San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents(bloomberg.com) |
San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents(bloomberg.com) |
20 years on, San Francisco could have become what New York City is today. One of the top 5 cities in the world, and the undisputed hub where all of technology resides. Instead, it's on track to be just another major city, in the same league as countless others like Chicago/Seattle/Boston.
...or we could move to a sensible model, where software delivers on its promise and allows people to work anywhere. The cost of living here is the invisible hand of the market showing you that you're making a mistake by locating your company in the bay area. Yet the dominant techno-nerd narrative continues to be that the bay area has somehow made a mistake in not anticipating the bizarre fetish that global wealth has developed for local real estate since the early 1990s.
It's insane that an industry of otherwise-intelligent people insists on cramming itself onto a tiny peninsula with seismic development challenges, and I chuckle every time someone draws the comparison to New York, which has seven times the land area, a capable and efficient transit system that has been developed over more than a century...and one of the highest costs of living in the world. Development is not a panacea.
I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros, where you can't get a good meal after 9:30. Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence.
In WV, you can find food at most places until 12-1am 7 days a week. And the major local grocery is a Walmart, which is open 24 hours.
Last Easter I had no clue nothing would be open, and didn't prepare for that. So I just had some crap picked up at a gas station to hold me over until the next day. It's a really bizarre situation compared to most other metros, but even compared to a bunch of small towns.
This one took me by surprise when I visited SF for the first time five years ago. I thought it would be booming with activity just like NYC, so I thought nothing of trying to find food when I arrived at ~11pm.
NOTHING. Nothing was open.
It must be a huge bummer to live in a city with NYC prices without that (very important --- to me) NYC perk.
Companies neither have to have physical offices nor do they have to be located in the Bay Area. And unfortunately culture dictates that an office is always necessary and that you need to locate your tech company in the Bay Area for dubious reasons like fundraising (which should only take a small portion of the operation of your company anyways), hiring (good engineers might come here if they agree with the lifestyle, and the job opportunities, but that doesn't mean jobs should come here because good engineers are here), or synergy (the belief that the physical proximity to other tech firms may help your company. Only applicable to certain markets at best).
Sorry, but this is flawed logic.
Tech, more than seemingly any other industry I can think of, has a winner-takes-all model of success. Given this, starting a tech company anywhere other than where the overwhelming majority of the most capable employees live is virtually suicide. And this seems to pan out in the data as well — Twitter, Square, Uber, Google, Facebook, Reddit, AirBnB, Apple, Oracle, Box, Palantir, Pinterest, Lyft, Stripe, CloudFlare… not that these are all of tech, but finding even a fraction of these anywhere (other than perhaps New York) is a stretch.
Given that, it's patently worth it to pay the extra cost per employee, when the relative value of each employee to the company ends up being so high compared to other industries.
This is not to say you can't build a strong tech company in other parts of the US, but you're stacking the odds against you by doing so.
...and hopefully, everyone has first class redundant internet, something not guaranteed across the nation.
If people really figure out how to consistently develop any kind of software remotely, with any team size and with average programmers, a lot of programming jobs will move away from high living cost areas, as happened with manufacturing jobs.
If you're in the US, where software developer salaries are much higher than most of the rest of the world (even on developed countries average programmers don't earn 6 figures), you'll be probably be on the losing side.
This is a false alternative, since it's not something SF government can do.
Unless you're proposing eminent-domaining people out of their houses to be handed over to for-profit developers (and man, that's a mess, and it's still super-expensive), you aren't going to be replacing too many blocks of two-storey homes with high rises, and you're also quickly going to saturate the ability of local developers to build out giant skyscraper projects -- like, how much slack do you think that there possibly was in the construction industry?
And as soon as we step away from literally insane levels of accommodation to a pattern of in-fill development and recognize that, rightly or wrongly, in-fill development is not wildly popular and you can't just strong-arm an entire city into an unpopular policy, the realistic amount of new development that you could get in SF is, you know, maybe twice as much development as we actually did get.
Which might've shaved 5% off the rents or so.
You also don't need to limit yourself to the existing local developers with political connections. Construction workers from all over the world could move here, just like software people do.
This timeline is measured in decades, but imagine if San Francisco was easier to get permits to build?
Large swaths of the city are built under their _currently allowed_ zoned height (there was a map that went around, I wish I could find it). Add a few stories to some existing buildings, build on empty/underutilized lots, reduce parking requirements, legalize in-law units, add in the affordable housing bonus program...you'd be talking about tens of thousands of units.
I do agree there is a strong argument that this wouldn't be enough (Bay Area-wide coordination is necessary), but it would slow the rate of increase. For example, after an apartment building boom, Seattle rents are now decreasing: http://cityobservatory.org/in-some-cities-the-housing-constr...
You don't need eminent domain to build high rises. Developers can easily make very compelling offers to those currently in small houses to get them to move.
We all know those would be luxury units, but it would add 20K below-market, so there's that.
As always, I stand ready to let them bring a bulldozer to their favorite Mission block as long as I can bring one to Palo Alto and Atherton.
For some reason, people just see that as a cray-cray demand...
this meme has reached seattle as well.
"Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, come out on top — attracting more than twice as many citations per paper as the global average."
Nah. Manhattan is a really, really expensive (not as expensive as SF, though, on the average) city to live in. SF rents would have dropped, but not enough to cover the influx of people coming in. Rent prices probably would've dropped in other areas of the Bay though.
