six years.

The last awesome snow filled winter we had was the 2009 to 2010 season. We accumulated up to 80 inches of snow; fun stuff!

San Fran weather is awesome, the amount of homelessness makes me sad though!

> San Fran weather is awesome, the amount of homelessness makes me sad though!

It bums you out?

Ive lived in Baltimore, Philly, NYC and Nashville and never encounter the culture of homelessness that one experiences in San Francisco.

I know part of why it's like that is because of the weather.

Besides being bummed out by being surrounded by destitution the smell of destitution is just as bad.

I grew up in Syracuse NY. The snowiest city in the U.S. I don't consider D.C. to "have" winters. They have a mild falls until spring.

I've lived in Syracuse. DC gets what Syracuse would consider a real snowfall about once every five years. But when it happens, everything shuts down. Not enough plows. And terrifyingly bad snow drivers.

The DC winter is pretty mild. There is perhaps one snowstorm a year. Yes, sometimes there's ice on your car, but if you live and work in the city there's a good chance you don't drive to work or necessarily own a car.

If you want to complain about DC weather, I would direct you to the heat + humidity level in the summer.

SF and DC are very different cities, but based solely on weather I would absolutely take DC + $11,000/year. No question. It's really not that bad and some people even enjoy having discrete seasons.

To add something to this discussion: On my South Florida tropical island, rent is 1500-1900 per month, depending on whether you live on a canal, or waterfront (nevermind living on dry land, which is much, much more reasonable). For most of a decade, I've telecommuted and received, well, let's round it down to the San Francisco 119K per year, and yes that's W2, and paid 22.8K/year a month for rent. Snow? Ice? haven't seen them in years. Jackets? Surely you jest, I shiver at 73 degrees.

My point isn't that San Francisco is worse than this or that, but that every day I read that it is the center of the universe, and recruiters used to tell me "but you _have_ to be here, this is the place to _be_" which is terribly unconvincing for persons of my particular persuasion, nevermind that I don't care for wading through bums and traffic.

TL;DR it's a huge universe, and you don't have to put up with California to develop software in it.

You read San Francisco is the center of the universe because there really is a network effect for software development. Companies looking for a bigger pool of talent to draw from relocate to the area, post jobs, and bring in yet more developers. On your South Florida island can you find someone with ten years of Cobol or five years programming 12F675s? If I started a company there, how many people could I hire that have solid experience in Scala? Not "I played around with it after work" experience, but real experience?

Having more money is pretty much objectively better, while more distinct seasons is personal preference, to a degree.

SF people have to stop quoting the weather. The summer's are miserable with fog. It's as annoying as snow or sleet.

It's never very foggy east of Fillmore street, even in the summer. YMMV but SF weather is only miserable to people from LA.

SMH. You know you're drinking the Kool Aid when you try and go neighborhood by neighborhood. SF is terrible, Oakland/Berkeley better but not much (Berkeley gets nailed by the finger coming straight in from the GG Bridge) If you grew up somewhere else where summer meant putting your coat away for 3 months then "Two blocks over here the wind is still biting but the sun is out" isn't much of a consolation. Now, if you hate heat, as some do, then it's wonderful. I just think SF has a fantastic climate April/May and Sept/Nov. Folks need to realize though that there are big trade offs living there. No beach and always needing to have warm clothes if you leave your house for more than a few hours in case the fog comes in.

I don't know what you mean. The microclimates there are just a fact of life. The sunset is going to be cooler and foggier than the Mission simply because of the topography. Berkeley and Oakland are actually 10 degrees warmer with only occasional fog all year round. The whole area gets like 300 days of sun per year. I just wonder where people are from when they say that the bay areas weather is "terrible." It seems highly relative. For reference, I've lived in Minneapolis, Tokyo, Tucson, Atlanta, Boston and NYC and thought SF's weather was better than all of those places. They all had at least one season where it was miserable to be outside.

Given we're talking about the weather some of this is in jest. And you've somewhat turned this around as "what do you mean the weather is terrible". I was objecting to the "the weather in SF is fantastic!" crowd who blow by Mark Twain's keen observation. Places I have lived for more than a year include the Bay Area, Boston, Melbourne Australia, Istanbul, Chapel Hill, London. I found the fog to be very annoying as I had to manage to the weather constantly there.

> Mark Twain's keen observation

If you're talking about "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.", Twain never actually said it: http://www.snopes.com/quotes/twain.asp

As someone who lives in Portland, I would love to have SF's weather.

Yo Larry! Come down to LA, Santa Monica area. Code with ocean views! Although, I do miss the amount of live music in Portland.

Hah, hey Patrick! Long time no see. Sounds like things are going well over there. I'll let you know next time I'm headed that way.

It's not foggy, but it's not warm either.

Foggy mornings and evenings aren't rare even as far east as 3rd St, although it usually burns off during the day.

Really, if you want good weather in the bay area live in the valley. It's close enough and the weather is waaaay better.

Hop in a car or on BART on the weekend, go 15-20min east and you can hike in the sun or wander around Berkeley/Oakland in warm weather. That said, March to April/early May and Sept-Nov are generally quite glorious.

Fog is a nice to have, you can always travel a short bit to avoid it.

SF people have to stop quoting the weather.

SF weather is awesome: ~50-75 all year round with specific neighborhoods that stay warm and sunny all the time if you're into that sort of thing. Heavenly compared to Pittsburgh, Boston, NYC, or DC.

The summer's are miserable with fog. It's as annoying as snow or sleet.

Bizarre claim. Also, avoiding fog is simple: move to a different neighborhood.

And let's not forget that DC during the latter part of summer is swamp-like, with high humidity and 80-90 degree weather. The city largely shuts down in August.

> Also, avoiding fog is simple: move to a different neighborhood.

A 20+ hour a week job for a month, even if you can afford a place in the neighborhood you want to move to.

The weather is one of the worst things (that and high cost of living) about San Francisco (the city itself, not suburbs). There are maybe 3 weeks a year of actual warm, sunny weather. But you don't get the cold/snowy or hot/humid weather either.

Now, if you live 30+ minutes outside of San Francisco, you can have great weather and slightly lower cost of living.

Some people find seasons preferable. I plan on moving back to Boston for that reason alone.

The lack of seasons in SF makes me feel like it's Groundhog Day. I'd gladly take some snow in exchange for the other seasons. For me, summer feels much better after a long winter.

I grew up in the Midwest, where we had all the seasons and often fairly bad summers (old people die if their air conditioners fail) and winters (can't leave the driveway without 4WD). Still, in San Francisco, I am personally uncomfortable due to weather far more often than I ever was in the Midwest. This is due primarily to the lack of air conditioning in housing (I have bay windows constantly open and a fan directly on my desk and bed, and am still almost always hot, often to the point of having difficulty sleeping for long stretches in the late summer), the lack of air conditioning in my office (an older building in the financial district), and being improperly dressed outside due to the lack of predictability in the weather. I really dislike San Francisco's weather, not because it looks bad on paper (it obviously looks great), but because it causes me discomfort much more frequently than I was used to in the Midwest.

It sounds like you could significantly improve your standard of living by buying an air conditioner...

Most apartments and shared houses I've seen and both the ones I've lived in had no easy way to install an air conditioner.

The rent comparison isn't exactly fair - you are looking at the rent in the city of SF vs the entire Greater Washington area. There are certainly cheaper places than SF to live in the Bay Area. Also, almost all apartments in SF proper have rent control meaning that rent pretty much never goes up.

You can find apartments for that much in DC proper. Maybe not the average, but certainly present. And it gets better even staying on the Metro lines out into NOVA and (more so) MD.

$1,400 isn't going to get you your dream apartment, but it's a reasonable budget for a one bedroom apartment that's in DC and not in a bad neighborhood.

It's also pretty common to live outside the city and commute in on Metro (DC's Metro is built more like a commuter rail than a urban subway system).

I wouldn't say 1.4k is a reasonable rent in DC, not in my experience at least. Not even if you move out to the nearby suburbs.

I agree that it's below average for a one bedroom in DC, but apartments do exist at that price. I've lived in DC for 9 years and I've never paid more than that. (Granted, my wife is a wizard-level Craigslist user.)

I think the tricky part is that there really aren't many apartment buildings in DC to begin with, aside from the recently built and very overpriced luxury condo conversions, so the supply of one bedroom apartments is low. If you can stand to have roommates, you're much better off with a 2 bedroom English basement or a 3-4 bedroom little rowhouse.

$1.4k is below average (but possible) in DC. I don't know anyone in SF who is paying $2.7k a month for a place (the high end condos go for that, but they're generally split by couples). The vast majority of people I know in SF pay under $1.4k a month for rent.

The rent is higher in SF, but the tradeoff is that you can walk or ride a bike everywhere, year round. It's possible to get by in SF without a car at all. In DC (or elsewhere) you're paying for parking, gas, insurance, and a monthly car payment. That starts to add up pretty quickly. There's not an $11k a year difference without that ($1.4k vs $2.7k isn't realistic), but factoring it in, SF really closes that gap, or likely becomes cheaper.

I currently live in the DC suburb of Fairfax. My rent is $675. I'm renting a room in a 4 bedroom 3.5 bathroom house. I had a friend that came down from New York to visit. He joked that my kitchen was the size of his apartment.

I don't get arguments like this. You live in DC. He lives in one of the greatest cities on the face of the earth.

So what. Market has spoken. His rent is X and your rent is X-market discount for living in DC.

As somebody who has lived here for 13 years, let me strongly agree. This is a terrible place and nobody should ever move here. Also, if you have friends living here, ask them to come home.

(Let's see if that helps with the average rents.)

Are you sure that the average rent for 1 bedroom is $2,700? I lived on Market street in a studio apartment with a pool and a gym in our building and I paid only $1500, that was couple years ago tho, but I dont think that the average rent is $2,700...sorry

I think you need to look around again. Prices have increased dramatically over the last two years. I have friends who landed a cheap place in SOMA for $3600. They were the ones who used the word "cheap". If you glance at craigslist, the majority of the listings are above $3k. All the cheap apartments are outside of SF-proper.

From the company who did the estimates:

> "is based on averaging all of the data points from each neighborhood, not the average prices of the neighborhoods."

