Don't forget us down here in Boise. The constant influx of people from other regions is straining our housing market, especially since the vast majority of employment options still left (after HP split and Micron downsized) are in the service industry. My mom paid $900/mo for a 4 bedroom house in a south-Boise subdivision in 2010, I'm now paying $1200/mo for a 3 bedroom house 5 miles further out in Meridian. Our housing costs aren't SF-crazy, but when you consider the lack of public transport necessitating vehicle ownership and depressed wages (lots of people making under $10/hr at call centers) it's becoming unaffordable for the masses.
Sure, it's affordable for me now - back when I was making $32K/yr on a MSP's help desk it would have been almost half of my wage - and that's good money for the majority of the population here. Lucky me, I make $85K now working from home - but 4 years ago it was a different story, and there's still plenty of people in the area who are trying to make ends meet.
Boise has been really slow to recover from the recession, where many people used to be able to get decent jobs at Micron, HP, Simplot, etc. there's much less available - call centers and other service industry positions have begun to dominate. The median cost of a house in the area is back to pre-2008 levels and rising fast, but wages aren't.
From my outside looking in perspective, it seems the gold rush is waning in the Bay Area. There will always be a pretty healthy tech industry there but anecdotal evidence tells me that fewer people are heading west to make it big in startups. This is probably a good thing for everyone except real estate speculators though.
I'd be intrigued to know how much of that is because of remote working, and how much is because of traditional jobs growing in other places (and, of course, how much is people not doing startups). My gut says that remote working isn't big enough to cause this sort of shift, but I'd love to know if I'm wrong.
Other cities with much better cost of living are gaining reputation in tech / start-ups and attracting talent (or just keeping the talent that went to school there).
Minneapolis springs immediately to mind. Companies like Amazon are opening dev offices in medium-sized American cities now as well, because importing everyone into Seattle or Boston isn't sustainable. From my experiences in places like Minneapolis and Cincinnati, I'd project a pretty serious difussion of tech talent back into the Midwest.
I've interviewed with "tech" companies in some of the cities you mentioned. The compensation was substantially lower than anything I can get in the Bay Area (by about a factor of 2 compared to my current compensation, for example). The CoL adjustment wouldn't be greater than the reduced savings rate.
These companies need to realize that the market rate for the kinds of engineering and talent they demand is set in the bigger cities, not their little slice of the Midwest. I understand why they're doing it, but for all the issues in the Bay Area the opportunities are still better than almost anywhere else and so is the pay.
Amazon does have 29 positions open in Minneapolis. On the other hand, they have 187 positions in Palo Alto plus 185 in San Francisco. And 7260 in Seattle.
The Bay Area has a pretty bad remote work culture. The vast majority of companies prefer if you’re physically here. Sure you can work from home or work remote while traveling for a few weeks, but for some insane reason most companies insist on your home base being here in the Bay Area. I’m sure there are notable exceptions and some people will disagree with me, but after 5 years here I’ve experienced first hand the aversion to remote work suffered by most Bay Area companies.
Oh come on, you must know it's not just "some insane reason."
A culture of remote work takes a lot of discipline, as it's so easy to have an in-person conversation, make a seemingly small decision at the time, and immediately the remote workers feel out of the loop.
Remote work is actually /hard/ to support, and a company has to make it a priority to do it well and be disciplined about writing down all communication. Otherwise, they're setting up their remote employees for failure, which nobody wants.
Also, there are things a remote worker just can't do; stand at a whiteboard and evaluate paths forward, for example. If a company values that sort of collaboration above anything else, it is certainly not "insane" to want people in the office.
Your last point is one I'd take a step further. The kind of collaboration you describe is necessary for non trivial products. So for them, at least for the people working on the harder problems, 100% remote just isn't feasible.
Non-trivial projects aren't very common even in the bay area.
Edit: I just got out of a meeting with someone in eastern Europe. An extra $20 for a camera pointed at the whiteboard solves the collaboration problem 90% of the way.
One can buy a MS Surface or iPad Pro (or Wacom tablet for PC/laptop) and share a virtual whiteboard via webex/gotomeeting/etc. Remote work can be incredibly efficient. It is easier for new companies/teams to start as remote vs. switching existing team to support remote work, but it can be done.
> Also, there are things a remote worker just can't do; stand at a whiteboard and evaluate paths forward, for example. If a company values that sort of collaboration above anything else, it is certainly not "insane" to want people in the office.
In my experience, meetings like this are more often than not a huge waste of time. Since I started working remotely I am less distracted and more productive, and have no trouble collaborating with other devs.
I agree. I contracted with a pure remote company for a while and we had less scheduled meetings but actually collaborated more. The one thing the remote company didn't have was the project management types who call meetings all the time like in my current job.
Great, if all you're given is a set of requirements. If you're trying to figure out what a product should do, look like, or build a larger system, a whiteboard is invaluable. Most of those meetings aren't scheduled, either.
I work on a big company with offices all over the US. My team is spread out over five different offices (which is pretty impressive given there are only seven of us). There's not much difference between being the only one on your team at your location and working from home.
While it's true you have to have software and processes in place to communicate, it is doable.
I'll make an observation that no one else has in this thread:
Effectively managing an organization that is at least partially remote is more difficult, and my experience in the Bay Area is that management skill is often overlooked and underdeveloped, particularly in startups.
I've seen several companies with very very competent technical founders, very capable engineering team, and not one person in the company that can manage their way out of a brown paper bag. The only way for that kind of structure to work is having everyone in the same room.
I own and am considering selling to retire (versus going to work to finish paying off the mortgage), it's kind of crazy real estate wise out here - the amount that zillow/redfin reports as positive home appreciation every month feels like more than the last bubble. Maybe the bubble is about to burst, but I don't know how to determine that.
Second, don't try to "time the bubble". Instead think about your goals. What do you actually want, and what is best for you (and your family if applicable). What's going to make your life more meaningful? What would make it a better story if someone were to tell it?
If cashing in now and moving someplace cheaper is in line with your goals, then do it!
If staying put and finishing off the mortgage is a better match, then so be it.
Lastly, financial independence doesn't have to mean not working. I'm still 10-15 years away from that point, but I certainly plan to keep working well after I have enough to retire. I'll just have a bit more flexibility in what I choose to work on.
Well for context, having lived in SF for 5 years before leaving, yes 80% probably plan to leave, probably 80% do leave, but only after many career years.
It's where I cut my chops because I could get a 6 figure engineering job without a relevant degree. Very few people expect to stay in a city permanently, and remember many of those workers aren't even citizens, so many of them plan to return "home" at some point.
This doesn't mean anything unless the influx is less than the outflux.
I've lived in SF for close to 20 years, and I completely agree.
That said, I'm part of the 83% who are planning on leaving, but there are two main problems:
• If I leave, where will I go? As many faults as SF has, it's still a beautiful, world class city, rich with culture. Walkability is huge for me, and I don't want to live someplace where I'm tied to my car.
• Salary. Usually the cost of living follows the pay scale of a local economy, but that doesn't help you when you want to buy things priced at a national level: computers, cars, bikes, etc. If you earn $160k/yr, buy a new MacBook Pro isn't a big deal; if you make $60k/yr, you have to put a little more thought into it.
> Salary. Usually the cost of living follows the pay scale of a local economy, but that doesn't help you when you want to buy things priced at a national level: computers, cars, bikes, etc. If you earn $160k/yr, buy a new MacBook Pro isn't a big deal; if you make $60k/yr, you have to put a little more thought into it.
I see this brought up a lot, but these expenses are such a small portion of my outlay that it barely moves the needle. Maybe I'm just weird.
Also, cars do vary across geographical areas. The MSRP may be the same nationally, but the drive-off price is pretty variable.
Don't forget retirement. That's the number one lifetime expense for most people and it's priced at a global level. You reach that point so much faster working in the Bay Area.
What? If you're really saving a bunch for retirement and able to buy a Mac without hesitation, then you are doing well! Cost of living isn't an issue then is it?
If you're really affording all these things then your housing expense is manageable.
But most in these cities are not. At least in NYC it seems to be just trust fund kids who aren't running off debt / paycheck to paycheck living.
You're doing well as long as you're a childfree renter. But no amount of abstinence at the Apple store will put you anywhere near affording homeownership, a bedroom for a child, access to decent schools, etc.
You'd need to put down $50k to mortgage a 3-bedroom house in a good school district normal housing market, or $250k to mortgage a 2-bedroom condo in a distressed urban neighborhood. That $200k gulf is 10 years of maxed-out 401k plus a new top-of-the-line Mac every year. Hardly anyone has that much to cut. But if they did, after 10 years, the gulf in necessary down-payment would be much wider than $200k and they'd still come up short.
That's why people are comfortable entering these situations as new grads (you can have a comfortable life as a young single renter in a small or shared space), but feel a need to leave them eventually (starting a family is basically off the table as long as you live there, and you're always at risk of being priced out if your rent rises faster than your salary).
Student loans can be a big one - your payments are the same no matter where you live, so nominal income matters quite a bit.
Lyman Stone wrote a good piece on this where he speculates that part of the reason Millenials have been clustering in cities is that "Given that student loans have a fixed nominal value, they are often easier to pay off in high-wage, high-cost cities."[1]
If you talk to them, they really do want that. They care a lot less about their properties values than they do about the amount of cars parked on their street and their daily commute times.
You would think that they would simply sell their million-dollar bungalow and move to greener pastures, but that's just not what happens.
I'm noticing similar sentiments among friends in New York City. Everyone came here for jobs/culture/friends after graduating, but the mad-rush of millennials is making the city more and more unlivable. Nobody wants to spend their thirties in a cramped, overpriced studio, but nobody is ready to leave their hip, startup lofts for the drudgery of a Westchester office complex (let alone endure an hour commute into the city every day).
Smaller cities (the Portlands, New Havens, and Columbuses of the country) will continue to inherit the overflow, with those cities that have the lowest cultural cachet taking the lowliest remnants. Given the demand for urban environments by businesses and consumers, it seems like the only thing holding back any city from heavy growth is incompetence or negative reputations.
> but the mad-rush of millennials is making the city more and more unlivable
IMO, the problem is the policies of the city that are unfriendly to growth and make housing a zero sum game, the problem isn't than people expressing their preferences.
It may not be a zero sum game, but it at least approximates/approaches zero sum. How exactly would you change downtown Manhattan such that anyone & everyone who wanted to live there could?
You've drawn a false dichotomy between the current situation and an unrealistic scenario. The truth is there could be more growth and room for more people without it being room for literally everyone.
Right, and that's what I mean by it approximates/approaches zero sum.
I'm not arguing against development, I just think a lot of the pro-development folks imagine that cities are making things zero sum with their policies, when real property will always have that element.
Housing does not inherently have a major zero-sum factor until you're inside one of the densest downtowns in the country. In the general case it's all about policies and whether they allow demand to turn into construction.
> How exactly would you change downtown Manhattan such that anyone & everyone who wanted to live there could?
That's not what we should be striving for. We should be striving to allow people to comfortably live and work outside of just downtown Manhattan. The biggest obstacles to that are zoning laws and a decrepit subway system that makes traveling between boroughs outside of Manhattan practically impossible.
Ok, maybe I was unfairly projecting, a few days ago I was talking to someone who was making basically that argument, that we have the housing technology to fit everyone in <downtown city>. Improved public transit in & out to neighboring nodes is a good goal that partially sidesteps the zero sum nature of property.
About 8 years ago I went to OSCon in Portland and someone told me it was currently employing some ridiculous percentage of all of the construction cranes available.
And about this time three years ago I was standing in an office in downtown Seattle and we could count fourteen cranes. There's still a lot of space for midrise buildings. I'm just not sure transportation is keeping up.
Denver's skyline is littered with somewhere around a dozen too. The west-side of downtown has grown a tremendous amount in just about 3 years. Seems like mostly shoddily-constructed apartment buildings (source: a guy who helped design 4 of them).
But it doesn't inspire much faith in those investing in living in Denver (by say, purchasing a very expensive home) when big capital doesn't see it fit to finance a building meant to last a century. Do they not have confidence that people will still be wanting to pay these same exorbitant rents in 2040?
I keep wondering when the supply of 2k+/month shoddily constructed one bedroom rental apartments will catch up with the demand for them. That may not seem like a lot for the Bay types, but Denver has traditionally been a lot cheaper. The last 5-10 years have seen crazy population and rent growth.
