In simplistic terms, maybe yes. I'm on the side of labor in this (in any) market so I don't intend to undercut the purpose of your comment...
... however. This depends on where the inflation is in the market and the way you intend to use your wages. "Inflation" is a number that we use to indicate much more complex and varied market trends.
I mean sure, you can dispute inflation number as being the relevant index, but CPI if anything underrepresents increased costs lots of people experience in Seattle.
Indeed - inflation is an aggregate measure and it definitely doesn’t apply equally across all individuals, in terms of impact.
Recognizing my own privilege here, for me, for example, many of my expenses are fixed: student loans and mortgage take the lion’s share of our monthly cash flow after taxes and retirement. Neither of those are indexed to inflation so if this drives higher cost of living increases, it’s a net win for me, in all likelihood.
Yes, and no. If you are paying for a $400k house in 2005 dollars with a 2021 salary the inflation is all good (bring it on). All the squawking about inflation is annoying and often wrong (gentle inflation like we are seeing is good for the common person). If you are sitting on piles of cash from yesteryear you become less wealthy--not counting gains from interest income or stock price appreciation.
Who doesn't like inflation? I love it when the market makes my existing debt cheaper.
> Who doesn't like inflation? I love it when the market makes my existing debt cheaper.
Those of us who want to purchase? …And understand that the housing market cannot outpace inflation indefinitely, and are queasy about what will happen when that day comes: do home prices eventually level off at some absurd level, or do interest rates rise, demand slackens, prices level off & then speculators jump ship for more lucrative investments and then prices crater, putting people underwater on their mortgage?
- People who are seeing wage stagnation while the cost of living goes up. The majority of jobs that keep the economy running aren’t like the tech sector where one can job hop to keep wages up.
- People who have a significant chunk of their savings in cash for a down payment, and they are seeing property values run away from them while the value of their money goes down. They are also seeing increasing costs, impacting their ability to save for a down payment.
- The people who are trying to buy a house that was $400k in 2005, that is now valued at 1.2M and requires $240k for a down payment.
> People who have a significant chunk of their savings in cash for a down payment, and they are seeing property values run away from them while the value of their money goes down.
This is a very important issue, but it's not really inflation in any normal sense.
I am not saying inflation is bad. However we should separate decreased real cost of debt with employer provided wages.
If prices on goods and services are increasing that extra money should proportionally drive wages. When people complain about how single income for blue collar employees no longer can support a family like in the times of yore it is exactly because the wages in these sectors didn’t keep up with inflation.
As an aside, in terms of home ownership, Seattle housing prices are up 20% in 2021 (more than CPI) [0]. For many tech workers (skew younger) saving for housing is a significant cost and for them the effective increase in cost may be significantly more that CPI (thus their real wage cut is even greater!).
It seems like it punishes those that are saving for the future.
Like, why plan ahead when you can just go into huge amounts of debt. Seems pretty short sighted and yet these decisions are the ones that are rewarded.
That is how everything is setup. We use debt for everything. "Saving" is only a savings if the saved money is growing (invested). If you put it under a mattress inflation always eats it. Hoarding money is always punished/disincentivized by any modern government. They want you under pressure to invest or spend.
I just moved to another company late last month. Before I left my old company, multiple people were either quitting, or moving to new positions within the company, and as a result the company was having a rough time filling all their open positions. I know this is anecdotal, but I really don't believe that the Economist is right in this case.
My team is full of lifers (everyone but me and the friend I got hired have been here >8 years), and only one person of the 12 of us left this year. My fiancee's company is in the process of losing the entire mobile team (Android/iOS, ~8 team members, lost 5 this year), but it's a dumpster fire with low wages, so them going down in flames isn't necessarily related to a broader movement.
I feel like you sorta added evidence to the idea that it is a broader movement. It’s not that everyone is just saying “I quit” - but those in bad jobs/bad teams/working for low wages are the ones supposedly making moves and I think your anecdotes align with that. Just say’n is all.
The trends of remote work and broader competition to find tech workers would make it much easier to get out of such a dumpster fire situation over the last ~18 months.
So perhaps the reasons for quitting haven't changed much, but the burden of jumping is lower so it's happening more often.
When there is enough anecdotal evidence, that is consistent, you have to consider that the researcher is missing something. In this case, there might just be a misunderstanding - the economist is considering all jobs, whereas this evidence is coming from experienced tech jobs. The evidence is multi-faceted - people quitting, more hits from recruiters, etc.
I think you misrepresent the comment, which was more "I know an anecdote cannot prove this, but..." Believing something while being aware your experience isn't really proof is not "faulty reasoning", since the awareness doesn't tell you your belief is wrong. It just alerts you that you should be open to additional evidence. (Which is always true, but we have to prioritize.)
That’s a little disingenuous. They’re simply saying “I know my evidence is light but I haven’t seen any stronger envidence to support the counter argument”.
The “great resignation” will be more pronounced in different cities and professions. Eg I’ve noticed London based cloud engineers such as DevOps seem to be really affected at the moment whereas a lot of friends in other industries haven’t seen any change at all.
> religious exceptions certified by a Christian priest
On what basis would a Christian priest exempt someone from a vaccine? I wouldn’t expect an Rabbi exempting me from traffic signals to be taken particularly seriously either…
I'm not passing judgment on the reasonableness of religious exceptions for public health issues in general or COVID-19 issues specifically, just trying to clarify the religious concerns that have been raised (valid or not).
I just took it as expressing confusion that anyone believed that to be a real option at all, since Christianity broadly isn't well-known for an anti-vax stance, so "Christian" without further qualifiers is surprising in this context. Christian groups known for being anti-vax tend to be relatively fringe, small, and well-known for those positions (e.g. Jehovah's Witnesses).
This matters for how upset anyone ought to be over this, assuming it's actually happening, since the government tends not to respect "deeply held beliefs" that, conveniently, were only recently arrived at, so depending on exactly which Christians we're talking about, denying these folks an exemption (despite whatever paper they got their pastor/priest/minister to sign) is either totally normal & expected, or somewhat unexpected and (perhaps) worrisome.
I don't see the post as flame bait, but an expression of confusion inviting clarification. I think the tone's appropriate for the original claim (which... smells a bit rotten).
In this case the comment consisted of one sentence pointing straight to two classic flamewar topics (religion + vaccines), and a second sentence containing a snarky, reductionist provocation ("traffic signals"). In other words, we had fuel plus flame. The effect such a comment can be expected to have is definitely flamewar.
If your intention was to engage in thoughtful conversation, the burden is on you to disambiguate that, since intent doesn't communicate itself. A person's intent is accessible to them, since it's immediately available in their head, but not to anyone else—so it needs to be encoded somehow in the message. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
In this case, the whole thing was probably best to leave alone, though, because nothing good (by HN's definition of good, i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity) was likely to come of it.
The whole idea of having a thread about "how upset anyone ought to be" about some religious topic is already flamebait.
Religious themes in general are best avoided on HN unless there's some extraneous neutralizing factor to supply some distance between the discussion and people's extremely strong emotions about religion. For example, historical articles sometimes allow for this. But thoughtful discussion about religion in the context of hot current topics? Basically impossible. When people starting getting upset about it, which is highly likely, the place burns down. That's what we're trying to avoid.
It's not religious, it's political—it's not inviting an argument over religion, but clarification for which Christian group might have thought they actually had a hope of the government accepting their religious exception, since those are normally subject to fairly intense scrutiny—this is either a real thing, which needs clarification to be understood, or totally normal government behavior being cast as exceptional in order to advance, essentially, a lie.
Which, fine, maybe politics is a bad topic for HN, too (and yet, the front page on most days...) but in that case you're addressing the wrong poster. Getting onto someone for pushing back (in, I think, straightforward, but not harsh or provocative, terms, in this case) on a shitty post is missing the mark, IMO, and is part of why HN is very vulnerable to certain kinds of shitposting/trolling—if you can fly just under the radar, enforcement will fall on posters trying to police your shittiness (or, in this case, just trying to make sense of a bad post), not on you directly, which is is a classic effect trolls aim for.
(Please don't take any of this as personal—I'm sure this stuff's hard on the best of days, and you can never please everyone, and it's entirely possible I'm dead wrong about all this, and we're all just trying to get through the day in a complex world, and I'm very sure I'd be overall much worse at what you do than you are)
From my perspective these arguments are short-circuited by much simpler points, which is sort of the level at which I try to look at all this.
First, if the GP comment was shitty and/or trollish, then "pushing back" is exactly the wrong thing to do. That is known as feeding trolls, which of course is even more "the classic effect trolls aim for". This is in the site guidelines: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." – a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls.
Second, if we're making arguments about whether a political-religious argument is more political than religious or more religious than political, we've already lost. All this is obvious flame fodder and to be avoided here—no? I don't believe that anyone on HN is eager to discuss Christian-priests-issuing-vaccine-exemptions for simple reasons of intellectual curiosity. But if they are, the burden is on them to disambiguate their intellectual interest from garden-variety flamebait.
They all still live beyond the means of dictators and kings of old.
Have any of them considered the real test of Gods is losing themselves to contemporary economic concept, making them poor stewards of the Earth and all His creatures?
Isn’t doing the work to care all this a central theme?
Everyone is moving the goal posts except science. I wonder if that’s a message from God? To care for it all, don’t get lost to contemporary group think. Follow the science.
>not even religious exceptions certified by a Christian priest.
I'm a Discordian Pope and I'll happily give you a certificate stating that it is my sincerely held religious belief that you are hereby exempt from any and all rules and laws that you don't want to apply to you.
I'm not sure why anyone would give such a document much credence however.
I think it's because people don't give any critical thought as to what "freedom" actually means. They don't understand the true costs we pay for freedoms (ex: freedom of speech means you hear, allow and protect things you strongly disagree with" and think it means "I only have to do what I want" like a petulant toddler.
There's no such thing as a religious exemption. You can contest on religous grounds, but then you can contest the requirement on any grounds you want; that doesn't mean they will be accepted.
I think that's a bit too severe. The reason that the vast majority of religious exceptions are being turned down is because the religions that people say they belong to actually have no objections to vaccines, and most people are just making up religious reasons for vaccine refusal from whole cloth. When people actually do belong to religions that eschew modern medicine, they do often get exceptions. For example, nobody can claim that Christian Scientists don't have a religious claim that long predates the current vaccine panic.
A google tells me that Dutch Reformed congregations have some doctrinal objections to vaccinations also, but many have endorsed them anyway. The big surprise for me is that the Jehovah's Witnesses are completely neutral on the issue.
edit:
> The First Church of Christ, Scientist, the publisher of the Monitor, said: “For more than a century, our denomination has counseled respect for public health authorities and conscientious obedience to the laws of the land, including those requiring vaccination. ... We see this as a matter of basic Golden Rule ethics and New Testament love.”
A lot of people believe that the law operates kind of like magic, and that if you can check the right boxes then the government just has do do whatever thing you think checking those boxes will make them do. This isn't the case, of course.
The way-off-the-deep-end extreme version of this thinking is the SovCit movement, the adherents of which seem to believe, contrary to all sense and evidence, that the right words spoken (or written) in the right order can eliminate the ability of the government to enforce its laws on a given person—that the government is in fact well bound (by whom? Who enforces this?) by some arcane set of well-hidden rules that, if you know how to correctly invoke them, gives you exceptional power over it. As if the government is some kind of rules-bound genie or magic mirror or something. However, weaker versions of this are common. If you've found someone who talks a lot about "technicalities" in legal cases, you're probably dealing with someone who operates under at least a partial misunderstanding of how the law works—that is, they very likely believe that finding little "gotchas" is way more powerful a tactic than it actually is.
I'd be surprised if there aren't a lot of people who think religious exemptions work a lot more broadly than they actually do, and that all you need is to get an ordained minister of some sort to sign off, and that's that, the government has to let you do what you want, and if they don't then that must represent some awful and dangerous break from the norm. Meanwhile, that's not how it works at all.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar. Unsubstantive comments on classic flamewar topics do that, and yours managed to hit a double: vaccines and religion.
Honestly, I'm not concerned if it "great resignation" really happened. My boss heard the news and I was able to leverage an offer to get a 50% salary increase.
This worked out well for me. The negative side-effect is that I am getting ghosted a lot on linked-in as my salary is high for the area and recruiters just stop responding when they hear what offer I would consider.
However, my next move is going to be to a tech company which will enable another 50% jump hopefully.
Honestly I'd have trust issues if someone increased my salary 50% because it would mean they severely underpaid for several years to get to a point where I am worth a 50% increase.
Not saying that your boss is bad or that you should leave your company, whatever works, but yeah it's something.
Agreed. When I'm in "Job hunt mode" I write up a paragraph or two with what I'm looking for (salary, health insurance, 401k+matching, etc) and what I'd be willing accept in lieu of some of those things (no matching? Ok then I need to be making X% more to make up for that). It also includes what types of technology I'm interested in working with. Then I just spam that out to every recruiter that has or is currently emailing me or messaging me on platforms like LinkedIn.
Every time I do look at switching jobs I consider going into recruiting instead as most all recruiters I've ever worked with are completely incompetent. I don't expect them to know every technology and how it works but I do expect some basic patten-matching-level of competence (for example, you don't need to know anything about Angular/Vue/React but those should come to mind when "frontend" is mentioned and if a developer says they want to work with "Vue" the recruiter should be able to ask "Would you also be ok with Angular/React?"). Most of the time they function only as slow go-betweens in a game of telephone that they mangle horribly. I've had recruiters lie, ghost me, or just fail at basic message-passing. The last recruiter I worked with was so slow at responding that I just went around them and contacted the company directly and had an interview setup almost immediately. For the amount a recruiter gets for placing someone I'd expect they'd be much better at what they do.
Because I start my conversation with "What is the salary range for this position?", and if that range is too low, I give them a number we may start a discussion at. I don't feel like talking about position that pays $20k less than my current one.
Edit: I am not telling anyone my salary, but minimum for me to consider a position.
> The negative side-effect is that I am getting ghosted a lot on linked-in as my salary is high for the area and recruiters just stop responding when they hear what offer I would consider.
I don’t know what exactly the truth is, but I’m one of the tech workers living in the Seattle area.
I’ll start off by saying that I work 60 hours a week, at least. My stress and anxiety levels are manageable now, but only because I found ways of managing them. They’re not reasonable though and most importantly, they’re not sustainable.
Based on the neighborhood I live in and my compensation, I am extremely privileged. I don’t have money concerns that my parents had. Most things that I might need, I can buy them without having to think too much or without putting a dent in my net worth.
But my job is not sustainable. So, I live way below my means and avoid any lifestyle creep.
I would like to own a home, a nice one. Not a $1M property that’s not even comparable to my parents home. Given my compensation and many, many years of savings, this would be reasonable. I looked at several houses over the weekend. One dump after another, going for $1.3MM at the minimum. One actually had an offer accepted, merely hours after we toured it. They told us the buyer offered $1.6MM.
But Seattle has become a lawless dump. The east side has started homes for $1.4MM where the inspection report shows you that you’re basically just paying for the land.
If I have to be a renter my whole damn life and can’t even afford a house, what is the god damn point? Yeah I get paid very well, but I am a pawn of people who earn significantly more. And it’s not that I’m just comparing myself, but even after all this work and money I can’t comfortably buy a house - then where does this leave the majority of this country?
This is not the reason. The reason is a supply shortage caused by bad policy that restricts building. This might have some tiny impact on it, but is not the root cause. In Vancouver they did a tax on property speculation. Prices continue to rise because demand > supply and Vancouver has the same dumb policies as in the US.
Also, because it’s a non-custodial physical asset, countries that allow foreign ownership get a lot of real estate investment from money laundered out of more financially-repressive countries.
Because building housing is effectively illegal in much of the US.
Single family zoning, NIMBYism, moral panics over public transit, suburbanism... the list goes on and on.
Building duplexes is a start but Seattle should look a lot more like Brooklyn than like Idaho Falls: 6 story apartment buildings everywhere. Density. Public transit galore with very restricted parking.
And if you wait to long to allow building, you get stuck in a negative feedback loop where people who work in the building trades get priced out of a city, so construction costs spiral out of control too.
It is not just the US, though. Prices are crazy almost everywhere.
I was born in a city that lost 40 000 people over the last generation. From 320 000 people to 280 000 people. A Central European rust belt city called Ostrava.
And the real estate prices there made a huge jump in the last three years. Not as huge as in Prague, but +50 per cent nonetheless.
Lots of those apartments are actually empty and cannot attract tenants, because there just isn't enough demand on the rental market. But they still sell like hot buns at a bakery. I believe this is caused by the fear of inflation combined with relatively low mortgage interest rates. People don't want to have cash in hand.
Interest rates are low, so mortgage rates are low, so there is a crap-ton of money going after what is effectively a fixed resource.
Outside the US: Investments.
A lot of people have made a shit-ton of money from low-interest-rate investments like the stock market in the last decade. These people are looking for places to put said money, including real estate in out of the way places. Once again, a lot of money going after fixed resources.
"Interest rates are low, so mortgage rates are low, so there is a crap-ton of money going after what is effectively a fixed resource."
This is a case in Europe, too, especially in the Eurozone, where interest rates are kept very low by the ECB to keep heavily indebted countries afloat.
"GROSS: So whether or not the king's using these properties or whether his children are using the properties, it seems that real estate is a popular way of sheltering money. And why is that? Because among the issues surrounding that is that when wealthy people from abroad buy up really expensive real estate and don't actually use it, it tends to kind of freak out real estate prices in that area. I know London's going through that. I think New York has gone through that. So can you talk a little bit about sheltering money in real estate?
MILLER: Yeah. It's a huge, huge issue, a global issue. And you're right, Terry, it distorts the real estate market when you have individuals - Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs or whoever - buying real estate as a way of basically moving money that they made from other sources into hard assets in Western countries that are attractive because of their stability. I mean, it works for them. it's basically - they've acquired an asset that they know is going to be reliable. It's going to be there. Their money - they're not going to lose."
> Brooklyn...Density...Only then would housing prices be reasonable.
Housing prices are NOT reasonable in Brooklyn.
> NIMBYism
I really dislike it when people immediately jump to this. There are simply a whole lot more people living in Seattle than a generation ago. The math dictates that the housing would be more expensive.
1. Housing prices are more reasonable in Brooklyn than in Seattle.
2. Housing prices in Seattle would be more reasonable than they currently are with more supply of housing.
3. NIMBYism is absolutely the problem in Seattle. Upzone everything to have a minimum density requirement of 4 family, instead of insisting that 70%+ of the city stay in single family zoning. Don't want a duplex in your back yard? Tough. Move. If the entirety of the city core were as dense as average Brooklyn you would have sufficient supply to meet demand. As is you can buy a fixer up apartment in Brooklyn for half the price of a burnt out shell in Seattle.
