Castles That Are Cheaper Than an Apartment in San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Castles That Are Cheaper Than an Apartment in San Francisco

upout.com

94 pointsjfaat31 comments

None of those examples are castles. If it's got windows on the ground floor it's a palace, not a castle. It's a castle if a foot-soldier sees it coming over a rise after trudging for hours through the freezing muck and thinks to himself "Oh man, this is going to suck."

Whose castle is this?

This is the castle of my master, Guy de Lombard.

We don't really have an accurate translation of the word "chateau". It's a superset of what we'd call anything from "fort", "castle", "mansion", "palace", "manor house" and anything in between. That being said, the word "chateau" comes from the exact same etymological root as our word "castle", so it's not exactly unfair to use the word.

They're not apartments, either!

Castle != Fortress

As they say: Location, location, location.

You are paying for the land. While building might cost a little more in the city due to permits, and labour's cost of living, in general it is mostly land. All this article tells us is: If land is cheap, you can buy a lot of it and built large structures on it.

This is why, to me, it is surprising that so few companies offer "remote only" jobs. On the face of it there seems to be downsides (worse communication, VoIP costs, etc) and few upsides. But just because you could employ people from lower cost of living areas (who would accept lower pay), you'd save enough on salaries to make the venture worth considering.

For example, let's say you're based out of NYC. You have to pay people in that area in the $80K+ ballpark so they can even make rent. However if you remain in NYC and employ people from Mississippi, Tennessee, or Idaho you could pay people in the 60K range and they'd have the same or better living standard than the 80K people in NYC.

> This is why, to me, it is surprising that so few companies offer "remote only" jobs.

Politics. Politics. Politics.

How do you prove, as a manager, that you are doing your job when nobody can see half of your employees?

As a side note, there are also good reasons to have your technical team co-located. It's sometimes really hard to drill into difficult technical problems without everybody standing in front of a whiteboard.

I think people can make lack of whiteboards work. The issue I have seen is when your team is partially co-located and partially remote -- the co-located people do the whiteboarding without bothering to involve the remote people, or the remote people do a lot more one-on-one discussions with other remote people. I think remote can work well, but the entire team needs to be remote to ensure communication.

> How do you prove, as a manager, that you are doing your job when nobody can see half of your employees?

I don't know if I buy it. How do you prove, as a manager, that you are doing your job when everyone can see all your employees? I fail to see how the visibility of you employees helps you prove that you're doing your job.

It's all perception. The manager talking with employees, having meetings with them etc gives the appearance of "work". This same thing causes interruptions to developers all day long. "Hands off" managers who hire people they trust to do their job are far more productive, but not the middle of the curve.

Remote doesn't imply lack of co-location. You have your sales/marketing office in New York, and your engineering office someplace cheaper.

And yet, I live in Vancouver and am looking only for remote work from the US... precisely because Vancouver companies don't pay enough to support Vancouver cost of living. If a US company just offered me Vancouver rates, I'd turn them down in a heartbeat.

Reminds me of Crack Shack or Mansion, a game of sorts to show the ridiculousness of real estate in Vancouver. These listings are several years old - the situation is much worse now:

http://www.crackshackormansion.com/

Yeah, I prefer this one. I mean, some of those SF apartments, while of course expensive, are pretty damn sweet. ALL of the houses in crackshackormansion are shitty, and I'm amazed the lot value of these places is still 1+ million.

Getting closer to $2,000,000 these days.

What a click-baity title. Yes, apartments are indeed expensive in San Francisco, but 2 of the 5 listings aren't even apartments: one is a mansion and the other is a 4,300+ sq ft home.

Very clickbait-y title. Only one of the "castles" is cheaper than an actual apartment. The rest are houses.

Also does not factor in the cost of upkeep of a 200+ year-old castle. Yes, the housing market in SF is crazy but this is a pretty spurious article.

The lower cost castles tend to have a lot of delayed maintenance.

That and they often cannot be rebuilt with modern materials and techniques. And you may even go to jail if you try.

Not to mention the need for seriously competent landscapers for some of the examples. Maintaining just the gardens could easily pay for a small studio in SF, I'd imagine.

Spoiler: Some apartments in SF are very expensive.

I'm sure I can find castles cheaper than other absurdly expensive apartments in other places too. I thought this article was going to be about castles cheaper than the cheapest apartment you can buy in SF.

Since when is a "studio" actually 5 offices and 3 apartments?

Looking at the Zillow listing it has 5 offices with a dedicated kitchen and bath and 3 apartments and is 8k sq/ft total with lots of updates. It isn't "cheap", but for that amount of rentable space right in the middle of SF that would be a pretty good investment.

i think they mean actual studio, like production studio. really strange choice of words though.

It doesn't matter how much you can buy it for. What matters is how much you'll pay for mortgage + property taxes + maintenance + insurance. A lesson that I admittedly learned the hard way when purchasing my home.

> 3... Or this mansion in Alamo Square for $6,400,000.

Grew up in a 7+7 city house in Zimbabwe (5ha property). When we left it was sold for less than US$100000 (current day value). Given that perspective I'd have to venture a guess to the true meaning of the article: property values vary wildly depending on location to extreme scales.

9+9 is a mansion by modern standards? Bloody hell.

I'm the co-founder of UpOut and even I think this article is not super relevant for HN.

Besides other flaws, premise of this article assumes that castles are better living quarters than apartments which I don't think is necessarily true.

Yeah, but how's the internet connection at the castles compare to San Fran?

"Win tix to unique SF events!"

How about no. <close tab>

What is the earthquake insurance on these apartments?

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