Here's the application they're using --> https://www.zumper.com/sf

1.) http://sfist.com/2013/03/07/map_average_rent_for_1br_in_san_...

key phrase: "couple years ago"

welcome to rent increase 30% in last two years... SF is a disaster and incomes aren't rising to keep up with this. these "high" tech worker salaries assume an outdated rental market.

People would kill to pay $1500 a month in the tiniest studio apartment possible anywhere in the city.

You can rent single bedroom for $1000 around multiple Bart stations and save 2000 more/month with 30 minutes commute by public transport in SF.

Your math is reasonably fair, IMO. That being said, the type of work being done in DC and SF is vastly different. I attended an iOS conference in DC a few months ago (I'm based out of NYC) and was shocked at how few "tech company" people were present. Nearly everyone was working for a government agency, a government contractor, or freelancing with a primarily government client-base.

Personally I don't think I can do it. Nearly everyone I talked to came from gigantic, monstrous organizations (either private or public) with huge, massive layers of management. I might just die in that environment.

At the end of the day, the spiraling cost of living in SF is a serious problem, and one that threatens the well-being of our industry if we can't curb it. Unfortunately, in the city being pro-development is almost as bad as pushing your grandma down the stairs.

This is really the only reasonable dig I've heard against D.C.

I guess I was lucky enough to land a public sector job at a software shop that runs much like the hip ones out west. They are here, just not well represented.

Have you worked in the bay area?

Physically no.

I've telecommuted for a few contracts and the structure of those companies appear to be similar to what I've been exposed to here on the east coast.

I would imagine both have their fair share of differences and being there physically is, I'm sure, much different. However I find it hard to believe that the difference is so significant that it warrants surrendering financial gain.

Whoa-whoa-whoa hold up. The spiraling cost of rent 'threatens the well-being of our industry?' I say this as an engineer who's worked in the local industry during both booms and as a native-born "local." Sure, perhaps but only just like it does for every other industry besides fancy restaurants and cafes. Rent is too damn high and no one wants to pay it, and we seem to be the only ones who can. But lets get some perspective here. I'm willing to posit that the relative high rent prices has give our industry to greatest boost of all in town [quick edit: for clarification if everyone is pushed out and only tech workers can move in, does that not just create room for more founders? Not at all arguing that wasted money is good].

This city is still the Gold Rush, always has been. People move here with the dream to make a ton of money and have a good time, most likely moving away after <10 years when they get serious about family. This city is fueled by alcohol and general hedonism, which is fun! San Francisco is an awesome place to live, and people want to live in it. Tech workers move in to town and push everyone out, blah, blah, blah -- but its true, for better or for worse. Top talent not only wants to work in the Bay Area, but are also so often willing to throw away everything to live in San Francisco. The Valley down south has been there for half a century, attracting the best and brightest in the world.

Its only now, with this Second Boom's influx of new businesses into the City Proper and the realization company-provided motorcoaches to bust the commute, that the tech workers are really pouring into SF. We're the only ones who can afford to live, so we stay here, working more and founding more businesses. If the price continues to go up (mark my words, no more than 30% above now), rather than be threatened, the industry will slowly spread out to the periphery. What is startup-rich Soma was urban blight during the 90's, the periphery.

I'd be the first to argue that urban development is good, especially when done effectively (not the conversion of existing rental space into high-HOA condos), and quickly (unlike commercial real estate development in Soma and South Beach). Just realize that we are the kings of this age of this city, and we are the last ones who would be at threat, especially when you can just move East or South and ride the comfy bus in to work.

tl;dr Nothing threatens tech but the drying up of capital to be invested in new business. Rent and/or supply is far, far down on the list of even those potential threats to the SF tech industry.

I disagree. The rising cost of living will have nothing but detrimental impact on startups. When $1m used to buy a year of runway, now it's $2m, and you're not really getting any more for your money, you're just making sure your engineers have a decent roof over their heads.

Your theory is sound except for one little problem: the Bay Area's transportation system is fucked. FUCKED. Completely, utterly, irredeemably fucked. BART is a joke, MUNI is like a fevered bad dream, Caltrain woefully inadequate.

So yeah, SOMA used to be urban blight, now it's urban blight with a bit of startups mixed in (seriously, go hang out at 6th/Mission for a bit). Rent (both residential and commercial) in SF is exploding, but there no more periphery, because nobody can reasonably get to said periphery.

Oakland has been trying to steal some of SF's thunder for years, offering themselves as the more affordable alternative. This will never happen at scale, because of how utterly screwed transportation is.

SF is out of space, and there's very little room for it to expand into, because nobody is willing to redevelop land, the the complete fuckery of a transportation network you have prevents effective expansion into anywhere that will let you develop.

At some point the cost of living and operating needs to square with reality. At some point a startup board member is going to say "Holy fuck, you pay HOW MUCH for your office?"

Your theory is sound except for one little problem: the Bay Area's transportation system is fucked. FUCKED. Completely, utterly, irredeemably fucked. BART is a joke, MUNI is like a fevered bad dream, Caltrain woefully inadequate.

A little hyperbolic, I think.

Bay Area mass transit is far from fucked. There's a lot of infrastructure there that, with minor upgrades, could massively improve the situation. Take BART, for example. Not enough trains. Upgrade the system to support more trains and then BUY MORE TRAINS. Suddenly living in Daly City and commuting to SF is feasible.

"Upgrade the system to support more trains" is easier said than done.

For one thing, BART is running ancient rolling stock that's already well pasts its original designed service lifetime - the bulk of the fleet is now sixteen years over its original 25-year service life. The system breaks down frequently because of this, and over the years the system has lost enough cars (and cannibalized enough for parts) that there is no longer sufficient spare capacity to rotate into service when trains break down.

Couple that with track and control design that does not permit bypasses, and you've got yourself a recipe for trouble. A train stuck in the tube cannot be bypassed - unlike other subway systems - and thus every single minor trouble cascades into a major cockup of everyone's day.

So you have a system that is prone to magnifying small failures into big ones, and you combine that with trains that are way past their service life and running on proverbial fumes.

Bonus also: BART hasn't purchased any new rolling stock in a very, very long time, and all of its rolling stock will come up to the end of their service lifetimes by 2019 (with 65% of the fleet already past service life). Instead of spreading the capital cost of new vehicles over decades, BART is now placed in a position where it needs to replace its 670+ car fleet in the span of about six years. In all likelihood this will mean even more of the fleet going into "beyond service life" territory and wreaking havoc on everyone's commute.

BART can be improved. But before BART can be improved you first need to catch up on 20 years of complete neglect. It's billions of dollars that has no hope of ever getting spent in the current political and economic climate, and that's just to get BART to the point where it's reasonably good at accomplishing its current stated purpose. At that point you can think about expanding the system, increasing capacity beyond its current scope, etc etc.

Actually, I just looked this up, the current plan is to phase in new vehicles beginning 2017, over a 15-20 year period. That's going to be quite a treat, considering even the newest trains in the current fleet will be 44 years old by the time BART is done with their rolling stock refresh - 18 years past its expected service life.

Bonus also: large parts of BART track are actually substantially damaged, reducing speed and increasing noise (to unsafe levels, even). You can't hope to begin adding capacity until you fix this. Between the fleet, the antiquated control systems, and damaged track, BART doesn't need minor fixes, it needs deep overhauls of nearly every aspect of its infrastructure.

MUNI isn't much better off: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/report-on-munis-light...

Ancient equipment, ancient infrastructure, a fleet stretched thin to the breaking point, decades of under-funding and mismanagement, all of these descriptors apply just as much to MUNI (if not more) than to BART.

The regional and city transportation infrastructure in the SF Bay Area is a complete mess. This is, unfortunately, not hyperbole. We are over a decade, and billions of dollars of additional spending, away from even restoring these transit systems to proper function, much less go after expanding their scope.

BART service is running close to capacity during peak hours on the central part through San Francisco to Daly City. You can't put a lot more trains through without building a second tunnel.

Why does high cost of rent threaten the tech industry? Can't it just shift focus to Boston/Tel Aviv/Berlin/Toronto/etc?

A loss of investor confidence does not necessarily mean the investment will shift to another tech hub. We saw during the first dot-bomb that loss of confidence simply led to money going into not-tech.

Tech investment is, unfortunately, not a zero-sum game. Every dollar that doesn't go into a Silicon Valley tech company is not guaranteed to go into a tech company elsewhere.

So yeah, the failure of SF/SV will probably mean an increase in tech investment in other cities, but ultimately I don't think there's a chance in hell we'll break even. It will be a huge net loss for the tech industry as a whole.

Not to mention there isn't really a strong SF/Bay Area alternative when it comes to tech. I know Boston/Tel Aviv/Berlin/Toronto (add Montreal, Waterloo, NYC, Austin, and Seattle to the list for more completeness) like to hang up banners proclaiming themselves to be just like Silicon Valley, but let's be honest, the scale difference is enormous. None of the above listed cities are even close to being able to assume Silicon Valley's mantle.

Even as someone who no longer lives in the area, who has no interest in returning to the area, the loss of the SF/Bay Area's status as the de facto tech capital of the world will have enormous negative repercussions.

> A loss of investor confidence

What? We were talking about high rental costs in SF (probably implying high employee salaries). why does that affect investor confidence?

The argument I've heard is that it's the "soul" of the industry that's being threatened, rather than the industry itself, and the fear is that SF will basically end up being "software hollywood".

Its not already?

I would think that SF is still a fairly good place if you want start tech companies and SV is fairly good if you want to work for one with substance. In comparison LA doesn't seem to be the natural choice if you want to make movies nor if you want to be in one with substance. But this is mostly speculation.

Interesting. I see you analogy. I read that assuming you meant the next Hollywood in the sense that its the nexus of where people move to make it big and be cool in their industry, regardless of futility. Funny how it can be read both ways.

LA still is where you want to be to make movies or TV shows.

You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

You think you're winning but you're treading water at best. On the MacLeod pyramid, you're hard-core Clueless. Put the Kool-Aid down!

I'm willing to posit that the relative high rent prices has give our industry to greatest boost of all in town.

What? That's money being wasted, not progress.