One of the main reasons we moved to Portland 17 years ago was there was almost no traffic, whereas Seattle, where my wife is from, had a ton of traffic. Now Portland has a ton of traffic. I recently read an article in the local newspaper that there used to be certain hours in the morning and afternoon when traffic would be heavy, but other others would have no traffic. But, that is no longer the case. All hours now have heavy traffic. It sucks ;-)
Of course, everytime we go back to Seattle to visit the family we are reminded of what real heavy traffic looks like (though that still isn't anything like what LAs traffic look like where I once got into bumper to bumper traffic at midnight on a Sunday from Anaheim to Santa Clarita - now that is real traffic).
I share the sentiment. I find it likewise amusing that the same crowd that argues that building additional highway capacity won't accomplish anything because it'll just get filled with more cars seems to think that additional housing capacity won't similarly be filled up immediately.
In both cases there are tradeoffs and diminishing returns. We discovered in 1930s New York with the Triborough bridge that highways will always reach a level of equilibrium (i.e. Max peak capacity) and will drive sprawl -- the new trio generation doesn't necessarily improve efficiency. In the case of NYC, it created inefficiency as it pushed the metro area up 75 miles up the Hudson River and at least 50 into Long Island and Jersey.
Housing is boom/bust. Housing booms always attract dumb money and always bust.
> And more people will be able to live there... Isn't that the goal?
The goal is "I want to be able to afford to live here." The only way to really affect prices is to absolutely flood the market with new housing. You can't just do it with a couple hundred units here, a couple hundred units there. Everyone in the world wants to live in SF, remember? They're just going to get snapped up and housing will still be expensive, the only real difference is that there's some more people living there now.
I doubt everyone in the world wants to live in a city with bad transit, unusable public schools and feces everywhere, but if you want to reduce demand you could try and prop up some competitor cities instead.
There's the Downs-Thomson paradox[1], which is usually quoted as adding capacity to highways to the road network will not reduce congestion, and the one I believe you mean. What the paradox actually states is that "the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport." That is, as you add capacity to road networks, you disincentivize people from taking public transport, because the roads are quicker, until the two level out in terms of cost/benefit.
I'm not certain how directly applicable it is to the housing market. Essentially, what is the housing market's "public transport"? I suppose you could argue it's still public transit, since there is a trade-off between the more expensive, but closer housing and the cheaper but farther away public housing. But I'm also in favor (and I think most of the people in the HN SF crowd are) of better public transit in the Bay Area and better housing/zoning policy. (Either would help me and many others: a better public transit network would reduce the need for housing in cities closer & further up the Bay.)
There's also Jevons paradox[2], which says that when "technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand." This is mostly concerned with reducing use of the resource though, and I fully expect that better zoning policy would result in more and cheaper housing, more use of said housing, and more demand — all in line with Jevons paradox, but none of which seems detrimental when compared to the current situation.
In transport, more roads means more capacity to carry traffic, and hence, more induced traffic. The death-spiral effect comes from the fact that each additional car on the road produces far more congestion than its operator alone experiences (negative externalities). True costs aren't born by the operator, so gridlock ensues.
For housing, or rather, urban development generally, the challenge is that denser cities with more inhabitants (generally) give rise to greater opportunity. This is where the action is, for whatever definition of action you have.
I'm not entirely sure what produces the death-spiral of cities pricing themselves out of their own housing markets, as SF is doing, but I'm inclined to think that the general trend of holders of investment assets to seek inflation of those assets' values is a key element. That is, you have a house, you've sunk a lot of money into it, you want its value to increase (hey! free money, right?). This turns into collaterisable assets for loans or other opportunities as well.
There's also the fact that high-value urban real-estate markets make for good options to bank wealth appropriated elsewhere, or for money-laundering. Values are high, tend to remain high, the market is liquid, and urban cores are far more stable for real estate prices than outlying areas. Hence, the housing stock value is bid up further.
Land value tax might help address that. Something I'm looking at. Originally suggested by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, though championed by Henry George.
I wish there was an investment vehicle where you could sell a portion of the equity of your own home for a share of equity in construction projects in your area.
If you're interested in 'real world' emperical and experimental data on under utilized resources due to low rents the economist for eve online has some pretty convincing data based on actual game changes they made.
Basically they had a problem of high value 'factories' being undeveloped since there was only opportunity costs associated with their not producing goods. Government rents were increased such that factories were only profitable for people utilizing them, and they saw a huge increase in total gdp.
That's not quite right. The argument about widening highways leading to more traffic is called "induced demand" and is an accepted concept in traffic engineering and city planning; when you make driving easier or cheaper, people will do more of it because they can. The same person with the same car will use it more of the time, because why not?
That's not quite how housing works. Yes, I suppose there's a broad supply-demand dynamic inasmuch as areas with more affordable house prices tend to see bigger houses and land parcels bought, but still, people don't just use more units of housing stock in response to a slightly less onerous housing crunch. If housing in the SF Bay area suddenly became more attainable, I wouldn't buy 3 apartments just 'cause.
But to be fair, more housing stock in San Francisco could also lead to wealthier tech workers buying crash pads in the city for work during the week while they spend their weekends out at their houses in Silicon Valley, Berkeley, etc.
All of that is certainly true, but given the supply and the pricing, it seems very unlikely that the needle is going to move anywhere near that much? In what other major metropolis in the world do you see people doing that on a mass scale — the kind of mass scale at which it is meaningful to speak of induced demand?
The very wealthy will do it, of course, as they always have, and always will.
> If housing in the SF Bay area suddenly became more attainable, I wouldn't buy 3 apartments just 'cause.
No, but you'd have all those people waiting on the sidelines jumping in immediately. Net result, housing is still expensive (sorta like the highway analogy, we still have tons of traffic after building these lanes).
> If housing in the SF Bay area suddenly became more attainable, I wouldn't buy 3 apartments just 'cause.
But that's equally true of the highways too. If you widen a freeway, I'm not going suddenly commute to and from work an extra 3 times each day just 'cause.
> when you make driving easier or cheaper, people will do more of it because they can.
Not really, not anywhere near the amount people claim. This is a common misconception made by miscounting traffic on freeways past capacity. They mistake failed trips as non-existent ones, and then mistakingly claim "new traffic" was created when failed trips stop failing.
It's like saying "if you make hospitals easier or cheaper, people will get more sick because they can". You could even support that false claim, by measuring patients in hospitals. "We had a 100 bed hospital last year, and it was full. We built a second 100 bed hospital this year, and now it's full too. Clearly building hospitals is a bad idea, because it just makes more sick people".
This obviously isn't true, people were still sick before, they were miscounted because they weren't in the hospital (it was full). Just like how new freeways don't create new traffic, they serve existing traffic that was miscounted before because it wasn't on the freeway (it was full).
> I find it likewise amusing that the same crowd that argues that building additional highway capacity won't accomplish anything because it'll just get filled with more cars seems to think that additional housing capacity won't similarly be filled up immediately.
Yes, this! One thousand times this!
Either additional capacity helps service that need or it doesn't. You can't argue it both ways simultaneously. So many people want to pick and choose where they apply that logic, just to fit their political desires.
These two ideas are inherently contradictory, and it is an constant pet peeve of mine that most people refuse to recognize the contradiction.
When a good is in limited supply, yes, it's trivially true that increasing supply will allow more people to use that good. That is not the same as saying that more supply will drive up demand or prices, merely that more of the existing demand will be met.
The difference between housing and cars-on-the-road is that housing is generally seen as a positive thing that people get real value out of, whereas cars-on-the-road are an unfortunate side effect of people not having housing near where they live. We explicitly want fewer people to drive into our cities; on the contrary we want more people living in housing near where they want to be.
To put it another way, if you really think that building more housing will make things worse, then why not argue for the destruction of existing housing stock to make things better?
Or do you think we're at a peak, where we have built just the right amount of housing and we should just leave it alone? I guess there probably is some amount that's just right for each city, though I have no idea what we'd have to look at to figure out that number.
> To put it another way, if you really think that building more housing will make things worse, then why not argue for the destruction of existing housing stock to make things better?
I don't personally believe that. I think capacity solves shortage needs, consistently. But most don't.
Most people really believe your reasoning is valid, and they advocate for the exact destruction you've mentioned (see "Road Diets" / freeway removal / any article from CNU / etc).
> The difference between housing and cars-on-the-road is that housing is generally seen as a positive thing that people get real value out of, whereas cars-on-the-road are an unfortunate side effect of people not having housing near where they live
I think most people agree with you, but I personally believe this is a very dystopian view. Transportation is an inherently positive thing too, that real people get real value out of. Even if every single human lived right next to their work place, it's still a good thing that people have fast reliable easy freedom of movement in whatever method they prefer.
Even if you live right next to your workplace, your next job won't be. Your spouses job, or next job, won't be. Your parent's home won't be, your children's school won't be. Unless your constantly moving every 2 years, this idea of "transportation is just a bad side effect of not living inside your workplace" doesn't really hold up to regular life, in my opinion.
Building more freeways will deliver transportation to more people. HN thinks this is a bad thing because driving is inherently bad, so facilitating more driving is bad.
Policies are shaped by people and people are motivated by forces. The motivating force in this case is probably money. There are lots of people who make money off real-estate and they're motivated to keep supply down to drive up costs. What better way than by influencing public policy to suit their agenda.
If you try to change city policy to make housing affordable then you're basically declaring war on a very influential portion of the population that has a lot to lose.
Not really, because yuppie employment doesn't move the needle in most places. Pittsburgh is having a real renaissance with a tech scene built around CMU. There are new restaurants where you can get a bone marrow whatever. [But the city is on pace to post another double-digit percentage population loss this decade.]
To this point, the urbanization trend is often overstated because, in the sense that people here use it, it's actually fairly limited. A lot of it is about college educated twenty-somethings moving to a handful of dense urban cores.
Broader urbanization is much less pronounced and, to the degree it's a trend, it's mostly to what a lot of people here would be more inclined to call suburbs than cities.
I've seen quite a few New Yorkers moving Upstate to Western, NY. Rochester has been having quite a renaissance in the last 5-6 years. Especially in the food/cocktail scene. Outside of NYC, it's probably the best in the Northeast as far as I'm concerned. RIT, University of Rochester, and other top schools. Easy commutes, short rush hours, Fingerlakes, Great Lakes. There's multiple festivals nearly every week during the summer months. The Public Market is the second oldest in the entire country, and amazing. Far, and away the best grocery chain in the country (Wegmans). Also recently received $600 million in funds for photonics research.
Also cost of living is LOW, any decent wage here, especially in tech. You'll live like a king.
Everyone I know who has moved upstate has done it because they can work remotely as a software engineer, and they are either from there, or just like the quality of life / cost of living balance. So, I would say the availability of remote work rather than industry.
There's obviously a significant sample bias in the above.
A lot of research has come here, especially with University of Rochester, and RIT getting a research program. UofR is a HUGE employer, Paychex, Rochester General Health, Wegmans, and like I said previously the food, and drink scene has just exploded. There are quite a few restaurateurs, chefs , and bartenders that have moved upstate from downstate. I'm directly involved with that stuff, so I hear/eat/drink quite a bit.
I went to RIT and Rochester is definitely a city trying to recreate itself, but it runs into the same problem that most every other north eastern city outside of NYC and Boston do. The weather sucks 6-8 months a year and there's not enough there to make up for that fact. I think it's a much more attractive option for families because it's so cheap and the schools are good. Still I think for a lot of personality types the lack of nightlife and comparatively small demo of post grad but pre middle aged people (what do we even call that age range) kills it.
Anecdotal obviously but after graduation everyone I know left, and those who couldn't still mostly want to. And to me that's the difference between say a city like Philly that's growing because people want to stay there after graduating.
Regarding the nightlife, that has done a total 180 in the last five years. Seriously, if you're into killer craft cocktails, seasonal farm to market type food. It's here, in droves. Yes, the weather sucks sometimes, but welcome to the Northeast. I'll take seasons over the same day over, and over.
I still wouldn't classify the nightlife as great. There is a lot for the college scene but Rochester is really missing that in between stage. I'd say even Buffalo's nightlife is better. And it helps that stuff is open til 4 there.
Side note Rochester is the same day over and over. And that day is cold, dreary and probably snowing. The 4-5 months of Spring/Summer/Fall though is amazing though.
Venture out past East and Alexander then. There is TONS of nightlife for adults. Revelry, Nosh, Cure, Branca, Cub Room, Lento, Roux, Nox, Goodluck, Daily Refresher, Lux, and the general park ave area are all a good start. Buffalo's college scene is MUCH bigger.
