Life in a Studio Apartment with My Wife and Two Sons(gregkroleski.com) |
Life in a Studio Apartment with My Wife and Two Sons(gregkroleski.com) |
http://www.section8facts.com/2014/10/23/section-8-guidelines...
I think you fail to see that he'd definitely describe his living over the past few years as 'decent', and likely even much more than just decent.
I thought the direct lessons he laid out were excellent, about being ruthlessly honest on what you truly need to be happy, and the freedom that you get from the resulting wealth when combining that with a SF tech salary.
It is a reasoning from first principles on living conditions that not enough people do imo. I think we tend to subconsciously accept the default of more space/stuff=better without making a direct choice on what is the specific right amount for ourselves. Coming to a definition of what "enough" is for ourselves keeps the goalposts from moving as income rises.
Also the point about gaining empathy for the poor based on experiencing a lower margin for error and high cost when things went wrong in this lifestyle was another good observation.
I know this seems like tedious legal nitpicking and the main apartment room is right there and "everybody does it", but nearly every line of fire and building code exists because of a preventable tragedy. Even if it's not against the lease it's unsafe. (And he built a barely-braced lofted bed in an earthquake zone!?)
The author happily compounded the rent they saved every month but failed to compound the increased risks they took every night.
To be a bedroom it has to have a window, a certain size (which varies), and some places even require a closet in the room.
If they find a bed in a room like that they normally start with a warning, then a visit from child protection services, or even condemning the entire house.
Obviously if they don't inspect they'll never know, but rentals, and people with contact with authority (CPS, Police, etc) could expect an inspection.
If you own, I'm not sure if the fire department can legally enter a home for an inspection without a warrant, but for a rental I believe they can, and do!
How does it compare to the risks of alternative courses of action such as moving to a neighborhood with a higher crime rate, tolerating an increased commute (hours of life directly lost, increased risk of road accidents, increased chronic stress with accompanying health risks) or moving to a different city before having a replacement job lined up?
http://www.gregkroleski.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/studi...
And yet, clearly, plenty of people do choose to live in San Francisco.
In SF, NYC (where I live) and other US localities, the issue is not family income but rather is the use of politics to limit zoning density and thus artificially creating housing scarcity.
Thus, renters pay more than they otherwise would with an efficient market and billionaire land-owners have much greater wealth than they would in an efficient market.
In NYC, we had a somewhat similar situation with Taxis. Medallions were artificially limited to 13,000 in this city of 8 million where many people do not own cars and use mass transit and taxis. As a result of this 13,000 limit, taxi medallions had a market value of $1.2 million.
Then thankfully, Uber came along, thus creating a larger supply of hail-able taxis and the taxis medallions now have a market value of $700,000 or so and some taxis are no longer in use.
In NYC, our current mayor has two properties that he rents out for a total of $120,000 per year. He is able to get this high rent because of city laws that limit zoning density. Thus, he has every incentive to want to artificially limit zoning densities.
Thus, while many liberals fret over income-inequality, they still support zoning regulations in cities such as SF and NYC that amount to a transfer of wealth from lower income individuals to wealthy individuals.
There are not typically 10 children at once in the home BTW. The older children will be away at school, around 14 for boys, 17 for girls.
What you do is have 3 bedrooms: parents, boys, and girls. Depending on the boy/girl ratio you can have up to 2 triple-bunk-beds in a room.
Doing that you can easily sleep 12 children in the house (if you had to).
There is no living room, instead there is a dining room with a huge table (large enough to seat everyone at once) that doubles as a multi-purpose room for homework, and other activities.
Children are encouraged to play outside (there's hardly room inside).
For possessions there is not usually a need to store much since you'll pass things on to other people, your children, relatives, friends, neighbors, etc. and they with you, so most items are in active use. (For example, once the kids are older and you don't need a triple-bunk-bed you pass it on to someone else.)
This also means you don't need to spend as much as you might expect on stuff. If you don't have a lot of money you can go your entire life without once buying new clothes, or other gear for the kids.
Not even Hollywood is like that. People may stay in trailers for some time but that's it
As personally having to live in a tiny place (not in SF though) it is not something I want to do for an extended period of time, even though the advantages like 'city living' are good
Because it's their choice.