4. There are more people than ever and they're all coming back from the desolation known as suburbia: Cities simply have to densify in response. You can't keep your city the same size forever.
1. "Slightly" more reasonable. Let's not tell tales.
3. Having lived in NYC, I can tell you that living in Seattle is far more pleasant than Brooklyn with its massive over population.
4. "Cities simply have to densify in response." Your solution is to make it unpleasant for everyone. Got it. There are many other solutions - don't jump to the easiest one.
> Having lived in NYC, I can tell you that living in Seattle is far more pleasant than Brooklyn with its massive over population.
Having also lived in both I deal with needles and aggressive homeless people far less often here than I ever did in Seattle. I have functional public transit. I can also even walk places for food, groceries and entertainment.
Don't be such a NIMBY: You're clearly against people having affordable housing. Just move to some shithole suburb and get out of the cities.
Housing prices are fairly constant/slowly rising based on payment amount for a 30 year mortgage. The problem is the interest rate has really dropped to crazy low levels. A few years ago a $1,500 payment meant ~$310,000 purchase price, today that same payment is ~$350,000. The drop in interest rates is responsible for a majority of the recent price increases for the vast majority of the country outside the most in demand cities in the country.
The # of dollar millionaires in the world is at all time high, at the same time there are fears of rampant inflation. So people who can do it sink a lot of their money into real estate.
> Jokes aside, why the prices are so high in some countries?
This is localized to specific cities, not the entire country. (Though country-wide home prices are also up, just not into the millions like this).
The reason is that people want to live in these specific places, but they can't build upward fast enough to hold everyone who wants to move in. So instead, new buyers compete over the same housing inventory and the current residents never want to sell because they're afraid they may never be able to buy back into the city in the future.
Seattle does have some major problems right now, but it's not literally a lawless wasteland. I think most of us believe that the city will get on top of the social issues eventually, at which point it becomes even more attractive to live in Seattle and the prices go up even more.
There's a negative difference between mortgages and inflation, fuelled by the ridiculously low interest rates. Anyone that has the down payment to invest in property is making bank, that is, until it'll all come down crashing again.
> Jokes aside, why the prices are so high in some countries?
Prices of all assets has skyrocketed in the last few years. Part of the blame for that is speculated to lie on the ZIRP (Zero interest-rate policy). Real estate all throughout the developed world has seen a lot of money going into it, as has the stock market as well.
Most people agree everything is overinflated right now and a correction will come, but that sentiment has been around since around 2016. I don't think a violent crash will come without another event to cause it, but I wouldn't be surprised by a plateau or a stagnation in prices for a few years.
Anecdotally, most of the people I know who moved into remote jobs took the opportunity to move straight into the most expensive, most trendy areas.
I know it's the exact opposite of what everyone was told would happen, but it turns a lot of places are expensive because people want to live there. Letting everyone cut physical ties to their jobs means everyone who wants to live there can now rush in and do it.
Yep. Which is why Boise, ID is the most expensive real estate market in the country. Remote work is coming with its own issues, rather than being the cure-all HN thinks.
In many places, such as East TN (Knoxville) remote workers are moving in with CA salaries. HN thinks that someone remote working from Knoxville, TN should be paid Bay Area salaries. However, Bay Area salaries are high for a reason. There are many Knoxville companies that can't compete with those salaries, which is why they set up Knoxville offices in the first place.
But now their employees are suddenly priced out - and no one is happy about it.
That's the thing. I make a bay area salary working for an east coast tech company. If silicon valley thinks they can pay less they are shooting themselves in the foot and talent will leave. They seriously want to cut salaries in this inflationary market? Lol.
Generally, the people working in those expensive places got compensated accordingly because it was so expensive to live in those places. So how can people who are not working in those expensive places afford to live in them?
Well yeah, if you can move somewhere and automatically be compensated accordingly, then it makes perfect sense. I'm thinking about jobs where that sort of thing doesn't happen, as in a remote worker who is going to be paid what they're going to be paid regardless of where they live.
I just bought a house for 900k outside of LA 30 minutes from Malibu. We could have lived in an apartment easily enough but I liquidated 50% of my crypto and stocks to use as down payment. The house is already worth 75k more.
It was always the dream. I have no regrets. Yes I could have retired to somewhere cheap but I'm only 34 and my skills are in high demand seeing salaries in the 200k+ range.
They are building housing here but so many people want to live here that no matter how much they build it will just all be absorbed immediately.
Congrats on that (seriously!) but you were already wealthy and earning the type of salary that allows someone to live out there in the first place. You kind of proved my point.
There's no way I'd have been able to get the house without the crypto and it was mined, not purchased. So what I'm saying is yes I could have afforded an apartment but never a house and those are two totally different levels of wealth in a place like LA.
Just gonna say that it's super relative cause in march of 2020 it was only worth 60k maybe. Then it peaked at 1.5 million in may 2021. Of course I wasn't able to time the sell off perfectly.
It made one thing perfectly clear to me though. Building wealth is more about investing than saving.
Remote work will allow the people who helped turn the areas they came from into overpriced lawless dumps to spread out and turn more areas into overpriced lawless dumps.
There is nothing special about Seattle (or anywhere else) that made it's descent into an overpriced lawless dump inevitable. It was the people who live(d) there. Not all of them, and probably not even a majority of them. But enough of them.
So this all sucks, and you're in a rough situation, and I sympathasize, and I'm not trying to tell you not to complain or that it's under your control. I think you wrote that well in a way that is aware of a lot of what's going on and your position.
BUT. "where does this leave the majority of this country?" -- well, the majority of the country does not have as crazy a real estate market as Seattle, as far as paying ~$1.5 mil for a dump where you're basically just paying for the land. That is not most of the country.
So... have you considered moving elsewhere? Even if you take a salary drop, you can probably wind up ahead overall with cost of living, especially if buying a home is a main goal you have. Of course, you won't get to live in Seattle. Seattle is awfully nice, it's true. But maybe you can afford a nice home and without working 60 hour weeks either.
But as far as "where does this leave the majority of this country" -- definitely not in the insane Seattle or San Francisco (or other "hot" cities with tech money) real estate market, is where.
Where I live (on the east coast even, but in a disinvested non-top-tier city) you can easily get a perfectly liveable no-repairs-needed if modest-sized ~1300 sq ft townhome for $200K, or easily a nice detached larger home in a "good" neighborhood for $500K. which I almost don't want to talk about, becuase if the tech money comes here, maybe that won't last.
But there's plenty of the country that's not on the coasts and is not Austin or Boulder or something, that is like this or even cheaper.
(And, as we both know, there are also plenty of people in even these cities who don't make nearly as much as you or I, and have trouble affording a home in them too!)
To add on to this, point a real estate app (Zillow, etc) to Racine Wisconsin. The east side is fairly nice. Also, look at north-eastern Illinois, starting in a radius about 40 miles or so outside of Chicago. The grate thing about that area is there is a lot of open farm land, and pieces get converted to housing development periodically whenever the market can support it. So that means many areas have 1500 sqft on 1/4 acre homes in the $200K range (or $100k if you want to put some work into fixing it up).
And everything is "close enough" to a major city, and there is enough of the city that expands out in the surrounding areas (a number of large employers aren't downtown, although some have been migrating back to the city to attract the employee demographic that prefers the city life).
So sick of seeing this. I grew up in rural Illinois, first 20 years of my life. Also spent 10 years in Chicago proper. 40 miles outside of Chicago is the middle of nowhere.
It is not a substitute for living in a city. I do not see the draw in buying a cheap house in a rural community with nothing to do and nothing around it. My family owns a house in a rural community. It is dead weight. Nobody wants to buy it from us.
It is not a good place to raise your kids. The schools are under-funded. The people you interact with are bigots and they will teach your kids to be bigots.
If your kid is gifted they will sit them in a corner and do NOTHING to address how they are learning more quickly than their peers. They will suffer from under-funded schooling that is just desperately trying to keep the bottom half of the students from spilling out.
Kids are heavily influenced by their peers. There are no "garage bands" or art groups or clubs or anything for your kids to participate in. There is school and sports. If you are lucky there will be a marching band.
Also, you are assuming this person is a cis hetero white male. There IS sexism in these communities, there IS racism, there IS bigotry. You will not be welcome if you do not fit in. You WILL be confronted, you WILL be harassed.
It just grinds my gears. It is such a non-solution to the problem. Basically "if you don't like it leave." and it just muddies the water around discussions about affordability of housing.
Move away from your friends and family and community to somewhere in the middle of nowhere, make a massive investment, and cross your fingers you find friends in the community! There is no job market to speak of, so good luck when the remote work fad ends[0]!
Also pretending these communities are not extremely religious and contain bigotry is dishonest. It is out there.
We once had a black man come to one of our city council meetings to propose a new housing development near the school. He left after multiple people called him the n-word.
My friends who were gay and came out in high school were harassed.
It is in the place you grew up. Projecting negative stereotypes onto people because they share a broad group with other people you had negative experiences with is stereotyping.
Of course not all of them are, and there's plenty of bigots in urban and suburban areas, but you start looking at voting patterns and it's hard not to conclude that the bigot density is a lot higher.
I grew up in the Midwest as a person of color. I specifically refuse to go back and am consider a $1.5MM home purchase only because of the bigotry and prejudice that I faced and my parents faced. My friends at school couldn’t come over because their parents weren’t comfortable with it.
It is a problem, and it’s not that most rural dwellers are bigots but enough people are, and they’re the loudest in the room.
Asking a person of color, lgbt, Muslim, etcz to live in rural white america is often a non starter.
Yeah...there's something spooky about places like Racine, Wisconsin or rural Illinois. And I don't think it's specific to me. Get Out resonated with a lot of people (ofc it's way different and difficult for Black people) because there is some fear and discomfort in going to a white, rural area. Even if the white, rural area is ostensibly liberal and friendly. There's something disturbing about being alone, the only one of your race and surrounded.
40 miles away from a major city is hardly the "middle of nowhere." That's still within spontaneous day-trip range. My hometown is 88 miles to the nearest real city, and that city is Fresno. Double that distance at least to get anywhere you actually want to go.
Hour and a half total round trip? Almost certainly more including traffic and navigating the city? Plus having to drive yourself ( or public transit) instead of a cab?
How often are you actually making that trip? At that point you aren't participating in the culture of the city.
Also you aren't going to school in the city, aren't meeting people at cultural events in the city, etc. Etc.
I'm not sure what "participating in the culture of the city" means exactly. I live an hour and a bit outside of a major city. I don't go in all the time but I regularly will go in for dinner and a show, to meet people, etc.
Not that I would have wanted to do it long-term, but 60+ minute commutes are not exactly rare (and I once had one part-time), so that length of drive hardly rules out going into a city on a weeknight or weekend every 2 or 3 weeks.
I live in west San Francisco, popping over to the East Bay is an hour and a half round trip for me, so that's not quite a deal-breaking amount of time. That's a magnitude of difference from having to do at least a four hour drive each way.
See, the thing is, not everyone wants to live in the city. Some find the quiet more refreshing than the noise. Some find open space better for raising kids than city streets. To a point that you posted in a follow-on, not everyone wants to participate in "the cultural life of the city" all that much.
Personally, I'm not sure that I'd want to be closer than 40 miles to downtown Chicago... but I might want to be close to a Metra line.
Looking at this from an outsider's perspective:
a couple of years ago this issue was only affecting SF. Then it spread to almost all of California (Oakland at 1.6M yikes much?)
Then it spread to Seattle and parts of Texas (Houston, Dallas, Austin).
Looking at this progression, I'd be careful of such talk. In a few years there might not be anymore 'sane' to move to.
Who knows what the next real estate trend will be, barn doors are already popular, maybe rural Oklahoma will be place to be in 5 years, and farm estates skyrocketing.
For sure. I mean, how much of the country it can spread to depends on how many people there are that can afford insane house prices, compared to how many that can't, and their distribution -- basically, as long as our society keeps moving to increase disparity in wealth and income, keeps moving to a bimodal distribution with the "rich" 10-15% on one hump separated by an ever-increasing amount of dollars from the rest.... the rich getting richer while the poor get poorer and the middle keeps shrinking... it'll keep eating up more and more of the country.
The only solution in aggregate is political, indeed. I didn't mean to suggest individual choice of where to live as a solution to the socio-political problem, but it can be an individual's solution to present situation that's making you miserable. Even that's not available to everyone, but just for those who can manage to get a job that pays well more than typical for the USA, even if not enough to live comfortable in Seattle. As long as you buy before the place "blows up", you're good even if it does. But if you want to reduce the chances the place you pick will "blow up" for a good long time, and are willing to live a place with less obvious regional amenities to do so, while there's no guarantee, we can all come up with places that seem like good bets. Des Moines maybe? Median house price $185K compared to $870K in Seattle.
I grew up in Des Moines, it's a rather nice place to live and raise a family. Great amenities, pleasant(relatively) traffic, good roads, decent airport, quality schools, etc... there's plenty of compelling reasons to live there - especially at that price.
Boring at times, but it's a lively enough city and you can still park in front your destination for free, which I've always appreciated.
Even if 2 went away and zoning didn't exist, you would still have the banal, inane mountains of bureaucratic spaghetti that slow the process down every step it can, so some of that would have to go as well. AFAIK, one of the main reason California has such a large housing shortage isn't NIMBYs or zoning laws, there's plenty of space after all, but ass-backwards regulations, and stupid politics.
Builders want to build. Let's make it easier for them to do that.
There are so many things wrong with Texas, it is hard to even know where to start. I would probably start with "kids pledge allegiance to the Texas flag in school" [1] and end with "politicians will call you a freeloader for expecting electricity to be available in the winter" [2]
The Dallas housing market doesn’t really qualify as affordable anymore. Affordable compared to Seattle or the Bay Area, for sure, but housing prices here have probably doubled over the past few years. The days of finding a well-maintained starter home for under $200k are gone.
I'm wondering how it will spread as well, I am already seeing bay area prices on houses in my area of socal where 1.5-2 years ago it was 30-40% cheaper. I think people in high paying positions are moving to nice areas that are not extremely crowded and close to nature. If this continues as it is(covid variants popping up and tech keeping offices closed), I could see the big companies finally allow remote full time, and then expect to see certain areas skyrocket in price. Think Boulder CO is expensive now, wait until it gets to Palo Alto levels of affordability. Or same with Bozeman, or Bend etc...
And of course there’s plenty of cities that were reasonable a couple years ago but are creeping up: Boise residents complain constantly about all the transplants, and I expect Raleigh to look a lot like Austin in 10-15 years (to give a couple examples).
This is exactly what has happened in NZ in the past few years. People flee the biggest cities, then those people push out others from the small cities and big towns, then even the little economically depressed towns 60 minutes from jobs are overpriced.
In 2021 there is not a single remote corner of this place that's affordable anymore.
Costal California has always had ridiculous home values, and nothing has changed that. 20 years ago I looked in Oakland and homes were 400k, which were still relatively unaffordable based on the salary I made at the time, 70k.
I think the income levels interest rates have helped raise values, but I think income has more to do with it. You’ll see high prices anywhere that can support workers, and they will pay for proximity.
I remember a conversation I had with a taxi driver in La Jolla in January 2002. I asked how a taxi driver could buy a house. He laughed and said you shouldn't be a taxi driver if you want to buy a house there, because the cheapest piece of junk was $400,000.
Housing prices were one reason I didn't move out to the Bay Area in the 1990s--at a time when salaries in the tech industry were nothing particularly remarkable relative to engineering salaries elsewhere.
This was actually one of the reasons I did not want to move to California. Around 2000 I had someone from Oakland staying at my $139k home in Minneapolis. Admittedly, I did live in a very nice neighborhood, but her estimate was that my house would cost at least $500k in a comparable area in Oakland.
That was all the incentive I needed to stay put. IIRC, I wasn't making that much more than $70k at the time but I could have worked in a coffee shop and paid my mortgage.
Some say TX prices are depressed due to high property taxes since it represents a significant component of household TCO. Comparing Seattle to Austin, the property value is 43% greater but the ongoing tax burden is 8:11, 27% less.
In the absence of an income tax and presence of similar overall government spending then increased rates of other revenue sources are a first order effect.
How this shapes the valuation of other things, like houses, is an interesting second order effect. Property tax rates shape how affordable housing is during the mortgage period and after.
That SF number isn't accurate. The 2021-2022 rate is 85% higher (1.18248499%). [1]
Another important thing about property taxes is to know when an updated assessed value is triggered and if there are any limits on how it changes. For example in SF, the assessed value is basically set to the sale price, immediately. But then the assessed value doesn't change until there's another property sale (or permitted improvements are made).
In some states assessed values are updated every year regardless of sales or improvements. [2]
I think that right now, you can still get a very nice house for < 500K in many midwestern college towns (e.g. Oberlin OH, but there are hundreds of good small colleges in smaller towns). A college town offers some of the benefits of urban living (probably better coffee), likely good internet, and often good schools. And the worse the weather is, the better the real-estate value. And, they may need some adjuncts teaching CS.
You could recently get a good house within <1h drive from Seattle for <600k. Prices are probably up now, but the problem here is Seattle in particular. No need to even leave the county (although you can hop to an adjacent one)
Which is true with a number of major cities. The Bay Area being something of an outlier in part because of geography.
But, for example, while Boston/Cambridge are very pricey in general as are some of the more exclusive suburbs with good school systems, there's almost certainly housing in that general range within an hour drive (or even on a commuter rail).
Absolutely. Last year I bought a house about eight miles outside of Boston. It's a 25 minute walk or a five minute drive to the supermarket. It's a five minute walk and a thirty minute train ride to downtown. I've got about ten restaurants/bars within walking distance. I like my neighbors. $500K.
> I think that right now, you can still get a very nice house for < 500K in many midwestern college towns
I'm in Madison, WI. The house I'm currently in was 180k back in '09. It has appreciated some since then. My neighbors have each turned over in the past decade and have sold their house for ~$300k.
If you go with 500k, you're in a very nice part of town or one of the extremely large corner lots. Most of the houses are in the 300k - 350k range.
Yikes. Living in Canada, the weather is shitty everywhere compared to a large part of the USA. There's way less nice weather places to live here. Things are going to get squeezed sooner here than in the US.
Oakland is still SF Bay Area, that’s really not “the rest of California”. In fact, yes things are pricier in the every part of CA, but not even close to the extent.
> BUT. "where does this leave the majority of this country?" -- well, the majority of the country does not have as crazy a real estate market as Seattle, as far as paying ~$1.5 mil for a dump where you're basically just paying for the land. That is not most of the country.
True - and the problem is less bad in cheaper areas, but it's still bad and getting worse there, too. OP may be able to afford a $300k house in Kansas, but I doubt the average worker in Kansas can.
It's not even Seattle. There are still places going for 600k and 800k just fine.