4-5 months of amazing is fine with me, spend the rest working on projects, and making money.
I live in the SE and from the opposite end it's not that great. A/C bill is high and only getting higher. And some days the trip outside leaves you drenched in sweat. Our "good" weather is really only from Nov-March and then it's a humid inferno.
I have a few friends that are looking to move north. Georgia seems to be absorbing a lot of Florida residents.
I'll second the endorsement of Rochester. The quality of life for the cost can't be beat. I have (affordable) gigabit fiber running to my house thanks to a local ISP. Rochester punches above its weight for culture, thanks to the philanthropic history of Eastman, Bausch & Lomb, etc. The orchestra is world-class and affordable, and the music scene in general is quite good, perhaps owing to the Eastman School of Music at UofR, which alternates with Juilliard as one of the best conservatories in the country. Geva, the local stage theater is enjoyable, and the independent movie theater, The Little is great ($3 student tickets, anyone?), and there are fun museums. It takes 20 minutes to drive anywhere. But you can bike if you don't want to drive, most of the year. Housing is actually affordable. Imagine beautiful Victorian homes for <$250k, or even <$150k. I rented a single room in the Boston area last year, and the cost for a month was 150% of my monthly mortgage in Rochester for 10% of the space. The UofR Medical Center is a heavyweight research hospital.
Rochester and Monroe County have an amazing system of public parks and green space, and they're always well-kept. If you golf, there are many nice public courses. Bike trails abound for transit, and you can hop on the Erie Canal towpath trail and ride from Buffalo to Albany. Irondequoit Bay has sailing, and people row on the Erie canal and Genesee river. Club sports take advantage of the parks. Parks nearby have hiking, though not tall mountains.
The Public Market is an amazing resource as you mention. Vendors at "farmers' markets" in big cities have realized they can charge inflated yuppie prices, while the Public Market has farmers from the local area selling directly at wholesale rates, as well as third-party vendors selling overstock/ugly produce from local supermarkets. Wegmans is the best, for consumers and their employees.
The Rochester city government is (mostly) functional and well-meaning, and citizens generally have a sense of civic pride and interest in their communities. The tax base is not what it once was, but the city makes the most of what it can, with new experimental initiatives and impeccable maintenance of public services. Rochester weathered the recession well.
A downside is of course the grey skys of winter, but that is counterbalanced by four distinct seasons with a beautiful summer. When I lived in California I missed having four seasons.
It's a fairly future-proof place to live; Western NY is not prone to natural disasters like earthquakes, droughts, wildfires, volcanos, tornados, or hurricanes. Most areas are high enough where flooding is not a concern. Climate change will have less of an impact than many other areas. Blizzards are likely the most probable "natural disaster", but you can wait them out: snow melts.
If VCs were willing to take more risk, they could bankroll startups in cheaper areas like Rochester and spread their resources across larger portfolios.
Buffalo is having a similar resurgence, or so I've heard. Western NY is cheap enough to take risks, and people are. New restaurants; cocktail joints; art, dance, meditation, and yoga studios are opening all the time. Startups could be next; take a look at Rochester for your next company and lower your burn rate.
That's a good point about the VC money, and I wish there were more looking this way. There is a relatively decent sized tech culture, having regular meetups, sharing what we're all working on. With the cost of living, and access to RIT/UoR grads, it would encourage more people to make this a tech base in the Northeast. It wouldn't take more than a few higher profile companies, to get the ball really rolling. People are looking for excuses to get out of the overpriced city grind.
I could never understand why Poughkeepsie isn't thriving as a tech hub. You've got IBM hiring & firing employees in droves, good universities nearby, and NYC as a client/talent pool. I can only assume government incompetence or shortsightedness.
The growth in tech over the past decade had some clear winners, but any city that is just mobilizing now is entering a crowded pool. Anyone thinking ahead should consider how remote work will change businesses in 5 - 10 years, and start planning from there (schmooze freelancers instead of VCs and prepare legislation that would benefit the employee, rather than the business).
Most of NY state is amazing, beautiful, great outdoors and scenery, lakes, rivers, tons of nice little towns and smaller cities. And aside from NYC, it's also dirt cheap.
You're pretty much describing how Manhattan has been for many decades. New grads go into finance and they just have to live where the action is. Fast forward a few years and the vast majority of them take jobs elsewhere or move out to the burbs.
> but nobody is ready to leave their hip, startup lofts for the drudgery of a Westchester office complex (let alone endure an hour commute into the city every day)
I live in New York City, and I can certainly empathize with the no one wanting to do endure a long daily commute in a crowed, cramped, subway full of people where you likely might not get a seat. (LIRR/MNR/NJT are great in comparison (but terrible in frequency).)
But I dissent on your comment on living and working in Westchester (or really any suburbia in general). I understand people think the city is hip and all, but I really like greenery, nature, having a lot of space, being able to get to places in the comfort of your car, reasonable/low cost to own a home, generally low cost of living, the lack of noise, clean air, etc, etc. What's so dull about it?
I'm not familiar with Westchester specifically but, to me, suburbia isn't good for any of those things you mentioned. To me suburbia feels like a giant mass produced parking lot and is an incredibly depressing display of concrete! Nature is nowhere to be found in the suburbs. The real estate is very expensive in desirable suburbs and traffic is still bad in the suburbs, just bad in a different way than in a bigger city.
Right now I live in what I guess would be described as a town. Its ~100 miles from any major urban area and it's much more effective at providing the majority of the things you mentioned plus amazingly short commute times! It also has some sorts of benefits you would associate with the city as well - for example, I can walk to at least 10 establishments as well as 2 parks whereas when I lived in a suburb the street I lived off of was 4 lanes 45 MPH and didn't even have a sidewalk. Even if it did have a sidewalk the noise of a mass of neverending SUVs buzzing past is unpleasant.
You would also have no problem driving almost everywhere in a smaller city.
I think you're describing the difference between a suburban town vs. a suburban bedroom community. The latter usually lacks services and amenities [1] or a real sense of community, so on the weekends you're forced to commute just to get a good meal.
Luckily both exist -- often times the sweet spot is to live near downtown + transit of a smaller town. Then you get a faster commute, some walkability, and the option to do things in town as well.
IDK, I would not, personally, consider my town in any way suburban. It's European "founding" predates the American revolution and the vast majority of the construction in the town center is pre war and it's nowhere near any major or even minor urban area.
My opinion on suburbia that I stated was based on what would be "suburban town" moreso than a "suburban bedroom community." I've never lived in the latter.
I know it's just my opinion though, I know some people like suburbia but smallish towns like mine are better at providing greenery, nature, and a low cost of living plus a pleasant environment. To me suburbs are the opposite of that. (Getting to the airport is a giant pain in the ass though...)
Pretty much the first thing I did when I moved here was take a walk!
That is not how Westchester is. I would love to live in Westchester or Hudson Valley towns. The problem is due to shitty trains, the commutes are far too long.
Look at a town like Beacon NY. Beautiful place with ridiculously cheap real estate.
If we had high speed trains we could link these cities to NYC for daily commuting and it would pay for itself with increased property values.
There's so much value being lost and inconvenience beared by us because of shitty government.
High speed trains only reach high speeds because they don't stop. They're not high acceleration and deceleration trains. MNR has too many stops (and curves, but setting that aside) for high speed to matter.
Of course, you can run them express, but then they probably wouldn't stop in small towns like Beacon or Cold Spring. Amtrak is basically this on the New Haven line, how many people actually take it to commute?
It would be nice to see the visualization of the inflow-outflow: the people eagerly coming in to the city, then then gradual spreading out to adjacent metro areas as the city gets more crowded and unlivable. This style of growth would probably benefit from efficient, affordable, convenient transit options, like the high-speed rail teasers that pop-up every now and then in the news about connecting the east coast's major cities.
Taking hints from the likes of Japan to support this growth; and other examples and ideas would be cool for discussion here as a solution to this metro-area-growth.
True facts, I just moved to Westchester after living in NYC for almost 20 years. An opportunity came to buy a lovely house overlooking the Hudson and I leapt at it. Brooklyn really had started to grate on me even though I was used to the "lifestyle" of living in New York.
What is wrong with westchester? It doesn't smell as bad, you can get a place for the same price as nyc with 4x the space and you're only a 1 hr drive away if you don't try to go during rush hours.
A big problem I see with going to westchester to nyc is the parking costs in nyc. Like $50/day is wayyyyyyyy too high to be sustainable. And the trains are just too slow, it is faster to drive from where I am in westchester than take the train.
I meant the Westchester comment as a bit tongue-in-cheek. More of the stereotypical opinion among my generation, rather than my own opinion. I'm actually shopping around in the Hudson Valley with my fiance atm.
Regardless, the "corporate campus" will need to go through a reimagining if it wants to appeal to city-weary knowledge workers. This will require some more lateral thinking beyond replicating Facebook's Headquarters in White Plains, NY.
> Nobody wants to spend their thirties in a cramped, overpriced studio, but nobody is ready to leave their hip, startup lofts
Well I think this is it. I was born in New York City, and while it may be more expensive than some town in the Midwest, the housing problem is not like it is in San Francisco. On the other hand, if you insist on living in Greenwich Village or Williamsburg then you will have to pay. If you're OK with living in a slightly older, not super exciting, middle class neighborhood that has a half hour commute to the city, then you have plenty of affordable options. Another thing about New York affordability is rent in some towns in the Midwest is cheaper but you need a car, in New York City you can get around pretty well without a car.
Also a commute into Manhattan does not have to be an hour. You can make a map of the rent prices of apartments in boring but decent neighborhoods that are within 10 minutes commute of Manhattan, then 20 minutes, then 30. Plenty of options. For myself, I can walk out my door and in less than thirty minutes walk out of a train in Penn Station. I used to live in another part of the city and my apartment door to office desk commute was less than 30 minutes.
It's probably in one's interest to be an early adopter in the tech migration (or wait for a collapse) unless you win the IPO lottery. You can get something nicer closer to work in a trendy area before prices go through the roof.
This is just the normal migration pattern. Once you have kids and get married, the advantages of living in a big city start to go away.
Those fun bars and restaurant become generators of noise and parking problems. The fun diverse neighborhood translates into a school district where the legacy of desegregations means your kid will be dragged across the city for school. The list goes on.
NYC is a pretty terrible city to live in by first world standards unless you're wealthy. Crappy shoeboxes in tenement buildings that used to house servants go for outrageous prices, overcramped, awful subway (though Americans think it's amazing because they're not used to big cities that don't require a car). People put up with it because of the jobs, the people, the cosmopolitan nature of it, not needing a car, and because there aren't any comparable cities in the U.S. in terms of size, density, and significance. Millennials don't seem to be as fond as suburbs as the boomers (I personally hate suburbs).
NYC used to be a city where artists and writers could live, but it's become a city of trust fund kids, corporate shmucks, and tourists. Everybody works all the time - not because they're working on groundbreaking stuff - but to make a buck.
Personally my plan is to work remotely and go somewhere else, most likely outside the country because nothing in the car-obsessed suburban sprawl-infested U.S. compels me.
Mostly true, but they have built new highrise towers in Brooklyn. I am probably living in the most convenient building in the US right now, with lots of amenities in a very comfortable 1bdrm. The problem is it's still $3400/mo+ and all the buildings are rentals, no buying, and most of all this is not sustainable for us as a couple who plan to have kids so we have to jump ship.
It's also very true that so many Americans are willing to put up with NYC because there's not many other options for proper cities in the US. The public transportation sucks and there's now a divide where everyone I know seems to be grabbing Uber to work which is totally ridiculous and irresponsible.
I would guess that one of the big reasons that there are a "mad-rush of millennials" into select cities is that most of the ambitious, type-A personalities used to try and pick a mate in the high density environment of a selective university. That is not nearly as common now but un-paired people still want/need a high density of potential mates that meet their minimum standards. Choosing what happening city to move to after college is now much more important instead of getting a job(s) and moving directly to a home selected for raising the kids.
The Bay Area is only a place of permanence for those lucky enough to buy a house. For the rest of us, it's a place to get fantastic work experience and awesome pay.
Even if you're paying $2k to rent a studio, if your take-home pay goes from $500 to $1500 you're coming out way ahead dealing with the headaches of living here. But you need to move away to truly realize those gains.