Silicon Valley was built when the land was cheap. It's now expensive and still somewhat strong, but that's an artifact of former greatness. Even if people move quickly, the patterns that attract and repel talent are slower to move (decades) and the chickens haven't come home to roost yet. Trust me: the land price problem is very bad for San Francisco's future.

This city is still the Gold Rush, always has been.

You don't have to have landlords making you poor to want to be rich.

This city is fueled by alcohol and general hedonism, which is fun!

Dude, San Francisco hedonism's got nothing on New York or L.A. or Miami, and none of those cities are regarded as tech hubs.

Just realize that we are the kings of this age of this city, and we are the last ones who would be at threat

You realize that 25-year-old VCs with no discernible merit (but the family connections that got them there) are making more than you will at age 50, and that those VP/NTWTFKs (Non-Technical Who The Fuck Knows) are getting 0.75% equity slices to your 0.03%, right?

You can't buy a house because of the real kings of that place and age: the VCs and those horrible executive implants that the VCs bring into your company (i.e. the VCs' underachieving friends who get positions in what you worked your ass off to build).

Overall, SF makes me feel like the standard of living for developers is really going down, not up. For all that the startup culture has produced, it has also encouraged lots of people to basically save no money and significantly reduce their living standards all for the sake of "doing a startup." I'm always shocked to hear so many stories of people living in near poverty to work on a startup idea which is, in total honesty, far from amazing.

I don't mean to come off the wrong way or as judgmental. But when I think of a software developer in SF, I don't think of someone with a nice house with a backyard. I think of someone in a cramped apartment, probably with roommates.

I'm totally generalizing here but I often find that young entrepreneurs, especially those living in or wanting to move into the valley, lack the financial aptitude that it takes to run a profitable business. You also have the engineers moving there that harbor much of the same mentality.

This has always puzzled me. It's certainly not the salary as many cities around the country pay more in terms of the relative cost of living. My only thought is that it must be the companies that are headquartered there; which in turn takes a severe lack of financial foresight from said engineer. It's almost like these people don't know how to balance a check book, or rather, they don't care to.

The roommate thing is really annoying. I'm a grown man with a full time job paying $100k+ and I gave to have roommates? That was not in the plan...

Good luck affording a house :)

You know, a working spouse can count as a roommate. And think, you can do your grown-man-thang.

Hogwash. You don't need to spend that on an apartment.

I live in a smaller place that isn't very exciting, but I make a SF style salary and pay $1,300/mo for a 4 bedroom house in a residential neighborhood. My office isn't a table with 4 rock stars and a dog, but the company will be there in 10 years too.

A good friend moved out to SF and loves it. He's mid twenties with no family, and living in sublets for 3 months at a time is fun for him. I probably would have dug that 20 years ago, but doing that now, with the prospect of moving to some lame suburb and commuting 2 hours when I start a family isn't so appealing to me.

In other words, most people do what works for them, today.

Why do you have to live in SF? You can live in SJ/MV and save more than half on rent. You can use BART/Caltrain for commuting. Life is great in Bay Area doesn't matter if you are staying in SF or in other cities in the Bay. I seriously don't the understand whats so special in living in SF. I do commute to SF on weekends whenever I want and on weekdays for work.

Dc is primarily made up of takers, Sf is filled with doers. Don't mistake the fed govt parasite contractors for true hackers, it just ain't so.

I'd gladly give up that $11K three times over to live in San Francisco instead of DC. And, looks like other people would too, hence the ridiculous rents here.

What a sweet and good-natured write-up. It's not cynical, and you can feel a positive outlook on life and people throughout. It's an outlook that's probably very helpful in being productive and happy generally.

> The coffee is very different than the Italian one

I've heard this many times :)

His point about SF lacking children is very very accurate. SF basically forces people with families out because its so expensive and the school situation is bad (your kids don't get to go to the neighborhood school). One of these days SF will wise up and at least fix the school problem, but until then the peninsula will get families and SF will get DINKs.

"Dual Income, No Kids" (I had to look it up)

Not a great place for raising a family: expensive, bad schools, disfunctional government, drugs on streets, and lots of crazies[1]. Pretty much everyone I have ever know who had kids in SF moved away within a few years.

The demographics always reminded me of China where you did not see as many girls because of the one child policy. In SF children of both sexes (10% of population) are just missing:

   Persons under 18 (2010 Census)
   US 23.7% [2]
   SF 13.5% [3]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pse50YZsyck [NSFW: male nudity & mild violence]

[2] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

[3] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html

The census citation is pretty incredible indeed... About schools, that's something you could never tell just looking at the city that seems very civilized, and this usually correlates with quality of schools. I hope there will be efforts to fix that in the future.

I hope they fix the school situation, but its unlikely. There's a reason why SF is listed as one of the least well run cities in the world.

I'm very late to this discussion, but SFUSD schools really aren't terrible, they're just very uneven. SF has an unusually high number of extremely highly rated schools, a large number of middling ones, and a notable number of failing schools.

To see more about this, there's a site called greatschools.net. You can list the schools by API score (adjusted by expectations based on demographics as well). What you'll see is that SF has an unusual number of schools scoring 8, 9, and 10 out of 10. Below that, there are plenty of decent performing schools. And then, there are some 1's and 2's. Pretty grim.

If you list schools in the suburbs, you'll find a similar situation. The big difference is that in the suburbs, you can convert a very high mortgage payment or rent into priority access for a top school. If you can't afford that, you're stuck in middling or poor schools.

SF uses a lottery, where parents list their choices and then get an assignment. If you only list highly in demand schools, you do risk getting a default assignment to a very low performing school across town (you can still get on wait lists). These people often do leave.

Prop H would have recommended giving priority access to district residents. It failed by a whisker. Probably the most interesting thing it revealed is that voters in good school districts favor priority access for district residents, whereas residents in poor school districts don't. Yeah, huge surprise there.

I feel some ambivalence about this, because I do see advantages to neighborhood schools. However, there was an article in reason magazine making a very surprising libertarian case for SF's school lottery...

http://reason.com/archives/2006/04/01/the-agony-of-american-...

Article is a little old, but I'd say schools have improved since it was written.

Sounds like London, UK where I currently reside with three children...

Expensive: check. Bad schools: check. Disfunctional government: check. Drugs on streets: check. Lots of crazies: check.

The thing I hate is that people wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire.

Going to move out to the countryside I think...

As for the nutter on BART, I got urinated on whilst on the tube in London .... twice. And no I was not on fire :)

SF is way worse (I used to live in Finsbury Park, now live in the Mission).

Seriously? I lived in a crap hotel in Finsbury Park for a few weeks and it was a dive.

I was down nearer the Highbury end of things, but in terms of drugs/violence/random menacing on the streets SF is way sketchier.

Yeah, I'd agree with that. I've lived in both. This is not to say that parts of London aren't dodgy, but SF is I think both subjectively and quantifiably worse.

For example, London has around 500 people sleeping rough each night. San Francisco has almost ten times as many, between 3-5,000 (mainly because a winter's night in SF is rather more survivable than a London one).

More subjectively, I think public transport in London far surpasses SF, both in terms of safety and quality (...Friday nights excepted, but I think that's par the course of any large city).

[1]: London figures from here (http://www.thamesreach.org.uk/news-and-views/homelessness-fa...), SF figures from here (http://www.sfgate.com/homeless/)

An old guy collapsed on the street in front of me in London. I thought he was a drunk tramp, but my sister (who lives there) immediately stopped to check on him as did several other passers by. Turned out he was having a heart attack. Someone with medical training came forward and pumped his chest cavity or whatever they do while we ordered and flagged down the ambulance.

Guy was conscious but confused when the medics arrived.

Nobody urinated on him or stole his wallet. Anecdotal evidence that suggests were you really on fire people would do more than get out the marshmallows.

And conversely I saw someone get stabbed in the stomach at Waterloo. I was the only person out of at least 200 witnesses who did a thing and to be honest I have no idea what to do so could only apply pressure and call paramedics.

Same with an old woman I saw faceplant on the pavement. I was on a bus that was moving. People just stepped over her.

The worst thing: a guy got pushed in front of a friend's tube train (he was a tube driver). Immediately after he got out of the cab, some platform peon started shouting at him saying "how fucking long is this going to take?". The guy was pretty much screaming his head off on the track under the train dying painfully and slowly.

Good for that heart attack guy, but he must have been lucky. It isn't the norm - and the police I've spoken to over the years confirmed it.

In regards to the "crazies" aspect: I've spent a few months in SF (near Haight St), and 5 years in London.

The thing that shocked me most about SF was the shear number of mentally ill homeless people on the street. London has homeless people, but they're generally coherent enough to carry on a conversation. In SF it seemed that almost 100% of the homeless were "bat shit crazy" - I pondered at the time if the NHS's mental health care was the difference, and thanked good fortune to have lived my life within countries with social care.

I agree, SF is a fun place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

I also don't like how some San Franciscans like to put down other areas. You can have pride in your city without insulting other people and places. As someone who grew up in a poorer area, it left a very bad taste in my mouth. Most SF people are nice, but it's those other few people who ruin it for me.

Often the people putting down other areas aren't actually from San Francisco. There's a huge mentality in the coastal "progressive" communities that derides other ways of life, and its mostly fostered by non-natives.

It is indeed sad and shallow.

I think Rent Control tends to hold people hostage from having new families (as turnover in larger houses is much smaller as a result, and there's no real benefit to waiting to have a family), and that's a part of it. While I'll agree that most families don't need a huge house to live, you at least need a 2 or 3BR house (especially as the become teenagers) to raise 2 children. At current market rates, you'd need $3k at least (in a decent cheaper neighborhood like the Sunset, Richmond districts) in order to raise kids right now. I don't think that's feasible with less than 140k gross family income.

Rent control is the ONLY reason we were able to stay in the city and have a child recently. It gives renters the housing security they need to put roots down and start families.

I believe that too, but I meant that also in terms that rent control punishes you for deferring decisions on moving. I have a very large 1BR apartment that can be 2BR if needed. I'm very reluctant to leave. If I had 2 children, it would be too small. A move up to an extra bedroom in my neighborhood would easily be $2k more for an extra room. 3 years ago it might have been a different story. If I was in a studio now, I'm not sure I could afford a move to a place like mine seeing how most studios are more expensive than my place now.