I'm not sure what this person is looking for, honestly.
Even stretching out just a bit and going to the Mill Creek area for more north, or Lynnwood, or Issaquah and perfectly nice, even new construction are in their claimed price range.
What's the ethnic breakdown like in these cities? I imagine some places have growing ethnic communities but it is hard to go from diverse enclaves like New York or the Bay Area to a less diverse city. Even going to Seattle was a bit of a shock. The Asian food was not even close to New York's.
Of course many Asian and people of color move to less diverse communities. They have my respect, but I'm not sure I want to end up one of a handful of Asians or relegated to a chinatown.
Moving to a cheaper city is a valid decision but it's a more complicated value choice as a person of color.
This is a perspective immigrants to America seem to have that I’ve never really understood. What’s the point of moving to a new country if the number one thing one to seek out is culture and cuisine which makes them feel like they’re back home?
I certainly can’t imagine someone from Texas moving to Japan and wondering where the all American BBQ places are :)
More diverse = less racist. Generally speaking, of course.
If you’re a person of color, it matters. If you’re the only non-white family in the neighborhood, it matters. If your kids are going to stand out in school because of the color of their skin, it matters.
If you’re white, then yes, moving to Japan is probably easier (though you might be surprised).
An observation, and honest question: aside from a few well known stereotypically racist areas, to my knowledge, most of the country is fine. You might run into ignorance, or be subjected to the the curiosity of others because of novelty when moving to a mostly white community, but the distribution happened because of communities and families emigrating en masse, so you get Irish towns and Polish towns and Italian places, etc. They become more diverse over time but they're not white for any reason except genetic happenstance. By and large, they don't care about race.
My question is this: doesn't it matter more to engage those communities with the same level of willingness to live among them as to deliberately pick already diverse areas, or an area that matches your own genetic happenstance?
If you don't have specific friends and family you're relocating for, then I'd say it's probably better to minimize the impact of any sort of decisions based on race or ethnic diversity. I think it's best to find good people and participate in your adopted community. And with that in mind, if you can work remotely, there's a vast array of affordable housing and land and communities of good people out there.
I see what you're saying. It is very admirable when people engage in these communities, cross boundaries and educate others. It's also a lot of work. Even if we take your premise that most of the country is fine, there's a lot of work to be done in encountering innocent ignorance. Some of the more hurtful, frustrating experiences have come from innocent ignorance. Just because people "don't care about race", doesn't mean they're always great at interacting with other races. Some people are willing to either put in the work or ignore these unpleasantries and survive. Others are not. They may not relish being obligated to act as a representative for a race or a culture in their community. They may not like having to ignore or brush off remarks that are not so great, even if they're meant in good faith
Roxane Gay has a good bit in one of her essays about how she struggled to help the black and LGBT organizations in colleges. She felt obligated as one of the few black queer professors, but that obligation in of itself really wore her down. Being a minority can be an extra job and some people do not want that responsibility.
>the distribution happened because of communities and families emigrating en masse, so you get Irish towns and Polish towns and Italian places
why dont we see as many british or french neighborhoods?
>but they're not white for any reason except genetic happenstance
:hmm: i dont agree that one could accurately describe the evolution of racial diversity in american communities as "not white for any reason except genetic happenstance"
> so you get Irish towns and Polish towns and Italian places
My italian ancestors settled where they did because (a) the polish wouldn't sell them the land they originally wanted near but not in the italian neighborhood, so they had to find an italian to sell them some and (b) they wanted to live somewhere that had italian grocery stores, and italian churches (this is very important 100 years ago) and other italian cultural points.
> They become more diverse over time but they're not white for any reason except genetic happenstance.
Redlining. Segregation. The history of america is "genetic" segregation.
> If you don't have specific friends and family you're relocating for, then I'd say it's probably better to minimize the impact of any sort of decisions based on race or ethnic diversity
I think the opposite is true. If you don't care where you're going, why not go somewhere that can feel like you're a bit at home when you're homesick?
I don't know SF is very diverse and the year I spent there I felt it was the most unfriendly place I have ever lived. Its the only place where I never met or even talked to a single neighbor. And its also the only place I would never move back to for any position.
> What’s the point of moving to a new country if the number one thing one to seek out is culture and cuisine which makes them feel like they’re back home?
Sometimes (actually a lot of times), immigrants move for a better quality of life (more pay, better schools, more job opportunities) and not for culture and cuisine. If I am moving for culture, why move to USA? Europe would be much better. A lot of people move for a better home (same but better) and not necessarily for new experiences.
>I certainly can’t imagine someone from Texas moving to Japan and wondering where the all American BBQ places are :)
You can't? You don't think eventually they won't crave the food they're used to eating?
New ideas are one thing, but your food, the food your mother cooked you growing up, will always be special to a person. And your people will understand you better than anyone else-- I'm the child of Indian immigrants and I still find people from my culture get the issues that I have to do through better than others. No one else knows or cares about the stereotypes one has to deal with, the particular ways culture can clash, the common challenges, etc etc
A. Not an immigrant, born here and parents were born here. We live in New York because of the discomfort (ahem, racism) experienced outside of New York. I know this wasn’t your implication but want to emphasize that not all Asians are immigrants. For a lot of us, coastal cities are our home.
B. An american would definitely choose to live in Tokyo versus a small town in the middle of nowhere. That’s why ex pat communities are a thing! No harm in wanting a little bit of home abroad.
C. I get plenty of America in New York. It’s not like the city is some asian bubble. Indeed part of the reason I want to live in New York is to have access to asian food and asian people without living in a solely asian neighborhood. I like having multiple cultures in one neighborhood.
> Moving to a cheaper city is a valid decision but it's a more complicated value choice as a person of color.
Its not just racial minorities that face this issue either. If you're gay, you might have a very limited selection of potential partners to meet in a minor city, and very few culturally gay places to go to. If you're trans, you'll probably be alone in a small town and almost certain victim of a hate crime.
A good perspective i like to use for regular straight white americans that don't experience much diversity is sports teams. If you like the cowboys, how much would you enjoy going to only sports bars in boston that play the Patriots games? Sure you can watch the cowboys at home, but none of your friends will want to watch with you, and if there is a cowboy v patriots game on TV, you might feel super comfortable wearing your team's jersey out in public.
I can relate to your modest living. Time to leave seattle. Not all privilege is financial, we are generally fortunate (assuming you are a programmer) to be able to work remote, especially with the post covid market. There are still places in the country where housing is affordable that aren't in the middle of nowhere.
This anxiety over housing seems to be primarily limited to select cities.
Places like SV or Seattle or London are places you go to and make money in (and then leave), not places to settle in and stay forever. So, for now, make as much money for as long as you can, then relocate to some place where houses cost a fraction of your net worth and start working remotely from there. Alternatively, if you can stomach your job for 10+ years and really hate renting, get a mortgage for a good house in Seattle, pay it off while living in it, then move anywhere else and just life off renting the house + some cushy remote, possibly part-time, job. Really, most people in the world can only dream of being in your position.
>Places like SV or Seattle or London are places you go to and make money in (and then leave)
AND THEN LEAVE is the part most people forget.
Switch to a remote company (yes, take a pay cut if you have to), use your millions to buy a $500k home (essentially a mansion) in any mid-tier city (Indianapolis, Houston, Dallas, Cleveland, Oklahoma City, etc.) and use the savings as a nice little investment / nest egg, you can have more kids if you want, or just enjoy being rich.
That's not a sustainable model for a population though. That works for the average SV type, but the legion of service workers that support that population aren't making enough money for the (and leave) portion. If you're only barely making it here, where do you get the resources to plan a move?
I agree, it's just a shit sandwich for them. They should leave asap if they can.
Also, somehow in Zurich (another place with obscene salaries and real estate prices), the service workers lead decent lives from what I've heard. They're paid enough to live on, and it's reflected in everything involving local labor (e.g. a sandwich at a local kiosk) being super expensive in absolute terms. BTW, I'm not sure if their higher wages are mandated by minimum wage laws or are an just effect of labor market forces.
This is something that has always fascinated me regarding the US, there's so many workers standing around providing "service". Greeters, baggers and what not, maybe this has changed in recent years since I last visited, and previously lived in the US.
Something in Scandinavia which usually would be operated by a single person, likely teenager, instead has 2 or 3 people hanging around.
Grocery baggers, at least, are actually the stores main gofer people. Bagging is done to either make lines move faster during busy periods or as a default position when there's nothing to do, but they also handle go-backs, grabbing products that customers couldn't find, cart return, and restock on the high volume areas.
The cashier or customer manages all that in your regular Scandinavian grocery store. The cashier has two "lanes" so two customers can bag simultaneously, if that is too slow they'll just leave a third pile up and close and hope it's a small order, or see which side goes fastest. Never a problem.
For the few go backs the cashiers has a tiny stash. For the rare question you likely have to find someone restocking somewhere in the store and ask, otherwise their time is wasted. If you forget something, well pay and put the bag(s) by the cashier and go back in yourself.
I guess someone sometimes are sent on cart-return or rebalancing. Though we tend to place those out by the cars so you grab them outside and then put them back by your car when done.
> even after all this work and money I can’t comfortably buy a house
You can, just not in Seattle. Just like you probably couldn't comfortably buy a penthouse in NYC or a wooded estate in London. There are countless places you can afford to buy a house
I 100% agree with you, I left another lawless dump in the sfbay area and am glad I did. Me and my spouse are both in higher level tech positions and we were not getting ahead financially. Taxes were sky high, our 100 year old house that needed alot of work was at the highest we could afford(cheapest house in the area), schools were terrible, packages were being stolen off of our porch. City services were non-existent, our quality of life was terrible. What is the point of working yourself into an early to grave to live like this? I made the move to be closer to family and although its not perfect its alot better than we had.
I hope you can stay positive. You sound prudent. Are you really in a hurry to buy or can you wait for a crash? Are you tied to the lawless dump or can you move?
You're not alone. I have the exact same thoughts here in London, England. Average house prices here are 10x median income.
Me and my partner want to start a family, but on my sole income we'll be paying ~50% of my take-home pay in mortgage + property taxes. It's probably not worth her continuing to work (although it's her choice) if we have a kid, due to the cost of childcare.
Belts will be extremely tight even though I'm well inside the top 1% income wise. That said, I still thank my lucky stars I am where I am, and can't imagine how someone on a median income feels about their prospects.
I know it sounds harsh, unreasonable even, but....just move out of London. I"m in the north east, just bought a 3 bed house with a garden and a double drive for £180k. My friends just moved up from London literally a month ago, bought a massive townhouse with 5 bedrooms/3 bathrooms on a major street for £300k.
We're all tech workers, we all work remotely - why stay in London? Because it has nice restaurants and museums? I don't buy it. Not if you want to start a family, own a house, afford a nice car and still have some money left at the end of the day.
My career is in the types of companies typically only found in London. None of them hire remote workers, even now. My partners career requires her to work on-site in London. My family are in the South East.
Besides all that, home ownership is really becoming a huge class and generational divide and house prices are rising faster outside London than within. It's only a matter of time before people in areas like you describe are priced out too.
One thing I'll say you might be very off the mark with the quarter of salary thing. Both me and my wife(also a programmer) make about 75% as much as those friends who just moved out of London.
Yes, anecdotes, I know. But I'm pretty sure tech worker salaries aren't as bad up here as people make it out to be.
I removed the comp comment, as it seemed a bit crass. In any case, my experience doesn't echo that. My salary is almost 6x what it was 3 years ago when I worked 30 miles outside of London (as the crow flies) and my job is way less stressful now
Before moving to London I had offers from 2 other companies both offering numbers close to what I was on previously. Moving to London was instantly 2x their best offer.
Overall I think if you can get over the home ownership hurdle, the potential for future comfort in the city is way greater.
That sounds miserable. Finding a sustainable employer imo is key to getting out of a situation that you recognize as subpar.
I just left Seattle and moved to Olympia. Sold my Seattle house and got a lot more for my money this far out. My company is fully supporting remote into the future, and we've hired a lot of folks that don't live in Seattle.
I won't name and shame, but Seattle has always had a number of hellish "startups" that are basically pump and dump schemes. They come and go. There are plenty of places that do offer sustainable employment, and I was lucky enough to land at one, so leaving the city was an option afforded to me by landing somewhere stable.
I ended up moving to Maple Valley. $1M will actually buy you a reasonable house here (assuming you don't need a large yard), it's very green and the schools are fantastic. I'm almost fully remote anyway so the occasional long commute to the office isn't much of an issue - if I had to be there in person every day it would be different as a rush-hour commute is almost an hour (it's 35 minutes normally) to downtown Seattle. Bellevue is closer of course.
Almost every person in my neighborhood works in tech and most of them used to live in Seattle but got fed up with the prices and the size of homes available for any kind of non-insane price.
Issaquah is another option at around $1.4M for a nice house. It also has great schools etc.
Your experience is the ethos of tang ping, or "lying down" movement. Sure, you can try, and even if you do your very best and end up in the top decile of society, you still are getting a run-down home at best in a selective metro area.
They asked for "dumpy up and coming city" not liberal safe havens.
If more people moved to red states instead of threatening to move to canada when republicans take higher office, our country might look a lot different.
The reason the properties are cheap is because the government isn’t pro NIMBY bullshit. That has nothing to do with liberal views. Even the deep red states have college towns with cheap housing if you can’t stand to live in a place where there are people with different views from you.
>I’ll start off by saying that I work 60 hours a week, at least.
Too much, even if you want to work that much. Do 40 for your primary and then 20 where you are your own boss.
>Based on the neighborhood I live in and my compensation, I am extremely privileged. I don’t have money concerns that my parents had. Most things that I might need, I can buy them without having to think too much or without putting a dent in my net worth.
HN is very likely >90% part of the zoom class. Though you it might not be zoom but rather whatever flavour, teams, etc. Welcome to being rich. You got there because of whatever skillset you have learnt. Good for you.
>But Seattle has become a lawless dump. The east side has started homes for $1.4MM where the inspection report shows you that you’re basically just paying for the land.
Welcome to high energy costs fueling inflation and pushing high energy things like homes so expensively.
>If I have to be a renter my whole damn life and can’t even afford a house, what is the god damn point? Yeah I get paid very well, but I am a pawn of people who earn significantly more.
You're looking at it the wrong way. What is your investment strategy? Rent vs own calculators certainly exist. Maybe you're out of real estate because you predict a crash? If you expect they continue rising. Then buying is the way to go.
housing is not stocks, thus you cant think like a house is a stock. They are a leveraged investment that lacks the price discovery and liquidity stocks provide.
imagine a 1m$ house. you have to put 200k$ down into a single house (no diversification). A 10% decline means a 50% decline on that 200k. selling it takes days to months with usually at least 6% fees. So this thing is highly illiquid. so its not like stocks where you can say 'well just buy and hold'.
given that they dislike Seattle, Seattle is as bubbly as ever, there is a new condo in construction on every other block, and things like the mayor saying 'we are not going to enforce the law in favor of safety towards the protestors', purchasing a home in Seattle is a scary idea.
Also another issue with Seattle its not like you can buy and rent out. a typical home that costs 3500$/month to own will only rent for max 2500$. so you have to be in something thats 1k$/month cash flow negative. even if you are networth positive, that may be unsustainable for the individual
>housing is not stocks, thus you cant think like a house is a stock. They are a leveraged investment that lacks the price discovery and liquidity stocks provide.
Even better :)
>imagine a 1m$ house. you have to put 200k$ down into a single house (no diversification). A 10% decline means a 50% decline on that 200k. selling it takes days to months with usually at least 6% fees. So this thing is highly illiquid. so its not like stocks where you can say 'well just buy and hold'.
But you cant buy 1m$ of stocks on borrowed money. 10% increase means 50% increase on your downpayment. Even better, when does housing crash? The governments just printed a bijillion dollars to prevent it crashing and rates have real yields of negative. It's free money. There is a rent vs own calculator and even in bad cities the ROI will be only a few years tops.
>given that they dislike Seattle, Seattle is as bubbly as ever, there is a new condo in construction on every other block, and things like the mayor saying 'we are not going to enforce the law in favor of safety towards the protestors', purchasing a home in Seattle is a scary idea.
The antifa rioters aren't about race or whatever they claim. It's about destroying a neighbourhood to push people like you out of the market and reduce demand. The george floyd riots have caused billions in damage, very much higher than the few hundred million in insured damages. Those markets like Seattle and Portland are going to pay for in the long run. House insurance will be exorbitantly high.
>Also another issue with Seattle its not like you can buy and rent out. a typical home that costs 3500$/month to own will only rent for max 2500$. so you have to be in something thats 1k$/month cash flow negative. even if you are networth positive, that may be unsustainable for the individual
That's the funny thing about investing. The first hit at your mortgage is the worst. You amortize for 25 years. You pay some principal in say the first 5-10 years. In those 10 years you also got a raise and are earning more. So the next time you are coming to bat to refinance you're in a better situation owing less and able to pay more. You will then be winning. The calculators out there will tell you buying vs owning is only a few years. The question is whether or not you're staying in seattle that long.
There's also the spin of the dice. There will be homeowner moments where oh shit I have tospend $5000 to fix that sump pump or roof. So its not so easy to calculate.
My wife is from Tokyo. I feel this so much. I'm very grateful, we moved to the US during the start of the pandemic (a two year process in itself). I'm very grateful to work in this industry and work hard for the success of my company and team members. I moved to a small town near where I grew up. I can buy a house but we want, get japanese food, and a have a walk-able city. Safe place for kids too. Most people like these things. There are few places like this in the USA and those that have it are priced at an incredible level that is out of reach for us. I'm applying for a return Tokyo where I can afford a home in a great place near the city at a reasonable price, get great food and still do work I care about. I'm sure I'm not alone in this feeling.
My fiancee is from West Virginia. She doesn't even come from the really rural part of it, but she basically has nothing good to say about living there. Poverty, drug abuse, environmental degradation. And seeing as half the people I've met from WV are basically lowlifes I'm inclined to agree.
You can get land pretty cheap there, though. I've thought about buying a forested plot before but ... nah. If I want to do that I can afford to do it in a more rural part of Ohio.
I was born a stones throw away from WV on the Pennsylvania side. I grew up a stones throw away from WV on the Ohio side.
That entire geographical region is an economically depressed shithole (until you get up to Pittsburgh and Columbus and their suburban areas). WV may be ground zero (it's also not the only one, Kentucky has it's fair share of the same thing going on) but its contagion rots out from the center. If you're ever looking for land in rural Ohio or rural southwestern PA, I'd implore you to go spend some time on the ground in those communities first.
I would be cautious moving to a "city" with a population lower than 5,000 (Flandreau SD, but home of Gene Amdahl, and Washburn WI); good repair people/contractors/restaurants will be much harder to find. And without Starlink, perhaps useless internet. But some of the other places you list seem to be much closer to modern, if not Seattle level, "civilization".