Not to mention there are plenty of companies out here who are okay with their employees working remotely, so if you can make a 6 figure salary in a place with more arts and culture and where rent is $1500 for a luxury one bedroom downtown instead of $4500, then it's clear what the better choice would be. Also you'd be stupidly lucky to pay only $2K for a decent studio, personally I pay $2600 and that was a steal for the location (not getting stabbed at night, no homeless tents, close to MUNI), and amenities (washer/dryer).
And then there's roommates... I used to pay $600 a month for an SF house, and did this by having 2 roommates and a live-in girlfriend. Saved enough for a house. Much comes down to delayed gratification.
And then there's the ability to sleep at night without your roommate having a conversation next your door at 2 AM, a different set of roommates that expected only you to take out the trash, another roommate that blasted tv next to your door at 2 AM, having to switch out a good roommate with someone who might also be terrible when they leave, not having your own space to work and focus on the job and hobbies, etc. etc. There is no delayed gratification when there is nothing to work towards to as you slowly go insane living with people who have no idea what it means to be "quiet" at night nor have a basic level of accountability/self-awareness, even if they say they do.
Right. I work remote for an SF startup and I live on the beach in southern California. Literally in a house on the beach, five minutes walk to the little beachtown downtown area with bars and restaurants. And I pay a hell of a lot less than I paid when I lived in SF.
I would take this survey with a heavy grain of salt. From the article
"The two-question survey (“Do you plan on settling down in another city?” and “What’s your biggest reason for leaving?”) covered 24,000 respondents nationwide."
If I was living in SF and someone asked me "Do you plan on settling down in another city?" - my answer would be yes, somewhere in the Bay Area suburb like Palo Alto. I think very few people are looking to "settle" in SF.
I think the key question I don't see answered here is "When?"
Most people want to move at some point and often do for jobs, kids, spouse's job, etc. But whether this is impending (this year) or "an acknowledged desire" is a big difference.
I have lived here since 2010, so somewhat early in the current bubble. I am lucky enough to rent a place that's fairly large (most of a house) but also rent controlled, so I can afford to live here. If my landlord sold the house and I had to find a new place, I'd have to leave. So: plan to leave? Probably. Want to? Nope. I love the outer sunset. I just foresee a time when I won't be able to afford to live here anymore.
Too expensive, too crowded, too stifling, and nowadays sometimes even too bland.
Without roots in the city, there doesn't seem to be much to recommend it these days besides the weather and the massive, insane availability of liquid capital compared to the extensive dearth in other markets. But as long as the money is there, and other sources of investment capital remain locked away, that's not a bad recommendation.
SV VCs may be getting more cautious, but investors in other markets don't seem particularly eager to loosen the purse strings. So they may say they plan to leave, but I just finished a comic fantasy novel called 'Thud!', and this (lightly edited) passage comes to mind:
-
"I'd wonder...you know, if I were a king...I'd wonder why people were happier living in squalor in [the city] than staying back home. ...
"There's dwarf bars all over, and they've got mining tools wired to the wall, and there's dwarfs in 'em every night quaffing beer and singing sad songs about how they wish they were back in the mountains digging for gold. But if you said to them fine, the gate's open, off you go and send us a postcard, they'd say, 'Oh, well, yeah, I'd love to, but we've just got the new workshop finished...maybe NEXT year we'll go back home.'"
It does make a sort of sense - VCs in the bay area seem to congregate there because software companies can promise (if things go just right) stratospheric return rates. Those glitzy home-runs can fund a lot of flops, and the investors still win out.
If you want to make something physical, you can't hand-wave and make wild assumptions about growth rates and user acquisition and ARPUs. You have a Bill of Materials, distribution costs, a slim margin, and rapid competition from cheaper and often outright dangerous knock-offs with little recourse. Look what happened with hoverboards.
So in a market that is as jaw-droppingly risk averse as this, but people still want to grow their huge hoards of capital, the money takes the path of least resistance and follows the only available market that can theoretically produce an exponential growth curve more than once every few decades.
High Speed Rail helps fix this issue. You can live an hour out of the city, where housing prices are much lower and the schools can be much better and then commute via HSR to the city. Unfortunately, there are too many short term voters and residents in California to see the vision of high speed public transportation to solve many of the housing ills that plague this state.
Even if all the municipalities suddenly jumped on board, even in the best case high-speed rail is a decade and a half off. It isn't a realistic solution.
SF to Gilroy could be done in under a decade, which then would be connected to LA once that track was done.
California is messing up the HSR project by not getting SF to Gilroy and LA to San Diego completed first. Sacramento to Nowhere is a PR blunder for the state.
It's because that's the only places where they can actually build. The peninsula is full of millionaires that hate the idea of HSR. ("But I don't it at grade!" "But I don't want it in the air!" "But I don't want it in a trench!" "But I don't in a tunnel!" "It's all moving so fast!" "Can we put an HSR to stop every 2 miles?")
The BART extension to San Jose was first voter approved in 2000. Many years and bonds later it's closer but a San Jose BART station still does not exist.
I'm not sure CA could do SF to Oakland by HSR in a decade.
It is not a realistic short-term solution, but maybe a good long term move? Your comment makes it sound like it isn't a reasonable investment at all because it won't return in the desired timeframe.
The only reason it could not be realistic is that California is politically dysfunctional and unable to solve problems. Nearly every other industrialized country has a rail system that connects cities and helps commuters. It is totally possible to accomplish.
In addition to the long timeframe, HSR is also mostly not a commuter solution even in places like Japan. And commuter rail is already a thing in many places and widely used (including the Bay Area). I live about 40 miles west of Boston and I can get into the city by rail today in about 90 minutes.
I can't say I've really looked at housing prices in the area for a long time, but my sense is that they've been relatively stable. Trulia says the median price for sales in Fitchburg is something like $180K. (I expect some of the surrounding more rural communities like mine are higher.)
It's one big difference between Boston/Cambridge and some other places like the Bay Area. You can get away from some of tthe really high real estate prices relatively quickly and a lot of the tech jobs aren't even in the city anyway.
I was being facetious though I fully expect Fithburg to turn into Cambridge within my lifetime.
There's not much to be gained by living in Fitchburg. The real benefit is that a commute from somewhere rural to a train station in Fitchburg (or the "end of the line" for some other city train system) is painless.
I sort of thought you might be :-) No, for me, the reason to live out here is to be more or less rural (certainly exurb). It would be barely tenable as a daily compute into Boston (though I did a sometimes commute for a year) but works for the 495-belt companies.
I guess it's just a function of overall population but it's nonetheless interesting that while Boston/Cambridge have indeed gotten very expensive, there's a lot of pretty reasonably-priced housing not all that far out.
I don't know. I work with someone who recently sold their house in Leominster (next to Fitchburg for those not from the area). He said there had been very little appreciation over a long timeline.
ADDED: The problem when these old small New England manufacturing cities gentrify is that you end up with a dozen square blocks of upscale and the rest is like it's been for decades. I worked in downtown Nashua for a long time and it was like that. Which, for me, makes it get boring quickly.
I meant more along the lines of NIMBYism (which should really be NIYBYism since it's about what other people do on their property).
I guess caring about your neighbor's politics is just NIMBYism of the mind.
It's kind of a catch22 since wanting to live in a community where people don't care if your opinions are different or if you want to raise rabbits for food makes you one of the people who cares about what other people care about
Alright, since this is not the first time I see this: what the deal about people from Austin trying to shoo people away? As if Austin was really that great and everybody wanted to come there? And isn't it the case that the more tech people go live in the Austin, the better the tech scene and thus benefit tech people like you (I assume you're in tech)?
I had lived in the Bay Area, moved to Austin just to move to another place within a year. Austin has many nice things, but definitely not one of the top US cities I would consider building a family in. I can list out tons of things about Austin that would be deal breakers for many people and there are better cities out there in many aspects.
I'm truly puzzled by this sentiment from Austin people.
Most people came from CA are too liberal that is out of touch with reality, they ruined CA then came to TX for its next victim. I suggest them moving to North Korea directly instead. Without them Austin will be a much better place for sane people.
I can not wait for CA to become independent from the states.
Not a lot of reasons to stay if you will never own a home here. Stay in the bay so you can pay someones mortgage for the rest of your life or share an apartment? Meanwhile the cost of a shared room is more than people are paying for a mortgage in other areas not too far from here.
If you grew up here, you'd like to stay here or start a company here, please get involved politically in electing candidates and pushing for policies that help lower the price of housing.
- AB 71 would raise $300 million a year for affordable housing, call your CA Assemblymember.
- SB 35 would take power from local NIMBY's for projects that meet affordable housing targets. Call your CA Assemblymember.
- Email baylands@ci.brisbane.ca.us and ask them to build 4400 units of housing on the Baylands, just south of San Francisco. They are waffling but the local residents want to build an office park.
- Email your C level employees and VC's and tell them about your struggles to continue staying here, afford a babysitter or find a good school, and ask them to get involved in developing better housing policy for the Bay Area.
How will more housing do anything other than make the traffic congestion even worse? More people will move here, prices will be close to the same, and traffic will be way worse. More VCs need to start supporting the idea of satellite offices and remote cultures for anything more than a dent to be made.
Traffic congestion mainly exists when people don't live close to work. By building more housing all over the Bay Area, people will be more able to live close to work and thus reduce congestion.
Not having enough housing forces people to commute from further out, which adds congestion all along their path.
> AB 71 would raise $300 million a year for affordable housing, call your CA Assemblymember.
This is just an indirect subsidy of Facebook, Google, etc. By providing low income housing and food assistance to low income workers in high cost of living cities, it simply allows the well to do companies to continue not paying a living wage that corresponds to the situation that they've created by concentrating their businesses in the same area.
But the large salaries that they pay their employees pushes up the cost of living. Those employees then patronize businesses in the area. If those businesses are not traditionally high wage occupations, government aid is simply providing the high income earners the opportunity to pay the same price for a deli sandwich or an oil change as someone from Fremont. The more free market expectation would be that those low wage employees would be pushed out of the area and the businesses go under, or the businesses raise prices and pay their employees more.
In the same sense that funding the NHS is an indirect subsidy of Barclays, Rolls-Royce, BAE, Dyson, and Skyscanner. By providing free healthcare to folks living in Britain, it simply allows those well to do companies to continue not providing comprehensive health insurance to their employees.
Any political body that tries to foster the growth of high-paying jobs in an area should also put in place policies so that there is at least 1 bed for every desk. More if they want to allow children, retirees, and manual laborers to live there.
Right on -- we need more supply and local activism seems to be the only way to make that happen.
NIMBYism cuts supply because existing homes are worth more when there are fewer new homes available. Any economically rational homeowner would want that (even though it sucks for everyone else).
Demand is high because people have gotten rich! Google and Facebook stock prices have increased over 2x in nearly 2 years. That probably made a $1M+ for a few THOUSAND people. Then extrapolate all the other big exits or stock growth in time period... unreal wealth creation for many people. Demand isn't going anywhere. It's a supply issue.
The problem with the supply of Bay Area housing isn't that there's not enough money involved. Adding more money to the situation will just make costs go higher. It's like healthcare or education.
The problem is that big tech companies have practically unlimited money at their disposal, but are surrounded by communities that like their low density housing, open space lifestyle, think the traffic is terrible already, and aren't really interested in giving it up for any amount of money.
The reason the big tech companies are there is because these communities are really nice and venture capital people, CEOs and top engineers want to live in these nice neighborhoods. If it was just a cost issue, they'd be located in Fresno.
Of course real estate developers are hungry to build new rental apartments because the rents are so high and frame it as some sort of populist issue. It's really just rich people vs other rich people. There is no way they're ever going to build enough for prices to come down. Every tech company would move their entire workforce here if they could do so affordably.
The best solution, IMHO, is to improve public transit, which would have all other sorts of beneficial side effects. The downside is that it would bring poor people into the area which would cause quality of life issues as far as the existing residents are concerned.
> are surrounded by communities that like their low density housing
This is changing; Facebook is sponsoring 1500 units, 300 affordable, in Menlo Park, Mountain View also becoming more welcoming of new housing, they recently approved 10,000 units in the North Bayshore area. Cupertino (where Apple is located) continues to distinguish itself in a bad way; they approved 11,000 new office spaces for Apple without any corresponding increase in housing, and routinely send people to San Jose city council meetings in an attempt to block housing on San Jose land.
> The best solution, IMHO, is to improve public transit
Again, there are promising developments here. Facebook sponsored a Dumbarton Corridor study, and all of the tech companies are throwing their money behind a new bridge tax ballot measure that would raise money for public transit. http://www.greencaltrain.com/2017/08/dumbarton-corridor-stud...