We have exactly the same kind of apartment. I'm not sure if eliminating rent control would make things more affordable. I am pretty sure that we would have constant insecurity every year, wondering if our rent is going to jump and we're going to have to move. The buffer from short term market fluctuations is a big factor is helping us stay and build a life in our neighborhood.

But yeah, if we have a second kid it's gonna be tight. THAT IS WHY IM ON HACKER NEWZ 2 MAKE MILLION$$$.

While you have personally are benefitted from SF's rent control laws be aware it has had many perverse effects:

- Higher rents for everyone else, less affordability overall

- Reduced new constructions (even higher rents, fewer working class jobs)

- Increased vacancy (9.7% vacant [1])

- Reduced maintenance

- Lock-in (you move you lose)

- Endless litigation and political disputes

- Side effects (condos, TICs, Ellis Act, affordable housing)

[1] http://factfinder2.census.gov/bkmk/table/1.0/en/ACS/11_5YR/D...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_the_United_Sta...

[3] http://www.sfweekly.com/2000-08-09/news/the-case-for-ending-...

[4] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/17/us/san-francisco-rent-cont...

Your citations don't actually establish your claims. In fact, the wikipedia article outlines many arguments in favor.

That's comparing it to the US average. To compare it to other cities, Manhattan is 17.1% and that's considered a "baby boom" (source: NYT article from a few years ago).

Anecdotally I see a lot more young families popping up in my neighborhood (Nopa / lower haight) over the past few years. Though i'm not sure if everyone can stay if the market stays this way when they need more space.

Regarding [1], I'd be more worried that there's only one guy helping out.

This (no children) is what I hated about the city when I stayed there over the summer. And the smell.

Unfortunately we have a variety of smells, from the unabated bodily waste (homeless, drunks) to the poorly functioning sewer system.

However, we know why the sewer system isn't functioning well - low flow toilets. Yes, the lack of water to move effluent down the system causes it to get stuck and then start drying and it creates a pretty horrible smell.

The homeless situation is out of hand due to the unfortunate confluence of well meaning people and a lack of framework to deal with the chronically homeless.

One of the things that I really noticed when I moved from San Francisco to Italy was that here (Padua, Italy), there are young people, old people, rich people, and people not so well off. San Francisco is this kind of weird bubble where everyone has to have money to be there, so "regular people" don't exist. No kids, no old people, no people with sort of average jobs. I didn't like it, it felt too strange to me. I prefer to have a mix of people from all walks of life.

Also, some people - a minority, but "anecdotally significant" - seem to be a bit smug: like living in San Francisco makes them better somehow.

That said... I don't regret the time I spent there, and it's a city I heartily recommend to Europeans visiting the US, as it'll be a lot more familiar to them than something like Los Angeles, and it has a ton of stuff to do and see. And California in general has probably the most variety of any one US state in terms of geography, so if you get bored of the city, you can go the mountains, or the "lost coast" up north, or Death Valley, or pretty much whatever suits your fancy.

I hadn't thought about the "people from all walks of life" aspect missing from SF before. I find that true as well. I haven't been to many other big cities but I'm curious how SF relates on that aspect to cities such as Seattle, New York, and LA. I wonder if SF actually does have quite a lot of diversity if you expand your definition of SF from anything within 10 minutes of Civic Center to everything from Outer Sunset to South San Francisco.

I think part of the problem is just geography. A city like Boston or Seattle has a lot of room for suburbs, so if you have less money, you can go further out. In SF, you can only go South, otherwise you have to cross the bay. San Francisco, as someone else writes here, has a housing supply problem.

Take a walk around SF's Chinatown if you want one example of people who are a mix of: young / old / rich / not so well off.

The outer Sunset and Richmond have lots of families and older folks.

There are actually a lot of kids, and people with average jobs in SF. They just aren't white so tech people don't notice them.

Regarding old people, retired people are actually the fastest growing demographic in the city.

Retired people are the fastest growing demographic in every city. We're living longer.

Yeah, but the article I read suggested that rich Californians from other parts of the state were choosing SF as a place to retire. (Whereas people actually from SF were leaving due to costs) I'll try to dig up the article if I can.

Look at the census data for SF. There are far fewer children there than average in the US. I think the average is around 24% for under 18. In SF it is around 12%. Brooklyn, by comparison, is average.

There really aren't. I live in one of the few "family" neighborhoods in this city and there are maybe 2-3 families with kids within blocks of here. Plenty of non-white people around here too. If you go out to the "burbs", everyone has kids...

I guess I lived next to an elementary school so it seemed like there were a lot of kids. I know statistically it's low but I chalked this up to the large numbers of transient workers and singles. Amongst groups who seemed more rooted in the city (like, say Chinese people in the Richmond) it seemed like the number of kids was about the same as anywhere.

There are actually a lot of kids, and people with average jobs in SF. They just aren't white so tech people don't notice them.

This, 1000x this.

> This, 1000x this.

Repeating a grammatical error 1000 times does not make it "more better".

If you look at actual statistics, they do seem to back up my impression: income in SF is not your typical bell curvish distribution you'd see in many other places. There are a lot of people making a lot of money, more at still quite a bit of money, and a small peak for those making very little money, and fewer in between:

http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-Califor...

Look at:

Distribution of median family income in 2009 (number of people)

Distribution of median household income in 2009 (number of people)

Repeating a grammatical error 1000 times does not make it "more better".

Douché.

If you look at actual statistics, they do seem to back up my impression ....

You're either confused about my comment or making a completely non sequitur argument for the heck of it. The claim I agreed with was that there are actually a lot of (largely minority) kids and people with average jobs in SF.

That is true and can be shown so by inspection, at that.

There are plenty of kids and families who live in my neighborhood (I'm on the cusp of Union Square and the Tenderloin). If you take a ride on the T towards Bayview in the middle of the afternoon, you'll also see plenty of kids.

Are the public schools in San Francisco just empty, waiting for families to move in and send their kids there? Of course not. As for people with "average jobs," who do you think is serving you that latté, helping you at Macy's, or cleaning your office? They don't just ship all of those people in from Oakland.

That San Francisco has no children or working class is a preposterous idea, mostly advanced by those who fail to step outside of the high-rent parts of the city.

San Francisco is this kind of weird bubble where everyone has to have money to be there, so "regular people" don't exist

I've dropped this link many times before, but it's still relevant here: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... . There's not really a "weird bubble" so much as basic economics at work: SF is a desirable place to live in many respects, but it's virtually impossible to build new housing there for reasons discussed at the link. In the face of exploding demand and constant supply, prices rise.

Regular people move to the sunbelt, where development is easy and real estate prices more reasonable, and the people who have the money and/or need to be in SF stay/move there.

I think that this argument about kids in San Francisco is totally wrong. There are tons of kids in San Francisco...just not in the neighborhood that he went! Go to the Richmond, the Sunset, the Marina, Cole Valley, or especially Noe Valley...and you will see tons of kids. But sure, in SOMA or Union Square/Financial District...not so much.

Why is that ? Because San Francisco is a very neighborhood-focused city - where kids stay in kid friendly neighborhoods, and where younger hipsters or developers live in more fun neighborhoods with typically less babies.

Your impressions are incorrect. From a comment above:

   Persons under 18 (2010 Census)
   US 23.7% [2]
   SF 13.5% [3]

[2] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

[3] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06075.html

These two posts are not incompatible. That 13.5% of kids needs to live somewhere. I'd bet that a heatmap would show "kid locuses" in some neighborhoods and "kid voids" in others.

They are not incompatible only if by "tons" you mean "half as many". I would expect some areas of San Francisco to have more kids than others but overall the number is very low.

SF is a small region in a larger urban area. My guess is that you could easily single out dense, urban sub-regions in LA or Chicago that are as childless as SF. SF used to have more kids, but I'd guess that this used to be true of the dense, urban sections of other cities. The difference is, a kid who moves from urban chicago to suburban chicago is still counted in Chicago's stats.

Meanwhile, some districts in SF might have quite a high percentage of children compared to the average for areas of equal density. Not sure of this, but it would be interesting to see.

Well... Many families are also in the suburbs (South Bay or East Bay) as the weather tends to be better and you can have houses with gardens for the kids to play around (also the school system is less messed up there). Which does not mean that there are not kids-full neighborhoods in the city.

There is a lot of truth in this. SOMA and the Financial District are very much places to work, not places to live. I remember being in SOMA a week or two ago on Saturday at 5pm and everything was closed. I was there for an event at the museum of modern art (MOMA). Even Starbucks had shut down! It's a ghost town on the weekends. In fact, some San Franciscans don't think that SOMA is a real neighborhood, for exactly these reasons. The Embarcadero area is also kind of touristy, because the docks are there. If you want to see the real SF, you're better off going to someplace like Haight-Ashbury or the Mission.

The weird thing is that the west part of the city is effectively a suburb of the east part (but "suburb" is a dirty word in SF). Yes, I am oversimplifying here-- so sue me. I guess one nice thing is that the commuters can walk to work rather than driving.

The comment on schools is incorrect. The school system changed a year back and now you have a very high chance of making it to your neighborhood school. This is both from reading the system description and first hand accounts from friends with kids going to Kindergarden.

Noe Valley is pretty nice and it's hard to say if it's more expensive than say Mountain View in the south.

The comment about lack of children in San Francisco reminded me of this piece: http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2007/09/rhythm-of-memory.html

I moved to the Bay Area, with my family, 8 months ago. We tried to make SF work (and did live in temporary housing in SOMA for three months), but SF is not a place for young children (unless you are beyond financial constraints). I commute to SOMA every day from Rockridge. Rockridge is nice, except for Oakland's inability to provide an adequately sized police force!

All the tech things antirez outlined are true, but the reality is, it took some commitment and blind faith to move out with a family and no friends or contacts. Its like moving to another country :). There is more of everything in SF (bay area really), success and destitution, beauty and ugliness, brilliant people and charlatans, opportunity and desperation. I'm loving it, but it's a balancing act.

Can you elaborate on lack of police? Have you been affected by the crime in Rockridge? I thought it was a pretty decent area the last time I visited.

No he's just being a typical transplant and talking out of his ass.

Don't down vote the parents comment. He/she's right!