On the other hand, "free and clear" is free and clear.
If you want world class dining just hop in your Tesla down to the airport for a quick weekend excursion, who cares what it costs, you're swimming in money without a rent bill.
We’re talking about an order of magnitude difference in cost. Property taxes on a $300k house would be in the range of $3k per year — less than a months rent of a 1bed apartment in an expensive city
It's all about what you value. Do you value living more financially sustainable or do you value being closer to entertainment, people your age, and outlook on life? Not saying either is right or wrong but it's a choice. My wife and I had this discussion earlier this year and we value sustainability and being close to family so we're moving back to the rural county I'm from.
Something that blew my mind when researching internet there was that 90% of the county has fiber to the door with 1GB speed. The entire county has a population less than 25k distributed pretty evenly throughout.
What are these locations like though? I’m not from the US so maybe I don’t know but the first two look pretty “middle of nowhere” places in states that might be less progressive (am I wrong?).
At 200k I’d prefer an apartment and trade size / space for location. Even with kids.
They're all frigid wastelands, every winter, except for the place in Kansas, which is about as middle-of-nowhere as you can get and still have neighbors. These houses are affordable because they are awful to live in. In Moorehead the average temperature is below freezing for five months out of the year.
These discussions tend to end up contrasting a handful of large cities with middle of nowhere. You can find plenty of places in maybe the $400K range and probably less than I think an hour of many major coastal cities.
probably same reason as me. I hate Seattle, but I have to live here for employment. many employers dont give flexibility, and I am not in a position to work at an employer that both pays me well and allows me to live where I want.
You live in the golden age of remote work. Ask your current company if you can go remote or find a job that will let you, there are a huge number of them currently and so many of them are actively hiring. Get a well paying job and go live somewhere affordable. After stating this please know I am not trying to make light of your situation. I know there are a million factors that can prevent someone from moving, elderly parents, children with established friends, and a million others. Just saying that there are options out there. I would move to Bali if I could, but responsibilities are what they are. 60 hours a week though is not sustainable, whether you get a remote job or not, I highly encourage you to find a job where the workload is manageable. I was in the same boat as you and the long hours were pretty much killing me. One day I just decided to get a new job, now I work 40 hours a week, make more money, the job is remote and if I am forced to work OT I get paid overtime. Life is short friend, make decisions that will maximize your joy. Wish you the best.
There's a simple solution to the house price issue: leave Seattle. There are many cities and towns across America with reasonable real estate, good communities, and good schools. In terms of local political zeitgeist you can easily take your pick as all kinds of tendencies are available.
Maybe but they don't have mountains, fjords, ocean and freshwater beaches, world class job markets(I know, I know; remote), and mild weather year round.
For some such as myself the choice is anything but simple. In fact I left Seattle primarily for this very reason and one cheap house bought and sold in the midwest and a year later I found myself back.
> Based on the neighborhood I live in and my compensation, I am extremely privileged. I don’t have money concerns that my parents had. Most things that I might need, I can buy them without having to think too much or without putting a dent in my net worth.
> If I have to be a renter my whole damn life and can’t even afford a house, what is the god damn point?
People seem to have been taken in by the societal conditioning that you need to buy a house. Housing and shelter is a basic human need. Owning a house is not. As you yourself mentioned, you are extremely privileged and can afford most things you want without having to think twice. So why stress yourself out over piece of paper.
I too live in one of the highest-COL places in America. And I'm paying $3k/month in rent for a wonderful 4-bedroom townhouse in a great neighborhood. I've done the math, and I financially come out ahead by paying $3k/month in rent and investing the remainder in worldwide index funds - a strategy which made me a millionaire in my 30s. I spend an hour commuting into the city via public transit, but that's no problem. I include this time as part of my working hours, and specifically chose my home for its accessibility to public transit.
You mentioned that you're avoiding lifestyle creep. But your biggest lifestyle creep is your expectation of owning a family-sized home in a prime urban neighborhood. Let go of this societal brainwashing and you'll find yourself far happier.
Renting is throwing away money. I understand people do it when they only plan on living in a place for a brief period of time, but you'd still be better off buying a house, then selling after a few years in most time spans. There is risk though, but I doubt the risk would ever equal $3000 a month loss you are currently taking.
For example, if you bought a house, it would have to lose $72K value in 2 years or $144K in 4 years (minus inflation, taxes, maintenance) to break even with paying $3000/month rent.
However, if your house appreciates as most do in highly industrialized areas, you basically get paid to live there.
>For example, if you bought a house, it would have to lose $72K value in 2 years or $144K in 4 years (minus inflation, taxes, maintenance) to break even with paying $3000/month rent.
You're not factoring in transaction costs, maintenance, property taxes, and cost of capital (ie. the downpayment). Transaction costs (eg. relators) are 2.5% on each side, so after buying/selling you're already down 5%. Property taxes and maintenance are estimated to be 1% each, so over 4 years you're down 8%. The cost of capital is hard to quantify, especially if you also factor in appreciation, but housing has historically under-preformed the stock market, so that should theoretically be a non-zero cost there.
Suppose we ignore cost of capital (since that's hard to quantify), let's calculate what that % equates to. According to [1] the price to rent ratios is many cities exceed 30. If we use a price to rent ratio of 30, then a $3000/month rent translates to a house price of $1.08M. Factoring in the % costs from before, that's a cost of $140.4k. That's nearly as big as the $144k loss that you budgeted for, before factoring in drop in home price. The maintenance/property taxes alone is going to eat up more than half of your hypothetical $3000 in rent savings.
> Factoring in the % costs from before, that's a cost of $140.4k.
For a married person with a million dollar home, they'll make ~$150k back from the section 121 nonrecognition provision alone if they ever sell, not to mention the salt and mortgage interest tax deductions. The tax code heavily incentivizes home ownership.
>For a married person with a million dollar home, they'll make ~$150k back from the section 121 nonrecognition provision alone if they ever sell
1. that's on capital gains. If they're selling for a loss in OP's scenario, that works out to a tax savings of $0.
2. realistically speaking this can be factored into the cost of cost of capital (ie. opportunity cost of the downpayment/mortgage payment), but I didn't want to get into that because the calculation can get subjective. Housing has historically under-performed the stock market, but if you're a housing permabull, you might argue that the housing bubble will continue and outperform the stock market, making the opportunity cost of buying a house negative.
>not to mention the salt and mortgage interest tax deductions
that's a savings on mortgage interest, which is a cost that wasn't in my calculations. Including that cost and factoring in that deduction will make the numbers worse, not better.
>The tax code heavily incentivizes home ownership.
I didn't realize you assumed a loss through the entire thing. Sure, if you ignore the realities of the US property market and begin with the assumption that your home is going to lose six figures in value every few years then yeah I guess renting is better than buying.
That's not how realtor fees work. The seller pays them. And plenty of real estate changes hands without the involvement of real estate agents. What you've described is a worst-case scenario which completely ignores the fact that homeowners have a real asset they can then sell.
Further, any of this handwaving about all the fees of ownership apply just as well to whoever owns the property you're renting -- all of which costs they simply pass to the renter. There is no world where renting is as cost-effective as ownership over the long term.
>That's not how realtor fees work. The seller pays them
1. even if you're not paying them, it's baked into the price.
2. OP mentioned buying and selling (for a loss), so he'll eventually have to pay it
3. if you search around, realtor fees are customarily at 6% for the seller, so my estimate of 2.5% for both sides is actually underestimating it.
> What you've described is a worst-case scenario which completely ignores the fact that homeowners have a real asset they can then sell.
I'm using the case that OP himself provided.
>Further, any of this handwaving about all the fees of ownership apply just as well to whoever owns the property you're renting -- all of which costs they simply pass to the renter. There is no world where renting is as cost-effective as ownership over the long term.
Right, I'm not claiming that you're not throwing away any money when renting, just that it's nowhere the full rent, and the numbers aren't as rosy as OP initially suggested (ie. you can lose $144K house value in 4 years, and still break even).
Paying property taxes and mortgage interest and insurance and maintenance and real estate commissions are also throwing away money. Don't forget all the carrying costs when you're selling the house and have the house sit empty for months. Just because you already moved out doesn't mean it stops costing you $$$.
Buying a house only makes sense if you're going to stay there 5+ years.
I've owned several homes as I've moved around. Lost money on all but one. My parents lost money on all the houses they bought. Real estate is hardly the guaranteed "wealth builder" people think it is.
I hate mowing the lawn, too.
Oh, and if you build a new house in Washington state, you get to pay sales tax on it! That's another 10% poke in the eye.
> Paying property taxes and mortgage interest and insurance and maintenance and real estate commissions are also throwing away money.
I don't understand, do you think landlords don't pay tax, insurance premiums, or maintenance costs for their property? Those are all passed on to tenants with room left over to make the landlord a profit.
Of course the landlords do. But I'm talking to the assumption that paying rent is throwing away money, while buying a house is not throwing money away.
>But I'm talking to the assumption that paying rent is throwing away money, while buying a house is not throwing money away.
Compare paying someone $3k a month to use their asset vs paying a bank ~$3k (probably less) a month while owning that same appreciating asset. When renting, that $3k is gone, a guaranteed loss. With buying, it goes into an asset you can later sell, hopefully at a higher price. Alternatively you can keep it and not have to pay mortgage or rent once it's paid off and still have a place to live. You can also borrow off whatever equity you've built up. Also that mortgage payment is locked in, so you aren't subject to the landlord raising rent after your contract expires in a couple of years.
It's a big investment that you also get to live in. You could lose money on it, but it's unlikely in most populated places, and you will most likely lose less than what you would otherwise pay in rent.
Just make sure you buy in an area / state that isn't shrinking.
Interest payments are not adding to your wealth, they're subtracting from it. Almost none of your house payment in the early years of the mortgage goes towards increasing equity.
> that mortgage payment is locked in
Unless you bought an adjustable rate mortgage. Once you do buy a house, you'll discover that taxes, maintenance, insurance, etc., are not at all locked in. If you don't pay the taxes, you won't have a place to live, as the government will toss you out.
Nearly all people imagine that if they paid $X for a house, then sold it for $(X +Y) that they made $Y profit. They leave out all other costs, like taxes, real estate commissions, insurance, etc., etc., etc.
>Interest payments are not adding to your wealth, they're subtracting from it. Almost none of your house payment in the early years of the mortgage goes towards increasing equity.
Ya that's fair based on the payment schedule, banks gotta get their money if you pay it off early; but still more equity than renting.
>Unless you bought an adjustable rate mortgage.
Ya a lot of people got burned by balloon payments in 2008 after the market tanked. They were speculating more so than buying a house to live in many times I suspect. I bought a house in 2002 and it never went below what I paid for it by 2008. I bought at a really good time for my city though.
>Nearly all people imagine that if they paid $X for a house, then sold it for $(X +Y) that they made $Y profit.
I don't think anything ever works that way. Always giving someone a cut.
>They leave out all other costs, like taxes, real estate commissions, insurance, etc., etc., etc.
Ya all that sucks. But if you are renting, you still pay that for somebody else, it's baked in plus profit. If renting wasn't profitable, they wouldn't do it.
Don't forget closing costs and the opportunity cost of investing the down payment (which regulations basically require to be like 20% now I think).
But yes, I agree that that's the history, that if you're in an area for a few years it's better to buy than to rent, but isn't it untenable for real estate to increase in value at ~3% higher than inflation indefinitely? I genuinely don't understand the long run bull case for real estate as an investment.
But the idea that you'll get a rate of return that's close to the stock market, from owning some land that's just sitting there? It's very strange to me, from a 10,000 foot view of the economics.
It's true that there's a fixed amount of land, but the population (both in the US and in the world as a whole) is growing slowly now and will soon stop.
I suppose one potential driver for real estate's value in major cities is that the returns to concentration of talent will continue to increase. That seems possible (though beware of tail risks there, like remote work, VR, pandemic). But for real estate that's outside of a big growing city?
It just seems possible that we've been in a long bull run in real estate that could slow down or halt drastically at any time.
But that doesn't mean that it's not better to own than to rent. When you rent, you've got another party that's looking for a profit, and your rent is pricing in risks that are more under your control when you're an owner (like the risk that you totally trash the property, or the opportunity cost when the house is sitting empty).
You sound like a propaganda billboard from "They Live"; it's pretty incredible to call a property deed a "piece of paper". Setting aside the financial and psychological benefits that come with home ownership, the United States is a society that has made a lot of sacrifices in the name of preserving choice. You made yours, you chose to rent; the choice to own a home should remain a realistic alternative for those who want it. If your argument is that houses in absolutely prime real estate areas are always going to be out of reach of most buyers fair enough, but treating the idea of home ownership like a diamond ring is absurd.
I’ll start off by saying that I work 60 hours a week, at least. My stress and anxiety levels are manageable now, but only because I found ways of managing them. They’re not reasonable though and most importantly, they’re not sustainable.
I'm in this boat. I told my manager, talked about my pay & how it doesn't match my responsibilities. I talked about how I'm OK with a little crunch, but crunch 52 weeks a year is not crunch, it's just taking advantage. He said he's aware of the situation and that everyone's in the same boat, as if that justifies it somehow. He said wait to ask for higher pay. I feel like I'm being jerked around. I hear this from you & I hear the same from some of my other friends in my field, too, so I doubt the grass is greener anywhere else, and leaving won't have much effect.
I liked my job in the past. I think I would like it again if my workload was more reasonable. The best I can do is just constantly try to set expectations that, no, I won't be putting in any more additional extra effort.
See if you can get more money or even just better work life balance elsewhere if you're not happy. These designated promotion/raise times are the biggest load of BS. "oh sorry, we'd love to give you a raise but those happen in 6 months, so maybe then?"
I'm curious, what would happen if you worked 40 hours instead of 60? Would the company fire you?
(I'm privileged. I am in a scale-up that has found product-market fit. We could be cashflow positive if we needed to. I'm in a management position now so I get to shape the rules. Engineers work 40 hours, and nothing's on fire)
The grass is much greener. There are lots of companies with reasonable hours now. Start asking for help. Message people (like me!) and we’ll refer you.
If you're defining the East Side as only Bellevue and Sammamish, maybe... But I just did a search in Bothell and there are a number of decent-looking houses for under $1M. Yeah, it's absolutely crazy compared to what it was even a few years ago, and I'm not going to argue that the values should be anywhere near as high as they are. But if you actually want to buy (rather than just vent, which is valid), you don't have to broaden your search that much to find much better options.
>"I don’t have money concerns that my parents had."
vs
>"can’t even afford a house"
Only one of these statements can be true. Would you have money concerns if you did buy a house that is as good as your parents? i.e. if your housing costs were $10k/mo, $20k/mo or more?
Why do you say a 30 year mortgage carries more risk (as a borrower) than a 10 year? You can always treat the 30 year as a 10 year (by throwing more money at the principle) but you can't do the reverse.
30 years is 60% of your career and there's no evidence that the gravy train for software developers is going to last that long or from 2021 or that any particular individual will remain employable 30 years into their career (yes, many do but many also don't if the anecdotes on HN are to be believed).
This is exactly my thought process. If I have to pay a mortgage I know I have to work a much longer to pay off the house. This means I have zero control over what dictates my daily actions in life. Having a mortgage means I’m not free to do whatever I wish; focus on family, start a company, work on passions. The cost of houses/homes are just too high. I don’t want all of my net worth to be in a house either. It’s JUST a house.
-> This means I have zero control over what dictates my daily actions in life.
OTOH, having a mortgage "locks in" your price of housing for the next ## years. It's perfect for families and startup businesses because it affords some long term stability.
It doesn't sound like you're ready to settle down yet, so buying a SFH probably isn't the best move right now anyway.
This assumes I want to pay for housing over a period of time. I’d love to just pay for it once and never be beholden to anyone ever again. My car was $5000. When something breaks I fix it myself for nothing. I’ve replaced heater core in 1940s furnaces myself, put on new roofs, can drywall anything myself. Houses are cheap to fix and you can find people that do it right for little money if you know your stuff. I’d love to settle down and I’m ready to do that where it makes sense, but where I want but is not affordable. I can rent but then I’m wasting money. Building more housing fixes this problem very easily.
Maintenance isn't that cheap even if you put in a lot of sweat equity. And you have property taxes which can be a fair bit depending on the area.
You absolutely buy yourself a degree of stability and reduced future payments with a house but you're still probably looking at thousands of dollars a year for a standalone house.
Mortgage is the minimum amount you'll pay for housing, where-as rent is the maximum. You need to factor in mortgage payment + PMI + property tax + home insurance + repairs. With 5% down, NerdWallet estimates that at $5,281.
I agree for the most part, but I wouldn't recommend anyone buy a house without 20% down. PMI is not a good deal for the homeowner and should be avoided.
I bought my first house with a tiny down payment, and PMI. Then after about 5 years the value of my home had gone up enough (Denver area) that I had enough equity I was above 20% and I refinanced so the PMI went away.
Neighbors' son and daughter-in-law are moving from the Washington, DC, suburbs to Raleigh, North Carolina. A four-bedroom house there in a good development costs maybe a third of what his parents' house would sell for in a good (but not most expensive) neighborhood of Washington.
Last year, my Seattle lease was up. I saw the same thing with houses - I instead found a place in Tacoma for substantially less and it was substantially nicer. And it's super easy to go to Seattle and enjoy anything in the city whenever I wish.
I'm also formerly a Seattle Amazon office worker. After a few years and promotions, I started working remotely for Bay Area companies (the short flight makes me appealing) for good pay for years now. But I still love living in WA.
Sounds like you should consider leveraging your prestigious Seattle tech pedigree into a remote position. If you really work 60h now, your effective hourly wage will skyrocket even if you get paid less by nature of going down to sub-40h due to remote work. And it'll still be plenty of money for Western WA.
Lived in Seattle for a decade before relocating to Utah 2.5 years ago. Growing up in central WA we visited Seattle often when I was a teenager in the 90's. It was a pleasant, beautiful place - many areas around Seattle still are (love the outdoors there). A lot has changed over the past 10-15 years and not for the better. People are fleeing the city to the suburbs (mainly north and east of Seattle or even to the other side of the Cascades). The city needs better leadership to address chronic homelessness, crime, and drug use. Seems like they've had the funds, just don't get anything done effectively. Totally agree that housing affordability is a real challenge there. It's grown too fast for the infrastructure to catch up.
What is your definition of "reasonable house"? Plenty of 1900-2200 square foot houses are selling in neighborhoods like Maple Leaf, Greenwood, etc. for just over $1M. If you want something bigger/newer, of course you have to go to the Eastside, but even there
Why do people put up with these tiny homes in cramped, expensive cities?
There are lots of inexpensive cities with incredible housing inventory. Cities that are surrounded by culture, cuisine, and an endless assortment of things to do.