Wouldn't we be needing something more like 1 Million new units to fully satisfy demand for housing and bring prices back to levels similar to the rest of the USA?
A 30x30 grid of 100 story residential towers with 10 apartments per floor would nicely solve your issue...
There are only ~20 buildings of 100+ stories in the world. The tallest building in the Bay Area is the Salesforce Tower at 61 stories, and there are only ~50 buildings in SF that hit 400 feet, which is about 1/3 the height required to hit 100 stories. *All stats from wikipedia
So in theory they would solve the issue, it's just that your solution dwarfs the number of humanity's 100 story buildings by a factor of almost 50.
The problem is that there is not enough supply to meet demand, and it's politically trendy to blame demand. Squeezing supply is a surefire way to make sure only Google engineers can afford apartments, and that's a bad thing, but the typical anti-housing activist doesn't think this far ahead. They want to blame wealthy tech people for everything, but don't understand they're creating a world where only wealthy tech people can compete with existing property owners for housing.
Increased supply would boost the American economy and make everyone happy except the NIMBYs. But the NIMBYs have the political power.
Those are all really nice things for the Bay itself, but they aren't the way to fix things, they are just band-aids.
If you really wan't to fix it, call your legislator and tell them to get rid of Prop 13. It's not commonly known for transplants to the Bay, but property taxes only get re-assessed upon sale of the property in California. They do not get reassessed every 5 years or so, like in most states (read the wiki article for more info, and yes, what I said is not exactly true, things get complicated very quickly, but I think the gist of what I said was true)
My folks in the East Bay paid ~70k for the house in about 1970. Their monthly taxes are under $200 and they paid off the mortgage a few decades ago. Their new neighbors paid ~1 million for the exact same 3 bed/1 bath but just filled with black mold. We estimate they pay ~2.5k/month in taxes, let alone the mortgage (likely ~6.5k/month total with electricity, water, sewer, etc. every month, for the rest of their lives).
I agree, it's just that there isn't any immediate action you can take to get Prop 13 reform, whereas each of the things above is something concrete you can do right now to help the issue. If and when we get a Prop 13 ballot issue then yeah, I'll do a big call to action on it.
I think you see now why things are so crazy in the CA property market then. For a few years after the repeal, you'd be kicking a LOT of older home-owners out of their homes. My folks, likely, included.
However, what is the alternative? My siblings and I moved out of state a long time ago, due specifically to the housing issues. Most of my former HS classmates do not own homes in CA. They simply cannot afford it. Prop 13 'ate the seed-corn' of California youth's property aspirations. We simply cannot afford to own homes.
This is why I said that GP's ideas were only band-aids. The giant elephant in the room in CA housing discussions is Prop 13, something that is abhorrent to continue on with and something that cannot possibly be removed now.
CA will have to remove it someday, to give the youth any hope at reasonably 'owning' California, and everyday that it does not, things will get worse for when they do remove it. It's a quagmire, but it is the thing to talk about, not higher density band-aids.
Sure you can. Maybe not in LA, Palo Alto, or SF, but somewhere in California. I mean just how affordable do you think housing would get on the peninsula without Prop 13? $300K starter homes? Surely you jest. Manhattan doesn't have a Prop 13, still pretty expensive last I checked.
Everyone is moving to the area, and any additional supply is going to get snapped up instantly. And the issue of "grandma getting kicked out of her home" will always loom large in such a desirable and expensive part of the country, it's not something that would just happen in the aftermath of a repeal. I mean that was the driving force behind Prop 13 in the first place.
Let me give a clear example of why repealing Prop 13 would be a bad idea: my Mom.
My Mom has a fixed income and owns her home. Plenty of savings for retirement like a responsible person. My Dad retired in 1986. This is in Fremont, California. Since then, prices have skyrocketed. In your example, she would have to pay $30K/year in taxes.
So here's the problem: how do you plan for retirement if reassessments are a thing? Depending on luck, you may live for 40 years or more past retirement. Must one move away from family that serves as a support system?
Some states do reassess, but recognize that that is a policy choice. California has made a choice which results in predictable tax consequences which can be planned for. It's not a perfect policy choice, but it is a legitimate choice that results in predictable outcomes.
One way to handle this would be with a reverse mortgage. Effectively, the $30k/y of taxes are counted against the value of the home when it's sold. Since the home has gotten enormously more valuable (which is why the taxes would be higher) the homeowner still comes out very much ahead.
One solution is to sell your home and rent. You'd be a millionaire renter, and a lot of renters would want to trade places with you.
Another solution would be to design the reform bill to grandfather in people who have lived in their homes for some long amount of time, or are above a certain age, or whatever.
In some sense, though, the way we are using land is currently very inefficient and improvements necessarily mean changing how we use the land.
If people had "skin in the game" with regards to the housing market you'd see a lot more people out ensuring an adequate supply of houses are constructed. Instead, you have large amounts of people living off of Prop. 13 and rent control "subsidies" who are actively opposing new housing construction. We need to slowly phase out these "subsidies" to ensure that people making the policy decisions also live with the consequences (whether they be positive or negative). There are many other metro areas in the U.S. that don't have Prop. 13-style controls or rent control, and have a much larger supply of affordable houses.
What about your own nuclear family, your children?
The younger/new home-owners of CA are subsidizing your mother's housing costs, not the other way around. I'm happy that my folks are happy and healthy, and I know if they paid more taxes, they'd be in Reno or Phoenix.
But the couple next door to them? She's a teacher and he's a recruiter for some tech-firm in SF. He drives 2 hours each way, 4 a day, to get into SF each morning and then out again. We think her parents are helping out with the costs, there is almost no other way they can make those payments. Their little boy can't see his dad most of the days of the week, and when he does, it's after 2 hours of traffic. That's 2 families, one working full time and one retired (we assume, so heavy caveats here) that are now required to make ends meet for one little boy. How the hell are they gonna pay for his college? Will that boy know his father at all? What happens when Daddy gets laid off? Are they going to continue to be my folk's neighbors? Where are they going to go then?
Prop 13 is taxing the younger/newer homeowners for the benefit of the older homeowners. Many of these younger/newer people can't make the payments, not even close. So they need help from their own parents who are benefiting from the tax structure. This assumes that those parents are alive themselves, willing to help, and can help at all. Not all younger couples have that; it shouldn't be a requirement.
I'm saying that you should just let the market decide how these taxes are allocated, it seems to work pretty well for nearly every other state in this country.
Yes, it would be chaos for a few years. No doubt, my own folks would be forced to move. Just nuts all around. But every day that Prop 13 continues, it gets worse and worse for the youth of California and for their children too. Via Prop 13, California is directly hurting it's sons and daughters futures and therefore it's own. California is eating it's seed corn.
Holy selection bias, batman. The data is taken from an Internet survey by ApartmentList. Why would you ever go on ApartmentList? Because you're looking for a new apartment. Why would you go on ApartmentList particularly, vs. a more common rental site like Craigslist? Because it's organized by city - the front page has glossy photos of major metropolitan areas - and so you can easily browse through other cities without knowing much about what neighborhoods exist in that city.
Title should be "83 percent of ApartmentList visitors in the Bay Area plan to leave". While anecdotally I know a lot of people that are considering moving away, it's nowhere close to 83 percent, and the way the data was collected for this PR piece doesn't support that conclusion either.
Craigslist is organized primarily by neighborhood: if you go to sfbay.craigslist.com and visit apts/housing, the first level filter is by region (east bay, north bay, SF, peninsula, etc), and then before you even get to the type of housing, the next-level filter is by neighborhood (Mission, Potrero, Sunset, etc.) These regional filters are virtually useless for someone moving out of state; if I go to portland.craigslist.com and the top-level filters are clark/clackamas/multnomah/etc, I have no idea what these even mean. Even getting to another metro area's Craigslist is a challenge; if I hit www.craigslist.com, it defaults to sfbay.craigslist.com, and to go elsewhere requires finding the tiny "other US cities" link on the front page (the default is "Nearby", which gives other California cities) and selecting a metro area.
All this facilitates within-region moves at the expense of between-region moves.
If I go to ApartmentList.com, it defaults to San Francisco, but right underneath the three local metro areas (ironically, it doesn't have San Jose, where I am) are glossy photographs of Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Chicago, and 12 other metro areas. And if I click on one of them, the first filters that come up are by price, size, and amenities. Everything is located on a map, and I don't need to know anything about local neighborhoods.
ApartmentList is clearly using "people who are looking to move between cities" as their market segmentation and features for them as a differentiator, which is great, but also means that their data is suspect if generalized to the population as a whole.
(As for anecdata; I'd say that among my friends and acquaintances close enough to keep tabs on their life, maybe 50% are looking to move out of the Bay Area at some point, including myself & my wife. But only three - out of a sample size of several dozen, perhaps close to a hundred - have actually done it, and two of those moved back to their hometown to be close to family when kids arrived. Moving cities is a big commitment; people dream of it, but few do it.)
> Back in March, some 40 percent of locals responded to an annual phone survey saying they want to live elsewhere. But that was a survey of all residents, not just renters alone.
an annual phone survey saying they want to live elsewhere
If you were to ask me if I'd rather live elsewhere, in absolute terms, according to the purest form of truth, the answer is Yes. That question, taken as a bald query, with no specifically enforced context is often true for many, if not most, people. I would prefer to live in Shangri-la, or perhaps any tropical paradise, if possible.
Does that mean I want to live elsewhere within the intended interpretation for the context of that particular survey?
This smacks of the folk threatening to move to Canada every time a Republican president gets elected (although with this particular one, they may really be onto something). If the Bay area's hold were this fragile, it wouldn't have got this way to begin with. Clearly, living within driving distance of 90% of the world's tech giants outweighs a great many other considerations, despite the rent pressure cooker.
Disclaimer: don't live in the Bay Area and don't plan to, so have no dog in this fight.
I moved out to the bay area five years ago. Mostly, because I'm a nerd and wanted to be around other like-minded nerds and fulfill my nerd dreams.
Fast forward to today. I've worked at startups, big tech, and generally have lived that tech life. I see my friends back in Ohio taking vacations, buying homes, and generally having a nice life. And I see myself here, paying more and more rent each year, working in the high stress of startups and in the tech scene as my own passion for the actual tech slowly wanes. Sure, I make a lot of money and I have a fancy job but money and prestige, I've learned, isn't everything. If you're pissing all that money away with no end in sight, except to become fabulously wealthy in some kind of exit that likely won't ever happen, you start to question your original motives.
At this point I have decided to stay another five years here, mostly so I can say I had a "10 year career" in the bay area. I will then take that experience, most likely back to the midwest, and try to leverage it into a better job than I'd be able to get by spending 10 years back in the midwest. Hopefully, this strategy will be successful for me. I think by then I'll have a shot at becoming director or VP-level, and coupled with my experience out here I will stand out in the midwest. I'll also have a far better experience-lead "technical education" out here than I would have ever had in Ohio, and that at least stands for something.
Indeed, one of the functions of tech economy meccas is precisely to enable this type of economic arbitrage, and certainly, that's one of the reasons why the cost of living in them commands a sizable economic premium. :)
My techie friends in New York tend to be the ones taking the interesting vacations because they have a lot more money.
New York and Bay Area tech companies can pay two or three times what the suburban office park type companies pay, and they have other benefits that add up as well (i.e. fully-paid tiny-copay health insurance). While housing costs will eat into that somehwat, whether you rent or buy, I don't think that they come close to cancelling out that increase.
Then, when we do go on vacation, there are more flights, since we're near major international airports. Since I live near EWR and JFK, I don't really need to consider connecting flights for European vacations, for example.
There are other less objective things for describing a "nice life", of course (IMO, renting vs. buying should be categorized as one of these, neither is superior). For example, non-chain restaurant availability, quality of cultural institutions, etc.
Yes, the difference between $250k and $1.2m homes will absolutely cancel out the difference between $80k and $120k salaries.
You're coming out ahead only if homeownership is not important to you, or you're willing to live in shared/substandard housing. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in your early 20s, but not necessarily long term.
Those are totally fair. The one remain barrier that SF suffers from is 'starting a family'. Looking around, it seems you need a level-above the regular engineer's salary for you to afford a family living in San Francisco.
That's about what I planned for, except I gave up and moved back to Ohio after a year in the bay area. (I was already married before moving out; my wife's wishes were part of the reason for moving back earlier than planned.)