Crime has gotten noticeably worse since I moved to Lake Merritt in 2005. Everyone I know who lives on Oakland agrees. For example, Oakland is currently the robbery capital of the nation (http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/Oakland-is-Americas-Rob...). OPD employs 20% fewer officers than it did ten years ago, and probably half as many as it should for a city with its size and crime figures. Pull your head out of your own ass and look at some actual data before you post things like this.

Oakland has about 600 police officers for a population which requires around 1,100. There have been five robberies on my street in upper rockridge, where we rent. It's an incredibly beautiful neighborhood and we pay a pretty high rent to live there. In 2010, the police announced that for a long list of crimes (including burgularies) they will not come out. We have caught people casing our neighborhood, strangers sitting in cars for hours, "solicitors" checking for who is home, etc. One woman was abducted from her home, but managed to flee before being permanently maimed (I don't know which year this was, but it was mentioned at a neighborhood watch meeting. Combine a typical neighborhood of strangers with desperate criminal elements, as well as an understaffed police and you can have a bad situation. Hoping the governor will help out (it's his hometown) because Oakland could be an incredible town.

Oh typical petty crime. BRING ON THE POLICE! "Oakland could be an incredible town". It already is. If you don't appreciate it, then go elsewhere? Berkeley may be more of your taste (lots of granola for ya).

in rockridge, they are pretty much in berkeley already. oakland "could be" an incredible town? coming from someone who moved here 8 months ago? this guy is trolling on the out-of-towner's ruining the bay meme, and we're falling for it

Rockridge is far, far more crunchy than any part of Berkeley these days...

The abduction happened in Rockridge?

Probably this one but there have been a few in the past few years:

http://rockridge.patch.com/groups/schools/p/two-attempted-ab...

Sit on your porch with a shotgun more.

I've lived in Rockridge for about 10 years and can attest to everything you've seen: half a police force, restaurant "take over" robberies, broad daylight muggings at Rockridge BART station, many "solicitors" casing houses.

I've been bullish on Oakland for a long time. It could be a great city. It has an international airport, a major shipping port, easy BART access to SF, cheaper real estate than SF, near UC Berkeley and a number of smaller colleges. But Oakland's crime waves, understaffed police force, history of police abuse, and years of do-nothing city government is taking its toll.

You may be interested in joining the "Rockridge Neighborhood Watch Network" Yahoo group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RockridgeNeighborhoodWatchNetw...

rockridge is 100x safer and nicer than many of the places where people flock to in SF, as is grand lake, as is jack london square, as is piedmont, as is temescal... oakland has some of the nicest neighborhoods and most coveted real estate in the entire bay. drive around the hills sometime. the "oakland is dangerous" meme is laughable. you are in trouble in parts of west oakland and far east in fruitvale. just like in bayview/hunter's point in SF. welcome to oakland! now I can't compare it to suburbs in the midwest, but if you take it as a city, oakland is already an incredible place and one of the last places you can get good housing on a normal person's salary in the bay.

For someone who is considering moving to Oakland in less than 2 months, can you comment on the safety of the other Oakland BART station areas (12th & 19th)? I honestly can't get a good read on Oakland anymore. So many people (yourself included) say that there are plenty of safe places to live in Oakland but crime maps suggest otherwise, especially within walking distance to BART stations.

I live in Berkeley now and I'm considering finding another place somewhere in Berkeley but it should would be nicer to be a little closer to SF, where I work...

Its boosters will suggest otherwise, but Oakland is pretty sketchy. Everyone I know there has been jacked at one point. It's just a matter of time. That said, the only place I've personally been held up at gunpoint in the Bay Area was in Berkeley. (San Pablo and Dwight area)

Sorry you had to go through that. I live downtown now on University (and I'm probably gonna try and stay downtown) and I pretty much never go west of Sacramento, that area is pretty sketch.

It's so bad, you could easily join the OPD or SFPD (as a presumably fit young male) and be making more than an avg. engineer in a year or two (overtime incl.)

Apparently Oakland is running a handful of police academy's this year in an effort to increase the size of the force. Salary's start in the $80's I think before overtime. Might be a pretty lucrative position.

And you get to shoot people at will! (ok, not really, but my cop friend says a lot of their "what not to do" case studies come out of oakland.)

Hopefully more officers on the street will help the incidence of crime, but I'm not convinced. Time will tell.

> Rockridge is nice, except for Oakland's inability to provide an adequately sized police force!

You live in North Oakland. Duh. You think they're really focusing efforts on this area? Move to Piedmont if you want a dedicated police force.

Piedmont is definitely very nice. We have made some great friends there. Unfortunately, nothing was available when we moved. Pro tip: don't relocate around thanksgiving/Christmas ;).

Piedmont, however, is really nice. If I had a particular need for decent schools or a police force, I'd probably live there. There is a decent shopping area near Piedmont in Oakland (confusingly, on Piedmont Ave), similar to Rockridge. The problem with Piedmont is lack of BART vs Rockridge or Oakland Uptown. Around 19th st BART is ok if you have no kids; it is only particularly dangerous on the other side of Telegraph.

On one hand, you have people earning six figures fighting for the dwindling, ever inflated supply of conventional housing options, and on the other, you have people like Nadia Eghbal who display the utmost resourcefulness and manage to live in SF for $20k a year (http://helloimnadia.com/post/52242701025/how-to-live-in-san-...). Really goes back to what pg says about being relentlessly resourceful.

In the end, if you really want to get settled in SF, all it takes is some persistence and a healthy network. (I moved here when I knew next to no one and managed to find home at a coliving space called Startuphouse for most of last year; not only was my stay free but it gave me a fantastic network on which to jumpstart life here.)

Haha, I stayed at StartupHouse for awhile before they got shut down by city officials.

Haha, yeah, I stayed at the StartupHouse a bit too. It was great being right in the middle of the city and being able to walk a block for groceries or tech meetups. Got a lot of coding done too! Too bad someone filed a complaint and got it shut down.

I've never found the cost for living terribly high. All I need is a private room in a shared dwelling. The most I've ever paid for that is $2000/month in the center of SF. Dropped down to $1000/month in the southern hills, which was still an easy BART/bus ride into downtown. East Palo Alto was $600 a month, but you had to take a bus to the Caltrain to get anywhere. Currently staying in Walnut Creek on the BART for $1000/month. I only ever rent month to month, so could get way cheaper buying longer too.

> I've never found the cost for living terribly high. All I need is a private room in a shared dwelling.

That's fair enough, and describes me when I moved to SF straight out of college. It's probably also fine (even necessary) if you're a student or bootstrapping your own startup. But I've only been here two years, and it didn't take long for me to get sick of having a home situation that's in many ways worse than when I lived in my college's dormitory and significantly worse than my last two years of college living in a one bedroom apartment. With no lack of great and lucrative career opportunities in the area, I wish I didn't have to either live like a starving college kid in a house packed full of starving college kids or spend 20 hours a week searching for an affordable studio apartment in a tolerable location. Although I've actually been hearing good things about Oakland...

Like the commenter above, I stayed at StartupHouse for awhile, actually until they got shut down. It was pretty awesome to have my own bed, good WiFi, and be in the middle of SOMA for ~$1,000/month. I also interned at a startup in SF and lived pretty happily during that time. I was being paid $40k/year, but it was a 6-month internship so really only $20K. But I lived pretty well. I had a bed to sleep on in the city, I went out with friends on the weekends, and had a great time. I guess it all depends on your priorities and the standard of living you're looking for.

You don't have to live like a college student. Move to the south bay and you can get a 2BR place for half of what you're paying now. We have dishwashers, washing machines, garages, and storage rooms here too, oh my!

I stayed at StartupHouse until they got shut down and I have felt the same way. While I interned at a startup I was making $40k/year (it was a 6-month internship, so really only $20K), and I was able to live perfectly happy. I wasn't able to go out and spend money lavishly all the time, but I ate well, went out with friends on weekends, and overall had a good time.

The person in your link had a room in SF for $575 per month. She also does not have student loans, and the spreadsheet has no list item for health insurance. It's a nice story but not really an option for many/most people living here.

San Francisco truly is a wonderful city, all things considered. I'm currently traveling throughout Europe and while I'm having a blast seeing how another portion of the world lives, I'm more thankful than ever I can call my home SF. It has temperate weather, is relatively clean, Napa, Stinson Beach, and Pt Reyes to the North, Pacifica, Santa Cruz, Monterey to the South. Tahoe for skiing and summer fun is 4 hours away. And if you are craving more warmth, just have to cross over a bridge or two. There are awesome dog parks complete with doggie ice cream. There are endless amazing restaurants. There are enough singles to keep your dating life occupied for months. And there are fun festivals nearly every weekend. Every neighborhood has something different and unique to offer if you keep an open mind. I've also found that people are incredibly family oriented, not because they have families of their own, but because their families live 20-30 minutes away. You also experience different cultures and homelessness -- something which many people go to great lengths to hide. But IMO it keeps the city grounded and humble. Yes, SF is expensive. It has cost overruns and mismanagement. But I have yet to meet people (in person) who seriously dislike where they live.

When talking about singles you mean men right?

Yeah seriously. The number of single women I meet in SF is for whatever reason vastly disproportionate to living in other cities in the United States, like New York or Los Angeles.

Is it a common experience that, as a single person in SF, you'd make $100K and end the year without any money saved? I'm not asking with any judgment or critique implied. I'm genuinely curious if that's normal in SF.

You can certainly save money if you make that much living in sf. Your take home would be about 65k. A very nice apartment shared with one roommate should not cost more than 2k a month, leaving you with 40k for food, entertainment, and travel. If you can't save some of this that is a comment on your priorities, not the fundamental difficulty of living in sf.

Is your estimate of 65 including state (10%) and city (1.5%) taxes?

Yes. It might actually be a bit conservative, since the overall burden for a single person making $100k with 10% state taxes is around 20% for federal taxes. And the CA overall burden is going to be more like 8.9% (marginal is 9.3% below $1M).

So, let's do the numbers to be sure.

      100 000
    -   7 009  (2013 CA on 100 000 -- not sure if std deduction should be factored in)
    -  17 820  (2012 Federal on 87 000 -- GI - state - std deduction)
    -   7 650  (Soc sec + Medicare)
      =======
       67 521

The city 1.5% tax is paid by employers and has no bearing on the $100K base salary or take home pay.