Right now the housing market in San Fran is redic. However, there are other major tech areas that don't nearly have the same problems.
A) establish themselves in such an uncomfortable location
B) not embrace distributed teams
It's a terrible cycle at this point.
I think you making a pretty broad leap here... This is entirely his choice, and nobody is "making" them live in a confined space - most of my friends that are starting a family leave San Francisco and move to the suburbs to get more space at a lower cost (e.g., San Mateo) and take BART to get to their job in San Francisco.
Isn't tech approach the same? You wait for your big break and then move out.
I wish I could say we have kept this up now we are back living in the "real world" but some of the spirit has rubbed off and we're definitely much better at becoming less attached to particular belongings.
I strongly believe that most belongings end up becoming burdens if you don't establish a process of questioning their utility on a somewhat regular basis.
Thanks for the article! Really thought-provoking.
That said, I am looking forward to moving away from the Bay someday to more space. : )
The compromise is that the stuff they sell that has significant decorative elements is extremely flimsy. The malm series is probably the most durable furniture they sell, because it's just 3/4 inch or 1 inch osb sheeting that's cut and joined in different configurations with bolts.
That article has a black board with a tally of diapers changed today. The count was up to thirty. Is that somewhat accurate/possible???
If so, holy shit, I'm investing in cloth....
Anyway, it's a really good read and not at all what I was expecting. I am sort of disappointed that so many of the comments here are about "Boo -- small space living!" or "Ugh! San Francisco!" or "It's even worse in many other countries!" because the piece really was not written that way. It wasn't written as "Ugh! Pity me! Boo hoo!" It is very thoughtful and a really good read.
I just wish the article had a native tweet button. I couldn't find one.
Basically, if you live where all of the minimum-wage people live, you're going to get spill-over from all the typical problems in such a neighbourhood.
In an age of high-speed internet, it's ridiculous that we insist software engineers be jammed into dense, expensive globs. Working remotely with Skype calls/IM/screensharing is a better experience, all around, than trying to collaborate in the same office, at least in my experience. You do have to have employees that will actually work, though.
EDIT: typo, I meant sqf and not sqm.
I'm only making the change I am now because it's actually closer to the job I started a couple months ago, and I'm hoping in the next 18 months to have my credit clear (still paying off medical bills from 5-6 years ago), my car is paid off in 14 months, and want to have enough for a down payment for a house.
It's hard for me to imagine living in SF, where rent is significantly more than I pay now, and the pay doesn't quite correlate.
I had discovered that excellent wisdom independently when setting up my various college dorm rooms.
He later says that he is "forever changed" by the experience. I hope so. Myself, I had forgotten, and I thank him for the reminder.
If you can do 50 miles when the hail is coming in sideways and it's dark and your on a hill in the middle of nowhere then everything else seems easier.
In our case, we put one up over the middle of our bed, and hung all our clothes on it (even hanging-optional stuff like T-shirts). You had to kind of tunnel through it when getting into bed, but this let us make use of the otherwise useless airspace over our bed. It also formed a kind of soft wall or curtain that made the area where your head was darker than the rest of the main room. That was handy when one person wanted to sleep and the other was still working.
It's simply where the most opportunities are. The idea is to move there and live uncomfortably until you network your way to an awesome, high paying job.
Alternatively, the tech companies there usually do more interesting stuff than in other area. Here in NYC most are related to advertising or media—stuff not easy to get exited about. San Francisco has its large share of silly ideas for companies, but it also has many that do interesting stuff.
I could easily live somewhere cheap and commute for a few years then build up enough to move somewhere nicer.
What irritates me the most is there is absolutely no physical reason why London has to be the place for start ups in the UK and a whole bunch of reasons why it's not a good place.
Where I live now rent and house prices are incredibly cheap (even compared to most parts of the UK), the city is rolling out excellent fibre (I have 150Mbps at home and 100Mbps at work) and transport links are excellent, it would be a good place to start a software company (I am doing) but hiring is going to be hard since it will require relocation to get the talent needed (or working entirely remote, something I'm considering).
Well, he didn't choose to live in San Francisco for long. By the end of his four years there, he decamped to Seattle, which seems to be the natural progression these days: live in SF and close a few deals in a tiny space, then move to Seattle into a slightly larger place and be amazed at all of the room you have.