But I managed to keep a low/mid-range SF salary and work remote from Ohio. So, while I'm not a director or VP yet, I do have a house that will be completely paid for in about 8-10 years total, and I should be financially independent by age 45-50.
>In 2015, the US Census found that about 80,000 people left the SF-Oakland area over the course of a year. But then about 100,000 new people moved in to replace them.
229 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] thread(The Californian invasion has always been a thing in the PnW)
Uhm...wow, that's cheap. If you had a decent tech job in Boise (at HP?) it might work out pretty well.
Boise has been really slow to recover from the recession, where many people used to be able to get decent jobs at Micron, HP, Simplot, etc. there's much less available - call centers and other service industry positions have begun to dominate. The median cost of a house in the area is back to pre-2008 levels and rising fast, but wages aren't.
These companies need to realize that the market rate for the kinds of engineering and talent they demand is set in the bigger cities, not their little slice of the Midwest. I understand why they're doing it, but for all the issues in the Bay Area the opportunities are still better than almost anywhere else and so is the pay.
Housing costs are eye-watering from my perspective, but cheap for someone from SV or even Seattle.
A culture of remote work takes a lot of discipline, as it's so easy to have an in-person conversation, make a seemingly small decision at the time, and immediately the remote workers feel out of the loop.
Remote work is actually /hard/ to support, and a company has to make it a priority to do it well and be disciplined about writing down all communication. Otherwise, they're setting up their remote employees for failure, which nobody wants.
Also, there are things a remote worker just can't do; stand at a whiteboard and evaluate paths forward, for example. If a company values that sort of collaboration above anything else, it is certainly not "insane" to want people in the office.
Edit: I just got out of a meeting with someone in eastern Europe. An extra $20 for a camera pointed at the whiteboard solves the collaboration problem 90% of the way.
In my experience, meetings like this are more often than not a huge waste of time. Since I started working remotely I am less distracted and more productive, and have no trouble collaborating with other devs.
While it's true you have to have software and processes in place to communicate, it is doable.
Effectively managing an organization that is at least partially remote is more difficult, and my experience in the Bay Area is that management skill is often overlooked and underdeveloped, particularly in startups.
I've seen several companies with very very competent technical founders, very capable engineering team, and not one person in the company that can manage their way out of a brown paper bag. The only way for that kind of structure to work is having everyone in the same room.
Second, don't try to "time the bubble". Instead think about your goals. What do you actually want, and what is best for you (and your family if applicable). What's going to make your life more meaningful? What would make it a better story if someone were to tell it?
If cashing in now and moving someplace cheaper is in line with your goals, then do it!
If staying put and finishing off the mortgage is a better match, then so be it.
Lastly, financial independence doesn't have to mean not working. I'm still 10-15 years away from that point, but I certainly plan to keep working well after I have enough to retire. I'll just have a bit more flexibility in what I choose to work on.
It could just be that renters in SF are the grumpiest ;-)
It's where I cut my chops because I could get a 6 figure engineering job without a relevant degree. Very few people expect to stay in a city permanently, and remember many of those workers aren't even citizens, so many of them plan to return "home" at some point.
This doesn't mean anything unless the influx is less than the outflux.
That said, I'm part of the 83% who are planning on leaving, but there are two main problems:
• If I leave, where will I go? As many faults as SF has, it's still a beautiful, world class city, rich with culture. Walkability is huge for me, and I don't want to live someplace where I'm tied to my car.
• Salary. Usually the cost of living follows the pay scale of a local economy, but that doesn't help you when you want to buy things priced at a national level: computers, cars, bikes, etc. If you earn $160k/yr, buy a new MacBook Pro isn't a big deal; if you make $60k/yr, you have to put a little more thought into it.
I see this brought up a lot, but these expenses are such a small portion of my outlay that it barely moves the needle. Maybe I'm just weird.
Also, cars do vary across geographical areas. The MSRP may be the same nationally, but the drive-off price is pretty variable.
If you're really affording all these things then your housing expense is manageable.
But most in these cities are not. At least in NYC it seems to be just trust fund kids who aren't running off debt / paycheck to paycheck living.
You'd need to put down $50k to mortgage a 3-bedroom house in a good school district normal housing market, or $250k to mortgage a 2-bedroom condo in a distressed urban neighborhood. That $200k gulf is 10 years of maxed-out 401k plus a new top-of-the-line Mac every year. Hardly anyone has that much to cut. But if they did, after 10 years, the gulf in necessary down-payment would be much wider than $200k and they'd still come up short.
That's why people are comfortable entering these situations as new grads (you can have a comfortable life as a young single renter in a small or shared space), but feel a need to leave them eventually (starting a family is basically off the table as long as you live there, and you're always at risk of being priced out if your rent rises faster than your salary).
Lyman Stone wrote a good piece on this where he speculates that part of the reason Millenials have been clustering in cities is that "Given that student loans have a fixed nominal value, they are often easier to pay off in high-wage, high-cost cities."[1]
[1] https://medium.com/migration-issues/millennials-have-less-de...
You would think that they would simply sell their million-dollar bungalow and move to greener pastures, but that's just not what happens.
Smaller cities (the Portlands, New Havens, and Columbuses of the country) will continue to inherit the overflow, with those cities that have the lowest cultural cachet taking the lowliest remnants. Given the demand for urban environments by businesses and consumers, it seems like the only thing holding back any city from heavy growth is incompetence or negative reputations.
IMO, the problem is the policies of the city that are unfriendly to growth and make housing a zero sum game, the problem isn't than people expressing their preferences.
I'm not arguing against development, I just think a lot of the pro-development folks imagine that cities are making things zero sum with their policies, when real property will always have that element.
That's not what we should be striving for. We should be striving to allow people to comfortably live and work outside of just downtown Manhattan. The biggest obstacles to that are zoning laws and a decrepit subway system that makes traveling between boroughs outside of Manhattan practically impossible.
Better public transportation would also relieve pressure on the city center.
And about this time three years ago I was standing in an office in downtown Seattle and we could count fourteen cranes. There's still a lot of space for midrise buildings. I'm just not sure transportation is keeping up.
https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/maps/crane-watch
I keep wondering when the supply of 2k+/month shoddily constructed one bedroom rental apartments will catch up with the demand for them. That may not seem like a lot for the Bay types, but Denver has traditionally been a lot cheaper. The last 5-10 years have seen crazy population and rent growth.
Of course, everytime we go back to Seattle to visit the family we are reminded of what real heavy traffic looks like (though that still isn't anything like what LAs traffic look like where I once got into bumper to bumper traffic at midnight on a Sunday from Anaheim to Santa Clarita - now that is real traffic).
Remember: if housing is expensive, it must be because there aren't enough skyscrapers. There can be no other logical explanation.
I share the sentiment. I find it likewise amusing that the same crowd that argues that building additional highway capacity won't accomplish anything because it'll just get filled with more cars seems to think that additional housing capacity won't similarly be filled up immediately.
It will allow more people to commute into the city, which is the goal, right?
> seems to think that additional housing capacity won't similarly be filled up immediately.
And more people will be able to live there... Isn't that the goal?
Housing is boom/bust. Housing booms always attract dumb money and always bust.
So... it unlocked a whole bunch of housing supply? Sounds like a great policy!
The goal is "I want to be able to afford to live here." The only way to really affect prices is to absolutely flood the market with new housing. You can't just do it with a couple hundred units here, a couple hundred units there. Everyone in the world wants to live in SF, remember? They're just going to get snapped up and housing will still be expensive, the only real difference is that there's some more people living there now.
There's the Downs-Thomson paradox[1], which is usually quoted as adding capacity to highways to the road network will not reduce congestion, and the one I believe you mean. What the paradox actually states is that "the equilibrium speed of car traffic on a road network is determined by the average door-to-door speed of equivalent journeys taken by public transport." That is, as you add capacity to road networks, you disincentivize people from taking public transport, because the roads are quicker, until the two level out in terms of cost/benefit.
I'm not certain how directly applicable it is to the housing market. Essentially, what is the housing market's "public transport"? I suppose you could argue it's still public transit, since there is a trade-off between the more expensive, but closer housing and the cheaper but farther away public housing. But I'm also in favor (and I think most of the people in the HN SF crowd are) of better public transit in the Bay Area and better housing/zoning policy. (Either would help me and many others: a better public transit network would reduce the need for housing in cities closer & further up the Bay.)
There's also Jevons paradox[2], which says that when "technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand." This is mostly concerned with reducing use of the resource though, and I fully expect that better zoning policy would result in more and cheaper housing, more use of said housing, and more demand — all in line with Jevons paradox, but none of which seems detrimental when compared to the current situation.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs%E2%80%93Thomson_paradox
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
In transport, more roads means more capacity to carry traffic, and hence, more induced traffic. The death-spiral effect comes from the fact that each additional car on the road produces far more congestion than its operator alone experiences (negative externalities). True costs aren't born by the operator, so gridlock ensues.
For housing, or rather, urban development generally, the challenge is that denser cities with more inhabitants (generally) give rise to greater opportunity. This is where the action is, for whatever definition of action you have.
I'm not entirely sure what produces the death-spiral of cities pricing themselves out of their own housing markets, as SF is doing, but I'm inclined to think that the general trend of holders of investment assets to seek inflation of those assets' values is a key element. That is, you have a house, you've sunk a lot of money into it, you want its value to increase (hey! free money, right?). This turns into collaterisable assets for loans or other opportunities as well.
There's also the fact that high-value urban real-estate markets make for good options to bank wealth appropriated elsewhere, or for money-laundering. Values are high, tend to remain high, the market is liquid, and urban cores are far more stable for real estate prices than outlying areas. Hence, the housing stock value is bid up further.
Land value tax might help address that. Something I'm looking at. Originally suggested by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, though championed by Henry George.
Basically they had a problem of high value 'factories' being undeveloped since there was only opportunity costs associated with their not producing goods. Government rents were increased such that factories were only profitable for people utilizing them, and they saw a huge increase in total gdp.
I keep hearing that gaming comes up with interesting case studies, but rarely specifics such as this.
That's not quite how housing works. Yes, I suppose there's a broad supply-demand dynamic inasmuch as areas with more affordable house prices tend to see bigger houses and land parcels bought, but still, people don't just use more units of housing stock in response to a slightly less onerous housing crunch. If housing in the SF Bay area suddenly became more attainable, I wouldn't buy 3 apartments just 'cause.
The very wealthy will do it, of course, as they always have, and always will.
No, but you'd have all those people waiting on the sidelines jumping in immediately. Net result, housing is still expensive (sorta like the highway analogy, we still have tons of traffic after building these lanes).
But that's equally true of the highways too. If you widen a freeway, I'm not going suddenly commute to and from work an extra 3 times each day just 'cause.
> when you make driving easier or cheaper, people will do more of it because they can.
Not really, not anywhere near the amount people claim. This is a common misconception made by miscounting traffic on freeways past capacity. They mistake failed trips as non-existent ones, and then mistakingly claim "new traffic" was created when failed trips stop failing.
It's like saying "if you make hospitals easier or cheaper, people will get more sick because they can". You could even support that false claim, by measuring patients in hospitals. "We had a 100 bed hospital last year, and it was full. We built a second 100 bed hospital this year, and now it's full too. Clearly building hospitals is a bad idea, because it just makes more sick people".
This obviously isn't true, people were still sick before, they were miscounted because they weren't in the hospital (it was full). Just like how new freeways don't create new traffic, they serve existing traffic that was miscounted before because it wasn't on the freeway (it was full).
Yes, this! One thousand times this!
Either additional capacity helps service that need or it doesn't. You can't argue it both ways simultaneously. So many people want to pick and choose where they apply that logic, just to fit their political desires.
These two ideas are inherently contradictory, and it is an constant pet peeve of mine that most people refuse to recognize the contradiction.
The difference between housing and cars-on-the-road is that housing is generally seen as a positive thing that people get real value out of, whereas cars-on-the-road are an unfortunate side effect of people not having housing near where they live. We explicitly want fewer people to drive into our cities; on the contrary we want more people living in housing near where they want to be.
To put it another way, if you really think that building more housing will make things worse, then why not argue for the destruction of existing housing stock to make things better?
Or do you think we're at a peak, where we have built just the right amount of housing and we should just leave it alone? I guess there probably is some amount that's just right for each city, though I have no idea what we'd have to look at to figure out that number.
I don't personally believe that. I think capacity solves shortage needs, consistently. But most don't.