Big city prices are driven by offices. You're going to be working remotely anyway.
Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami, Austin, Chattanooga, Savannah. You can draw a $300-500k salary living in these places, pay a low mortgage, and buy a second or third home for travel / rent.
>Why do people put up with these tiny homes in cramped, expensive cities?
In what universe is 2000 square feet tiny? Most of America - to say nothing of the rest of the world - makes do with far less. Sure, if you have 5-7 people living under one roof, more might be appreciated, but especially for 2-4 people it's tons of space.
If you want more space, a city isn't the place for you.
My fiancee and I live in a house that's ... I forget how big, something like 2200sqft of finished space. We basically ignore probably 40% of the house. If we didn't have animals (rabbits take up one room) it'd be even more than that.
If you question is "why would people want a smaller house in a city rather than a giant house in a different city", then there are all sorts of answers:
1) Bigger cities have more and better things to do. Sports teams, theaters (both local and touring professional), concerts, bars, parks. Faster access to a major airport makes travel easier and cheaper.
2) More space isn't always better. More space means more to clean and heat. It's also an excuse to fill with more junk you don't necessarily need. If you added another room or two to my house, I have a good idea of the kinds of things I would fill them with - but my life has been fine for 5+ years without those things.
3) It's feasible to work in an expensive city while maxing out your retirement savings and go live somewhere cheaper later. It's impossible to do the opposite. It gives you choices.
4) The local populace in many of those areas can be unwelcoming if you're anything other than a white heterosexual. Even if you find a neighborhood that tolerates you, your state government is gerrymandered by people who go around vocally wishing you were dead. That turns away a lot of people. I grew up in Michigan, I still have family in Michigan, and I visit regularly enough to be quite certain I never want to move back there regardless of if its cheaper.
Median household income in the US is about $67k, where many of the households include two or more income earners. The homeownership rate for millennials though lower is still over 40%. How are they making it work, indeed. They just live in different places, places that we don't think are good enough. Maybe this is a prison that we have built for ourselves. I think I'm smart for seeing through Cartier ads and other luxury marketing tactics, but I think I've been sold on an idea just as unattainable.
The answer is right on the surface, but not usually spoken about very openly:
Intergenerational wealth transfer. Every single millennial home-owner that I know (myself included) received a very generous gift from their parents, or, in some cases, other surviving relatives (usually older than them).
The average gift size was approximately the size of the down-payment.
> They just live in different places, places that we don't think are good enough.
Young people generally live approximately where their parents live, regardless of what people think about that place. NYT found the average distance from parents that people live at, is approximately 18 miles. The reasons, again, should be fairly obvious.
Honestly, if you're working 60 hours a week, and not by choice, it's time to start considering other positions. I don't work over 40 hours a week most weeks, and still make a reasonable salary. Admittedly, I'm not 1.5mm home rich; but, when rent is 2-3k, I don't find much value, myself, in buying a house or condo for more than like 500k, so I'm sitting and waiting, for now.
I don't think managers intend to burn people out, they would rather have efficient, productive workers. Good workers can get overwhelmed and not get time to focus on tasks or not enough support to be successful. To sustain a high productivity environment, there needs to be clear communication and a good relationship between managers and staff. It took me a long time to learn about managing up, and it's still hard sometimes. We need to be able to say what we can and can't do, be trusted that we are still working hard, and set reasonable expectations that can be met reliably. If I'm doing my best and my manager acts like a coach, we can grow together quickly. In hindsight, I could have fixed jobs and relationships I bailed from by asserting my intent, desires, and boundaries more clearly. I was in fear of looking bad if I said no, so I worked harder until I burned out. If you can fix things and find balance, take a shot. If they retaliate, you're in a bad relationship with someone who is not receptive to your needs and you need to move on. I quit my last gig because I couldn't get the changes I needed. There are many more places to work, I may as well move on till I find a happy place.
For now, I landed a consulting gig, helping a small agency improve team dynamics and build the company they want to work for. I'd like to expand into technical training, mentoring, and find more clients. I think this industry has potential for awesome careers, and most of the struggles we feel comes from resolvable problems. Fixing these things would lead to higher productivity and happiness.
> even after all this work and money I can’t comfortably buy a house - then where does this leave the majority of this country?
Most of the country isn't trying to buy a house in San Francisco—they're living in much more affordable places. Some problems are universal, but others are limited to a few small locations—or at least, considerably worse there than others.
I’ve lived in Seattle for 30 years, and I work in tech.
- Houses are cheap compared to other metros related to comp. You can get something great for 700-800k that would be 1.5m in the valley.
- You are working way too much. You can certainly work 40 hours or less for whatever comp you’re getting now. This takes work - learning to set boundaries, learning how to pick a team.
Living in Seattle is a huge handicap. There are so many other places in the United States to live where you can buy a 1,5000-2,000sqft starter home within a 10-30 minute commute for $300-$600k (recent home inflation included).
If you have tech skills, get a remote job (or a local one and make a little less), pick any metro area with 1-3 million metro population and move yourself somewhere where you can live an affordable life.
If you can arrange so that you don't have to be in the office daily and/or have flexible enough hours so you can commute outside of rush hour it might be worthwhile to take a look on the other side of Puget Sound. Housing in Kitsap County is a lot more affordable than in King County, and ferry commuting is fine as long as you can do it at times when there is not massive contention for spots.
If your office is either within walking distance of the Seattle ferry terminal or there are good public transit options between the terminal and your office, so that you don't need to take your car on the ferry I don't think ferry contention is an issue. I believe there are park and ride lots near the ferry terminals on the Kitsap side, but I don't know if they fill up.
> I’ll start off by saying that I work 60 hours a week, at least. My stress and anxiety levels are manageable now, but only because I found ways of managing them. They’re not reasonable though and most importantly, they’re not sustainable.
Would you care to share what kinds of things specifically cause you stress and anxiety?
No problem if you don't feel comfortable to do so, I am just really curious what kinds of stressors people such as yourself are experiencing.
What an awful article. Two quotes to show how garbage this is-
> The great-resignation thesis seems strongest in America and Britain. In September a record 4.4m Americans quit their jobs (see chart 1). In the third quarter of the year nearly 400,000 Britons moved from one job to another after handing in their notice, also the highest-ever level.
> In other parts of the rich world, however, a great resignation is harder to spot.
So basically the premise of their title is that the "Great Resignation" doesn't count because it's primarily happening in two countries instead of in every country.
The "Great Resignation" has been fueled by anecdotes and a tiny upward tick in the underlying data.
If you go looking, it's not hard to find comments, anecdotes, and stories from people whose workplaces did experience some sort of large resignation event where a lot of people went out and got new jobs.
The common theme in those anecdotes is always that they were underpaid and/or mistreated to begin with. In some ways, the "Great Resignation" news stories being blasted all over the news gave a lot of people the final push they needed to go out and look for new jobs. Combined with the booming economy, it wasn't hard for these people to find better jobs. Once their coworkers realized what was happening, they also made the leap.
So in a sense, it does appear that small pockets of employers who were behind the curve are finally getting what's coming to them. I half believe the news stories about "Great Resignation" stuff became a self-fulfilling prophecy where everyone who wasn't getting a new job felt left out.
But if you look at any larger company data or at companies who were smart enough to keep pace with compensation and employee treatment norms, there isn't really a wave of resignations like the news stories suggest.
Overall employee turnover is slightly higher than normal, unless you also factor in the decrease in employee turnover during early COVID, at which point the running average of employee turnover is all that abnormal.
>The common theme in those anecdotes is always that they were underpaid and/or mistreated to begin with.
One area where it certainly seems to be very common is with restaurants. In every city I've been to over the past few months, restaurants are very obviously on reduced hours, reduced days, or (supposedly "temporarily") closed. And it's fairly obvious in many cases that it's not due to lack of demand. And, in many cases, these jobs are not terribly attractive.
Restaurants are adding surcharges and increasing worker pay but it appears to not be enough in general.
Many restaurants treat their employees like shit and let their customers treat their employees like shit. It's not surprising people don't want to work for them.
It doesn't have to be this way but no one wants to be the first place to refuse abusive customers.
I would have to imagine that tracks similar to the "K" shaped economy recovery. This means that lower pay physically based positions [retail, travel, food] have seen great amounts of people leaving those industries as Government stimulus checks have given people time and money to think about their jobs, many are also leaving the industry permanently if they can.
On the flip side higher payed professional positions are seeing some turnover but no where anywhere like the other lower paid sectors.
I know for a fact that the restaurant/food service situation is on full meltdown mode in Southern California. A few panda expresses have run out rice. Multiple Habit burgers have shut down due to lack of staff, eating out at restaurants have been the worse I have ever seen it as everyone is really new and it shows.
That being said I have been to a lot of places in the country this year(Utah, Arizona, Hawaii) and nothing is similar to what I've seen locally in southern California so it may track to how expensive California has become and could be people are quitting jobs in expensive areas and moving to cheaper ones.
It’s a great state in many ways, but the way most of the local and state leaders have repeatedly punted on the issue of housing affordability is shameful. Calling their efforts half assed would be too generous, it’s quarter assed at most.
The recent change to upzone previously single family home only areas is good, but even then, the new regulation is filled with caveats that weaken it.
>I know for a fact that the restaurant/food service situation is on full meltdown mode in Southern California.
I won't say it's everywhere but I've seen the same problem as California in Washington (including rural Washington) and Raleigh. Everyone I know who travels has been running into the difficulties of trying to find places to eat at on a given day.
I'm in LA and it's in a downward spiral. Went to a restaurant yesterday and a dish was $16 which was a shocking increase. I went to look at menu photos from 2019 on yelp and the same dish was $12 back then. Service was really bad, they basically took the order, delivered the food, and we never saw them again. No water refills, got tired of waiting for the check and had to walk up front to ask for it. I'm usually generous with tips, but why should this poor service be rewarded? And on top of the already inflated prices?
So restaurants are getting squeezed on all sides. Supply costs up, wages are up, labor shortage, rent is up. Tips will go down as customers are upset with poor service, which means more pressure on wages. All of this means higher prices, which means fewer customers and more takeout orders. The old restaurant business model is simply not sustainable.
my restaurant experience and it happened more than twice were: drinks taking 40+ mins to arrive, kids food never came, food was wrong and 1 hour+ and cold. 4% covid charge on top of sky high bill. I don't think I'll eat out anymore, we are just resigning ourselves to cook every meal. No way I am going to waste money for a horrible experience that costs a fortune.
I’m not going to comment on the evidence, but I can say that my previous manager was very quick to support the ‘great resignation’. It was a very convenient excuse to deflect from her terrible management.
I left a FAANG just last week. I'd say for a mix of work-related reasons and also because I just wanted a break in general. I wouldn't say it was "COVID" or some specific reason but I'm sure it contributed.
Edit: Also, FWIW roughly 4 people left my team in the past year (since Oct 2020) before me. A couple went to new jobs, a couple did not and just resigned without plans (me too).
Similarly, I quit a job at a FAANG earlier this year. I had had frustrations there for awhile, and while it wasn't COVID that directly made me quit, I think it exacerbated my existing problems to a breaking point.
In a sense I'm sort of glad about growing to hate the job as much as I did; it inspired me to finish my bachelors and start the path forward to transition out of software engineering and into CS research.
Granted, this transition is going to take 5-6 years, but it's at least a path forward.
No, I don't think so, and I don't think they pay terribly well. I just got accepted into a PhD program, which will take me 5-6 years to complete, so I'm hoping that will qualify me for the roles that do exist, and get something approaching a decent salary in the process.
> What roles would that entail?
I would ideally like to work entirely on formalization of algorithms, working primarily within Isabelle or Coq or Agda or something like them. I realize those jobs aren't exactly common, but it's at least a goal to work towards.
Total anecdotal evidence but it seems that in tech a lot of people are quitting/changing jobs or looking at it. It seems like big co's have tweaked their comp packages a bit to front load equity packages and avoid those crazy comp numbers you could get in the past and that and various news stories have made people more willing to leave.
Some companies may also be doing a bit of downsize without layoffs and others have done layoffs and reigned in comp in a way that leaves the remaining people looking at their options.
Overall it seems like a good time to be hiring, especially as a startup/pre ipo company.
I've seen around 50% attrition this year in the ML department I'm in.
The reasoning:
- People want to leave the cities
- People want to spend time with family
- Racism, sexism and exclusion is becoming unbearable (largest single factor I've seen)
- Forcing medical procedures (second largest single factor I've seen)
- Salaries are becoming very competitive with the inflation and job switching
- Companies are re-gearing to be more online and that means more tech opportunities
Every time someone leaves I ping them and ask why. Personally I'm curious. Many have purchased farms and have moved to the middle of no where. I generally think they'll miss the cities, but there's a pretty significant move of tech people out to the country.
Eh. My wife has trouble taking out blood for panels and exams. Arm goes blue for up to a week for the tinest quantity of blood extracted. Frequent exams would be painful.
> - Forcing medical procedures (second largest single factor I've seen)
Yeah I'm sure this is true. /s
Even the supposed "mass exodus" of cops everyone was saying will happen, didn't happen. Cops, a very conservative group of people, decided getting the jab was better than getting a new job.
> Cops, a very conservative group of people, decided getting the jab was better than getting a new job.
Do you know any cops? Many of the mayors backed down and many more just retired. I know several in around the Chicago area and none of them followed through, they updated their guidelines.
How many? I have no idea, based on what I've seen probably ~10-15% of people would rather be fired than get a vaccine. I know a couple in the medical field, a couple of friends in sales, etc.
Anyway, it's anecdotal to a degree, but only because most people aren't tracking it. It's easier for people in tech to just move to a remote-first company.
Does it really matter if it's "real" or not? The original article says it's not for equally tenuous reasons in my opinion: e.g. it's only happening in the US and GB which apparently means it's not "real" if it's not happening literally everywhere.
Further, I think highlighting the collective power of workers and people generally leaving shitty jobs, bosses, and companies for greener pastures is a good thing. There's a million ways to Sunday that this phenomenon could be localized or sliced (certain geographies, any number of socio-economic or demographic lines, industries, even specific job titles etc. may show increased worker turnover). If people are leaving customer facing service jobs because of anti-mask nut-jobs, low pay, lack of autonomy in hours, and general staff shortages I don't exactly blame them. It also doesn't mean that this turnover would be visible in high-earning tech jobs.
I hate being conspiratorial, but who does this narrative benefit? Obviously employers (and probably the majority of the subscribership of The Economist).
What are you going to do after you quit? I've seen a lot of turn over, but it's not like anyone started working in the first place because they wanted, we all work for money, so I never really understood the great resignation idea, what happens next?
A great turn over where people that weren't happy try to find a job they are happy with might happen, and honestly that sounds great for everyone.
Does anyone have a good understanding of how this narrative got started and took off? We've always had narratives outpacing facts (in hopes that the facts could be nudged into catching up), but I wonder to what extent social media plays a role in driving these stories now.
It's just the media fishing for clicks, like everything else. People love stories about quitting because they dream of doing it themselves. Particularly the people whose attention is already on social media rather than work.
The reality of the so-called "great resignation" is just pent-up demand for job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic. Every number looks high compared to 2020's artificially suppressed baseline.
Of course social media wants to push the idea that people aren't working, because people who aren't working consume more media, and that's all they care about.
I don't think a significant proportion of people are actually leaving the workforce permanently, but something major is shifting in the US: workers are demanding better working conditions and pay, and taking less bullshit.
I think there are probably 10% of the worst employers in the country who just can't hire right now - from a mixture of bad reputation and unwillingness to pay (rising) market wages. There are better jobs out there - so workers are going to where managers treat them with humanity.
Check out reddit.com/r/antiwork - this subreddit has grown extremely rapidly over the past ~6 months. It feels like a movement is bubbling. I wouldn't be surprised if we see widespread labor marches and strikes in 2022.
To add more data points, I also just quit my software engineering job last week to go to a place with a better product and better pay. I think one of the commenters was right on when they said it was more about the "last straw" and incentivizing people to look for other jobs and that there are a LOT of tech jobs that offer remote work now.
Odd that the article doesn't even mention the labor participation rate ("the number of people ages 16 and over who are employed or actively seeking employment divided by the total noninstitutionalized, civilian working-age population".
Looks like baby boomers retiring is what's fueled this decline for the last 20 years or so, and the pandemic has forced people to reevaluate their situation.
I'd be shocked if we got back up to pre-pandemic participation barring a WWII style extreme scenario.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 316 ms ] thread... however. This depends on where the inflation is in the market and the way you intend to use your wages. "Inflation" is a number that we use to indicate much more complex and varied market trends.
Recognizing my own privilege here, for me, for example, many of my expenses are fixed: student loans and mortgage take the lion’s share of our monthly cash flow after taxes and retirement. Neither of those are indexed to inflation so if this drives higher cost of living increases, it’s a net win for me, in all likelihood.
Who doesn't like inflation? I love it when the market makes my existing debt cheaper.
Those of us who want to purchase? …And understand that the housing market cannot outpace inflation indefinitely, and are queasy about what will happen when that day comes: do home prices eventually level off at some absurd level, or do interest rates rise, demand slackens, prices level off & then speculators jump ship for more lucrative investments and then prices crater, putting people underwater on their mortgage?
- People who aren’t leveraged with a lot of debt.
- People who are seeing wage stagnation while the cost of living goes up. The majority of jobs that keep the economy running aren’t like the tech sector where one can job hop to keep wages up.
- People who have a significant chunk of their savings in cash for a down payment, and they are seeing property values run away from them while the value of their money goes down. They are also seeing increasing costs, impacting their ability to save for a down payment.
- The people who are trying to buy a house that was $400k in 2005, that is now valued at 1.2M and requires $240k for a down payment.
This is a very important issue, but it's not really inflation in any normal sense.
2) Rental housing costs and owner-occupied housing costs are correlated but have a complex non-linear, non-monotonic relationship
3) Housing costs vary in absolute terms by substantial ratios in different areas
4) Housing costs vary in relative (CoL) terms in different areas
5) Changes in housing costs over a given time period can vary dramatically in different areas.
If prices on goods and services are increasing that extra money should proportionally drive wages. When people complain about how single income for blue collar employees no longer can support a family like in the times of yore it is exactly because the wages in these sectors didn’t keep up with inflation.
As an aside, in terms of home ownership, Seattle housing prices are up 20% in 2021 (more than CPI) [0]. For many tech workers (skew younger) saving for housing is a significant cost and for them the effective increase in cost may be significantly more that CPI (thus their real wage cut is even greater!).
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS42644Q
Like, why plan ahead when you can just go into huge amounts of debt. Seems pretty short sighted and yet these decisions are the ones that are rewarded.
So perhaps the reasons for quitting haven't changed much, but the burden of jumping is lower so it's happening more often.