NYC also offers plenty of compelling options in other boroughs that are simultaneously cheaper and more convenient than their SF equivalents.
Hilarious. No. Absolutely not. To even compare the cities on this level is an insult to what New York is and how it came about.
San Francisco is a dinky little town compared to New York, the population is comfortably under a million people. It will take another hundred years of perfect planning and growth to catch up to where NYC is today.
Thought experiment: Let's say we do massive high density development in SF. A bunch of people move in, but now that SF is denser it's more desirable, so demand has increased as well, which drives rents right back up. Now we're stuck where we were before: high rents.
Having said that, I still support high density development because I think it leads to better living (and is better for the environment usually). I just am not optimistic that it will actually lower rents.
When you ask why Manhattan is expensive even with increased supply, you ignore demand.
The theory that increased density in itself drives up the value of housing is popular among anti-housing activists. I've never heard an economist who believes it.
If true, it would be an incredibly simple way to generate enormous amounts of money to simply building super dense neighborhoods. Since I don't see anyone getting rich off that, I have strong doubts about that model.
People don't move to where they can find expensive housing - people move to where they can find good jobs. Doubling SF housing wouldn't double the number of good jobs there.
Thought experiment: What do you think doubling the number of high paying jobs do to SF rent? Or, alternatively, halving the available housing?
Democracy in action!
Also: SF's refusal to build is having repercussions elsewhere, like here in Oregon where there is a steady stream of people who can't afford a house for their family in the bay area. In turn, they're pricing out people here, and so on.
Also, there's nothing 'extreme' about the population density of San Francisco. Density in Paris is 21,000/km^2 and in SF, 7,124/km^2
We might wonder what will happen this momentum is deflected. Technical talent will disperse, and we'll end up with a more distributed workforce? Or will it simply concentrate somewhere else?
Right now, the Bay Area is in an extremely enviable position: it has a high concentration of extremely profitable companies; it has a high concentration of highly skilled workers; it has a high concentration of wealth; and, except for housing, it's a desirable place to live.
The Bay Area's residents and local governments oshould be able to leverage these positive factors to maintain the strong economy while making the area a better place to live for skilled workers who want to set down roots and raise families. Of course, it's more likely that nothing will happen and living conditions will become less and less sustainable.
I am a fan of neither, but they are completely different cities.
Compared to actual dense cities in the world, SF is nearly empty.
A new 50-story apartment building is far more likely to survive an earthquake without damage than a 3-story apartment built in the '70s or '80s (even with retrofitting).
In SF, my 1 bedroom, 650 square foot apartment in SOMA went from $2,600 to $3,200 over 3 years.
In Austin, my salary went down $10k to $120k/yr. My 2 bedroom, 1,100 square foot apartment is $1,150/mo.
The tech scene here isn't as vibrant as SF, but there's still plenty of great meet ups.
All in all, yes there are some things I miss about SF, but the benefit of having way more cash month to month outweigh the negatives.
Edit: Clarity.
I thought about moving out of SF but I don't have any social connection outside of San Francisco. Plus weather is very nice here and there are lots of diverse cultural events happening in San Francisco. Add very thick job market on top of it. I was able to interview 50 companies when I was looking for a new job.
I'm saying I, as a case study is paying this rent because of reasons and I'm well aware how much more it is compared to other cities. There are 600 apartments in this high rise and out unit is one of cheapest ones. Most of units are having residents, so there are people who pay those rents.
It's just the way it is here. Housing is so expensive because everyone wants to be here, and for good reason. This is the most thriving technical community in the entire world. We live different lifestyles as a result. It's not better or worse, just different.
It seems like there are a fair amount of people who come for 2-3 years and then go back to wherever it is that they came from, but I think the amount of people who actually leave the bay area for tech jobs in Seattle/Portland/LA is pretty slim. I'm sure it happens, but if there's an exodus happening I for one am completely unaware of it.
Interesting times.
Spend one weekend hiking in Yosemite, another working on a digital arts project in Oakland, and you still got plenty of bandwidth to sip your fancy coffees and swing by Stanford for some lectures and run into competent friends to solve some business problems for fun and profit... life is pretty damn good for work and play.
Caveat: Of course, this is coming from a position of privilege: that I spent both undergrad and grad in the area and have built up a strong base of connections here within the profession world and academia, and that the $10k-20k net salary optimization does not meaningfully affect my quality of life.
Seattle locals complain a little about all the cranes across the skyline. I see it another way - Seattle is absolutely going to eat SF's lunch if it doesn't change.
You already have Microsoft, Boeing, etc here. Google, Facebook and Space X have now opened offices too. This city seems to be fully engaged handling that growth and how to capitalize on it. We've been receiving flyers about developing the transit system for the next 25 years. A far cry from the sassy (and painfully accurate) BART twitter account calling out the lack of investment in it.
I'm not saying it's perfect, but there's some real problems with the inelastic supply of housing in the SF/Bay Area.
One underestimated part of CA's success, though, is the fact that non-competes are illegal: http://asr.sagepub.com/content/76/5/695.short. If Washington State banned non-competes, it would have a really tremendous long-term advantage.
I rent a two bedroom house in Oakland for $2,200. My commute is not too much longer than it would be if I live in certain parts of San Francisco.
There's simply little advantage to living right in the heart of a major city.
You have to ask yourself:
"Instead of renting in a high-profile location, what else could I buy with an extra $24,000 a year?"
Yes, average rents are too high, but nobody says you have to pay the average rent.