Most people really believe your reasoning is valid, and they advocate for the exact destruction you've mentioned (see "Road Diets" / freeway removal / any article from CNU / etc).
> The difference between housing and cars-on-the-road is that housing is generally seen as a positive thing that people get real value out of, whereas cars-on-the-road are an unfortunate side effect of people not having housing near where they live
I think most people agree with you, but I personally believe this is a very dystopian view. Transportation is an inherently positive thing too, that real people get real value out of. Even if every single human lived right next to their work place, it's still a good thing that people have fast reliable easy freedom of movement in whatever method they prefer.
Even if you live right next to your workplace, your next job won't be. Your spouses job, or next job, won't be. Your parent's home won't be, your children's school won't be. Unless your constantly moving every 2 years, this idea of "transportation is just a bad side effect of not living inside your workplace" doesn't really hold up to regular life, in my opinion.
Fewer believe that people-living-in-homes is bad.
Both are laughably wrong.
That's more like a symptom.
Policies are shaped by people and people are motivated by forces. The motivating force in this case is probably money. There are lots of people who make money off real-estate and they're motivated to keep supply down to drive up costs. What better way than by influencing public policy to suit their agenda.
If you try to change city policy to make housing affordable then you're basically declaring war on a very influential portion of the population that has a lot to lose.
Edit: I can't read. Pittsburgh has only lost 0.7% since 2010: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/pittsburghcityp....
Broader urbanization is much less pronounced and, to the degree it's a trend, it's mostly to what a lot of people here would be more inclined to call suburbs than cities.
Out of curiosity, where did you get that information?
This article claims that the population of Pittsburgh is essentially static:
http://www.post-gazette.com/local/city/2017/05/25/2016-censu...
Also cost of living is LOW, any decent wage here, especially in tech. You'll live like a king.
I'd moved there after college because it seemed to be the last Upstate place with any life in it but that all drained away.
What's changed in the intervening time? What's drawing people there, specifically for jobs?
There's obviously a significant sample bias in the above.
Anecdotal obviously but after graduation everyone I know left, and those who couldn't still mostly want to. And to me that's the difference between say a city like Philly that's growing because people want to stay there after graduating.
Side note Rochester is the same day over and over. And that day is cold, dreary and probably snowing. The 4-5 months of Spring/Summer/Fall though is amazing though.
4-5 months of amazing is fine with me, spend the rest working on projects, and making money.
I have a few friends that are looking to move north. Georgia seems to be absorbing a lot of Florida residents.
Rochester and Monroe County have an amazing system of public parks and green space, and they're always well-kept. If you golf, there are many nice public courses. Bike trails abound for transit, and you can hop on the Erie Canal towpath trail and ride from Buffalo to Albany. Irondequoit Bay has sailing, and people row on the Erie canal and Genesee river. Club sports take advantage of the parks. Parks nearby have hiking, though not tall mountains.
The Public Market is an amazing resource as you mention. Vendors at "farmers' markets" in big cities have realized they can charge inflated yuppie prices, while the Public Market has farmers from the local area selling directly at wholesale rates, as well as third-party vendors selling overstock/ugly produce from local supermarkets. Wegmans is the best, for consumers and their employees.
The Rochester city government is (mostly) functional and well-meaning, and citizens generally have a sense of civic pride and interest in their communities. The tax base is not what it once was, but the city makes the most of what it can, with new experimental initiatives and impeccable maintenance of public services. Rochester weathered the recession well.
A downside is of course the grey skys of winter, but that is counterbalanced by four distinct seasons with a beautiful summer. When I lived in California I missed having four seasons.
It's a fairly future-proof place to live; Western NY is not prone to natural disasters like earthquakes, droughts, wildfires, volcanos, tornados, or hurricanes. Most areas are high enough where flooding is not a concern. Climate change will have less of an impact than many other areas. Blizzards are likely the most probable "natural disaster", but you can wait them out: snow melts.
If VCs were willing to take more risk, they could bankroll startups in cheaper areas like Rochester and spread their resources across larger portfolios.
Buffalo is having a similar resurgence, or so I've heard. Western NY is cheap enough to take risks, and people are. New restaurants; cocktail joints; art, dance, meditation, and yoga studios are opening all the time. Startups could be next; take a look at Rochester for your next company and lower your burn rate.
The growth in tech over the past decade had some clear winners, but any city that is just mobilizing now is entering a crowded pool. Anyone thinking ahead should consider how remote work will change businesses in 5 - 10 years, and start planning from there (schmooze freelancers instead of VCs and prepare legislation that would benefit the employee, rather than the business).
I live in New York City, and I can certainly empathize with the no one wanting to do endure a long daily commute in a crowed, cramped, subway full of people where you likely might not get a seat. (LIRR/MNR/NJT are great in comparison (but terrible in frequency).)
But I dissent on your comment on living and working in Westchester (or really any suburbia in general). I understand people think the city is hip and all, but I really like greenery, nature, having a lot of space, being able to get to places in the comfort of your car, reasonable/low cost to own a home, generally low cost of living, the lack of noise, clean air, etc, etc. What's so dull about it?
There is a lot of middle room between suburbia and NYC for build environments.
Right now I live in what I guess would be described as a town. Its ~100 miles from any major urban area and it's much more effective at providing the majority of the things you mentioned plus amazingly short commute times! It also has some sorts of benefits you would associate with the city as well - for example, I can walk to at least 10 establishments as well as 2 parks whereas when I lived in a suburb the street I lived off of was 4 lanes 45 MPH and didn't even have a sidewalk. Even if it did have a sidewalk the noise of a mass of neverending SUVs buzzing past is unpleasant.
You would also have no problem driving almost everywhere in a smaller city.
Luckily both exist -- often times the sweet spot is to live near downtown + transit of a smaller town. Then you get a faster commute, some walkability, and the option to do things in town as well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commuter_town
My opinion on suburbia that I stated was based on what would be "suburban town" moreso than a "suburban bedroom community." I've never lived in the latter.
I know it's just my opinion though, I know some people like suburbia but smallish towns like mine are better at providing greenery, nature, and a low cost of living plus a pleasant environment. To me suburbs are the opposite of that. (Getting to the airport is a giant pain in the ass though...)
Pretty much the first thing I did when I moved here was take a walk!
Look at a town like Beacon NY. Beautiful place with ridiculously cheap real estate.
If we had high speed trains we could link these cities to NYC for daily commuting and it would pay for itself with increased property values.
There's so much value being lost and inconvenience beared by us because of shitty government.
Of course, you can run them express, but then they probably wouldn't stop in small towns like Beacon or Cold Spring. Amtrak is basically this on the New Haven line, how many people actually take it to commute?
I hope the trains pass you by. We don't want you.
Go drive South a couple thousand miles if you want to be an insular hillbilly.
Taking hints from the likes of Japan to support this growth; and other examples and ideas would be cool for discussion here as a solution to this metro-area-growth.
> https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/sep/30/-sp-shinkanse...
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dkaid%C5%8D_Shinkansen
A big problem I see with going to westchester to nyc is the parking costs in nyc. Like $50/day is wayyyyyyyy too high to be sustainable. And the trains are just too slow, it is faster to drive from where I am in westchester than take the train.
Regardless, the "corporate campus" will need to go through a reimagining if it wants to appeal to city-weary knowledge workers. This will require some more lateral thinking beyond replicating Facebook's Headquarters in White Plains, NY.
Well I think this is it. I was born in New York City, and while it may be more expensive than some town in the Midwest, the housing problem is not like it is in San Francisco. On the other hand, if you insist on living in Greenwich Village or Williamsburg then you will have to pay. If you're OK with living in a slightly older, not super exciting, middle class neighborhood that has a half hour commute to the city, then you have plenty of affordable options. Another thing about New York affordability is rent in some towns in the Midwest is cheaper but you need a car, in New York City you can get around pretty well without a car.
Also a commute into Manhattan does not have to be an hour. You can make a map of the rent prices of apartments in boring but decent neighborhoods that are within 10 minutes commute of Manhattan, then 20 minutes, then 30. Plenty of options. For myself, I can walk out my door and in less than thirty minutes walk out of a train in Penn Station. I used to live in another part of the city and my apartment door to office desk commute was less than 30 minutes.
Those fun bars and restaurant become generators of noise and parking problems. The fun diverse neighborhood translates into a school district where the legacy of desegregations means your kid will be dragged across the city for school. The list goes on.
NYC used to be a city where artists and writers could live, but it's become a city of trust fund kids, corporate shmucks, and tourists. Everybody works all the time - not because they're working on groundbreaking stuff - but to make a buck.
Personally my plan is to work remotely and go somewhere else, most likely outside the country because nothing in the car-obsessed suburban sprawl-infested U.S. compels me.
It's also very true that so many Americans are willing to put up with NYC because there's not many other options for proper cities in the US. The public transportation sucks and there's now a divide where everyone I know seems to be grabbing Uber to work which is totally ridiculous and irresponsible.
Even if you're paying $2k to rent a studio, if your take-home pay goes from $500 to $1500 you're coming out way ahead dealing with the headaches of living here. But you need to move away to truly realize those gains.
Still love that city, though.
"The two-question survey (“Do you plan on settling down in another city?” and “What’s your biggest reason for leaving?”) covered 24,000 respondents nationwide."
If I was living in SF and someone asked me "Do you plan on settling down in another city?" - my answer would be yes, somewhere in the Bay Area suburb like Palo Alto. I think very few people are looking to "settle" in SF.
Most people want to move at some point and often do for jobs, kids, spouse's job, etc. But whether this is impending (this year) or "an acknowledged desire" is a big difference.
Without roots in the city, there doesn't seem to be much to recommend it these days besides the weather and the massive, insane availability of liquid capital compared to the extensive dearth in other markets. But as long as the money is there, and other sources of investment capital remain locked away, that's not a bad recommendation.
SV VCs may be getting more cautious, but investors in other markets don't seem particularly eager to loosen the purse strings. So they may say they plan to leave, but I just finished a comic fantasy novel called 'Thud!', and this (lightly edited) passage comes to mind:
-
"I'd wonder...you know, if I were a king...I'd wonder why people were happier living in squalor in [the city] than staying back home. ...
"There's dwarf bars all over, and they've got mining tools wired to the wall, and there's dwarfs in 'em every night quaffing beer and singing sad songs about how they wish they were back in the mountains digging for gold. But if you said to them fine, the gate's open, off you go and send us a postcard, they'd say, 'Oh, well, yeah, I'd love to, but we've just got the new workshop finished...maybe NEXT year we'll go back home.'"
There is some sort of irony in SV VCs being at a keystone of the internet and yet somehow being unable to invest outside of SV.
If you want to make something physical, you can't hand-wave and make wild assumptions about growth rates and user acquisition and ARPUs. You have a Bill of Materials, distribution costs, a slim margin, and rapid competition from cheaper and often outright dangerous knock-offs with little recourse. Look what happened with hoverboards.
So in a market that is as jaw-droppingly risk averse as this, but people still want to grow their huge hoards of capital, the money takes the path of least resistance and follows the only available market that can theoretically produce an exponential growth curve more than once every few decades.
California is messing up the HSR project by not getting SF to Gilroy and LA to San Diego completed first. Sacramento to Nowhere is a PR blunder for the state.
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/10/14/palo-alto-bla...
http://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/high-speed-rail-met...
I'm not sure CA could do SF to Oakland by HSR in a decade.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley_BART_extensio...
It's one big difference between Boston/Cambridge and some other places like the Bay Area. You can get away from some of tthe really high real estate prices relatively quickly and a lot of the tech jobs aren't even in the city anyway.
There's not much to be gained by living in Fitchburg. The real benefit is that a commute from somewhere rural to a train station in Fitchburg (or the "end of the line" for some other city train system) is painless.
I guess it's just a function of overall population but it's nonetheless interesting that while Boston/Cambridge have indeed gotten very expensive, there's a lot of pretty reasonably-priced housing not all that far out.
I don't know. I work with someone who recently sold their house in Leominster (next to Fitchburg for those not from the area). He said there had been very little appreciation over a long timeline.
ADDED: The problem when these old small New England manufacturing cities gentrify is that you end up with a dozen square blocks of upscale and the rest is like it's been for decades. I worked in downtown Nashua for a long time and it was like that. Which, for me, makes it get boring quickly.
That being said, I do think the bay area is a great place to start one's career.
Edit: While you might not see it as an issue many of the people who liked the culture as it was prior do.