The “great resignation” will be more pronounced in different cities and professions. Eg I’ve noticed London based cloud engineers such as DevOps seem to be really affected at the moment whereas a lot of friends in other industries haven’t seen any change at all.
On what basis would a Christian priest exempt someone from a vaccine? I wouldn’t expect an Rabbi exempting me from traffic signals to be taken particularly seriously either…
https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/2021091...
I'm not passing judgment on the reasonableness of religious exceptions for public health issues in general or COVID-19 issues specifically, just trying to clarify the religious concerns that have been raised (valid or not).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This matters for how upset anyone ought to be over this, assuming it's actually happening, since the government tends not to respect "deeply held beliefs" that, conveniently, were only recently arrived at, so depending on exactly which Christians we're talking about, denying these folks an exemption (despite whatever paper they got their pastor/priest/minister to sign) is either totally normal & expected, or somewhat unexpected and (perhaps) worrisome.
I don't see the post as flame bait, but an expression of confusion inviting clarification. I think the tone's appropriate for the original claim (which... smells a bit rotten).
In this case the comment consisted of one sentence pointing straight to two classic flamewar topics (religion + vaccines), and a second sentence containing a snarky, reductionist provocation ("traffic signals"). In other words, we had fuel plus flame. The effect such a comment can be expected to have is definitely flamewar.
If your intention was to engage in thoughtful conversation, the burden is on you to disambiguate that, since intent doesn't communicate itself. A person's intent is accessible to them, since it's immediately available in their head, but not to anyone else—so it needs to be encoded somehow in the message. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
In this case, the whole thing was probably best to leave alone, though, because nothing good (by HN's definition of good, i.e. gratifying intellectual curiosity) was likely to come of it.
Religious themes in general are best avoided on HN unless there's some extraneous neutralizing factor to supply some distance between the discussion and people's extremely strong emotions about religion. For example, historical articles sometimes allow for this. But thoughtful discussion about religion in the context of hot current topics? Basically impossible. When people starting getting upset about it, which is highly likely, the place burns down. That's what we're trying to avoid.
Which, fine, maybe politics is a bad topic for HN, too (and yet, the front page on most days...) but in that case you're addressing the wrong poster. Getting onto someone for pushing back (in, I think, straightforward, but not harsh or provocative, terms, in this case) on a shitty post is missing the mark, IMO, and is part of why HN is very vulnerable to certain kinds of shitposting/trolling—if you can fly just under the radar, enforcement will fall on posters trying to police your shittiness (or, in this case, just trying to make sense of a bad post), not on you directly, which is is a classic effect trolls aim for.
(Please don't take any of this as personal—I'm sure this stuff's hard on the best of days, and you can never please everyone, and it's entirely possible I'm dead wrong about all this, and we're all just trying to get through the day in a complex world, and I'm very sure I'd be overall much worse at what you do than you are)
From my perspective these arguments are short-circuited by much simpler points, which is sort of the level at which I try to look at all this.
First, if the GP comment was shitty and/or trollish, then "pushing back" is exactly the wrong thing to do. That is known as feeding trolls, which of course is even more "the classic effect trolls aim for". This is in the site guidelines: "Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." – a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls.
Second, if we're making arguments about whether a political-religious argument is more political than religious or more religious than political, we've already lost. All this is obvious flame fodder and to be avoided here—no? I don't believe that anyone on HN is eager to discuss Christian-priests-issuing-vaccine-exemptions for simple reasons of intellectual curiosity. But if they are, the burden is on them to disambiguate their intellectual interest from garden-variety flamebait.
Btw I'm not saying either of the GP commenters was being trollish or malicious - just that the expected value of such subthreads is negative (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...).
They all still live beyond the means of dictators and kings of old.
Have any of them considered the real test of Gods is losing themselves to contemporary economic concept, making them poor stewards of the Earth and all His creatures?
Isn’t doing the work to care all this a central theme?
Everyone is moving the goal posts except science. I wonder if that’s a message from God? To care for it all, don’t get lost to contemporary group think. Follow the science.
I'm a Discordian Pope and I'll happily give you a certificate stating that it is my sincerely held religious belief that you are hereby exempt from any and all rules and laws that you don't want to apply to you.
I'm not sure why anyone would give such a document much credence however.
A google tells me that Dutch Reformed congregations have some doctrinal objections to vaccinations also, but many have endorsed them anyway. The big surprise for me is that the Jehovah's Witnesses are completely neutral on the issue.
edit:
> The First Church of Christ, Scientist, the publisher of the Monitor, said: “For more than a century, our denomination has counseled respect for public health authorities and conscientious obedience to the laws of the land, including those requiring vaccination. ... We see this as a matter of basic Golden Rule ethics and New Testament love.”
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2021/0920/Vaccine-man...
The way-off-the-deep-end extreme version of this thinking is the SovCit movement, the adherents of which seem to believe, contrary to all sense and evidence, that the right words spoken (or written) in the right order can eliminate the ability of the government to enforce its laws on a given person—that the government is in fact well bound (by whom? Who enforces this?) by some arcane set of well-hidden rules that, if you know how to correctly invoke them, gives you exceptional power over it. As if the government is some kind of rules-bound genie or magic mirror or something. However, weaker versions of this are common. If you've found someone who talks a lot about "technicalities" in legal cases, you're probably dealing with someone who operates under at least a partial misunderstanding of how the law works—that is, they very likely believe that finding little "gotchas" is way more powerful a tactic than it actually is.
I'd be surprised if there aren't a lot of people who think religious exemptions work a lot more broadly than they actually do, and that all you need is to get an ordained minister of some sort to sign off, and that's that, the government has to let you do what you want, and if they don't then that must represent some awful and dangerous break from the norm. Meanwhile, that's not how it works at all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This worked out well for me. The negative side-effect is that I am getting ghosted a lot on linked-in as my salary is high for the area and recruiters just stop responding when they hear what offer I would consider.
However, my next move is going to be to a tech company which will enable another 50% jump hopefully.
Not saying that your boss is bad or that you should leave your company, whatever works, but yeah it's something.
I doubled my salary in 4 years, but I try to do my best to produce results.
It means I'm not getting nagged by recruiters weekly. I still get a new one every month or two, but the frequency is much more manageable now.
Every time I do look at switching jobs I consider going into recruiting instead as most all recruiters I've ever worked with are completely incompetent. I don't expect them to know every technology and how it works but I do expect some basic patten-matching-level of competence (for example, you don't need to know anything about Angular/Vue/React but those should come to mind when "frontend" is mentioned and if a developer says they want to work with "Vue" the recruiter should be able to ask "Would you also be ok with Angular/React?"). Most of the time they function only as slow go-betweens in a game of telephone that they mangle horribly. I've had recruiters lie, ghost me, or just fail at basic message-passing. The last recruiter I worked with was so slow at responding that I just went around them and contacted the company directly and had an interview setup almost immediately. For the amount a recruiter gets for placing someone I'd expect they'd be much better at what they do.
Edit: I am not telling anyone my salary, but minimum for me to consider a position.
Haha, sounds like a real first world problem!
I’ll start off by saying that I work 60 hours a week, at least. My stress and anxiety levels are manageable now, but only because I found ways of managing them. They’re not reasonable though and most importantly, they’re not sustainable.
Based on the neighborhood I live in and my compensation, I am extremely privileged. I don’t have money concerns that my parents had. Most things that I might need, I can buy them without having to think too much or without putting a dent in my net worth.
But my job is not sustainable. So, I live way below my means and avoid any lifestyle creep.
I would like to own a home, a nice one. Not a $1M property that’s not even comparable to my parents home. Given my compensation and many, many years of savings, this would be reasonable. I looked at several houses over the weekend. One dump after another, going for $1.3MM at the minimum. One actually had an offer accepted, merely hours after we toured it. They told us the buyer offered $1.6MM.
But Seattle has become a lawless dump. The east side has started homes for $1.4MM where the inspection report shows you that you’re basically just paying for the land.
If I have to be a renter my whole damn life and can’t even afford a house, what is the god damn point? Yeah I get paid very well, but I am a pawn of people who earn significantly more. And it’s not that I’m just comparing myself, but even after all this work and money I can’t comfortably buy a house - then where does this leave the majority of this country?
I don’t know.
Jokes aside, why the prices are so high in some countries?
Basically, houses are being used to serve profiteering much moreso than actually housing people affordably.
That's a lot of un-lived-in houses.
Also, because it’s a non-custodial physical asset, countries that allow foreign ownership get a lot of real estate investment from money laundered out of more financially-repressive countries.
Single family zoning, NIMBYism, moral panics over public transit, suburbanism... the list goes on and on.
Building duplexes is a start but Seattle should look a lot more like Brooklyn than like Idaho Falls: 6 story apartment buildings everywhere. Density. Public transit galore with very restricted parking.
Only then would housing prices be reasonable.
I was born in a city that lost 40 000 people over the last generation. From 320 000 people to 280 000 people. A Central European rust belt city called Ostrava.
And the real estate prices there made a huge jump in the last three years. Not as huge as in Prague, but +50 per cent nonetheless.
Lots of those apartments are actually empty and cannot attract tenants, because there just isn't enough demand on the rental market. But they still sell like hot buns at a bakery. I believe this is caused by the fear of inflation combined with relatively low mortgage interest rates. People don't want to have cash in hand.
In the US: Interest rates.
Interest rates are low, so mortgage rates are low, so there is a crap-ton of money going after what is effectively a fixed resource.
Outside the US: Investments.
A lot of people have made a shit-ton of money from low-interest-rate investments like the stock market in the last decade. These people are looking for places to put said money, including real estate in out of the way places. Once again, a lot of money going after fixed resources.
This is a case in Europe, too, especially in the Eurozone, where interest rates are kept very low by the ECB to keep heavily indebted countries afloat.
MILLER: Yeah. It's a huge, huge issue, a global issue. And you're right, Terry, it distorts the real estate market when you have individuals - Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs or whoever - buying real estate as a way of basically moving money that they made from other sources into hard assets in Western countries that are attractive because of their stability. I mean, it works for them. it's basically - they've acquired an asset that they know is going to be reliable. It's going to be there. Their money - they're not going to lose."
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/14/1046008243/the-pandora-papers...
Housing prices are NOT reasonable in Brooklyn.
> NIMBYism
I really dislike it when people immediately jump to this. There are simply a whole lot more people living in Seattle than a generation ago. The math dictates that the housing would be more expensive.
2. Housing prices in Seattle would be more reasonable than they currently are with more supply of housing.
3. NIMBYism is absolutely the problem in Seattle. Upzone everything to have a minimum density requirement of 4 family, instead of insisting that 70%+ of the city stay in single family zoning. Don't want a duplex in your back yard? Tough. Move. If the entirety of the city core were as dense as average Brooklyn you would have sufficient supply to meet demand. As is you can buy a fixer up apartment in Brooklyn for half the price of a burnt out shell in Seattle.
4. There are more people than ever and they're all coming back from the desolation known as suburbia: Cities simply have to densify in response. You can't keep your city the same size forever.
3. Having lived in NYC, I can tell you that living in Seattle is far more pleasant than Brooklyn with its massive over population.
4. "Cities simply have to densify in response." Your solution is to make it unpleasant for everyone. Got it. There are many other solutions - don't jump to the easiest one.
Having also lived in both I deal with needles and aggressive homeless people far less often here than I ever did in Seattle. I have functional public transit. I can also even walk places for food, groceries and entertainment.
Don't be such a NIMBY: You're clearly against people having affordable housing. Just move to some shithole suburb and get out of the cities.
You jump to conclusions a lot. I disagree with your solution of making it overcrowded for everyone. There are other solutions.
> Just move to some shithole suburb
Your language says a lot about you. The reason suburbs exist is because people don't want to live in overcrowded places.
This is localized to specific cities, not the entire country. (Though country-wide home prices are also up, just not into the millions like this).
The reason is that people want to live in these specific places, but they can't build upward fast enough to hold everyone who wants to move in. So instead, new buyers compete over the same housing inventory and the current residents never want to sell because they're afraid they may never be able to buy back into the city in the future.
Seattle does have some major problems right now, but it's not literally a lawless wasteland. I think most of us believe that the city will get on top of the social issues eventually, at which point it becomes even more attractive to live in Seattle and the prices go up even more.
Prices of all assets has skyrocketed in the last few years. Part of the blame for that is speculated to lie on the ZIRP (Zero interest-rate policy). Real estate all throughout the developed world has seen a lot of money going into it, as has the stock market as well.
Most people agree everything is overinflated right now and a correction will come, but that sentiment has been around since around 2016. I don't think a violent crash will come without another event to cause it, but I wouldn't be surprised by a plateau or a stagnation in prices for a few years.
I know it's the exact opposite of what everyone was told would happen, but it turns a lot of places are expensive because people want to live there. Letting everyone cut physical ties to their jobs means everyone who wants to live there can now rush in and do it.
In many places, such as East TN (Knoxville) remote workers are moving in with CA salaries. HN thinks that someone remote working from Knoxville, TN should be paid Bay Area salaries. However, Bay Area salaries are high for a reason. There are many Knoxville companies that can't compete with those salaries, which is why they set up Knoxville offices in the first place.
But now their employees are suddenly priced out - and no one is happy about it.
Their company had a simple CoL compensation adjustment that only accounts for zip code. Move to a more expensive zip code, get a raise.
It was always the dream. I have no regrets. Yes I could have retired to somewhere cheap but I'm only 34 and my skills are in high demand seeing salaries in the 200k+ range.
They are building housing here but so many people want to live here that no matter how much they build it will just all be absorbed immediately.
It made one thing perfectly clear to me though. Building wealth is more about investing than saving.
There is nothing special about Seattle (or anywhere else) that made it's descent into an overpriced lawless dump inevitable. It was the people who live(d) there. Not all of them, and probably not even a majority of them. But enough of them.
BUT. "where does this leave the majority of this country?" -- well, the majority of the country does not have as crazy a real estate market as Seattle, as far as paying ~$1.5 mil for a dump where you're basically just paying for the land. That is not most of the country.
So... have you considered moving elsewhere? Even if you take a salary drop, you can probably wind up ahead overall with cost of living, especially if buying a home is a main goal you have. Of course, you won't get to live in Seattle. Seattle is awfully nice, it's true. But maybe you can afford a nice home and without working 60 hour weeks either.
But as far as "where does this leave the majority of this country" -- definitely not in the insane Seattle or San Francisco (or other "hot" cities with tech money) real estate market, is where.
Where I live (on the east coast even, but in a disinvested non-top-tier city) you can easily get a perfectly liveable no-repairs-needed if modest-sized ~1300 sq ft townhome for $200K, or easily a nice detached larger home in a "good" neighborhood for $500K. which I almost don't want to talk about, becuase if the tech money comes here, maybe that won't last.
But there's plenty of the country that's not on the coasts and is not Austin or Boulder or something, that is like this or even cheaper.
(And, as we both know, there are also plenty of people in even these cities who don't make nearly as much as you or I, and have trouble affording a home in them too!)
And everything is "close enough" to a major city, and there is enough of the city that expands out in the surrounding areas (a number of large employers aren't downtown, although some have been migrating back to the city to attract the employee demographic that prefers the city life).
It is not a substitute for living in a city. I do not see the draw in buying a cheap house in a rural community with nothing to do and nothing around it. My family owns a house in a rural community. It is dead weight. Nobody wants to buy it from us.
It is not a good place to raise your kids. The schools are under-funded. The people you interact with are bigots and they will teach your kids to be bigots.
If your kid is gifted they will sit them in a corner and do NOTHING to address how they are learning more quickly than their peers. They will suffer from under-funded schooling that is just desperately trying to keep the bottom half of the students from spilling out.
Kids are heavily influenced by their peers. There are no "garage bands" or art groups or clubs or anything for your kids to participate in. There is school and sports. If you are lucky there will be a marching band.
Also, you are assuming this person is a cis hetero white male. There IS sexism in these communities, there IS racism, there IS bigotry. You will not be welcome if you do not fit in. You WILL be confronted, you WILL be harassed.
Move away from your friends and family and community to somewhere in the middle of nowhere, make a massive investment, and cross your fingers you find friends in the community! There is no job market to speak of, so good luck when the remote work fad ends[0]!
Also pretending these communities are not extremely religious and contain bigotry is dishonest. It is out there.
[0]: which is not guaranteed but possible
My friends who were gay and came out in high school were harassed.
It is out there. You just don't care.
It is in the place you grew up. Projecting negative stereotypes onto people because they share a broad group with other people you had negative experiences with is stereotyping.
> You just don't care.
Less of this, please.
It is a problem, and it’s not that most rural dwellers are bigots but enough people are, and they’re the loudest in the room.
Asking a person of color, lgbt, Muslim, etcz to live in rural white america is often a non starter.
How often are you actually making that trip? At that point you aren't participating in the culture of the city.
Also you aren't going to school in the city, aren't meeting people at cultural events in the city, etc. Etc.
Not that I would have wanted to do it long-term, but 60+ minute commutes are not exactly rare (and I once had one part-time), so that length of drive hardly rules out going into a city on a weeknight or weekend every 2 or 3 weeks.
I call "40 miles away" a daily commute distance.
Personally, I'm not sure that I'd want to be closer than 40 miles to downtown Chicago... but I might want to be close to a Metra line.
The only solution in aggregate is political, indeed. I didn't mean to suggest individual choice of where to live as a solution to the socio-political problem, but it can be an individual's solution to present situation that's making you miserable. Even that's not available to everyone, but just for those who can manage to get a job that pays well more than typical for the USA, even if not enough to live comfortable in Seattle. As long as you buy before the place "blows up", you're good even if it does. But if you want to reduce the chances the place you pick will "blow up" for a good long time, and are willing to live a place with less obvious regional amenities to do so, while there's no guarantee, we can all come up with places that seem like good bets. Des Moines maybe? Median house price $185K compared to $870K in Seattle.
Boring at times, but it's a lively enough city and you can still park in front your destination for free, which I've always appreciated.
Second reaction - so uh where in Oklahoma exactly?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18463553
Factor 1 - Very low interest rates allow people to borrow large sums.
Factor 2 - NIMBY-ism is in various degrees the de facto policy in most major cities, so very little new housing is built there.
Factor 1 might be ending as we speak, since the Fed is talking about changing policy.
Factor 2... I wish it will change, but don't have a ton of hope.
Bingo. If you want to be part of the solution, this is a good group of people: https://yimbyaction.org/2021/
Although, it must be said that building homes takes time, and getting the politics right takes time, so don't think of it as a short-term solution.
Builders want to build. Let's make it easier for them to do that.
Millions of people could live there.
1. https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Why-do-publ...
2. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-mayor-resigns-aft...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-12-04/arkans...