The article names the usual suspects for engineer emigrants (Austin, Portland, strangely no mention of NYC or Raleigh RTP), but why are people moving to Phoenix? Isn't living in the less sexy areas of South Bay (Sunnyvale, Milpitas, South San Jose) pretty much on par with urban life in Phoenix?
(Personally, I've turned down job offers for ~2x what I make now just so I don't have to endure today's rent prices, which I anticipate are only going to increase.)
If you're in SF and you want better access to talent, consider a distributed team instead of expecting everyone to move to SF.
>$569,500 in Los Angeles, Zillow data show.
If you want a decent quality of life without 1-2 hour one-way commutes and you work in tech, most likely you need to live either in Sillicon Beach (Santa Monica/Pacific Palisades to about Redondo) or Pasadena or Irvine areas. None of these are as cheap as $600k. Rents are catching up quickly as well.
If you are trading traffic for cheaper rent, Bay Area has those options too.
Once the startups make it, rather than develop large campuses in the bay area they can expand elsewhere and take advantage of those workforces.
"A software engineer in Austin earning $110,000 would need to make $195,000 in San Francisco to maintain the same quality of life"
Would they? They point out the median in the bay area is $118k, but there's no indication that the median in Austin is $110k; maybe they just pulled that number out of thin air?
They cite slowing tech employment growth in SF, but it seems clear that it's a result of near-0 tech unemployment.
They talk about the exodus "in the past year" as if it suddenly started happening; people have been bitching about the most recent cycle for years, but it's been going on for decades.
"They've become tech hubs in their own right in a way they weren't three to five years ago"
What?
"We bought a beautiful Craftsman home in an awesome neighborhood and that just would not have been possible in San Francisco."
I have no problem with people moving and displacing others, but you have to be clear that the reason you can afford that is bringing the fruits of a higher-cost-of-living area to a lower-cost-of-living one, not because it's inherently more affordable for people who actually (already) live there. In this case, he's .. moving his company? So I guess he's able to keep his pay the same (??).
http://get.hired.com/rs/348-IPO-044/images/Hired-State-of-Sa...
The real question is "does an engineer of X qualities" make more or less after cost of living adjustments? eg: Maybe you could live well on 110k , but would only earn 95k, suddenly SF seems better.
I learnt from others that in other parts of US, we get good schools and decent house at reasonable price in Seattle/Portland/Austin etc. But uprooting entire family looks extreme at this point and we don't have stomach to do it.
Curious, as to what others in similar situation are doing.
Who is going to be the first to move? The capital or the talent?
One has to drive the other out. VC money isn't going as far as it used to, and talent has to increasingly eat more ramen just to live and keep the lights on in their company.
I'm tired of the costs and crowding. The cost of living is about 30% lower and housing is significantly lower.
I'm managing my career by working for a San Francisco company and working remotely. I'll commute in once a week, which is still less commuting than I was doing in the bay area. I'll have a house instead of a condo. I'll have a nicer/larger place. I'll have plenty of things to do (though things still close early). I'll be closer to my family. I'll be able to support my wife when she goes back to school.
I'm looking forward to it.
Leaving it in the bank is an excellent option. You've got two main things to save for, a down payment for a house and your wedding. Better still is a balanced and sane investment portfolio, but leaving it in the bank is better than a bad portfolio, so take some time to learn how investing works if you choose to go that route.
I also bought a few expensive toys that I really wanted (nice high-end camera, for example) and take regular vacations to nice spots.
I started giving to charity, too. I also decided to do something closer to home and helped a relative with their student debt. I started taking some of the free time I have and that nice camera to do photography for a local charity.
Saving it (in an index fund rather than a bank) is an excellent thing to do with it. Keep living like a college student (or even a fair bit better than that), and save the rest, and you'll be able to retire in your mid-to-late 30s.
Resist the inclination to expand your expenses to match your income; it doesn't actually make you any happier, long-term. (Many different studies have confirmed this: increasing your level of spending tends to give you a short-term burst of happiness followed by a return to the baseline; it doesn't permanently raise your baseline.)
You don't necessarily have to retire early. If you prefer, keep working past that point as long as you're enjoying yourself. You'll be able to have a lot more flexibility in your work, and later in your career you'll be well into the territory of "start your own charitable foundation" or "don't bother raising a series A".
[0] https://personal.vanguard.com/us/funds/snapshot?FundIntExt=I...
Thought that might be interesting, it was to me (came upon it on HN).
cha-ching
That and invest.
From Bankrate.com - Seven U.S. states currently don't have an income tax: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and Wyoming. And residents of New Hampshire and Tennessee are also spared from handing over an extra chunk of their paycheck on April 15, though they do pay tax on dividends and income from investments.
I am in downtown Austin. My rent is just shy of double that and I only have a 500 or so square foot apartment. I have a hard time believing you moved to something comparable to SOMA.
I'm going to guess you live either more North or South of downtown and have to commute if you work or want to get downtown. Which I think many would agree is not even close to comparable of living in SOMA. Also, if memory serves BART is far superior and actually a legitimate means of transportation. Our transportation situation here in Austin is a bit of a joke unless you live directly downtown.
Markets are smart!
Crazy to think, but these other neighborhoods are nicer and cheaper to live in. Don't fall prey to paying the "tech tax" of SOMA.
Whats this different lifestyle of which you speak? Dodging panhandlers on Market Street? Stepping over human excrement? Using Uber b/c the city in which you have chosen to piss away your money doesn't provide decent mass transit for most?