[0] http://www.estately.com/blog/assets/Snapshot-62713-144-PM.pn...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austin,_Texas#Demographics
I guess caring about your neighbor's politics is just NIMBYism of the mind.
It's kind of a catch22 since wanting to live in a community where people don't care if your opinions are different or if you want to raise rabbits for food makes you one of the people who cares about what other people care about
I had lived in the Bay Area, moved to Austin just to move to another place within a year. Austin has many nice things, but definitely not one of the top US cities I would consider building a family in. I can list out tons of things about Austin that would be deal breakers for many people and there are better cities out there in many aspects.
I'm truly puzzled by this sentiment from Austin people.
I can not wait for CA to become independent from the states.
- AB 71 would raise $300 million a year for affordable housing, call your CA Assemblymember.
- SB 35 would take power from local NIMBY's for projects that meet affordable housing targets. Call your CA Assemblymember.
- Email baylands@ci.brisbane.ca.us and ask them to build 4400 units of housing on the Baylands, just south of San Francisco. They are waffling but the local residents want to build an office park.
- Email your C level employees and VC's and tell them about your struggles to continue staying here, afford a babysitter or find a good school, and ask them to get involved in developing better housing policy for the Bay Area.
Not having enough housing forces people to commute from further out, which adds congestion all along their path.
This is just an indirect subsidy of Facebook, Google, etc. By providing low income housing and food assistance to low income workers in high cost of living cities, it simply allows the well to do companies to continue not paying a living wage that corresponds to the situation that they've created by concentrating their businesses in the same area.
Any political body that tries to foster the growth of high-paying jobs in an area should also put in place policies so that there is at least 1 bed for every desk. More if they want to allow children, retirees, and manual laborers to live there.
NIMBYism cuts supply because existing homes are worth more when there are fewer new homes available. Any economically rational homeowner would want that (even though it sucks for everyone else).
Demand is high because people have gotten rich! Google and Facebook stock prices have increased over 2x in nearly 2 years. That probably made a $1M+ for a few THOUSAND people. Then extrapolate all the other big exits or stock growth in time period... unreal wealth creation for many people. Demand isn't going anywhere. It's a supply issue.
The problem is that big tech companies have practically unlimited money at their disposal, but are surrounded by communities that like their low density housing, open space lifestyle, think the traffic is terrible already, and aren't really interested in giving it up for any amount of money.
The reason the big tech companies are there is because these communities are really nice and venture capital people, CEOs and top engineers want to live in these nice neighborhoods. If it was just a cost issue, they'd be located in Fresno.
Of course real estate developers are hungry to build new rental apartments because the rents are so high and frame it as some sort of populist issue. It's really just rich people vs other rich people. There is no way they're ever going to build enough for prices to come down. Every tech company would move their entire workforce here if they could do so affordably.
The best solution, IMHO, is to improve public transit, which would have all other sorts of beneficial side effects. The downside is that it would bring poor people into the area which would cause quality of life issues as far as the existing residents are concerned.
This is changing; Facebook is sponsoring 1500 units, 300 affordable, in Menlo Park, Mountain View also becoming more welcoming of new housing, they recently approved 10,000 units in the North Bayshore area. Cupertino (where Apple is located) continues to distinguish itself in a bad way; they approved 11,000 new office spaces for Apple without any corresponding increase in housing, and routinely send people to San Jose city council meetings in an attempt to block housing on San Jose land.
> The best solution, IMHO, is to improve public transit
Again, there are promising developments here. Facebook sponsored a Dumbarton Corridor study, and all of the tech companies are throwing their money behind a new bridge tax ballot measure that would raise money for public transit. http://www.greencaltrain.com/2017/08/dumbarton-corridor-stud...
Wouldn't we be needing something more like 1 Million new units to fully satisfy demand for housing and bring prices back to levels similar to the rest of the USA?
A 30x30 grid of 100 story residential towers with 10 apartments per floor would nicely solve your issue...
So in theory they would solve the issue, it's just that your solution dwarfs the number of humanity's 100 story buildings by a factor of almost 50.
The issue is zoning regulations that make cheap enough and dense enough housing illegal.
Increased supply would boost the American economy and make everyone happy except the NIMBYs. But the NIMBYs have the political power.
If you really wan't to fix it, call your legislator and tell them to get rid of Prop 13. It's not commonly known for transplants to the Bay, but property taxes only get re-assessed upon sale of the property in California. They do not get reassessed every 5 years or so, like in most states (read the wiki article for more info, and yes, what I said is not exactly true, things get complicated very quickly, but I think the gist of what I said was true)
My folks in the East Bay paid ~70k for the house in about 1970. Their monthly taxes are under $200 and they paid off the mortgage a few decades ago. Their new neighbors paid ~1 million for the exact same 3 bed/1 bath but just filled with black mold. We estimate they pay ~2.5k/month in taxes, let alone the mortgage (likely ~6.5k/month total with electricity, water, sewer, etc. every month, for the rest of their lives).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...
I think you see now why things are so crazy in the CA property market then. For a few years after the repeal, you'd be kicking a LOT of older home-owners out of their homes. My folks, likely, included.
However, what is the alternative? My siblings and I moved out of state a long time ago, due specifically to the housing issues. Most of my former HS classmates do not own homes in CA. They simply cannot afford it. Prop 13 'ate the seed-corn' of California youth's property aspirations. We simply cannot afford to own homes.
This is why I said that GP's ideas were only band-aids. The giant elephant in the room in CA housing discussions is Prop 13, something that is abhorrent to continue on with and something that cannot possibly be removed now.
CA will have to remove it someday, to give the youth any hope at reasonably 'owning' California, and everyday that it does not, things will get worse for when they do remove it. It's a quagmire, but it is the thing to talk about, not higher density band-aids.
Sure you can. Maybe not in LA, Palo Alto, or SF, but somewhere in California. I mean just how affordable do you think housing would get on the peninsula without Prop 13? $300K starter homes? Surely you jest. Manhattan doesn't have a Prop 13, still pretty expensive last I checked.
Everyone is moving to the area, and any additional supply is going to get snapped up instantly. And the issue of "grandma getting kicked out of her home" will always loom large in such a desirable and expensive part of the country, it's not something that would just happen in the aftermath of a repeal. I mean that was the driving force behind Prop 13 in the first place.
My Mom has a fixed income and owns her home. Plenty of savings for retirement like a responsible person. My Dad retired in 1986. This is in Fremont, California. Since then, prices have skyrocketed. In your example, she would have to pay $30K/year in taxes.
So here's the problem: how do you plan for retirement if reassessments are a thing? Depending on luck, you may live for 40 years or more past retirement. Must one move away from family that serves as a support system?
Some states do reassess, but recognize that that is a policy choice. California has made a choice which results in predictable tax consequences which can be planned for. It's not a perfect policy choice, but it is a legitimate choice that results in predictable outcomes.
Another solution would be to design the reform bill to grandfather in people who have lived in their homes for some long amount of time, or are above a certain age, or whatever.
In some sense, though, the way we are using land is currently very inefficient and improvements necessarily mean changing how we use the land.
The younger/new home-owners of CA are subsidizing your mother's housing costs, not the other way around. I'm happy that my folks are happy and healthy, and I know if they paid more taxes, they'd be in Reno or Phoenix.
But the couple next door to them? She's a teacher and he's a recruiter for some tech-firm in SF. He drives 2 hours each way, 4 a day, to get into SF each morning and then out again. We think her parents are helping out with the costs, there is almost no other way they can make those payments. Their little boy can't see his dad most of the days of the week, and when he does, it's after 2 hours of traffic. That's 2 families, one working full time and one retired (we assume, so heavy caveats here) that are now required to make ends meet for one little boy. How the hell are they gonna pay for his college? Will that boy know his father at all? What happens when Daddy gets laid off? Are they going to continue to be my folk's neighbors? Where are they going to go then?
Prop 13 is taxing the younger/newer homeowners for the benefit of the older homeowners. Many of these younger/newer people can't make the payments, not even close. So they need help from their own parents who are benefiting from the tax structure. This assumes that those parents are alive themselves, willing to help, and can help at all. Not all younger couples have that; it shouldn't be a requirement.
I'm saying that you should just let the market decide how these taxes are allocated, it seems to work pretty well for nearly every other state in this country.
Yes, it would be chaos for a few years. No doubt, my own folks would be forced to move. Just nuts all around. But every day that Prop 13 continues, it gets worse and worse for the youth of California and for their children too. Via Prop 13, California is directly hurting it's sons and daughters futures and therefore it's own. California is eating it's seed corn.
The dam has to break sometime.
Title should be "83 percent of ApartmentList visitors in the Bay Area plan to leave". While anecdotally I know a lot of people that are considering moving away, it's nowhere close to 83 percent, and the way the data was collected for this PR piece doesn't support that conclusion either.
As long as we're sharing anecdata... 83% sounds about right based on my friend cohort.
All this facilitates within-region moves at the expense of between-region moves.
If I go to ApartmentList.com, it defaults to San Francisco, but right underneath the three local metro areas (ironically, it doesn't have San Jose, where I am) are glossy photographs of Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Chicago, and 12 other metro areas. And if I click on one of them, the first filters that come up are by price, size, and amenities. Everything is located on a map, and I don't need to know anything about local neighborhoods.
ApartmentList is clearly using "people who are looking to move between cities" as their market segmentation and features for them as a differentiator, which is great, but also means that their data is suspect if generalized to the population as a whole.
(As for anecdata; I'd say that among my friends and acquaintances close enough to keep tabs on their life, maybe 50% are looking to move out of the Bay Area at some point, including myself & my wife. But only three - out of a sample size of several dozen, perhaps close to a hundred - have actually done it, and two of those moved back to their hometown to be close to family when kids arrived. Moving cities is a big commitment; people dream of it, but few do it.)
> Back in March, some 40 percent of locals responded to an annual phone survey saying they want to live elsewhere. But that was a survey of all residents, not just renters alone.
Does that mean I want to live elsewhere within the intended interpretation for the context of that particular survey?
Disclaimer: don't live in the Bay Area and don't plan to, so have no dog in this fight.
You can always visit the big cities on vacation.
Fast forward to today. I've worked at startups, big tech, and generally have lived that tech life. I see my friends back in Ohio taking vacations, buying homes, and generally having a nice life. And I see myself here, paying more and more rent each year, working in the high stress of startups and in the tech scene as my own passion for the actual tech slowly wanes. Sure, I make a lot of money and I have a fancy job but money and prestige, I've learned, isn't everything. If you're pissing all that money away with no end in sight, except to become fabulously wealthy in some kind of exit that likely won't ever happen, you start to question your original motives.
At this point I have decided to stay another five years here, mostly so I can say I had a "10 year career" in the bay area. I will then take that experience, most likely back to the midwest, and try to leverage it into a better job than I'd be able to get by spending 10 years back in the midwest. Hopefully, this strategy will be successful for me. I think by then I'll have a shot at becoming director or VP-level, and coupled with my experience out here I will stand out in the midwest. I'll also have a far better experience-lead "technical education" out here than I would have ever had in Ohio, and that at least stands for something.
Best of luck in your venture.
"Mostly, because I'm a nerd and wanted to be around other like-minded nerds and fulfill my nerd dreams."
and
"taking vacations, buying homes, and generally having a nice life. "
Ideally, you wouldn't have to choose between the two. In fact, the two should compliment each other instead of trade-off.
New York and Bay Area tech companies can pay two or three times what the suburban office park type companies pay, and they have other benefits that add up as well (i.e. fully-paid tiny-copay health insurance). While housing costs will eat into that somehwat, whether you rent or buy, I don't think that they come close to cancelling out that increase.
Then, when we do go on vacation, there are more flights, since we're near major international airports. Since I live near EWR and JFK, I don't really need to consider connecting flights for European vacations, for example.
There are other less objective things for describing a "nice life", of course (IMO, renting vs. buying should be categorized as one of these, neither is superior). For example, non-chain restaurant availability, quality of cultural institutions, etc.
You're coming out ahead only if homeownership is not important to you, or you're willing to live in shared/substandard housing. Which is a perfectly reasonable thing to do in your early 20s, but not necessarily long term.
But I managed to keep a low/mid-range SF salary and work remote from Ohio. So, while I'm not a director or VP yet, I do have a house that will be completely paid for in about 8-10 years total, and I should be financially independent by age 45-50.
I'd like to own a home one day and there is no one in hell that is happening in the Bay.
The sentence that explains it all.