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I've lived in SF for going on 30 years now, and can tell you that this(moving to SF in your 20's) was true even before the first dotcom boom. Lots of folks moved here to live out "their wild years" before returning back to where ever they came from. I got really lucky in that I bought a house before the first boom, and the equity has made it possible to stay here, but there's no way I'd be able to do the same thing today. I really worry about where my kids will live when they get older.

So even you, 30 year SF resident, have some slight natural incentive to not stay in the area, once Having Kids Time rolls around.

To think that the bold 20-somethings flooding into SF these days have a path charted for long-term residency here seems all but impossible...

Yup, thats true. Not a year goes by where I don't wonder if I should move, but as others have pointed out, the Bay Area is pretty fantastic. I don't even know where I would go...

Ditto. That's the hard part.

Also, try being from the Southeast and missing Southern culture (well, the good parts of it, at least). There's very sparse tech hubs in the Southeast. Effectively none if you want to live in a coastal city.

Move away from the Bay Area ('back home', or elsewhere)

I work remotely for an SF-based company from Dallas, and I actually observe this happening.

Every month or so, we get an email about some departure from one of the Bay Area folks who is moving "back home." Any digging usually reveals the person had their first child.

I've been surprised to see this as well. The advent of a first-child seems to drastically change a family's priorities and I'm seeing many of my friends move closer to their parents to get the additional support for raising their child.

I actually observed one couple do the opposite. They subsidized one of their mothers expenses so that she could move to this area, work part time, and act as their primary daycare provider for their new child. They ran the math and found that it was cheaper than daycare and with healthcare reforms the mother was no longer tied to her old job and could so afford to quit and move.

However, this parent was renting to begin with, and I don't expect most parents to leave their hard-earned homes and communities to come support their children rather than the other way around.

This all depends on how you define "dream". If it's a picket fence, yard, pool, 2,5 kids, etc, that's not gonna fly in the Bay. But if the dream is to live in a nice place with easy access to a fantastic city, that's achievable anywhere in the Bay Area (Oakland has it's moments of greatness, Berkley has it's chartms, and SF is SF). My take is that the East Bay is about to start growing like crazy.

A "nice place" is not a 1 bedroom for $3K/month.

You can't live comfortably in SF proper on less than $120K-150K/year.

There's no reason for this, either. San Francisco has to relax their brain-dead backlash toward high density construction. Los Angeles, too. Is it a California thing in general?

Well... it kind of is. This article (now dated, from 2007) shows the cost of the "right to build" in various US cities. 4 of the top 5 are in California: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/a-tale-o...

Feel free to be cynical in your answer, but why would a property owner who just paid a fortune to buy a single family house in SF want to rezone the neighborhood to see a large apartment complex built next door? Now that they've paid the heavy toll, they stand to lose the most.

It's a vicious cycle. Some behavior has to break it.

That is completely overshooting it. Rent in a safe area starts at $2k a month. At the 2.5% rule, that's 80k of income to qualify.

If you network and land in a rent controlled apartment (a friend of a friend has the 4th floor of a mansion in the haight for $900/month) you can do it for even less.

Maybe more.

A 1-bedroom in a building next door to the Mission Hotel - San Francisco's biggest SRO hotel, located in the Mission District - just went for $2800/mo.

And the building isn't rent controlled.

For trendy neighborhoods like the Mission, yeah $2800 or more is the norm.

I was talking about places like Sunset or Ingleside--not highly desirable, but not Hunters Point or the Bayview.

It's already happening in the East Bay, and it's weird. A two-on-a-lot just went up on across the street from me, not 50 feet from where we had an 5-way shootout in broad daylight two years ago. I couldn't believe my eyes when they got snapped up for $750k a piece; I pay $500/month in rent. Just in the last week somebody started parking their new Porsche in front of my house, on a street where I still wouldn't feel comfortable leaving my old 1997 Civic overnight. Various brewpubs, taprooms, etc. have started opening up. This feels exactly like how people describe living in the Mission circa fifteen years ago.

Just wondering: what part of the East Bay do you live in?

Holy cow, I think I may be your neighbor; I bought one of those houses, judging from the brand new Porsche I've been seeing when I head to work in the morning. Do you have a link to the shoot out?

Except my half of the Berkeley two-on-a-lot cost substantially more than $750k...

http://www.berkeleyside.com/2012/03/07/dec-23-shooting-invol...

Welcome to the neighborhood! :)

> This all depends on how you define "dream". If it's a picket fence, yard, pool, 2,5 kids, etc, that's not gonna fly in the Bay

It might fly if you fly. :-) I don't know if this is still true, but when I lived in Silicon Valley a little over 20 years ago, I did some price comparisons, and it worked out that for the cost of a nice SV house, you could buy a much bigger house and pool in the Merced area in the Central Valley, and a Mooney M20 (private plane with a cruise speed of over 250 mph), hanger space for the plane in Merced and Palo Alto, and a car to keep in Palo Alto. You could even get the house on enough land with room from a runway, to save having to drive to the Merced airport every day. Get a couple other people to move to Merced and share the commute to split operating costs of the Mooney, and it looked like this would actually be quite viable.