People like you perpetuate some myth that you have to pay $4500 a month if you want to work in tech. Nonsense.
I feel like tech workers in San Francisco are fully bought-in to the "this is the best and only place to be if you're in tech" idea. So much so that they can't quite see that the grass is just as green on the other side, so to speak. You have to be fully bought-in to it, there's no other way you would be able to justify the cost of living there.
I'm curious about the different lifestyles- I live in Seattle and there's startups and meetups and hacker spaces all over the damn place, with decent public transportation, awesome coffee and beer and restaurants and anything else you could want. Maybe not as many conferences, but they're a quick flight away if you really want to go.
This isn't about going to a meetup or going out for craft beer, it's about access to resources behind closed (unlocked) doors.
But listen, I used to live in New York and there's a lot there too – just less, and a different vibe. The decision between living in New York or San Francisco should really come down to your particular interests.
What we do here is not go to meetups because you don't have to. Another commenter captured it better than I can. It's everywhere. It's just a huge sense of excitement. It's the jobs, the energy.
I don't live in SF, I live on the Peninsula. I don't go to meetups or bars or participate in "the scene". I just live my life, but I'm surrounded by tech and I love it. I first started working in tech in Seattle and moved to the Bay Area a dozen years ago, and I just love it. shrug
If it doesn't work for you, fine, don't live here. I'm quite happy. I find pay scales with costs. For a working-from-an-office job, I'm able to pay the bills and the mortgage and save up faster than I think I could anywhere else. Obviously you can always find an employer and then swing some deal where they let you live in Kansas and keep the same pay and hope you never lose your job, but in terms of the average in-person office jobs, I think it can't be beat.
You hear people outside major tech areas saying things like "man, I could never afford to live there." You know what you never hear people in high cost of living areas say? "Man, I can't afford to get out."
You can always afford to get out, but you might not be able to afford to get back in. I'm not on a Mr Money Moustache plan to retire at age 23, but I think the economics basically work.
If I had to start my own tech company, I would probably have the exec team here (because of VCs, really, that's the only reason, not a "tech thriving community") and build my team in EU, maybe Berlin.
We're currently hiring at my job and it's getting harder and harder to get high quality candidates.
This is a little harsh and I doubt what the OP was saying. If someone interprets it like you suggested that is their problem. I don't see the implication that you NEED to live in SV to work in tech.
I don't think anyone claims that you can't find thriving tech communities outside of SV, but the reality that OP put forth is undeniably true. SV is where the most money is. SV is where most of the talent goes. SV churns out its own home grown talent through 2 of the best schools in the world. Did the automative industry all move to NY & Austin? No. They moved to SV (not exclusively, but I'm sure you've seen the map of automative companies moving in to SV).
Hollywood isn't the only place you can make movies and SV isn't the only place you can make software or start software based companies... but how are you going to deny that they are the most thriving communities in the world respectively?
Together with SV and the rest of the Bay Area, yes. You really can't compare the sheer size (multiplied by grey matter density) with any other place in the world.
The first python meetup I went to in SF (back in 2013) had 300 spots and a waitlist that I doubt got cleared. The NYC meetups I went to managed maybe 80 RSVPs and a couple dozen who actually showed up.
Once you get to anything more specialized than a programming language meetup, it's basically non-existent anywhere else in the country, but the bay area will still manage an active user group.
I really wish this weren't the case, and I really resisted moving here. I had every expectation I'd hate it and the city has more than lived down to expectations (easily higher rent and worse crime than NYC - or least the tech enclaves of NYC where I spent my time - by healthy margins). It is absurd and frankly unjustifiable how densely tech is concentrated here. But that it is so isn't really debatable.
> This is the most thriving technical community in the entire world. We live different lifestyles as a result. It's not better or worse, just different.
I've been all over, including New York. I didn't appreciate Silicon Valley for what it is until I moved here.
Do you have to pay that kind of money to work in tech? Not at all. You don't even have to pay that kind of money to work in tech in the bay area. There are plenty of commuting options and there are plenty of tech communities all over the US.
What's different? I would counter with What's not different? I've been here a year and I have had conversations with founders of Netflix, Instagram, Uber, GreatSchools, and twenty others that you probably haven't heard of. I also met one of the guys who invented ethernet. I'm not particularly social or particularly important. In southern CA, I was isolated - I had a few friends who really understood what I did for work. Here, most people I meet do. I went to a small conference a few weeks ago and had engineers from Adobe sit with me until I had a working implementation of software that included their CreativeSDK. I have never had that kind of experience at a conference. My elementary school kids have a maker studio at their school where they have 3d printers, programmable robots, sewing machines, and all kinds of other cool things. My middle school kid has photoshop and web design classes as part of her curriculum. They have carts full of laptops, iPads, etc. that they pull into classrooms as needed, and other classrooms that are completely teched out. There are plenty of downsides that go with all the great things. I have to think three times about whether I take my family out for dinner because the cost of eating out is like the cost of housing - it just doesn't make sense to me. There are communities of people nearby who live out of motor homes parked on the street. There are dangerous areas that you have to watch out for. On a given day driving the kids through Golden Gate Park might result in running into a pack of naked bike riders. I have to warn all the out of town visitors about the tenderloin.
It's not better. It's different. Just like NY is different. You can live there for years without needing a car. You can see the best shows with the best artists. I imagine living there you meet all kinds of interesting people. But as far as tech community goes, nothing compares to Silicon Valley.