Even if I lived in SF I'd be reluctant to commute an hour to work if I could just as well work from home.
> And don’t forget about the importance of compound interest. I will remind you that $2k per month saved on rent for one year is $24k. Invested for 50 years averaging 6% interest comes to roughly $450k. Freedom. HTFU.
$450K towards retirement for one year of living in cramped, expensive SF sounds like it could be a reasonable payoff for many people.
It definitely costs my startup employer (and myself), especially factoring in preschool. It also steals a job and "juice" from the local economy - we'd have already hired a nanny if rents were merely 2x a normal city, and we'd happily spend more buying from local craftspeople. The money goes into my landlord's retirement account basically doing nothing.
Is your landlord's retirement account a sack under his bed? If not, that money is being invested in publicly traded companies or in bonds to fund public works. It is creating jobs, just not in your neighborhood.
They can afford to live anywhere they want and start their company near their homes.
You should clarify that in Russia they operate in "living space" sq.meters, meaning that 400 sqft will not include kitchen, corridors, bathroom, etc. Just the bedrooms and the living room.
Secondly, you are over-generalizing. While a part of population did in fact live in cramped conditions (or even in shared condos, whereby 2+ families shared a single apartment), more than enough people lived in a very decently spaced apartments, with living space ranging between 28 sqm to 40-50 sqm. So "400 sqft" apartments were nowhere close to being "luxury".
OTOH, a bathroom with a window - now that was indeed a true luxury (because how the vast majority of buildings where designed).
We definitely had company over, often gatherings of 10-12 people and one time we had 5 overnight guests (that was a bit crazy but fun).
Also, in the sentence about the coffee table (seen two photos up), shouldn't that be "second photo from the top"? Unless I misunderstood and tried to find a coffee table in the photo with the surfboards/piano
My parents went through it in 80s. By then this mostly worked for military/otherwise connected families, but has broken down for the rest of the country with wait list numbering in years. In theory you gave up smaller apartment for a slightly larger as need arose. In practice, most families did not want to move far and construction pace did not keep up for economic reasons.
My main comment, though, is that modern diaper technology is the bomb and you should definitely not go for cloth.
1. strips that change color so you can see with a glance from across the room if they need a change (if baby just wearing a diaper)
2. the wicking effect and absorbent substance in the diaper really do keep the baby's skin dry, even when they pee their diaper (not 100% but way better than cloth)
3. baffles around the thigh made of various materials prevent leakage in ways washable diapers cannot
4. well-designed diapers are super easy to put on, and more importantly, to take off and convert into a sealed bundle of mess -- they have integrated tape fasters not only to keep the diaper on the baby, but also to fold it up into a little kind of poo burrito, fastened with tape
But all those features are just minor differentiators, what you are fundamentally paying for when you buy disposable diapers is "not having to store and deal with a mountain of small towels with human feces on them". It's way, way worth it.
Here in Tokyo I pay about ¥13 per diaper, delivered by Amazon. It works out to about USD $40-60 per month per kid in diapers.
The only argument for cloth diapers is perhaps the pollution one, although I have heard (and want to believe) that the energy consumed and detergent pollution makes the difference insignificant.
Still, you are committing bag after bag of plastic into the landfill with disposables. But... if I had to improve my "eco" rating, disposable diapers would probably be the very last thing I looked at. You will have so many things to deal with when your baby is born -- anything that makes that easier is worth it and disposable diapers help several times every day.
Diaper pro tip: very young babies (first few months) require a "5-minute rule" on changing poo diapers. You see them doing it, or smell it, wait 5 minutes to change it. It's very likely it'll be a 2-stage operation, and if you change it too early you'll waste a diaper when wave 2 hits right after you're done (after if you're lucky). They can live with it for a few minutes.
Congrats, and good luck. The first ~6-9 months are fairly bad (mostly because it's a lot of work and kids just aren't that much fun at that age) but when they start doing stuff it's awesome.
One less important thing, we used cloth some too, for pee it is great. If/when your baby poops reliably, you can save a lot by using cloth during pee times of day and disposable when poops occur.
Diaper Genie
Incidentally, this is the first time since the change that I miss having the upvote score on an item.