That may have been true a year ago, but a 2br apartment for 1k a person would currently put you no closer to the city than the outer richmond.

James is saying 2k per person (~24k per year, leaving you with ~40k).

For comparison, my roommate and I in Houston pay $1950/month for our apartment (or $975/person). 1300 sq ft, brand new hardwood floor, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, huge windows, rain showers, full-sized washer/dryer in-unit, concierge service, etc. I also walk to work; it takes me about 5 minutes.

So we're paying almost exactly half what the rent would be in SF, assuming the apartment you had in mind is of the same quality. We individually make a lot more than half the wage we'd get if we went to SF, though.

> We individually make a lot more than half the wage we'd get if we went to SF, though.

But, you live in a place where it is unpleasant to be outside well more than half the year, and the typical dev in your area gets paid a lot less than the typical dev in SF (and, remember that ratios aren't really important when it comes to saving, only net [1]). Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Houston is a fine place for you, but it's important to be complete rather than just stating the pros.

[1] I.e. you make twice what it costs to live in Houston, while I make only 25% more what it costs to live in SF. But if it cost $10000 to live in Houston and $100000 to live in SF, I'm still better off.

Honestly, the weather here is great. I don't mind it at all. Your mileage may vary of course, but I find most people here do not find the weather to be a problem.

> remember that ratios aren't really important when it comes to saving, only net

Agreed, but the ratios have a big impact on what the net is. Right now, I wouldn't really be any better off going to SF in terms of saving potential. From talking with friends, the pay raise I'd get wouldn't be enough to justify it, from a purely financial viewpoint. If I stayed there for long enough, though, my salary would probably rise enough to put things in favor of SF in the end.

But that's assuming I rent my whole life. At some point I'd like to buy a house. Now things are in favor of Houston--hugely so. The average home price in SF has went above $1M recently, but in Houston it's in the 100s.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/29/san-francisco-media...

http://blog.chron.com/primeproperty/2013/05/median-home-pric...

In Houston, a $1M house gets you one of two things, depending on where you buy: (1) if you buy in a suburb, you'll get a mansion; (2) if you buy in the city ("in the loop"), you'll get a very nice house in probably a place like River Oaks (unambiguously the best neighborhood of Houston and possibly Texas).

IMHO, you need an income of well over $300k to afford a $1M house. How many developers in SF make that kind of money? Even in the HN demographic, it's got to be a very, very small number. Yet I could easily afford a median-priced Houston home on my starting salary out of college. I choose to rent just because I enjoy walking to work.

Anyway, strictly speaking the best strategy might be to go to SF for some of your twenties, live a crappy life but save like crazy, and then come somewhere more cost effective and buy a house, maybe also using your higher SF income to negotiate a higher wage here as well.

It is certainly not the case that you need $300k a year to afford a $1M house. $800k for a thirty year term on 3.5% gives you around $3k/mo payments. That could be reasonably carried by someone making $120k after taxes (1/3rd net income rule).

That said, for a lifetime home in this market you might need a little more than $1M, depending on what you're looking for and where you'd want to live.

I don't think we actually disagree about anything. Except the weather (^_^ I couldn't bear it). Houston vs. SF is a tradeoff. We'd need more data to know exactly where it crosses over for each person.

Yeah, I totally get why someone would go to the Bay Area. For me there were some particular reasons to stay in Houston. (1) I didn't want to leave my girlfriend behind; she couldn't have easily followed me if I had left at the time. (2) I really like the company I work for; amazing people, unique problems.

I lucked out in this regard; the biggest problem with Houston for developers is not the weather but finding a cool place to work. :P It's really a city for chemical engineers, not software engineers.

A lot of people here end up at Schlumberger or doing contracting for the oil and gas industry, which is decidedly not sexy. But it can pay well--there's an unfathomable amount of money flowing through the oil companies here. Not my cup of tea though.

There are a few good companies in Houston outside the energy industry. FlightAware is probably at the top of the list.

That said, there are huge software engineering challenges within oil. The work environment isn't what most here are comfortable with (especially Exxon and their accountability system shudder) but Houston's industries offer some extraordinary challenges for the taking. The largest medical center in the world as well as a growing financial industry offer a lot of opportunities in Big Data.

I would've stayed in Houston but I decided San Antonio had a more interesting startup ecosystem (Austin's not my cup of tea). Having TechStars and Geekdom here has really heated things up in past years.

Yes. Taxes are pretty high, so making $100k w/ benefits, you take home roughly $63k/yr. Then factor in rent and utilities: 1br ($2500+/mo), 2br w/ roomie ($1800+/mo), 3br w/roomies ($1500/mo). So let's assume 2br. You walk away with around $40k/yr. Then take out transport, cell phone, random monthly bills like student loans, etc and you're down to $28k disposable. Take out food and random living expenses and you don't have much left.

28k for food and random living expenses is a lot of money unless you are eating out for every meal; that's more that some people's entire paycheck (like grad students.) If you can't make room for savings in there, it definitely shows a lack of priorities.

It's twice the typical grad student pay check. (Ignoring the tuition/healthcare coverage you normally get, anyway.)

Well some people's priorities might involve having an active social life, dressing well, paying for entertainment, etc... all of which will be expensive.

It's not a "lack" of priorities, it's just a different set of them.

The point being that not thinking about the future is in fact a lack of priorities. The party is not going to last forever and not planning for that in the slightest is very short-sighted.

You can have an active social life without completely disregarding the future.

And that's your problem. I was the same way, though I live in NYC. With every pay raise I upgraded my lifestyle. Whether I was making $50k/year or $100k/year, I wasn't saving anything more besides the shit I was contributing to my 401k. My savings actually grew smaller over the years, until I made a conscious effort to save money. An effort so simple, I kick myself for not realizing it sooner.

Several simple ways I found to save money living in NYC (not SF, but close enough). Note these figures are on a per-year basis.

  - Scrap web hosting, move to AWS and S3 (~120 saved)
  - Get rid of cable, stick with cheap Internet (~1000 saved, Internet ~40/mo)
  - One night less at the bar each week (~2500 saved, that's just for a $40 tab)
  - Skip buying coffee every day (~500 saved)
  - Get a cheaper phone package (~120 saved)

In the end, I think a good rule of thumb is to keep your daily expenses under $20. You want to dress well? Wait for Banana Republic to have a 40% off everything sale, and buy clothes then. Buy clothes you're actually going to wear more than once (this is easy for guys, women have it harder).

I don't know your lifestyle or actually care what you spend money on, but complaining you can't save money is a bullshit excuse. I was bullshitting myself too, and I think everyone's got spending habits they can curb without impacting their lifestyle.

I'm not complaining about anything, I'm just pointing out that for some people saving money isn't their first or only priority, but doesn't mean they have no priorities.

$70 a day for “food and random living expenses” is far from not having much left, particularly after your $12K for “transport, cell phone, random monthly bills like student loans” which is pretty generous. Sure, you can definitely spend that much but it's not like you need to have every single meal at a nice restaurant, go to bars every night, etc.

Very true, just speaking from first-hand experience. I'm trying to pay off all my (astronomical) student loan debt as fast as possible, so I'm putting around $1800/mo into loans alone. Factor in my biggest hobby is seeing live music and you'd be surprised how quickly money can go. I've cut back severely on my drinking/partying, but with the occasional trip home to see family, 401k contribution, loan payments, and more, I walk away with about $28k/yr for all other expenses (including food, transport, cell phone, random services like spotify and netflix, and fun). Keep in mind I also got rid of my car, don't have cable, and keep monthly recurring expenses pretty low. $28k sounds like a lot, but when food is about 30% more on average than most of America (just my estimate after being back in Indiana), sales taxes are higher, and everything costs more in general, it goes quickly. I'm adjusting my priorities as I get older, but my salary also goes up and I get closer to having no debt, so it balances out I think.

Yeah, I don't want to come across as too critical but given how many people are making 30-40K before taxes I do feel the perspective is important. The major expense you mentioned is student loans and the degree to which you are not an outlier there scares me as it means that a significant people under 30, even relatively high-income professionals, are unable to make one of the best life moves because they're paying off debt rather than investing to accrue 3-4 decades of interest.

> $28k disposable... don't have much left.

For some context:

> In 2010, in the United States, the poverty threshold for one person under 65 was US$11,344 (annual income);

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_threshold

and

> Half of Americans live below or at the poverty line

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/30/half_of_americans_living_bel...

Now, I know that SF is one of the more expensive places to live in this country, but still.

You misquoted Salon - they said below or /near/ the poverty line. And near is highly subjective. The census number they cite in the article is 15% which is a long way from half, and there is nothing in the article that gets the number to half the population.

Note the difference in the URL vs the final title: it's why I misquoted, accidentally.

Sorry, didn't mean to nitpick the misquote as much as to point out that the implication seems far from reality: 15% actual poverty rate vs the 50% implied by Salon. I'm sure the people living between 16% and 20% aren't living large, but the article doesn't support the 50% claim.

The Salon article has a strongly biased and is inconsistent with the Wikipedia link.

Some facts from the US Census: The US median annual household income is $52,762 for the 2007-2011 period, the latest available [1]. This means half of US household made less than $52,762 and half made more than $52,762 during this period. The Census often averages over multi-year periods to adjust for the economic cycle. In 2011 alone the media was $50,502, down due to the recession.

By Census definition income does not include either reductions for taxes or additions for noncash assistance (food, housing, medical). A household is defined as a group of one or more people living together regardless of relationship (marriage, birth). The average household size is 2.60 people in 2007-2001.

[1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html

Yes, I've heard this from just about everyone. If you're making $50k in this city, you're basically working poor. With the average 2 bedroom condo renting for $2500+ and houses renting for more, you're dropping a ton of your income just on a place to live. Its not uncommon to see a single bedroom renting for $1600+ in the city.

Avg 1br prices are up to over $2500 now. Granted depending on area and quality, you can get down to $1600, but a majority are mid to high $2ks.

Citation? We're in the SF rental market and I work for a real estate start-up. I see 1br's in desirable neighborhoods available for $1.5-2k all day long.

A look through Craigslist gives you an idea: http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/apa/sfc?zoomToPosting=&qu...