I choose to pay more in rent because it gives my family access to great schools, it means that I don't lose family time to driving time and it means I can participate in what's going on locally, which is usually pretty awesome. It's a premium, but for me and my family I just wouldn't be able to make it work adding in a big commute. For many people it doesn't make sense.
I could have a bigger house and less financial pressure living just about anywhere else. I made more money outside the bay area. But here I'm with my people and while I used to love my kids' old schools, the ones I have access to now are a world apart. Up until I moved here, I didn't even know there was a community of "my people".
In any city in the world with a functioning open market for land use, there are compelling profit opportunities in high-density high-rises, economy box living pods with beige walls, high-end glass condos with verandahs, and everything in between.
Prices do not have to do with the Bay Area's beauty. The draw is economic. And if policies do not moderate, it is a draw which can go away as quickly as it arrived.
Rents are high because demand is high and supply is low. Demand is high because there are lots of jobs there. Supply is low because the city refuses to allow high density development. It's a great deal for the people who already own homes and are planning to move out. They can sell their homes for a fortune and live like a king somewhere else.
Rising demand is great. It means people want to enjoy your neighborhood. You can either meet that demand by increasing supply, or you can restrict the demand, and let certain people be outpriced by the market.
Locals aren't victims of gentrification. They're victims of zoning laws and nimbyism.
How does this work in your head? When the new homes are being built, where do the people who were living on the land they're being built on go?
Ok, let's say we double supply.
All the houses are now either twice as high, or half as big, or maybe the trees were cut down and the bushes ripped out to make room. There's twice as many people & everything therein. Is it still the same nice neighborhood?
Portland now has the fastest growing real estate price increases in the country: http://content.kgw.com/photo/2016/03/29/s%20and%20p%20home%2...
This increase is not being matched by increasing salaries (they're increasing, but not at the same rate): http://koin.com/2016/03/31/report-portland-wages-not-keeping...
There are potential implications of this. Not just for people living here already, but for workers that may or may not be able to maintain mortgages at these rates if there's a contraction in the "tech" sector. I don't know how many people are weighing these decisions on a 10+ year timeline.
At the end of the day, I'm not sure how much of this is sustainable wealth. Portland got burned pretty badly in the 2000 crash, and really badly in the 2008 crash (at one point the unemployment rate was around 14%). History suggests it's a legitimate concern.
Does this industry (to the extent that you can call AirBNB, Uber, and Twitter the same industry) really act like a flock of grackles or starlings, descending on a place, eating everything, and moving on?
I'm looking to buy a home soon so the recent municipal prohibition on STR2s gives me hope that the inventory will increase and allow some downward pressure on prices.
You say that as if gentrification is a bad thing.
The most insane part is the people who commute down to MTV (eg. Google) and only really get the benefit of the city on weekends anyway...
* No need to own car, or at least no need to drive everyday.
* For a spouse on a H-4 visa and who thus cannot work, living in the city makes things easier and a lot less boring.
* Mountain View / Sunnyvale / Palo Alto / ... have pretty sad downtown areas, they aren't bike/pedestrian friendly, and they make you live in purely residential areas.
So they end up spending $3~4000 on rent to live in SoMa and be close to their company shuttle lines or the Caltrain station. Some can work during the commute, some can't.
My friends in Berkeley have it better (much nicer residential areas, you can bike to your Bart station). But then of course you need a job in the city or in Oakland (and even though things have supposedly improved a lot, it still looked pretty sketchy to me).
Remember also that Mountain View despises mixed use and refused to rezone areas currently designated commercial-only in order to let Google workers live near their jobs. Of course, it also would have meant people who bought in the 70's would have some tiny amount of competition for their asset.
I pay the same amount as my cousin, who lives in Manhattan in a studio apt that's smaller than my guest bedroom/office.
At my current job in the financial district, the commute would be the same. Plus, I live in a historic neighborhood where there are houses with lawns and gardens and trees. And it reminds me of home in Texas.
NYC isn't as bad as SF, but it can be really awful if you insist on living in the most "happening" parts of town.
Depends on the city and what you're after.
Living in the centre of a city can bring lifestyle benefits, especially with fast and reliable public transport. Major cities with metro/subway networks can offer a massive playground of activities all without relying on cars. It might sound bizarre, but there's a certain freedom from moving through a city without using a car. In my experience cars rely on a fair amount of responsibility and effort, whereas public transport offers better opportunities to enjoy the journey.
In addition to that there's the social aspect. If you live close to where you work it's far easier to be social with your work colleagues after work. This can lead to a better sense if camaraderie with those you work with, especially if they live close to where you work too. Seeing as it's often the case that people work in the heart of a city rather than the suburbs, these are perks you're far more likely to get by living in the heart of a city.
There are certainly advantages to living further afield as well, but I hope you can agree the choice isn't one sided.
I lived in both good, bad and transitioning neighborhoods and I feel like people over estimate how much impact this will have on life.
Fact is, shit happens everywhere. Happens more often where there is density. You can be mugged in a good part of town (well because that's where people with money are at) and bad part of town. Before I moved back to NYC, my wife would regularly get harassed in SOMA on the street walking to her job.
