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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Supply of housing in SF is limited (mostly due to the same sort of do-gooders who make infographics like this one), and demand is what it is, and that sets the price. Living in a 2BR in the city proper is not a necessity. It's a luxury. Living with one income in a two bedroom is by itself a luxury. There is no reason we should expect it to be affordable on a minimum wage salary.

Heck, when I lived in New York, I lived in a 430 square-foot apartment with a wife and a baby while making six figures. And I was a 35 minute train ride away from Midtown!

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I more or less agree with you - living in SF "proper" is a luxury good, kind of like living in the left bank of Paris. So I definitely don't intend anything that follows to be interpreted as a disagreement, more just... well, a riff on the theme, I guess.

Part of the resistance to this comes from the very recent memory of SF residents. The transformation of an SF address into a luxury good is very recent.

I'm acutely aware of this having grown up here. I have a friend whose father was a professor at SF state. He (largely on one salary) raised his family in a pleasant 4 bedroom (!) house in the inner sunset. Another friend's parents were school teachers, one part time elementary, one full time middle school. The had a modest but pleasant place a little further out in the sunset.

It really wasn't until the late 90s that almost all of San Francisco detached from the middle class. I'm wishy-washy on the term almost here... there are still affordable corners, I guess... a modest house in nice shape in the excelsior probably could crack $700. Is that affordable?

I lament this a little bit, but I'm not that outraged. There isn't much to be done. I do think that a creative culture (which includes tech!) can't really flourish in such an expensive city. It just limits options too much when you have to make so much money just to live.

Some of the loss is long term residents who give up on living here (my brother was a professor at SF State as well, he was barely able to afford to share a 2br apartment with a guy he knew from high school - contrast that with the 4br house one generation earlier. They've since left SF, probably never to return as residents, and a good thing for them that they did, because they wouldn't be able to chart their own course in life with that kind of rent).

But this isn't about localism or resenting people who are moving here. Let me put it this way - Harvey Milk became who he was partly because he was able to move to SF and find an inexpensive apartment. SF was once a place where very creative people who didn't really fit in could show up and find their way in life, and interesting things emerged from that. I think that was worth much more than widely available tech talent of VC funding.

One last thing, though - this bashing of "tech workers" is pretty horrendous as well. Like someone isn't allowed to come out here, take a job, and rent an apartment?

I guess I just see it as a done deal. The innovation of life, the kind nobody even understands well enough to fund, that causes people to scratch their heads and say "what are those people doing"? Hard to believe it will come from SF anymore. I'm as bummed as the next guy, I just don't really see any villain here[1].

[1] I know, I know, some people will say building codes are the villain. I'm not prepared to present a long defense because I actually can't rule this out, but I'm highly skeptical of this argument... I guess I'd just ask if building lots of high rise dense apartment buildings would have "saved" manhattan or the left bank of paris from culture killing real estate prices. To me, the real solution is that the creative people will move, locally maybe to Oakland, or that other cities will pop up (austin seems like a prime candidate).

> The innovation of life, the kind nobody even understands well enough to fund, that causes people to scratch their heads and say "what are those people doing"? Hard to believe it will come from SF anymore.

I don't really know much about the history of SF. Can you give some examples here?

Love this post. I agree with almost everything you wrote here. One thing I would respond to is the notion that tech industry workers are somehow inherently not creatives or artists. The best programmers and designers I know here are without exception creative, thoughtful people in many other areas of life. The ones who choose SF over the valley may trend even more in that direction.

I didn't express that well. Some of the highly creative people who are displaced (or who never show up) are tech people. I'd even say some of the well funded tech stuff is interesting and creative as well.

I always thought of tech the way you described it, as part of the slightly quirky and interesting culture.

"I do think that a creative culture (which includes tech!) can't really flourish in such an expensive city. It just limits options too much when you have to make so much money just to live."

This is exactly why I moved to Portland, Oregon instead of San Francisco 4 years ago. We've had a very strong creative tech scene here, that has not had the same levels of cost pressure. It emulated the situation during the Homebrew Computer Club days in Silicon Valley, it had the formula I thought would make it a good place to do tech startups.

The affordable cost of living has allowed me to work on projects I otherwise would not have been able to in SF, because I simply couldn't have afforded it.

Concernedly, Portland rents/houses have been trending upward recently, largely due to a lot of people moving here from California. It's my hope that Portland is able to maintain that balance of affordability and ambition... we'll see.

Well if we could stop telling everybody about it... ;)

One concern is that jobs are generally located in the city. It's unfortunate that people who cannot afford to live in the city must also often make long commutes into the city. It'd be a shame if we said it was a luxury to avoid long commutes.

But it is a luxury... The demand for housing is affected by convenience. Those with more buying power are able to afford more convenient locations.

This is not unique to any particular city or country. I personally have experience with SoCal and Moscow. In SoCal, a 2br condo in Santa Monica costs the same as a house in a nice suburb, the difference is an hour+ drive. In Moscow, inner city is gridlocked 24/7 and unlike most of US, that's where the best jobs are, so the closer to downtown, the more expensive it is. Further out, prices are highest in walking proximity to a metro station (just like BART).

And then of course, the conversation turns to poor people using cheap cars to get there. And for once this is a "relatively" good deal for the poor, because the savings on car price more than make up for the difference in fuel costs for quite a distance (given that you can easily get a car $20k cheaper than a new efficient car.

Needless to say, this must be stopped ! "Not" because it makes life possible for a huge swath of poor people, that's not the problem. It pollutes ! "We" can't park anymore (because unlike poor people we don't arrive at work at 6am). "We" must stimulate public transport usage (without, of course, using it ourselves). Not that public transport even passes through the places where you'd live if you didn't have money, but who cares about that ?

The cycle continues.

Agreed. I don't know anyone (of many friends in SF) who live in a two-bedroom apt.

>>430 square-foot apartment with a wife and a baby while making six figures

Just because you chose a horrible situation doesn't mean that should be the mean. Many people live in a dirt-floored hut with no electricity or running water and that doesn't indicate that we should find that to be acceptable rather than trying to raise the global standard. That sort of thinking led to the ridiculousness that is SF/NYC real-estate.

There are other parts of the country where you could be living in a house you've purchased and still make "six figures."

No, what led to the ridiculousness of SF/NYC real estate is do-gooders talking about what we should find "acceptable" and what we should do to make things "acceptable." The do-gooders who complain every time you want to tear down low-rise development to build high-rises, the do-gooders who want to impose rent controls so old people can hang on to their apartments while younger people are priced out, etc. The housing market is like a balloon--you push on one end, and it inflates somewhere else.

I'm hardly a free-market true believer. But this is a basic bit of micro-economics: supply and demand of housing. If demand is high, you'll minimize prices by allowing supply to grow to accommodate demand. If you don't allow supply to grow, prices will explode. You can't legislate away the mechanics of the housing market.

Whenever I hear complaints about housing prices in San Francisco and how the single mothers working minimum wage jobs are getting priced out, I think of this article: http://seattletransitblog.com/2012/04/01/city-looks-to-detro....

That article was great. Further reading: http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-274.html

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