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/pregnancy-and-baby/pages/nappie...
> Some babies have very delicate skin and need changing as soon as they wet themselves, otherwise their skin becomes sore and red. Other babies can wait to be changed until before or after every feed.
> All babies need changing as soon as possible when they've done a poo (stool) to prevent nappy rash.
> Young babies need changing as many as 10 or 12 times a day; older babies at least six to eight times.
The UK NHS has a bunch of information about pregnancy and newborn children. You might want to find a site that you trust because you will get a lot of unsolicited advice from friends and relatives and a lot of it will be bogus.
(Congratulations, btw!)
By the time they hit six months it is less frequent, then after a year you may only have 3-6 diapers a day.
Remember with cloth that you have to scrape the poop into the toilet, you can't just toss it in a bag and have a service come pick it up (in which case you aren't saving money anyway).
I'm as environmentally conscious as anyone but disposable diapers are one of the few luxuries I choose to enjoy and I don't regret it for even a second.
That said, 30 seems high to me. Our kid probably peaked at about 8/day.
(We started with cloth diapers, but the amount of time washing them was just too high.)
Netherlands is number 30. Admittedly most of the others are a lot smaller, but Bangladesh and South Korea are a lot bigger.
San Fran is also denser than the Netherlands, and AFAICS denser than any Dutch city (comparable with The Hague).
http://www.xpat.nl/product/holland-handbook-2015-2016/
Perhaps they taking other factors into account by excluding city-states like Singapore, Hong Kong, etc.
Seoul is 17,000/km^2. But living spaces are surprisingly reasonable, even by American standards.
It always blows me away that Paris has a density of 21,000/km^2, but the living spaces I've seen are pretty bad.
Like the article says, it just makes very poor use of its space.
Beyond that, I always wonder about population density figures, afaik there is no standardised process for these calculations. You may think 'well it doesn't get much simpler than population within certain area over that total area', but when making comparisons, the statistics can be deceiving, especially as a proxy for 'living space'.
For example, I live in Amsterdam and we have quite a bit of water (from the Amstel river that divides the city east-west, the Ij river that divides the city north-south, or the Slooterpas lake that's more than a mile wide to the many different canals), as well as numerous sizeable public parks including just one of them, the Amsterdamse Bos, that's 3x (!) the size of Central Park... And if you're not familiar with Amsterdam, it's a tiny city with less than a million inhabitants. When you're outside you won't feel cramped, there's a lot of public areas, it's open, it's quite nice. But that doesn't mean that the density of actual residential space is like that. Especially when you consider that most of the Netherlands, including much of Amsterdam (a city mostly built in a swamp area!) has relatively low buildings and little vertical space as opposed to say Taipei.
Further, you may say the Netherlands is only nr 30, but there are only 4 countries with more than 10m people which are denser of which only 2 are developed countries. The US for context is number 177.
So the Netherlands is quite dense per total area for one. Secondly, vertical space is quite low, and thirdly many of its cities have large open areas (e.g. parks, bodies of waters, like Amsterdam) has ample open-areas where nobody actually lives. So while population density numbers are interesting to measure density, they can't simply be used a proxy for measuring density of housing space.
A better look would be at floor space per person. It's hard to find internationally comprehensive numbers for local areas, but take Germany and France. Germany has about twice the population density, but the floor space per person is pretty much exactly the same. Pop density would've been a terrible proxy for comparing floor area per person between these two countries.
Another example is Ireland and the Netherlands. The latter has 6x the population density. But floor space per person according to this source [2] is larger for Ireland. That's a striking difference that completely blows the popdensity statistic to irrelevance if a comparison between these countries was made for space in the home to live, even if the numbers are adjusted for errors.
I see pop density references pop up all the time in online discussions and it strikes me as a pretty bad statistic to pick for most arguments in such discussions. This particular discussion is about OP's tiny amount of floor space in his home, a popdensity stat includes much more and it may not be applicable when trying to make international comparisons.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/67/Wo...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/World_po...
is over 50% larger than the one in the article?
It's the difference between a studio and a nice one bedroom, or maybe even cramped 2 bedroom.
The new houses being built have 4 stories. Footprints are around 13x6.
In the UK in a similar town the footprint is easily twice that but the actual livable space is often less.