This is a very personal opinion, and can vary depending on one's interests and stage of life. Young single people benefit from being "where the action is" as they are near other young people doing the same thing and can pursue various social and romantic interests. People who aren't interested in those things for whatever reason have much less to gain from living in the heart of a major city.
i don't blame them, everyone has their reasons, but i want to caution you that while it's possible to find a good rental that works out for some period of time, it's not a long term assurance and being forced to move can make it difficult to acquire a place as favorable as the one you have with the combination of commute or rent or other intangibles you've grown accustomed to in your neighborhood. Or you may find one at the price, but it may take a much longer time than you have allotted, especially in this market where qualified renters are plentiful and willing (often out of necessity) to pay high rents for substandard properties.
I also asked myself the same question you did, but the conclusion i reached eventually involved me moving out of state last year. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also, this book, although it's pretty high level: http://amzn.to/1qsn2RD
I think this is one of the most important issues in this day and age. It's happening everywhere, and things need to change.
Edit: downvoters, care to actually state your opinions? I'm hardly a libertarian, and neither is Matt Yglesias, author of the aforementioned book. I don't think 'free markets' are the answer to all the world's problems. But I do think a more liberalized market would help housing a lot. These areas need more supply, and if you don't want LA style sprawl, the best way to do that is via density. And the best way to accomplish that is probably by letting the market work, within reason: I don't suppose I'd be in favor of allowing an outdoor thrash metal venue in the midst of an otherwise quiet neighborhood, but there are a lot of things you could add to make places more livable and walkable without cars.
Where I live people don't leave any room for parking on their own property and all of the streets are completely jammed with cars, every inch. You don't hardly dare move your car if you've been able to find a spot.
Is that freer?
We need to regulate good design that leads to compact and efficient communities instead.
My fear with less regulations is that while you could see taller, and denser buildings in some areas, you'd also open up the potential for an increase in sprawl, as lazy developers chasing profits would equally be allowed to build low density sprawl if there was an incentive to.
The local example of this is that in Metro Vancouver it is basically now impossible to build a typical suburban mall. No city will allow it because it's a terrible idea from an urban design and planning point of view. However, two malls have recently been built nonetheless! This happened because the developers found land near the airport and on First Nations land that was outside the jurisdiction of local government, and they could build whatever they wanted with little to no oversight.
It's all just so interesting, I think?
No way. Phoenix is a wonderful place to live! The weather is beautiful! Forget that stuff you read about the heat; you'll get used to it. It's a dry heat!
Seriously, if you live in the Bay Area or Portland or Seattle, move to Phoenix! It's great! There's plenty of room for everyone there! They even have excellent public transit with the Light Rail!
Cost of living index compared to San Francisco according to WolframAlpha:
Seattle -20%
Phoenix -42%
Austin -43%
Also funny: every time someone argues with this point, they'll put up a link to the most expensive condo in the hippest part of downtown Austin and say, "Look! Look, this apartment is $4000. Austin is expensive too!"
There are a number of cities that have significantly less of these problems. But that's primarily because they have other, different major problems that they are struggling with instead. (High violent crime, financial crisis, lack of employment or far-lower-than-average incomes, etc)
As a kid, my wife grew up always wanting to live in the Marina. Now, you couldn't pay her to spend a night there because of the landfill.
This article http://newyorkyimby.com/2015/01/the-yimby-report-2014-adds-a... suggests that in 2014, NYC added 44.8k units and in 2013 it added 22.9k units -- call it an average of 34k units.
This article http://sf.curbed.com/2015/7/16/9939720/sf-is-set-to-add-more... suggests that SF is adding about 3.6k units per year right now.
And NYC is 10x the population of SF. So. Sounds like they're expanding at around the same rate. (NYC is only 6.2x the land area of SF).
I haven't looked recently, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find anything below $1000/month that wasn't out in the middle of nowhere.
Also: beware. Some basement apartments aren't actually legal; make sure you sign a legitimate lease agreement, and get confirmation from the landlord that the unit is up to code with the housing board. Happened to a friend of mine not very long ago.
One of the reasons rents are getting up there is fewer people driving and not a ton of options on where to live if you don't. I'm in Boston and simple little stuff like an extension of the subway can't get off the ground due to mismanagement and lack of funding.
Deregulation within an urban growth boundary. I don't like sprawl either. Houston or LA are not my ideas of "the answer", although Houston does - apparently - get some deregulation right within the city as well.
Parking your car costs money. People should pay to use it if they need it, but the rest of us shouldn't have to. Right now, drivers are subsidized.
But if SF's refusal to build is having repercussions in Oregon, and all SF needs to do is build… well, then shouldn't Portland be able to solve its problems by doing the same thing?
Or has NIMBYism morphed into NIMSOTPNW (not in my section of the pacific northwest)?
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2016/03/charlie...
It'd probably be best if it were fixed in several places at once. For instance, Bend is a town of 80K people, and it could (and should) add a bunch of density. But if all that just goes to soaking up 1000's of "refugees" from California, it's not as effective as it could have been. In other words, California can produce many more people looking for a cheaper, better place than Bend can hope to absorb, so it'd be nice if the Bay Area fixed some of its own mess, as well as Portland, Seattle, Austin, Boulder etc...
I know this is ancient history, but I keep having to remind folks that the fetish for locating tech companies in SF didn't start until the late 1990s. Then it crashed, and didn't pick up again until the mid/late 'aughts.
Viewed dispassionately, the "momentum" of SF as a technology hub looks more like a fad that happens at the peak of VC consumer investment cycles.
Of course, that might not be in the Bay Area's interest but they seem to be voting firmly against it already.