And of course there’s plenty of cities that were reasonable a couple years ago but are creeping up: Boise residents complain constantly about all the transplants, and I expect Raleigh to look a lot like Austin in 10-15 years (to give a couple examples).
In 2021 there is not a single remote corner of this place that's affordable anymore.
I think the income levels interest rates have helped raise values, but I think income has more to do with it. You’ll see high prices anywhere that can support workers, and they will pay for proximity.
That was all the incentive I needed to stay put. IIRC, I wasn't making that much more than $70k at the time but I could have worked in a coffee shop and paid my mortgage.
Median home values (per Zillow):
San Francisco: $1,526K
Seattle: $870K
Austin: $606K
Dallas: $287K
Houston: $238K
Seattle: 0.930% of Assessed Home Value
SF: 0.640% of Assessed Home Value
Dallas: 1.930% of Assessed Home Value
Austin: 1.820% of Assessed Home Value
Houston: 2.030% of Assessed Home Value
Source: https://smartasset.com/taxes/property-taxes
Putting taxes on sales and property means that even those paid under the table can't escape taxation.
How this shapes the valuation of other things, like houses, is an interesting second order effect. Property tax rates shape how affordable housing is during the mortgage period and after.
Another important thing about property taxes is to know when an updated assessed value is triggered and if there are any limits on how it changes. For example in SF, the assessed value is basically set to the sale price, immediately. But then the assessed value doesn't change until there's another property sale (or permitted improvements are made).
In some states assessed values are updated every year regardless of sales or improvements. [2]
[1] https://sftreasurer.org/property/secured-property-taxes
[2] https://taxfoundation.org/state-provisions-property-reassess...
But, for example, while Boston/Cambridge are very pricey in general as are some of the more exclusive suburbs with good school systems, there's almost certainly housing in that general range within an hour drive (or even on a commuter rail).
I'm in Madison, WI. The house I'm currently in was 180k back in '09. It has appreciated some since then. My neighbors have each turned over in the past decade and have sold their house for ~$300k.
If you go with 500k, you're in a very nice part of town or one of the extremely large corner lots. Most of the houses are in the 300k - 350k range.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1305-N-Thompson-Dr-Madiso... isn't uncommon.
> And the worse the weather is, the better the real-estate value.
That's a big consideration for many people. Little tolerance for the winter.
True - and the problem is less bad in cheaper areas, but it's still bad and getting worse there, too. OP may be able to afford a $300k house in Kansas, but I doubt the average worker in Kansas can.
I'm not sure what this person is looking for, honestly.
Even stretching out just a bit and going to the Mill Creek area for more north, or Lynnwood, or Issaquah and perfectly nice, even new construction are in their claimed price range.
Of course many Asian and people of color move to less diverse communities. They have my respect, but I'm not sure I want to end up one of a handful of Asians or relegated to a chinatown.
Moving to a cheaper city is a valid decision but it's a more complicated value choice as a person of color.
I certainly can’t imagine someone from Texas moving to Japan and wondering where the all American BBQ places are :)
If you’re a person of color, it matters. If you’re the only non-white family in the neighborhood, it matters. If your kids are going to stand out in school because of the color of their skin, it matters.
If you’re white, then yes, moving to Japan is probably easier (though you might be surprised).
My question is this: doesn't it matter more to engage those communities with the same level of willingness to live among them as to deliberately pick already diverse areas, or an area that matches your own genetic happenstance?
If you don't have specific friends and family you're relocating for, then I'd say it's probably better to minimize the impact of any sort of decisions based on race or ethnic diversity. I think it's best to find good people and participate in your adopted community. And with that in mind, if you can work remotely, there's a vast array of affordable housing and land and communities of good people out there.
Roxane Gay has a good bit in one of her essays about how she struggled to help the black and LGBT organizations in colleges. She felt obligated as one of the few black queer professors, but that obligation in of itself really wore her down. Being a minority can be an extra job and some people do not want that responsibility.
why dont we see as many british or french neighborhoods?
>but they're not white for any reason except genetic happenstance
:hmm: i dont agree that one could accurately describe the evolution of racial diversity in american communities as "not white for any reason except genetic happenstance"
> so you get Irish towns and Polish towns and Italian places
My italian ancestors settled where they did because (a) the polish wouldn't sell them the land they originally wanted near but not in the italian neighborhood, so they had to find an italian to sell them some and (b) they wanted to live somewhere that had italian grocery stores, and italian churches (this is very important 100 years ago) and other italian cultural points.
> They become more diverse over time but they're not white for any reason except genetic happenstance.
Redlining. Segregation. The history of america is "genetic" segregation.
> If you don't have specific friends and family you're relocating for, then I'd say it's probably better to minimize the impact of any sort of decisions based on race or ethnic diversity
I think the opposite is true. If you don't care where you're going, why not go somewhere that can feel like you're a bit at home when you're homesick?
There are American food places in Japan, even BBQ.
Wealth or safety commonly.
You can't? You don't think eventually they won't crave the food they're used to eating?
New ideas are one thing, but your food, the food your mother cooked you growing up, will always be special to a person. And your people will understand you better than anyone else-- I'm the child of Indian immigrants and I still find people from my culture get the issues that I have to do through better than others. No one else knows or cares about the stereotypes one has to deal with, the particular ways culture can clash, the common challenges, etc etc
B. An american would definitely choose to live in Tokyo versus a small town in the middle of nowhere. That’s why ex pat communities are a thing! No harm in wanting a little bit of home abroad.
C. I get plenty of America in New York. It’s not like the city is some asian bubble. Indeed part of the reason I want to live in New York is to have access to asian food and asian people without living in a solely asian neighborhood. I like having multiple cultures in one neighborhood.
NIMBY free, as long as you don't mind the billboard in your back yard.
Its not just racial minorities that face this issue either. If you're gay, you might have a very limited selection of potential partners to meet in a minor city, and very few culturally gay places to go to. If you're trans, you'll probably be alone in a small town and almost certain victim of a hate crime.
A good perspective i like to use for regular straight white americans that don't experience much diversity is sports teams. If you like the cowboys, how much would you enjoy going to only sports bars in boston that play the Patriots games? Sure you can watch the cowboys at home, but none of your friends will want to watch with you, and if there is a cowboy v patriots game on TV, you might feel super comfortable wearing your team's jersey out in public.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29475091
This anxiety over housing seems to be primarily limited to select cities.
AND THEN LEAVE is the part most people forget.
Switch to a remote company (yes, take a pay cut if you have to), use your millions to buy a $500k home (essentially a mansion) in any mid-tier city (Indianapolis, Houston, Dallas, Cleveland, Oklahoma City, etc.) and use the savings as a nice little investment / nest egg, you can have more kids if you want, or just enjoy being rich.
Also, somehow in Zurich (another place with obscene salaries and real estate prices), the service workers lead decent lives from what I've heard. They're paid enough to live on, and it's reflected in everything involving local labor (e.g. a sandwich at a local kiosk) being super expensive in absolute terms. BTW, I'm not sure if their higher wages are mandated by minimum wage laws or are an just effect of labor market forces.
Something in Scandinavia which usually would be operated by a single person, likely teenager, instead has 2 or 3 people hanging around.
For the few go backs the cashiers has a tiny stash. For the rare question you likely have to find someone restocking somewhere in the store and ask, otherwise their time is wasted. If you forget something, well pay and put the bag(s) by the cashier and go back in yourself.
I guess someone sometimes are sent on cart-return or rebalancing. Though we tend to place those out by the cars so you grab them outside and then put them back by your car when done.
You can, just not in Seattle. Just like you probably couldn't comfortably buy a penthouse in NYC or a wooded estate in London. There are countless places you can afford to buy a house
Me and my partner want to start a family, but on my sole income we'll be paying ~50% of my take-home pay in mortgage + property taxes. It's probably not worth her continuing to work (although it's her choice) if we have a kid, due to the cost of childcare.
Belts will be extremely tight even though I'm well inside the top 1% income wise. That said, I still thank my lucky stars I am where I am, and can't imagine how someone on a median income feels about their prospects.
We're all tech workers, we all work remotely - why stay in London? Because it has nice restaurants and museums? I don't buy it. Not if you want to start a family, own a house, afford a nice car and still have some money left at the end of the day.
Besides all that, home ownership is really becoming a huge class and generational divide and house prices are rising faster outside London than within. It's only a matter of time before people in areas like you describe are priced out too.
One thing I'll say you might be very off the mark with the quarter of salary thing. Both me and my wife(also a programmer) make about 75% as much as those friends who just moved out of London.
Yes, anecdotes, I know. But I'm pretty sure tech worker salaries aren't as bad up here as people make it out to be.
Before moving to London I had offers from 2 other companies both offering numbers close to what I was on previously. Moving to London was instantly 2x their best offer.
Overall I think if you can get over the home ownership hurdle, the potential for future comfort in the city is way greater.
Did the city try not to be an asset parking for questionably acquired assets by wealthy foreigners?
I just left Seattle and moved to Olympia. Sold my Seattle house and got a lot more for my money this far out. My company is fully supporting remote into the future, and we've hired a lot of folks that don't live in Seattle.
I won't name and shame, but Seattle has always had a number of hellish "startups" that are basically pump and dump schemes. They come and go. There are plenty of places that do offer sustainable employment, and I was lucky enough to land at one, so leaving the city was an option afforded to me by landing somewhere stable.
Also fuck 60 hour weeks.
Almost every person in my neighborhood works in tech and most of them used to live in Seattle but got fed up with the prices and the size of homes available for any kind of non-insane price.
Issaquah is another option at around $1.4M for a nice house. It also has great schools etc.
At 60 hrs per week there's no time to spend money.
Everyone wanting to live in the same 5 cities doesn’t scale.
Do what the people who moved to Seattle did 50 years ago. Move to some dumpy up and coming city.
Chattanooga, TN
Birmingham, AL
Sioux Falls, SD
Fort Wayne, IN
San Antonio, TX
you can find 4-5 bed room houses for < 300k in some of these areas
Seriously, there's a reason properties are cheap over there.
If more people moved to red states instead of threatening to move to canada when republicans take higher office, our country might look a lot different.
Too much, even if you want to work that much. Do 40 for your primary and then 20 where you are your own boss.
>Based on the neighborhood I live in and my compensation, I am extremely privileged. I don’t have money concerns that my parents had. Most things that I might need, I can buy them without having to think too much or without putting a dent in my net worth.
HN is very likely >90% part of the zoom class. Though you it might not be zoom but rather whatever flavour, teams, etc. Welcome to being rich. You got there because of whatever skillset you have learnt. Good for you.
>But Seattle has become a lawless dump. The east side has started homes for $1.4MM where the inspection report shows you that you’re basically just paying for the land.
Welcome to high energy costs fueling inflation and pushing high energy things like homes so expensively.
>If I have to be a renter my whole damn life and can’t even afford a house, what is the god damn point? Yeah I get paid very well, but I am a pawn of people who earn significantly more.
You're looking at it the wrong way. What is your investment strategy? Rent vs own calculators certainly exist. Maybe you're out of real estate because you predict a crash? If you expect they continue rising. Then buying is the way to go.
imagine a 1m$ house. you have to put 200k$ down into a single house (no diversification). A 10% decline means a 50% decline on that 200k. selling it takes days to months with usually at least 6% fees. So this thing is highly illiquid. so its not like stocks where you can say 'well just buy and hold'.
given that they dislike Seattle, Seattle is as bubbly as ever, there is a new condo in construction on every other block, and things like the mayor saying 'we are not going to enforce the law in favor of safety towards the protestors', purchasing a home in Seattle is a scary idea.
Also another issue with Seattle its not like you can buy and rent out. a typical home that costs 3500$/month to own will only rent for max 2500$. so you have to be in something thats 1k$/month cash flow negative. even if you are networth positive, that may be unsustainable for the individual
Even better :)
>imagine a 1m$ house. you have to put 200k$ down into a single house (no diversification). A 10% decline means a 50% decline on that 200k. selling it takes days to months with usually at least 6% fees. So this thing is highly illiquid. so its not like stocks where you can say 'well just buy and hold'.
But you cant buy 1m$ of stocks on borrowed money. 10% increase means 50% increase on your downpayment. Even better, when does housing crash? The governments just printed a bijillion dollars to prevent it crashing and rates have real yields of negative. It's free money. There is a rent vs own calculator and even in bad cities the ROI will be only a few years tops.
>given that they dislike Seattle, Seattle is as bubbly as ever, there is a new condo in construction on every other block, and things like the mayor saying 'we are not going to enforce the law in favor of safety towards the protestors', purchasing a home in Seattle is a scary idea.
The antifa rioters aren't about race or whatever they claim. It's about destroying a neighbourhood to push people like you out of the market and reduce demand. The george floyd riots have caused billions in damage, very much higher than the few hundred million in insured damages. Those markets like Seattle and Portland are going to pay for in the long run. House insurance will be exorbitantly high.
>Also another issue with Seattle its not like you can buy and rent out. a typical home that costs 3500$/month to own will only rent for max 2500$. so you have to be in something thats 1k$/month cash flow negative. even if you are networth positive, that may be unsustainable for the individual
That's the funny thing about investing. The first hit at your mortgage is the worst. You amortize for 25 years. You pay some principal in say the first 5-10 years. In those 10 years you also got a raise and are earning more. So the next time you are coming to bat to refinance you're in a better situation owing less and able to pay more. You will then be winning. The calculators out there will tell you buying vs owning is only a few years. The question is whether or not you're staying in seattle that long.
There's also the spin of the dice. There will be homeowner moments where oh shit I have tospend $5000 to fix that sump pump or roof. So its not so easy to calculate.
$199,900, 3,594 sq. ft. -- https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/110-E-1st-Ave-Flandreau-S...
$149,000, 2250 sq. ft. with an outdoor pool -- https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1643-Washington-Ave-Baxte...
$192,500, 3,017 sq. ft. -- https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/906-7th-Ave-S-Moorhead-MN...
$199,500, 2,799 sq. ft. -- https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/906-5th-Ave-NE-Devils-Lak...
$174,900, 2,449 sq. ft. -- https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/504-W-3rd-St-Washburn-WI-...
There is a reason these places are cheap. It is partly because it would mean living in North Dakota.
Supply and demand don't lie :)
Others are less sensitive to human waste then I am and will work 60 hour weeks to be around it.
I'm seeing claims that it got that low once back in 1795.
In North Dakota they get some days that cold practically every year[2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_London
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_North_Dakota
$70,000, 1,808 sq. ft. -- https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/909-E-12th-St-Parkersburg...
$77,00, 1,168 sq. ft. -- https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/921-W-5th-St-Elk-City-OK-...
$60,000, 2,216 sq. ft. -- https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/154-N-Cedar-St-Manistique...
You can get land pretty cheap there, though. I've thought about buying a forested plot before but ... nah. If I want to do that I can afford to do it in a more rural part of Ohio.
You start to notice these little brown specks all over the state: https://www.google.com/maps/place/West+Virginia/@38.5978727,...
then you zoom in and see the mines: https://www.google.com/maps/place/West+Virginia/@37.9086459,...
That entire geographical region is an economically depressed shithole (until you get up to Pittsburgh and Columbus and their suburban areas). WV may be ground zero (it's also not the only one, Kentucky has it's fair share of the same thing going on) but its contagion rots out from the center. If you're ever looking for land in rural Ohio or rural southwestern PA, I'd implore you to go spend some time on the ground in those communities first.
If you want world class dining just hop in your Tesla down to the airport for a quick weekend excursion, who cares what it costs, you're swimming in money without a rent bill.
Something that blew my mind when researching internet there was that 90% of the county has fiber to the door with 1GB speed. The entire county has a population less than 25k distributed pretty evenly throughout.
At 200k I’d prefer an apartment and trade size / space for location. Even with kids.
For some such as myself the choice is anything but simple. In fact I left Seattle primarily for this very reason and one cheap house bought and sold in the midwest and a year later I found myself back.
> If I have to be a renter my whole damn life and can’t even afford a house, what is the god damn point?
People seem to have been taken in by the societal conditioning that you need to buy a house. Housing and shelter is a basic human need. Owning a house is not. As you yourself mentioned, you are extremely privileged and can afford most things you want without having to think twice. So why stress yourself out over piece of paper.
I too live in one of the highest-COL places in America. And I'm paying $3k/month in rent for a wonderful 4-bedroom townhouse in a great neighborhood. I've done the math, and I financially come out ahead by paying $3k/month in rent and investing the remainder in worldwide index funds - a strategy which made me a millionaire in my 30s. I spend an hour commuting into the city via public transit, but that's no problem. I include this time as part of my working hours, and specifically chose my home for its accessibility to public transit.
You mentioned that you're avoiding lifestyle creep. But your biggest lifestyle creep is your expectation of owning a family-sized home in a prime urban neighborhood. Let go of this societal brainwashing and you'll find yourself far happier.
For example, if you bought a house, it would have to lose $72K value in 2 years or $144K in 4 years (minus inflation, taxes, maintenance) to break even with paying $3000/month rent.
However, if your house appreciates as most do in highly industrialized areas, you basically get paid to live there.
You're not factoring in transaction costs, maintenance, property taxes, and cost of capital (ie. the downpayment). Transaction costs (eg. relators) are 2.5% on each side, so after buying/selling you're already down 5%. Property taxes and maintenance are estimated to be 1% each, so over 4 years you're down 8%. The cost of capital is hard to quantify, especially if you also factor in appreciation, but housing has historically under-preformed the stock market, so that should theoretically be a non-zero cost there.
Suppose we ignore cost of capital (since that's hard to quantify), let's calculate what that % equates to. According to [1] the price to rent ratios is many cities exceed 30. If we use a price to rent ratio of 30, then a $3000/month rent translates to a house price of $1.08M. Factoring in the % costs from before, that's a cost of $140.4k. That's nearly as big as the $144k loss that you budgeted for, before factoring in drop in home price. The maintenance/property taxes alone is going to eat up more than half of your hypothetical $3000 in rent savings.
[1] https://smartasset.com/mortgage/price-to-rent-ratio-in-us-ci...
>However, if your house appreciates as most do in highly industrialized areas, you basically get paid to live there.
but that's the same force that makes housing unaffordable.
For a married person with a million dollar home, they'll make ~$150k back from the section 121 nonrecognition provision alone if they ever sell, not to mention the salt and mortgage interest tax deductions. The tax code heavily incentivizes home ownership.
1. that's on capital gains. If they're selling for a loss in OP's scenario, that works out to a tax savings of $0.
2. realistically speaking this can be factored into the cost of cost of capital (ie. opportunity cost of the downpayment/mortgage payment), but I didn't want to get into that because the calculation can get subjective. Housing has historically under-performed the stock market, but if you're a housing permabull, you might argue that the housing bubble will continue and outperform the stock market, making the opportunity cost of buying a house negative.