400 square feet (~37 m^2)
No need to turn this into another stereotyping Europe vs US issue. I agree 37 m^2 is plenty of room for some people, not for others, regardless of where you are from.
But it is kind of true that Americans are extremely melodramatic about this stuff. 800 sqft house is often referred as a "tiny house" in American media. In the UK (for example) this is an average house size.
You mean 40 m^2 ? 400 m^2 is a big house :D In that case I can agree - in my country (Croatia) ~40-60 m^2 is the norm for family apartment. Also interesting - huge apartments (>100 m^2) are nowhere near to being proportionally expensive (except on the top end) because people can't afford them - eg. they might be double in size but only 1/2 more in price.
People need their space while it's true that there might be some "romantic" aspects to small housing the disadvantages are quite noticeable there are plenty of adverse physical and mental health effects when you live in smaller spaces, from asthma to mental stress and social friction that can increase the likelihood of divorces and breakups.
I live with my GF for 6 years and I would never ever live in an apartment with less than 2 bedrooms, people need their space, if you have a fight it's good to have a place to go and just cool down and not continuously get annoyed at the person, having a guest bedroom/office is also quite good for that time where you under allot of stress at work or just having a bad day and need to finish some things without being disturbed.
And while It's perfectly fine to say to your partner "look, I'm having a rough day and I need to be alone" it's just much better when you don't have too, when you know you can sit down some where and just relax.
Having larger space also gives people privacy which even in a relationship is very important if the 2nd bedroom door is closed my GF knows to knock, if our bedroom door is closed I know to knock. And before some one makes jokes about it no we don't expect to catch one of us with the mailperson in there but she might be having a private call with her parents or doctor, she might be planning a surprise and i can do the same.
And while you can do those things even without having an extra room by juggling your schedule the fact that you don't need too adds quite a bit of relief, I've seen other couples having issues while living in small apartments from having to lock yourself in the bathroom after a fight to having to make personal calls from it or worse have to say "hon, I need to make a call so I'm going out for a few" which is just uncomfortable for both people because even in a trusting relationship having a private call inside the house gives the added assurance that it's probably not that, while when you need to go out to make it there might be some fears gowning at your partner even if they are completely subconscious they are still there.
People need their space,calling it a luxury and that people in "Insert European, 2nd world, 3rd world country here" are living in small spaces is not true, because in many of them the overall living space tends to be much much bigger than what people would imagine, especially when you count in communal and open spaces.
I live in Canada, but feel free to comment on US / Commonwealth / Europe.
* Majority of students in elementary school's parents did not attend college.
* Less than a majority of high-school students continue to University
* Engineer, Doctor, or Lawyer is a very uncommon profession among my neighbours.
* Any non-domestic, non store-robbery, assault with a weapon (stabbing or shooting) within the neighbourhood within the last two years.
A city that has a height restriction of half of the other city can have exactly the same floor space to live in per person while ostensibly being half as population dense. And height is just one of many factors. Large bodies of water, parks, large open squares etc... they all can change density figures a lot without any change to the actual space per person in an actual house.
Paris certainly has tiny homes, I've been in more than a few, and they've felt smaller than Amsterdam (where I live) generally. But it's nowhere near the discrepancy that the density figures suggest (e.g. 21k vs 4k, but floor space per person is nowhere near 5x as big in Amsterdam, probably more like 25% or something). There are all kinds of reasons for this, one is that Amsterdam hasn't got nearly as many tall buildings as Paris does, and that Amsterdam's density is understated due to quite significant bodies of water (two rivers splitting the city vertically and horizontally), parks (Amsterdamse Bos is 3x Central Park), lakes etc etc, where nobody lives but that is part of the density calculation, making the actual places people do live denser than they appear in these numbers.
>The Netherlands is in the world’s top ten in export volume and it ranks in the world’s top twenty for GNP, even though, in terms of square kilometers, it is one of the smallest countries of the world. Though it is true that, in population density, it is on a par with countries such as India and Japan, nonetheless this only amounts to a population of almost 16.8 million.
Stop harrassing us until you solved them. Bye.
Are you really saying people with some money should be able to bend the law but not poor people?