But note that there are many 2+ BR's in the search results so skim the list with some scrutiny. Also there's a lot of spam in the "$1200 4br" listing that appears a thousand times. Sort ascending by price to get an easier look.

According to this[1], as of February average rent for 1br in OUTER sunset is 1.9k. Another source[2] puts average 1br rent at $2547.

[1]http://sfist.com/attachments/SFist_Brock/SF-Infographic.png [2]http://www.rentjungle.com/average-rent-in-san-francisco-rent...

See seph's comment. I took that from a heatmap I saw not too long ago on avg 1br prices in each neighborhood. I'll link if I locate it again.

I don't know if it's common, but it is definitely possible to save money while making 100k in SF.

I think this is normal everywhere in the US. I expect this has little to do with SF and more to do with the fact that many people all over the country, regardless of income level, are living far beyond their means and lack the discipline to make saving a priority; the US average personal savings rate has fallen to 2.5%. But what percentage buys cable tv, smartphones with data plans, auto loans for more car than they needed, etc?

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/PSAVERT.txt

People in the US don't do well at saving. But SF is still abnormal -- you need a considerably higher salary to have the same quality of living + savings in SF as compared to many other cities.

For example: elsewhere in this thread it was stated that a one bedroom apartment runs $2500+ in SF. In my neighborhood, a decent one bedroom apartment might run $700. Sure, you might earn $90k instead of $100k, but you save twice the difference just in rent.

It is very common.

But it's also the lifestyle that forces this. I was continually perplexed at how all of my colleagues seemed to be able to afford to go to all these conferences (not always on company dime), buy the most expensive coffee, upgrade their bleeding-edge laptop the moment Apple puts out a new one, and so on. I figured out later that they just weren't saving or investing any money, and often were even accumulating debt despite their high salaries.

The culture of always being at work (or at least seeming to be) is a factor too. More and more of your meals are eaten outside the home. A lot of people use cleaning services.

Some people feel they need to do all this to keep up. I'm not sure they're wrong. When I pulled out a three-year-old iPhone, people gawped at it, like it was the Ark of the Covenant or something. I lived in a district which was not the Mission or SOMA and people acted like I lived off the edge of the world.

You're forgetting how much money people outside of San Francisco spend on their car. That makes expensive coffee, eating out, and computer upgrades look like pocket change.

I dunno. In other places, Teslas are an unusual site. I can't commute three miles without seeing one or two each day. BMWs might be more ubiquitous than Toyotas here. To be fair, I'm not in the city, I'm on the peninsula.

I'm not sure if it's normal, but I can at least offer my own anecdotal experience: I'm a single guy who's been out of school for almost 10 years, living in SF for the past 3 years. I make a bit more than the $100k figure you're asking about, but if I were to adjust my income down, I'd still be saving ~35% of my take-home pay every month. And this is including eating out 8-10 times a week and going out to bars 3-4 times a week. I've since paid off my college loans, but while I was paying them I was tossing close to $1k at them per month while maintaining my savings rate. I'm not frugal, but neither am I a crazy spender either. At this point I've developed enough of a cushion that I could take 2-2.5 years off work if I wanted to.

So it's definitely doable. I think as another poster commented, it's more about priorities than ability. There's certainly enough to do here and spend money on that you could spend all your money with nothing to save, but you'd have to work at it. Especially for someone working in tech and making 6 figures, living in SF and not saving is a choice, and by no means a necessity.

Salvatore, the author, is the lead developer on redis, very interesting perspective on a visit to SF from Europe for a person that is globally connected.

He met up with a good crowd one night: http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-Redis-Meetup/events/1231...

Very happy he enjoyed the city! Next time he's in town, I'll be sure I'm following his twitter to remain informed. I'd love to buy him a drink.

While there is a lot of crappiness in the city, it really is a melting pot (not as much as 10-20 years ago of course) of motivated, friendly people.

What forces do you see bringing together SF as a melting pot? I've only spent a small amount of time there, and with a very small subset of people, but my experience has been that there is a large group of people from very similar backgrounds (20-something from Stanford/MIT/CMU in the tech industry).

I absolutely agree about the motivated, friendly people part. There's definitely a "pay it forward" culture in the tech community which you can feel in the atmosphere.

but my experience has been that there is a large group of people from very similar backgrounds (20-something from Stanford/MIT/CMU in the tech industry)

That's why I said "not so much as 10-20 years ago". It seems like our community is actually destroying what made SF so special in years past. That being said, while a majority of people coming in are fairly well-off 20-something tech industry kids, the fact that SF prides itself as being an "anything goes, something for everyone" kind of city helps to bring out the quirkiness and eccentricities of people who otherwise would've never found that side of themselves. In addition, if you look in the right places, you will find a ton of the goofy oddballs that made SF such a special place.

"UK people are especially hard for me to understand, and I guess the opposite is also true. Fixing the language if you don't practice it is either impossible or requires a lot of time, probably I'll star to travel more."

One very enjoyable way to improve at least understanding spoken English is to watch movies and (if you like that) tv shows. BTW, I agree that UK pronunciationS are much more difficult to understand (I wonder if that's only true for Italians, or for other foreigners too).

My guess is that foreigners are used to hearing American English from TV shows and movies, and thus find it easier to understand.

Until very recently, Italian people were only commonly exposed to spoken English through music - and there a lot of UK there. Almost everything on tv is dubbed here (and not long ago there was no almost :)

This is true. As someone who speaks English as a second language living in London, I can understand both "standard" American English and "BBC" British English very well.

The problem is that in a London alone you are exposed to all kinds of accents, including Queen's English, Cockney, Scottish English, and Irish.

This video is a good example of how a Cockney accents sounds:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnjGNJ5JL8w

The UK was where English first evolved, and it seems like there is a lot more diversity in how it is spoken there. Fragments of older dialects that didn't win out still linger.

The US was settled relatively quickly and there wasn't that much time for regional accents to evolve. There are a few recognizable ones, like the Southern US accent, but it's not as dramatic as something like a Cockney or a Scottish accent in the UK.

Mmm, can't agree with you there. There are significant, noticeable differences between American accents. Boston, NYC, Western PA, the South, Texas, Midwest, and California all have very obvious differences, on par with the difference between Cockney and other UK dialects.

I am Polish and I confirm. I thought that my English is not too bad until I went for a short trip to London.

I was reading up on Catania (the city from which he hails) and it looks like a beautiful place - very different from SF, but still having a large number of tech companies.

The nearby town of Taormina is awesome.

I can confirm both: Taormina and Catania are gorgeous, amazing cities. The whole island of Sicily is also a wonderful place to visit.... I highly recommend it!

I quite like the writing style, and I'm thankful that the author took the time to write this all down!

Hopefully this isn't taken as offensive, but I wanted to read this in a less plain-text way, so I've mirrored the article here with full attribution: http://xwl.me/md/3o6oo6u52127g68

It's just a bit easier on my eyes, I hope that's alright.

It is very hard to not love this guy.

This story reminds me of my most "San Franciscan" experience. I was lucky enough to spend a weekend at Mark Hopkins InterContinental and pretty much the entire time there were protesters yelling things (peacefully of course). One of which was: "Mark Hopkins, you're no good; treat your workers like you should". I went down and talked to the guys and got to hear their side of the story (fighting for minimum wage concessions for the workers there).

What a cool city to be a geek in. Where else can you see more billboards for web browsers and video games than you can for lawyers and liposuction?

First I am glad this is not another post about how many homeless people he saw and how he cannot believe it and how people in SF should fix these problems.

Thinking of the areas the author was around (Nob Hill, SOMA, FiDi) he is probably not going to see many families. You'll definitely see way more strollers and kids if you head south to Noe Valley or head north to Pac Heights.

Just out of curiosity... I assume the waiters, waitresses, receptionists, taxi drivers etc. of San Francisco are not all on $70K+ salaries? And if the answer to that is yes, how do they manage to make it work? Either there's a lot of #firstworlproblem esque moaning going on in this thread or taxi drivers in SanFran are the best paid cabbies in the world.

I enjoyed reading this as I'm planning on visiting CA next summer with my wife and son. I wanted to look at Palo Alto etc and consider emigrating there. If he and the other commenters on this thread are right and the schools suck, there's not a lot of families and the cost of living is really that high, it probably won't be a good idea.

This is very specifically about the San Francisco city area. The peninsular and south bay are much more suburban and family friendly.

Palo Alto isn't a lot cheaper that San Francisco it has a reputation as being much more family friendly and has some good schools. Also, Mountain View, Los Altos, Sunny Vale, Santa Clara are all more affordable and family friendly than San Francisco.

Disclaimer: I'm a single guy with no kids, so what would I know?

The schools in Palo Alto itself are very good. Palo Alto HS has an excellent reputation amongst people I know. It's a bit of a pressure cooker, as everyone in the school has parents in the tech industry who care about education, but the quality of teaching is great.

The cost of living is another matter. A very basic starter home will in Palo Alto will run $1-2 million. Not unattainable for an engineer, but it will require some sacrifices.

Not to nit-pick, but I'm curious about how a $1MM starter home is attainable for an engineer. For someone making let's say around $100,000/yr, your mortgage payment (assuming 4.5% is $5,000) is going to be at least 50% of your gross salary. That's a lot of sacrifice. The common formula is that you really don't want your total mortgage payment to exceed 28% of your gross income:

$5,000 * 12 / 0.28 = ~ $214,000/yr salary

I could see that for a very, very senior and specialized engineer working at one of a handful of companies, but that's probably double the norm in the 'Valley for your average 5-10 year experienced engineer.

Not to mention having to have $200,000 in cash for a down payment sitting around. Even if you saved as much as $1,000 a month, it would take you over 16 years to build up such a down payment--for a STARTER home!

It's attainable if you bet on the right startup and make it. Or if you bought it years ago. California doesn't re-asses property taxes unless you sell your property, which means that many people are paying tiny amounts of property tax on incredibly expensive homes. They just increase it by a small (less than inflation) amount per year, so effectively you pay less and less tax each year.

Key insight: old people vote.

2 engineers at 100k/yr gets you right to the figure you mentioned. $200K down payment is rough but not nearly impossible given the figure in the first sentence and willingness to maintain a college-ish lifestyle for a few years.