That just sounds like so much fun. You make me want to get a pilot's license.

As a pilot who flies for fun, I totally recommend it.

Up here in Portland, one of my friends just got his private pilot's license - he lives in Bend, and can commute if he so desires. It's expensive, but probably reasonable.

That have been always true. San Francisco kids population is only 13.4%: the lowest in country [1]. But there is also constant flow of fresh blood (20s something).

Now, the problem is that percentage of kids has been constantly declining. It is interesting to see at which point the economic system of the city will collapse because it lacks diversity. Or it is really possible to have city without kids and without older residents: just dogs and DINKY couples.

[1] - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/families-flee-san-f...

> Buy property in a remote, suburban sprawl-y part of the Bay Area (an unattractive option to anyone who's lived in SF for many years)

To raise kids though? I grew up in the suburbs, now live in SF, but certainly plan to live in the suburbs when I have kids of my own.

Places like San Mateo county aren't SF, but they certainly aren't remote.

I guess I don't see why options 2 or 3 are that bad, but either way, there isn't going to be a brain drain as long as the job market is good. New York, even at twice the expense (600k 1-BRs, sign me up!) doesn't have a problem with brain drain. Sure people leave every year, but more move in, as the quality of life in the city cannot be matched anywhere else.

/me wonders how old you are.

The problem with #2 is that a depressively expensive 1BR condo ceases to be a practical option once you have children.

When you are ready to have kids then either your finances have probably improved and you can afford that 2BR or you move farther out to cheaper areas of the city / suburbs.

Or be happy with a life without children as a lot of us are.

Well, according to this link, the average 2BR condo costs ~$900k. To put it bluntly, aint no way I'm gonna spend close to a million for a 2BR condo! That's even more depressing!

So, this brings me back to the original predicament: when you get to nesting age (which normally runs concurrent, or closely precedes Having Kids Time), you're gonna start looking at your finances and looking at the local real estate market and many will need to make some very tough decisions - decisions that I, personally, don't see including San Francisco.

A $900k home is ~$3,600/month P+I after 20% down. Considering that principal is actually savings and you can deduct X% of the interest, you are looking at a true effective cost at under $2k + real estate taxes and maintenance. The carrying costs are easily doable by a couple in the tech industry, let alone the actual effective monthly costs. What's depressing about that?

It sounds like you're brought up with a more traditional expectation of constitutes a house - 2.3 kids, picket fence, et. all. That's depressing.

In the last bubble, there was an exodus of nesters to Denver / Boulder that helped spur the startup scene there.

Aha! Didn't see even this reply before I had posted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6259899

Everything sounds accurate, and what tends to happen to those in SF, except they are replaced by new 20-somethings.

IMO, this braindrain could possibly synergize with the current trend of increasing remote work and we'll begin to see the stranglehold the SF Bay Area has on tech workers/startups chip away at an even faster pace.

Arguably, the SF rent issue has implications in that sphere, as well.

Did you read the article? SF has been expensive for a long time. When adjusted for inflation, this isn't even the most expensive that it's been.

It all sounds reasonable, except I think that it has probably been the case in San Francisco for much longer, and I don't know if the past 2-3 years has really seen an unprecedented or new swell of 20-somethings.

History doesn't support this. Industry dominance tends to concentrate. NYC is still the finance capital of the west. Everyone claims the high costs will drive the industry to migrate to Florida or something but it doesn't happen. Especially when you can just go across the river to Jersey City if you want to live cheaper. SF is expensive but you can still go to Oakland or Alameda or something which is a lot more reasonable than asking someone to move to Idaho for your company.

In the grand scheme of things, Oakland and Alameda are or are becoming quite highly priced, compared to average national housing market rates.

And this is in an industry where remote work is possible. Finance is less possible to work remotely.

I left New York not because I couldn't afford the prices (if I stayed in finance, that'd be a non-issue) but because I started hating what the high real estate prices did to the culture. You do get to a point, around 35, where your only options (if staying in NYC) are to move into management or finance. Non-financial programmers don't make enough to live there, and managers don't get to program.

I also think that New York's tech scene has a lot of quantity but not much in the way of quality. For every good company there are 50 dipshit companies founded by fired bankers and real estate guys who think waterfall is a valid software methodology and not an anti-pattern.

High housing prices truly are culturally toxic. I'm surprised more people don't get that.

This in a big way.

I'm curious to hear about the SF Bay Area tech scene frame in a similar point of view, from the older (wiser) hackers here.

My young brain hadn't yet connected the dots about the whole 'reaching a point where you have to move into management or finance, due to career path' thing, which is a very interesting angle.

You know, there is more in the bay area than San Francisco. If you try living in Berkeley or Oakland for a few months, you will find that it isn't "a remote, suburban sprawl-y part of the Bay Area." It's only a half hour away by BART from all those shiny SOMA offices. And there is San Mateo and all the other towns on the penninsula.