It only gets harder if you happen to have kids and are looking for decent schools. Would be interesting to see an infographic like this with both rent and school quality included.
If that's the case, Millbrae is a great stop. It has good schools, a safe downtown with many local shops, and a library. These are all within walking distance of the BART station. As an added bonus the station is the only station that also houses the Caltrain.
The only draw back is that a ride to/from say, the Embarcadero can be fairly long at times, sometimes approaching 45 mins off peak. Yes, I know it's only supposed to be 35 mins, but from my experience it's always a bit longer.
...and commute time. The mission and 24th price quoted at $2.8k is a 15 minute commute to downtown SF compared to a 51 minute commute from the Milbrae at $1.8k. That's $12k over a year compared to 37 work days of extra commute time, which is more than a month and a half of work days over the course of the year. Starting tech salary for a new college grad is what, $110k? With all the free time in the world, it might be worth it, but go up from there and it quickly gets questionable.
I think you mean the San Francisco area, which, yes, is terrible once you have a family. South Bay (Cupertino/San Jose) and deep East Bay (Fremont/Castro Valley) are relatively safe areas with several good schools. I don't have kids or live in the Bay Area anymore, but I know many people who grew up there and still have younger family growing up there.
I agree that people shouldn't be living on the streets. However I'm not sure about regulating rents. If you decree that people should be able to pay $500/month for a 2 bed apartment in SF, who is actually going to provide that rental? The only possible way that will happen is if the government provides the rentals. Now, that may be a good way to do it, but it certainly won't work with private rentals - landlords will simply not bother renting at all if they're going to lose money on the deal.
Founders, if you are reading this: When I click on the top left http://d.pr/i/JLux , please take me to the main site. It seems a bit counter intuitive, but I wanted to know what you guys do and there was no way other than to edit the URL (I’ve made the same mistakes).
As European, I'm usually astonished about the massive salaries that IT companies pay. When taking the rent into account, though, then it's a vastly different picture - I'd even say that in some of the mentioned areas the renters will have less income after rent and taxes than I have in Munich, Germany's 2nd expensive city.
Same impression (from Brussels, Belgium). + as a freelancer, it's actually quite possible to get rates in Brussels that are around 80% of what you can get in California (500€/day is totally possible).
For the record, for the rent of a 1 bedroom appartment in SF, you can get a 240 square meters house in the center of Brussels.
There's also the issue that there's not just one group of taxes: there's what your employer pays, and then there's what you personally pay. In at least France and Belgium, salaries typically include the former, but not the latter; whereas in the US, most people get their employer to withhold towards their personal taxes.
Others consider programmers underpaid, even at these salaries. This makes some sense when considering that Google has a revenue of around $500k/employee (saw this number a while ago in a comment, don't remember exactly which one).
Which companies pay that, though? I just spoke to a company in Hamburg that was offering me about 1/2 what I'd make in SF after calculating the cost of living difference and conversion to USD.
I find this data very 'surpising'. Average rent in Rockridge: 1775, Average Rent in Fruitvale: 2300. For those not familiar, Rockridge is probably the fanciest, most expensive neighborhood in Oakland, whereas Fruitvale is a 'hood where you won't find a lot of people walking around after dark.
Agreed, I think their data must be sparse for some areas but it would be nice to see them post at least the number, mean, median and standard deviation for each region. Also be interesting to grab data off craigslist to compare.
See my reply below, but the main issue is that they didn't use walking or driving distance from the station but a straight 1/2 mile radius, which is grabbing neighboring not-so-good neighborhoods.
Median posted rental prices may not be a great metric. Some comparisons don't pass the smell test - West Oakland should not be more expensive than Glen Park or Berkeley. Berkeley should not be cheaper than Fruitvale or Lake Merritt.
Or too small. In some cases, I bet there might just be one new luxo-lifestyle super expensive apartment building right next to the station, and nothing else.
About 80% of folks I know with kids leave San Francisco before they turn 5. The big issues are high rent, variability of school quality and logistics getting kids+gear around. City has done some great work to upgrade the kid's parks but the rent, schools and logistics make it very expensive to raise kids in SF.
It depends if you mean SF or are including the surrounding area.
The few people I know with kids in SF proper are either dual-income or did well on a startup. Some people live in the Sunset, which is more suburban -- still expensive but at least a little more kid friendly.
Most everyone else I know leaves the city for a suburb. Essentially having kids means your commute gets longer!
(Although in my case it actually got a lot shorter because I also got a job a lot closer to home in the South Bay instead of working in SF).
A couple folks have mentioned some of the numbers being off and not passing the sniff test. It's important to look at the methodology. All they did was calculate the median for all rentals within 1/2 mile of the station, as the crow flies.
Glen Park is a perfect example of how this goes wrong. It's right next to a freeway, and the homes right on the other side in the not so good neighborhood, while far away from BART, are counted because as the crow flies they are very close.
Also, actual Glen Park[1] has almost no apartment buildings -- it's almost entirely single-family homes.
So if you're only looking at apartments-for-rent within the given radius, your data is going to be almost entirely dominated by places in Sunnyside, Excelsior, and Diamond Heights.
I'd like to see the followup post, "how we spent time and money creating a useless infographic". If the data is just bad (see HN comments here), how is it in any way helpful? You have to start with valid data.
These costs are highly biased by the fact that most older apartments are multi-bedroom dwellings. Single bedroom apartments in the Mission or SoMa are newer buildings charging higher rates. A room in a 3 bdr apartment in the Mission is ~$1,000 - 1,400 / month.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 305 ms ] threadThe only draw back is that a ride to/from say, the Embarcadero can be fairly long at times, sometimes approaching 45 mins off peak. Yes, I know it's only supposed to be 35 mins, but from my experience it's always a bit longer.
You are still broadly correct, though - people underweight the importance of a short commute.
Leave the bay area. I'm up in Yuba City now. Full time work from home bay area job.
Edit: if you disagree with me you should downvote me. Lol, fucking traitors are hilarious.
Great post!
For the record, for the rent of a 1 bedroom appartment in SF, you can get a 240 square meters house in the center of Brussels.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/09/families-flee-san-f...
The few people I know with kids in SF proper are either dual-income or did well on a startup. Some people live in the Sunset, which is more suburban -- still expensive but at least a little more kid friendly.
Most everyone else I know leaves the city for a suburb. Essentially having kids means your commute gets longer!
(Although in my case it actually got a lot shorter because I also got a job a lot closer to home in the South Bay instead of working in SF).
Glen Park is a perfect example of how this goes wrong. It's right next to a freeway, and the homes right on the other side in the not so good neighborhood, while far away from BART, are counted because as the crow flies they are very close.
So if you're only looking at apartments-for-rent within the given radius, your data is going to be almost entirely dominated by places in Sunnyside, Excelsior, and Diamond Heights.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Glen+Park,+San+Francisco
Probably worth watching before making up your mind about the startup.