Anyways good luck on your search. I'm sure you will be able to find something since you are currently employed. Just gotta keep on plugging away.
The idea that there's a lot of elasticity to the construction trade is also naïve. Construction workers from "all over the world" can't move here -- we have an immigration process, and it's not one that's favorable to construction workers. We are also in an area that is itself not very conducive to living on a construction worker's salary.
And also, who are these developers who are so eager to build high-rise housing in a market that is stipulated to have affordable rents? It's a big capital investment to build a modern skyscraper, especially if there's a construction crunch, especially if you have to do things like buy out large areas without the benefit of government coercion, especially if there are similar projects going up across the city to compete with you. Housing is not typically a highly profitable use of real estate to begin with, and San Francisco is also a city that is not very landlord friendly.
This dream of in-fill development being a simple cure-all to San Francisco's housing ills like most "one simple trick to fix all your problems" -- click bait, not a real solution.
None of this is to say that SF shouldn't have in-fill (it should), or that SF shouldn't reduce barriers to development (it should). But be realistic. Unless you rewrite everything about SF back 50 years, it's not going to dramatically change everything about this city overnight.
Your post I responded to talked about 15 years, not overnight. I absolutely think SF could have been transformed with a different policy if starting in 2001.
Even without any immigrants, there are an enormous amount of construction workers among our 300 million US citizens.
The idea that it's so incredibly hard to build a lot of housing over 15 years is disproven by the many successful big cities that actually do it.
> This dream of in-fill development being a simple cure-all to San Francisco's housing ills
Again, nobody is talking about a simple cure-all in three easy $19.95 payments.
Process, shmawsess.
Look what actually happened during the real estate bubble years: a large number of laborers just simply came to California from foreign countries to build houses and condos.
A large number of these workers went to California when they felt like it and left when the bubble burst. The government was scarcely able to impose anything resembling a "process."
As a parent, I have decided to completely pull back academic pressure. In fact, I regularly talk to my kids about the fact that it's OK to not be academic superstars. They are thriving at this level, but I won't hesitate to move if it changes once we get to high school. I want my kids to have opportunities I didn't. It's not so important that I'm willing to risk their health or happiness.
Our school district has a policy against too much homework, but that goes away with honors level high school classes. I was very surprised at their lack of homework compared to what we are used to, but oddly enough it's making for happier kids that are doing about the same as far as learning and retention. I have good kids though - and it's not a parenting thing. They are just better at being good kids than I ever was.
Even the crack heads in SF are high class though. Where else do you see homeless people sleeping in $250 REI tents?
Redfin's realtors are generally pretty tech savvy as well - prefer email to phone, responsive to email, etc.
I just strongly agree with many of the academic articles showing strong correlation between long commutes and unhappiness. By the time you factor in a 90-minute SF-MTV commute, you really don't get many benefits of the city on weekdays anyway...
Remember that commute mode can make a HUGE difference. Crawling along asphalt is probably about the least fun method.
I rode Bart counter-commute to Fremont and then a bicycle the last 4 miles. I will say, if you want to stick out as an oddball in that part of the bay taking Bart and riding a recumbent to work will do the trick. It wasn't a good culture fit, to say the least.
After that, I worked in El Segundo and lived in Santa Monica. My commute was 26 miles (round trip) of gorgeous beach bike riding, which took around 90-100 minutes a day door to door (recumbents are quick!) I was in the best shape of my life, and always loved seeing bonfires, beach goers, drum circles, and once a pod of dolphins jumping out of the water alongside me as I rode down a 12 foot wide strip of land by the Marina.
Anyway, just trying to point out that the calculation is complex and depends on the person.
Do you truly think it's necessary that all houses in Seattle must be occupied by minimum wage workers in order for it to affect the cost of living?
Really the auto industry moved to SV? I'm pretty sure they are all in Detroit still, but I guess that doesn't count because its not Tesla? Who I don't believe moved there but actually started there.
Funny that you should mention Hollywood because Hollywood isn't thriving in Los Angeles, California any more and hasn't for some time. Hollywood is in Vancouver, New Orleans, and Atlanta now. So much so that there's a push in Sacramento to try to get it back.
Also interesting that you bring up "the most money" as testament to how much its thriving. You need to get paid a much higher salary in order to live in a place that is "thriving" and as a result are able to take home and substantially less.
Incidentally salaries in NYC are on par with those in SV and the rent is significantly cheaper.
We have shit transportation infrastructure & the housing market is (for us) insane.
So far all I hear is density. Is density of tech workers the arbiter by which you just how good a "scene", I will take quality any day. Are all of them awesome, engaging, friendly and social and supportive?
The Python meetup was striking to me because it was closer to the scale of a PyCon than any meetup I'd seen. The actual meetup I attend more often is SFPUG, the local PostgreSQL group, which is more in the neighborhood of 20-40 attendees, once or twice a month. In NYC, if there is an active group around the particular corner of tech you inhabit, you're lucky to get decent meetup a quarter.
And quality is what pushed me to move here, despite my expectations, in the first place. Simply put, all of the very best developers I knew from my hometown (in Charlotte, before my stint in New York) had moved here. There were two in particular I'll always owe for having opened my eyes to how little I knew; I work maybe eight blocks away from one of them, the other I ran into out-of-the-blue at the aforementioned Python meetup, three days after I landed at SFO.