Hiring networks. You want to hire people based on referrals and not experience or qualifications, you need to hire through your extended friend network, which if you're raised in the SF startup scene, is all in SF.
It's also a state of affairs that ends up being unintentionally racist, since probably most of your friends look like you, and probably most of their friends that they'll refer to you when you're hiring look like them
People in technology seem far more willing to accept to accept "worse" conditions and just generally less aware of technology as an competitive industry compared to other people in their respective industries.
Edit: it was in the picture with the surfboards. It is the blue trunk in the lower left. Coffee table/trunk/changing table
That said,
> high-density living (like SF) is pretty much the standard
I don't believe this. Yes, there are denser cities than San Fran, and yes, San Fran probably has more floor space per square mile than most European cities. Still, my default guess is that people living in San Fran have less floor space per person than average, for most reasonable choices of population to average over.
If you have statistics that show otherwise (don't have time to look currently), I'll gladly admit that I was wrong.
It's also not really relevant what the U.S. As a whole looks like.
No I don't, floor space per person seems to be one of those things that's barely registered or studied, it seems, on an international level. Some municipalities/cities do their own studies, and some organisations (EU, OECD) etc do run some country-level averages, but even here definitions are non-standard (e.g. they'll look at floor area per dwelling per capita, but definitions of dwellings range from houses to caravans to vacation homes and may include or exclude vacant dwellings etc, some count all area including outer walls, others count not the balcony, some count the balcony for half), but comprehensive solid international data that's standardised and available down to a local (city) level I'm not aware of. It's a shame because it's definitely interesting data! Who knows there may be a market for this kind of information :)
Also I don't find jobs / people in the state the most accurate indicator. To someone living in LA, moving to SF might as well be moving to Utah. The open positions / qualified people is the far more useful metric, and SF will still beat all of them on that.
I am in security (but it's similar in many specialties) and while there are very good companies in Austin if I want to to rise become a security architect or director of information security I have to go to the tech headquarters. Companies like Google and facebook may have regional offices but the core innovative security/ai/pl work and executive decision making is being done in the home campuses.
That being said, I would never leave Austin for the SF bay unless it involved a $350k+ salary.
San Diego, for example, stomps all over Austin in terms of software jobs, and Austin's hardware scene is laughable.
Big ones: BAE, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. (Previously I would have listed Qualcomm ...)
A zillion biotech startups: I drive past at least a dozen near here every day: https://www.google.com/maps/@32.9104712,-117.2304182,18.57z
Rockstar San Diego seems to be hiring as far as I can tell.
In addition, a lot of manufacturing companies up in the San Marcos/Vista area all need automation programmers.
If you're not finding SD companies with software jobs, I'm very surprised.
I'm not sure it's just that, it's also I think, that Americans find it acceptable to live in suburbs. If everyone tried to live in the city centers (like they do in nyc or SF), small places would also be the norm.
Suburbs are a compromise, where you get a little of column A (room enough for decent living) and a little column B (urban wages and access to capital), which equals a lot of column C (long, shitty commutes).
Guess what, tons of land leads to different expectations
Europeans, New Yorkers, and (increasingly) people from the Bay Area think that paying forty billion dollars a month to live in a closet is normal. It is not.
I should probably return that math degree :/
(see yesterday's discussion about rubbish buildings)
The same pitfalls that apply to outsourcing to low-cost-of-living countries should apply to hiring American remote workers: communication overhead, lack of context and understanding of what the product should be, etc. If a projects works well with remote workers in developed countries, consider that it's probably irrational and a borderline violation of fiduciary duty to pay extra for them rather than equally skilled workers in India/China/Eastern Europe.
Most people who work in a multi storey office communicate the same way with the people on a different storey as they would with people in a different city.
You could look at the growing number of layoffs at post-seed stage companies[1].
Or you could look at startups that voluntarily publish financial information. Take, for example, this one[2], which, as of June, was spending $525,000/month on payroll (equating to an all-in cost of $146,000/year per employee) when it had less than $300,000 of monthly bookings revenue.
A lot (perhaps the majority) of venture-backed Bay Area startups are entirely dependent on investor money to sustain their workforces at their current sizes. Even some of the tech companies in the area that have gone public aren't profitable. FireEye and Marketo are two that come to mind.