The norm is that both parents work, which changes the math substantially.

After including annual bonuses, ~214k is perfectly reasonable (on the low side if anything) for a good engineer with 5-10 years experience at google/facebook/apple/etc. Add in a second income and its easily feasible without bonuses. Million-dollar starter homes are obscene, but people actually do buy them.

Palo Alto is about 30 miles away from San Francisco and it's a very different place. Those 30 miles will probably take you somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour depending on traffic.

Palo Alto is the traditional headquarters of the venture capital business. Sand Hill Road in particular is famous for its concentration of VC offices, and people use expressions like "the view from Sand Hill Road" to describe how VCs see the world around here. As you might expect, there are a lot of golf courses, excellent restaurants, and some really nice clubs. The Stanford campus is nice, but you'll need a bike or a car to get around (it's over 6000 acres). It is not walkable, but it is a nice place to bike.

Palo Alto has two downtown areas. There are a bunch of places catering to students which are kind of fun, like the Nut House. Palo Alto has a lot of families, at least relative to SF, and it doesn't have that many homeless. But you will probably need to be loaded to get an actual house there.

If you just want to move somewhere in the Bay Area, and you're middle class, I recommend Campbell or perhaps the Willow Glen neighborhood. There are also some nice places in the East Bay. The penninsula and SF are overpriced unless you need to be there for business reasons, or you have so much money it doesn't matter.

British people are really hard to understand. The way they make whole syllables disappear is nothing short of black magic.

American people are really hard to understand. The way they pronounce "can" and "can't" the same, and the paucity of vowels in their phonemic inventory (cot/caught and Mary/merry/marry) is most perplexing.

(Which is another way of saying: that to which one is unaccustomed is difficult. British people understand each other perfectly well, and some of us even find American English a bit difficult to understand out of familiar contexts.)

Regarding the hotel gym: the most likely reason you couldn't find any free weights is America's penchant for lawsuits. The hotel's lawyers and/or insurance company probably insists on less "dangerous" fitness equipment.

Do you have some specific citation? I've seen plenty of hotel gyms with free weights. And any real gym has them, even though they face similar liability concerns.

I can think of a number of other reasons that hotels would avoid free weights. Fitness machines need less tidying, are harder to steal, are more friendly to novices, and look fancier to people looking at the hotel brochure.

I want a SF job but work remotely from Barcelona. I'm willing to travel 1 a month :). I know the pains of work and live there, it looks amazing but all my friends told me the same: it feels artificial.

I like Europe, with their pro/cons.

I love the bay area, nothing else to say.

Enjoyable read, however the notes about the hotel gym were a bit strange to me. I may have a insufficient sample set, however I've never seen free weights in a hotel gym, beyond a couple of low weight dumbbells. Certainly no one doing deadlifts, and I can't imagine a hotel dealing with that.

Sounds like a guided tour with no real exploration of the city.

Well it is, in the sense that, no exploration is really possible in three days full of meetings, but something can be captured walking on the street, talking with many people, most also not native of SF exchanging stories. I just tried to turn my feelings into a blog post without any special goal.

kryten:

Sounds like London, UK where I currently reside with three children...

Does your experience of life in London in recent years (since around late nineties) reflect that of this writer? I think this is one of the few writers (on the topic) I've found balanced and non-alarmist. That's the reason I've used her piece to moot a point that has been posited by many others in a more judgmental and accusative tone. So I ask, is this what London increasingly feels like for secular, middle-income families and individuals?

  "Of the 8.17 million people in London, one million are Muslim,
  with the majority of them young families. That is
  not, in reality, a great number. But because so many Muslims
  increasingly insist on emphasising their separateness, 
  it feels as if they have taken over; my female neighbours 
  flap past in full niqab, some so heavily veiled that I can’t
  see their eyes. I’ve made an effort to communicate by smiling
  deliberately at the ones I thought I was seeing out and about
  regularly, but this didn’t lead to conversation because they
  never look me in the face.

  I recently went to the plainly named “Curtain Shop” and asked
  if they would put some up for me. Inside were a lot of 
  elderly Muslim men. I was told that they don’t do that kind 
  of work, and was back on the pavement within a few moments.
  I felt sure I had suffered discrimination and was bewildered
  as I had been there previously when the Muslim owners had 
  been very friendly. Things have changed. I am living in a 
  place where I am a stranger.

  I was brought up in a village in Staffordshire, and although
  I have been in London for a quarter of a century I have kept
  the habit of chatting to shopkeepers and neighbours, despite
  it not being the done thing in metropolitan life. Nowadays,
  though, most of the tills in my local shops are manned by 
  young Muslim men who mutter into their mobiles as they are
  serving. They have no interest in talking to me and rarely 
  meet my gaze. I find this situation dismal. I miss banter, 
  the hail fellow, well met chat about the weather, or what 
  was on TV last night."

  "In the Nineties, when I arrived, this part of Acton was a
  traditional working-class area. Now there is no trace of 
  any kind of community – that word so cherished by the Left.
  Instead it has been transformed into a giant transit camp 
  and is home to no one. The scale of immigration over recent
  years has created communities throughout London that never 
  need to – or want to – interact with outsiders.

  It wasn’t always the case: since the 1890s thousands of 
  Jewish, Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Chinese workers, 
  among others, have arrived in the capital, often displacing
  the indigenous population. Yes, there was hateful overt 
  racism and discrimination, I’m not denying that. But, 
  over time, I believe we settled down into a happy mix of
  incorporation and shared aspiration, with disparate 
  peoples walking the same pavements but returning to 
  very different homes – something the Americans call
  “sundown segregation”.

  But now, despite the wishful thinking of multiculturalists,
  wilful segregation by immigrants is increasingly echoed by
  the white population – the rate of white flight from our 
  cities is soaring. According to the Office for National 
  Statistics, 600,000 white Britons have left London in the
  past 10 years. The latest census data shows the breakdown
  in telling detail: some London boroughs have lost a quarter
  of their population of white, British people. The number in
  Redbridge, north London, for example, has fallen by 40,844
  (to 96,253) in this period, while the total population has
  risen by more than 40,335 to 278,970. It isn’t only London
  boroughs. The market town of Wokingham in Berkshire has 
  lost nearly 5 per cent of its white British population.
  I suspect that many white people in London and the Home 
  Counties now move house on the basis of ethnicity, 
  especially if they have children. Estate agents don’t 
  advertise this self-segregation, of course. Instead there
  are polite codes for that kind of thing, such as the mention
  of “a good school”, which I believe is code for “mainly 
  white English”. Not surprising when you learn that nearly
  one million pupils do not have English as a first language. 

  I, too, have decided to leave my area, following in the
  footsteps of so many of my neighbours. I don’t really want 
  to go. I worked long and hard to get to London, to find a 
  good job and buy a home and I’d like to stay here. But I’m
  a stranger on these streets and all the “good” areas, with 
  safe streets, nice housing and pleasant cafés, are beyond 
  my reach. I see London turning into a place almost 
  exclusively for poor immigrants and the very rich.
  It’s sad that I am moving not for a positive reason, but to
  escape something. I wonder whether I’ll tell the truth, if 
  I’m asked. I can’t pretend that I’m worried about local 
  schools, so perhaps I’ll say it’s for the chance of a 
  conversation over the garden fence. But really I no longer 
  need an excuse: mass immigration is making reluctant 
  racists of us all."

Source:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/9831912/I...

Edit: Cleanup

I'm struggling to find what this has to do with San Francisco? Are you saying SF has been taken over by hipsters and is no longer recognizable as it once were?

You needn't struggle so much to find parallels, if you were to even glance cursorily.

While the general validity and the degree to which this writer's experience is shared by others can certainly be debated (which is the reason I tabled it in the first place), the fact that there are strong parallels cannot be contested.

The agents and parties affected in the two settings, London and S.F., could indeed be different. Nonetheless, the theme remains the same.

That's just typical Telegraph[1] hateful anti-immigration stuff. perhaps somewhere buried in there are a few grains of truthy material; did multi-culturalism cause ghettos? etc.

> Nowadays, though, most of the tills in my local shops are manned by young Muslim men who mutter into their mobiles as they are serving.

How does the author know they are muslim?

> I see London turning into a place almost exclusively for poor immigrants and the very rich.

I know many white British non-rich people living in London, but the author is right that London is very expensive. There is a problem with London being the place where everything happens. Some organisations are doing stuff to prevent this (government departments going to the regions; companies moving to much cheaper towns with decent[1] transport; BBC moving to the North; etc.) Perhaps the Telegraph could move their offices to Manchester?

A recent comment I made had the throwaway line about the UK being a lousy place to live. So normally I agree when people say the UK, especially London, sucks.

> It wasn’t always the case: since the 1890s thousands of Jewish, Irish, Afro-Caribbean, Asian and Chinese workers, among others, have arrived in the capital, often displacing the indigenous population. Yes, there was hateful overt racism and discrimination, I’m not denying that. But, over time, I believe we settled down into a happy mix of incorporation and shared aspiration, with disparate peoples walking the same pavements but returning to very different homes – something the Americans call “sundown segregation”.

Blacks first arrived in England with the Romans. But, if we restrict ourselves to the bigger immigrations of the Windrush era (1950s) - we still had both hateful racist violence and institutional racism over 40 years later (See Stephen Lawrence murder, 1993).

If I could be arsed I'd trawl through the Telegraph archives to find the hateful screeds they've printed in the past. Faced with that level of hate it's not surprising that people prefer to avoid Telegraph writers.

Yeah, I'd agree with you that The Telegraph isn't the most balanced of sources when it comes to immigration. It's an overtly right-wing paper.

Why is the slant of the source relevant?

This is the opinion of one person.

I tabled it to invite dissenting voices to offer sensible and rational critiques of the premise not petty and bitter ideologues who want to silence all dissonant viewpoints even when they may have more than a shred of truth value.

There are plenty of such people on sites like Gawker.

I thought this place was a platform for sensible and intellectually upright discussion.

Well, that one person is a polite racist and is using tactics from concern trolling to push their racist agenda; that person isn't wanting to engage in an intellectually rigorous discussion.

We ignore the trolls here.[1]

[1] I WISH. HN is vulnerable to trolling and there are many threads to prove this. :-(

Reply on news.ycombinator.com