>not to mention the salt and mortgage interest tax deductions
that's a savings on mortgage interest, which is a cost that wasn't in my calculations. Including that cost and factoring in that deduction will make the numbers worse, not better.
>The tax code heavily incentivizes home ownership.
no disagreement there.
Further, any of this handwaving about all the fees of ownership apply just as well to whoever owns the property you're renting -- all of which costs they simply pass to the renter. There is no world where renting is as cost-effective as ownership over the long term.
1. even if you're not paying them, it's baked into the price.
2. OP mentioned buying and selling (for a loss), so he'll eventually have to pay it
3. if you search around, realtor fees are customarily at 6% for the seller, so my estimate of 2.5% for both sides is actually underestimating it.
> What you've described is a worst-case scenario which completely ignores the fact that homeowners have a real asset they can then sell.
I'm using the case that OP himself provided.
>Further, any of this handwaving about all the fees of ownership apply just as well to whoever owns the property you're renting -- all of which costs they simply pass to the renter. There is no world where renting is as cost-effective as ownership over the long term.
Right, I'm not claiming that you're not throwing away any money when renting, just that it's nowhere the full rent, and the numbers aren't as rosy as OP initially suggested (ie. you can lose $144K house value in 4 years, and still break even).
Buying a house only makes sense if you're going to stay there 5+ years.
I've owned several homes as I've moved around. Lost money on all but one. My parents lost money on all the houses they bought. Real estate is hardly the guaranteed "wealth builder" people think it is.
I hate mowing the lawn, too.
Oh, and if you build a new house in Washington state, you get to pay sales tax on it! That's another 10% poke in the eye.
I don't understand, do you think landlords don't pay tax, insurance premiums, or maintenance costs for their property? Those are all passed on to tenants with room left over to make the landlord a profit.
Compare paying someone $3k a month to use their asset vs paying a bank ~$3k (probably less) a month while owning that same appreciating asset. When renting, that $3k is gone, a guaranteed loss. With buying, it goes into an asset you can later sell, hopefully at a higher price. Alternatively you can keep it and not have to pay mortgage or rent once it's paid off and still have a place to live. You can also borrow off whatever equity you've built up. Also that mortgage payment is locked in, so you aren't subject to the landlord raising rent after your contract expires in a couple of years.
It's a big investment that you also get to live in. You could lose money on it, but it's unlikely in most populated places, and you will most likely lose less than what you would otherwise pay in rent.
Just make sure you buy in an area / state that isn't shrinking.
> that mortgage payment is locked in
Unless you bought an adjustable rate mortgage. Once you do buy a house, you'll discover that taxes, maintenance, insurance, etc., are not at all locked in. If you don't pay the taxes, you won't have a place to live, as the government will toss you out.
Nearly all people imagine that if they paid $X for a house, then sold it for $(X +Y) that they made $Y profit. They leave out all other costs, like taxes, real estate commissions, insurance, etc., etc., etc.
Ya that's fair based on the payment schedule, banks gotta get their money if you pay it off early; but still more equity than renting.
>Unless you bought an adjustable rate mortgage.
Ya a lot of people got burned by balloon payments in 2008 after the market tanked. They were speculating more so than buying a house to live in many times I suspect. I bought a house in 2002 and it never went below what I paid for it by 2008. I bought at a really good time for my city though.
>Nearly all people imagine that if they paid $X for a house, then sold it for $(X +Y) that they made $Y profit.
I don't think anything ever works that way. Always giving someone a cut.
>They leave out all other costs, like taxes, real estate commissions, insurance, etc., etc., etc.
Ya all that sucks. But if you are renting, you still pay that for somebody else, it's baked in plus profit. If renting wasn't profitable, they wouldn't do it.
But yes, I agree that that's the history, that if you're in an area for a few years it's better to buy than to rent, but isn't it untenable for real estate to increase in value at ~3% higher than inflation indefinitely? I genuinely don't understand the long run bull case for real estate as an investment.
But the idea that you'll get a rate of return that's close to the stock market, from owning some land that's just sitting there? It's very strange to me, from a 10,000 foot view of the economics.
It's true that there's a fixed amount of land, but the population (both in the US and in the world as a whole) is growing slowly now and will soon stop.
I suppose one potential driver for real estate's value in major cities is that the returns to concentration of talent will continue to increase. That seems possible (though beware of tail risks there, like remote work, VR, pandemic). But for real estate that's outside of a big growing city?
It just seems possible that we've been in a long bull run in real estate that could slow down or halt drastically at any time.
But that doesn't mean that it's not better to own than to rent. When you rent, you've got another party that's looking for a profit, and your rent is pricing in risks that are more under your control when you're an owner (like the risk that you totally trash the property, or the opportunity cost when the house is sitting empty).
You sound like a propaganda billboard from "They Live"; it's pretty incredible to call a property deed a "piece of paper". Setting aside the financial and psychological benefits that come with home ownership, the United States is a society that has made a lot of sacrifices in the name of preserving choice. You made yours, you chose to rent; the choice to own a home should remain a realistic alternative for those who want it. If your argument is that houses in absolutely prime real estate areas are always going to be out of reach of most buyers fair enough, but treating the idea of home ownership like a diamond ring is absurd.
I'm in this boat. I told my manager, talked about my pay & how it doesn't match my responsibilities. I talked about how I'm OK with a little crunch, but crunch 52 weeks a year is not crunch, it's just taking advantage. He said he's aware of the situation and that everyone's in the same boat, as if that justifies it somehow. He said wait to ask for higher pay. I feel like I'm being jerked around. I hear this from you & I hear the same from some of my other friends in my field, too, so I doubt the grass is greener anywhere else, and leaving won't have much effect.
I liked my job in the past. I think I would like it again if my workload was more reasonable. The best I can do is just constantly try to set expectations that, no, I won't be putting in any more additional extra effort.
See if you can get more money or even just better work life balance elsewhere if you're not happy. These designated promotion/raise times are the biggest load of BS. "oh sorry, we'd love to give you a raise but those happen in 6 months, so maybe then?"
Edit: Boss is basically saying to you: "turnover is expected" while he is crossing his fingers you'll shut up and get back to work
(I'm privileged. I am in a scale-up that has found product-market fit. We could be cashflow positive if we needed to. I'm in a management position now so I get to shape the rules. Engineers work 40 hours, and nothing's on fire)
No problem if you don't feel comfortable to, I'm just curious to hear what kinds of problems people are having.
vs
>"can’t even afford a house"
Only one of these statements can be true. Would you have money concerns if you did buy a house that is as good as your parents? i.e. if your housing costs were $10k/mo, $20k/mo or more?
A $1m home is going to cost you $3,500 a month right now for the mortgage. That's very affordable for a lot of people in tech, especially couples.
OTOH, having a mortgage "locks in" your price of housing for the next ## years. It's perfect for families and startup businesses because it affords some long term stability.
It doesn't sound like you're ready to settle down yet, so buying a SFH probably isn't the best move right now anyway.
You absolutely buy yourself a degree of stability and reduced future payments with a house but you're still probably looking at thousands of dollars a year for a standalone house.
How is a ten-year mortgage less risky than a 30 year?
You will likely move and sell the house before the 30 years are up. The only risk is your home price cratering.
I'm also formerly a Seattle Amazon office worker. After a few years and promotions, I started working remotely for Bay Area companies (the short flight makes me appealing) for good pay for years now. But I still love living in WA.
Sounds like you should consider leveraging your prestigious Seattle tech pedigree into a remote position. If you really work 60h now, your effective hourly wage will skyrocket even if you get paid less by nature of going down to sub-40h due to remote work. And it'll still be plenty of money for Western WA.
Citations:
2200 square feet, sold for $1M: https://www.redfin.com/WA/Seattle/516-NE-91st-St-98115/home/... 2340 square feet, large lot, $1M, sold a month ago: https://www.redfin.com/WA/Seattle/9509-5th-Ave-NE-98115/home... 2000 square feet and a bit lot in Redmond, listed for $1M and will probably sell for 1.2 max: https://www.redfin.com/WA/Redmond/13626-179th-Ave-NE-98052/h...
These aren't cherry-picked, the listings are full of them.
There are lots of inexpensive cities with incredible housing inventory. Cities that are surrounded by culture, cuisine, and an endless assortment of things to do.
Big city prices are driven by offices. You're going to be working remotely anyway.
Atlanta, Charlotte, Miami, Austin, Chattanooga, Savannah. You can draw a $300-500k salary living in these places, pay a low mortgage, and buy a second or third home for travel / rent.
In what universe is 2000 square feet tiny? Most of America - to say nothing of the rest of the world - makes do with far less. Sure, if you have 5-7 people living under one roof, more might be appreciated, but especially for 2-4 people it's tons of space.
If you want more space, a city isn't the place for you.
My fiancee and I live in a house that's ... I forget how big, something like 2200sqft of finished space. We basically ignore probably 40% of the house. If we didn't have animals (rabbits take up one room) it'd be even more than that.
Most people can't afford 2,000 sqft at these prices, so they wind up living in closets or renting in perpetuity.
1) Bigger cities have more and better things to do. Sports teams, theaters (both local and touring professional), concerts, bars, parks. Faster access to a major airport makes travel easier and cheaper.
2) More space isn't always better. More space means more to clean and heat. It's also an excuse to fill with more junk you don't necessarily need. If you added another room or two to my house, I have a good idea of the kinds of things I would fill them with - but my life has been fine for 5+ years without those things.
3) It's feasible to work in an expensive city while maxing out your retirement savings and go live somewhere cheaper later. It's impossible to do the opposite. It gives you choices.
4) The local populace in many of those areas can be unwelcoming if you're anything other than a white heterosexual. Even if you find a neighborhood that tolerates you, your state government is gerrymandered by people who go around vocally wishing you were dead. That turns away a lot of people. I grew up in Michigan, I still have family in Michigan, and I visit regularly enough to be quite certain I never want to move back there regardless of if its cheaper.
Intergenerational wealth transfer. Every single millennial home-owner that I know (myself included) received a very generous gift from their parents, or, in some cases, other surviving relatives (usually older than them).
The average gift size was approximately the size of the down-payment.
> They just live in different places, places that we don't think are good enough.
Young people generally live approximately where their parents live, regardless of what people think about that place. NYT found the average distance from parents that people live at, is approximately 18 miles. The reasons, again, should be fairly obvious.
For now, I landed a consulting gig, helping a small agency improve team dynamics and build the company they want to work for. I'd like to expand into technical training, mentoring, and find more clients. I think this industry has potential for awesome careers, and most of the struggles we feel comes from resolvable problems. Fixing these things would lead to higher productivity and happiness.
Most of the country isn't trying to buy a house in San Francisco—they're living in much more affordable places. Some problems are universal, but others are limited to a few small locations—or at least, considerably worse there than others.
- Houses are cheap compared to other metros related to comp. You can get something great for 700-800k that would be 1.5m in the valley.
- You are working way too much. You can certainly work 40 hours or less for whatever comp you’re getting now. This takes work - learning to set boundaries, learning how to pick a team.
Why don't you move?
If you have tech skills, get a remote job (or a local one and make a little less), pick any metro area with 1-3 million metro population and move yourself somewhere where you can live an affordable life.
If your office is either within walking distance of the Seattle ferry terminal or there are good public transit options between the terminal and your office, so that you don't need to take your car on the ferry I don't think ferry contention is an issue. I believe there are park and ride lots near the ferry terminals on the Kitsap side, but I don't know if they fill up.
Would you care to share what kinds of things specifically cause you stress and anxiety?
No problem if you don't feel comfortable to do so, I am just really curious what kinds of stressors people such as yourself are experiencing.
> The great-resignation thesis seems strongest in America and Britain. In September a record 4.4m Americans quit their jobs (see chart 1). In the third quarter of the year nearly 400,000 Britons moved from one job to another after handing in their notice, also the highest-ever level.
> In other parts of the rich world, however, a great resignation is harder to spot.
So basically the premise of their title is that the "Great Resignation" doesn't count because it's primarily happening in two countries instead of in every country.
If you want to be right, maybe name it more like "The Minor Resignation".
If you go looking, it's not hard to find comments, anecdotes, and stories from people whose workplaces did experience some sort of large resignation event where a lot of people went out and got new jobs.
The common theme in those anecdotes is always that they were underpaid and/or mistreated to begin with. In some ways, the "Great Resignation" news stories being blasted all over the news gave a lot of people the final push they needed to go out and look for new jobs. Combined with the booming economy, it wasn't hard for these people to find better jobs. Once their coworkers realized what was happening, they also made the leap.
So in a sense, it does appear that small pockets of employers who were behind the curve are finally getting what's coming to them. I half believe the news stories about "Great Resignation" stuff became a self-fulfilling prophecy where everyone who wasn't getting a new job felt left out.
But if you look at any larger company data or at companies who were smart enough to keep pace with compensation and employee treatment norms, there isn't really a wave of resignations like the news stories suggest.
Overall employee turnover is slightly higher than normal, unless you also factor in the decrease in employee turnover during early COVID, at which point the running average of employee turnover is all that abnormal.
One area where it certainly seems to be very common is with restaurants. In every city I've been to over the past few months, restaurants are very obviously on reduced hours, reduced days, or (supposedly "temporarily") closed. And it's fairly obvious in many cases that it's not due to lack of demand. And, in many cases, these jobs are not terribly attractive.
Restaurants are adding surcharges and increasing worker pay but it appears to not be enough in general.
It doesn't have to be this way but no one wants to be the first place to refuse abusive customers.
On the flip side higher payed professional positions are seeing some turnover but no where anywhere like the other lower paid sectors.
I know for a fact that the restaurant/food service situation is on full meltdown mode in Southern California. A few panda expresses have run out rice. Multiple Habit burgers have shut down due to lack of staff, eating out at restaurants have been the worse I have ever seen it as everyone is really new and it shows.
That being said I have been to a lot of places in the country this year(Utah, Arizona, Hawaii) and nothing is similar to what I've seen locally in southern California so it may track to how expensive California has become and could be people are quitting jobs in expensive areas and moving to cheaper ones.
It’s a great state in many ways, but the way most of the local and state leaders have repeatedly punted on the issue of housing affordability is shameful. Calling their efforts half assed would be too generous, it’s quarter assed at most.
The recent change to upzone previously single family home only areas is good, but even then, the new regulation is filled with caveats that weaken it.
I won't say it's everywhere but I've seen the same problem as California in Washington (including rural Washington) and Raleigh. Everyone I know who travels has been running into the difficulties of trying to find places to eat at on a given day.
So restaurants are getting squeezed on all sides. Supply costs up, wages are up, labor shortage, rent is up. Tips will go down as customers are upset with poor service, which means more pressure on wages. All of this means higher prices, which means fewer customers and more takeout orders. The old restaurant business model is simply not sustainable.
Edit: Also, FWIW roughly 4 people left my team in the past year (since Oct 2020) before me. A couple went to new jobs, a couple did not and just resigned without plans (me too).
In a sense I'm sort of glad about growing to hate the job as much as I did; it inspired me to finish my bachelors and start the path forward to transition out of software engineering and into CS research.
Granted, this transition is going to take 5-6 years, but it's at least a path forward.
No, I don't think so, and I don't think they pay terribly well. I just got accepted into a PhD program, which will take me 5-6 years to complete, so I'm hoping that will qualify me for the roles that do exist, and get something approaching a decent salary in the process.
> What roles would that entail?
I would ideally like to work entirely on formalization of algorithms, working primarily within Isabelle or Coq or Agda or something like them. I realize those jobs aren't exactly common, but it's at least a goal to work towards.
You weren't getting a decent salary at a FAANG? :-o
I meant to say that I’m hoping to eventually get a research job with a decent salary
If the "great resignation" is not real, who is benefiting from that narrative?
Some companies may also be doing a bit of downsize without layoffs and others have done layoffs and reigned in comp in a way that leaves the remaining people looking at their options.
Overall it seems like a good time to be hiring, especially as a startup/pre ipo company.
So... less than inflation?
The reasoning:
- People want to leave the cities
- People want to spend time with family
- Racism, sexism and exclusion is becoming unbearable (largest single factor I've seen)
- Forcing medical procedures (second largest single factor I've seen)
- Salaries are becoming very competitive with the inflation and job switching
- Companies are re-gearing to be more online and that means more tech opportunities
Every time someone leaves I ping them and ask why. Personally I'm curious. Many have purchased farms and have moved to the middle of no where. I generally think they'll miss the cities, but there's a pretty significant move of tech people out to the country.
Covid vaccines?
Yeah I'm sure this is true. /s
Even the supposed "mass exodus" of cops everyone was saying will happen, didn't happen. Cops, a very conservative group of people, decided getting the jab was better than getting a new job.
Do you know any cops? Many of the mayors backed down and many more just retired. I know several in around the Chicago area and none of them followed through, they updated their guidelines.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/17/us/chicago-police-department-...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/With-hundreds-of-offi...
How many? I have no idea, based on what I've seen probably ~10-15% of people would rather be fired than get a vaccine. I know a couple in the medical field, a couple of friends in sales, etc.
Anyway, it's anecdotal to a degree, but only because most people aren't tracking it. It's easier for people in tech to just move to a remote-first company.
Further, I think highlighting the collective power of workers and people generally leaving shitty jobs, bosses, and companies for greener pastures is a good thing. There's a million ways to Sunday that this phenomenon could be localized or sliced (certain geographies, any number of socio-economic or demographic lines, industries, even specific job titles etc. may show increased worker turnover). If people are leaving customer facing service jobs because of anti-mask nut-jobs, low pay, lack of autonomy in hours, and general staff shortages I don't exactly blame them. It also doesn't mean that this turnover would be visible in high-earning tech jobs.
I hate being conspiratorial, but who does this narrative benefit? Obviously employers (and probably the majority of the subscribership of The Economist).
A great turn over where people that weren't happy try to find a job they are happy with might happen, and honestly that sounds great for everyone.
The reality of the so-called "great resignation" is just pent-up demand for job switching that didn't happen during the pandemic. Every number looks high compared to 2020's artificially suppressed baseline.
Of course social media wants to push the idea that people aren't working, because people who aren't working consume more media, and that's all they care about.
I think there are probably 10% of the worst employers in the country who just can't hire right now - from a mixture of bad reputation and unwillingness to pay (rising) market wages. There are better jobs out there - so workers are going to where managers treat them with humanity.
Check out reddit.com/r/antiwork - this subreddit has grown extremely rapidly over the past ~6 months. It feels like a movement is bubbling. I wouldn't be surprised if we see widespread labor marches and strikes in 2022.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/participationrate.asp
A quick look at the Fred chart shows that the US is nowhere close to regaining pre-pandemic levels, and that this comes amid a multi-year decline:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Although the reasons may not be clear, the resignation itself has some pretty good evidence.
I'd be shocked if we got back up to pre-pandemic participation barring a WWII style extreme scenario.