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Comment by jamesjguthrie | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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