Everybody has been trading profitability for growth, and that's a game most will eventually lose.
For tech companies, it doesn't really matter. They have unlimited money (relative to the cost of an employee). For startups, it does.
2. Many people in the Bay Area are employed by angel and venture-backed startups, so how does it make sense to ignore them? If and when there's a significant downturn that results in the unsustainable startup herd being culled, not all startup employees are going to find six-figure replacement jobs at companies like Google and Facebook. People who lived through the first .com bust know how fast the job market can dry up for a large subset of employees.
3. It is absolutely not true that the Bay Area's unprofitable publicly-traded tech companies have "unlimited money" relative to anything. Review their SEC filings and you can determine how much money they have down to the dollar. You should not be surprised when those that struggle to reach profitability sooner or later take cost-cutting action, which may include layoffs and adjustments to employee compensation. Twitter just did this. Even profitable tech companies, like IBM and HP, have laid off significant numbers of employees. Bottom line: when push comes to shove and the shit hits the fan, companies tend to use large knives, not scalpels.
Well, one reason would be:
> long, shitty commutes
another is that some people prefer urban life.
I bet you'd be surprised to hear that in some countries people actually prefer to live in apartments to houses.When I ask why, they often state the fact that it is much less work to upkeep an apartment, so I guess that would be another reason. I personally understand why would some kid from the midwestern suburbs want to live in nyc, even if it means a much lower standard of living.
But in reality I think it really is purely cultural, people prefer what people like them around them prefer. People in the US were living in the cities as well before the "white flight", so at some point, urban middle class families were also the norm.
One sniff test for the credibility of this is to look at what rich people do.
No matter where you go, the wealthy tend to have large country estates. Sure, they may have a luxury apartment in town as well, but where do they spend their leisure time? Bingo.
Of course, but I wasn't referring to those people. I was talking about the people who prefer to live in apartments, like, for example, my parents who moved from a house (that was actually in a great location) to an apartment by choice (in a worse location, and some years after that in another apt in a better location). Now they live in a house again (not by choice), but keep their city apartment. And my mom keeps telling me how she hates the house, and can't wait to move back to the city apartment :)
and she even has a housekeeper so it's not like she has to do the whole work around the house by herself. This is why I say it's really deeply culturally embedded. You are not able to step out of your cultural conditioning and imagine that there are people who really truly prefer to live in apartment.
Really, you exhausted all my arguments.
His basic point is that if your sample set consists of people who don't actually have the choice of buying a large home, then that's a major confounding variable whose influence you cannot reliably determine on the results. Beyond that, the sample set also must be large enough for it to not be anecdata. A single couple doesn't imply much about societal trends at large, but the behavior of an entire class of people -- the wealthy -- does, to at least some degree.
Someone who is forced to live in a tiny apartment because they can't afford anything better isn't really making a free choice, even if they rationalize it by claiming that it is.
If I won Powerball tomorrow, I'd tell my boss I could either work 99% remote, or he could try to find someone else to take over. Then I would go home, and be a somewhat more comfortable version of the subsistence farmers my great-grandparents were. Sawing and splitting firewood would be an excellent break from debugging ASP.NET applications, and hilling potatoes would be a great distraction from fighting with upgraded Windows installer tooling. I would never have to bag up another dog turd. I'd have free, non-chlorinated, decent-tasting water. I could plink at tin cans in my back yard without violating any town ordinances, scaring the neighbors, or having the police called on me. I could see the stars at night without the baleful day-glo glare of halogen streetlights polluting the sky.
I am hopeful that this utopia might be achievable within a foreseeable timescale, sans massive lottery-related cash infusion. Much more hopeful than I am about the possibility of an urban environment that could possibly meet my requirements for livability.
Look, you have admitted that rich people (i.e., the people who actually have a choice) prefer country dwellings.
This was true in Ancient Rome. It was true in Victorian England. It was true in the Soviet Union. And it is true wherever it is that you live.
"Really, you exhausted all my arguments."
No, the facts on the ground have exhausted your arguments.
No, I haven't. I am totally disinterested in rich people and what they prefer, but I'm not sure that there are fewer rich people living in cities such as NYC or Shangai than in the country.
> And it is true wherever it is that you live.
Right. Good to know. I'll let you get on with it now.