I've been working with people who make me very aware that I'm not the smartest person in the room (by their expertise, not their attitudes) for 30 months now. I do hate to say this, but it is why I didn't stick around in the end - in NYC, I really, really missed that.
Spend the money on a plane ticket to somewhere with women?
I emphasize social skills because, like Vitamin D, the hacker lifestyle leads us to be deficient in such a vital resource. We should be supplementing our lifestyle with lots of activities that force us to interact with other people in ways we're not used to. I've been going to the same bar for the last 8 years. It's often painful, I still don't really fit in, but it's been crucial for helping me develop my sense of self.
Another good place to frequent is coffee shops, but good neighborhood coffee shops are quite rare. Starbucks doesn't really do the trick, something about the atmosphere discourages the kinds of spontaneous casual community that you really need to develop social skills.
</sarcasm>
As someone who lived in Oakland and now has rent control in the Mission, I would say that my safety : price ratio is significantly higher here in SF after a relatively small period of time.
Here are some further details for those who care about the facts:
1. This is a representative review for one Thai restaurant that I wanted to go to in Rockridge where I noticed many reviews mentioned them being robbed repeatedly and now the restaurant has to buzz customers through the door because of it (read the first review or search for "robbery"): http://www.yelp.com/biz/saysetha-thai-cuisine-oakland?hrid=u...
2. Here is a recent article about how middle class residents of many neighborhoods including Rockridge and Temescal have resorted to hiring private security forces due to the rampant crime problems: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/30/oakland-priv...
3. Here is an article describing why robbers like Rockridge and other "target rich" neighborhoods where it is easy to rob rich people and escape: http://patch.com/california/rockridge/why-robbers-like-rockr...
My commute currently takes 4 minutes. Any longer than 10 and I'd start searching for a closer place to live
A quick search suggests that the closest home for sale near our corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley would be a 16-24 minute commute, list price $1M. Or 25-40 minutes for $600k.
Assuming you commute 5 days a week, twice a day, multiply your commute by 10 to get the time per week, or ~480 to get the time per year. A one hour commute is 480 hours a year, or 20 full days (or 80 8-hour periods).
Luckily for the intrepid, giving the market something it hasn't seen yet isn't terribly difficult.
Develop some social skills. Best place to do this is a bar. As you get good it can double as your dating pool.
DelMarVa is the geographic peninsula east of Chesapeake Bay and west of Delaware Bay.
The ring of urban sprawl around the federal capital is "The DC Area". Unfortunately, "DC Metro" is the train system, and "DC Metropolis" is where Superman lives.
The only (well paying) tech jobs in Delaware would probably be working on internal systems for credit card companies in Wilmington. Possibly also registered agent software for CT or CSC, or some other business revolving around corporate registration and reporting.
I can't help thinking "Columbia Metropolis" would be a better name for the urban areas around the District of Columbia. But I don't have the authority to just change the names of things.
It's actually possible to get cheap, bad, but livable housing in NYC. It would be difficult to get a plot of floor with a roof over it of any quality at $2k in SF.
For instance, for incomes between around $51k and $263k the rate is 9.30%. My state's rate is 4.25%, which is closer to not having a tax at all.
https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/taxes/how-much-do-americans-...
For all our complaints about how evil taxes are we sure have a whole lot of them!
If you are normal. If you're particularly rich then it'll be different because the majority of your assets aren't from income and there's all kinds of loopholes. If you're particularly poor taxes will be significantly lower but the threshold is pretty low... The poverty line for a family of 4 is shockingly low.
I saved nearly $500 a month in taxes moving from Maine to New Hampshire, staying in the same job.
A quick scan of Fortune's unicorn list* shows 12 out of the top 25 are from outside of California, and two of the Cali ones are LA, bringing SF down to 11 (after generously counting Palo Alto in SF, because I assume you meant the Bay Area). Without numbers on how many startups are started in various places, I'm not sure what these numbers mean, but it doesn't obviously favor your winner-takes-all argument.
For an area with less than 2% of the country's population, that is overwhelmingly dominant. I'm not sure if you could have underscored my point any more succinctly.
The point is that you still have contributed no idea of what portion of startups are starting in SF. If 95% of startups come out of SF but only 80% of winners do, it still has an overwhelming majority but is by the numbers a terrible place to start a startup.
Of the top 25 international, only about half are American, so stop pretending the denominator is 25 if you've decided that international companies for some reason don't count. There are 2 in LA, one in Boston, and 1 in NYC (what list are you looking at?), giving the Bay Area something like 2/3 of American companies, and about 1/3 of all.
Communication technology hasn't so far enabled, at least in the general case, geographically-distributed tech companies – otherwise we would be seeing an increasing trend of successful tech companies headquartered elsewhere. I don't think we are. Put another way, whatever advantage is conferred upon SF by physically housing an outsized share of tech workers is clearly giving it a competitive advantage that other locations have yet to overcome.
Having a distributed tech team is not hard, but most startups aren't distributed because the VCs aren't distributed. They want face to face meetings.
As someone who lives in Santa Rosa, having something that connected directly to SF or BART from up here would be awesome (even if not really feasible). My brother lives here as well and he commutes to the Embarcadero for work. I'm not jealous, I already have no time. An extended commute would be the end of me.
No it doesn't. You might have some memories crossed, but there's definitely no railway.
Has nobody started a great 24/7 food delivery service bringing overpriced food to tech workers on demand?
You probably couldn't see anything open from your hotel in Union Square or SOMA, but it's there. Just open foursquare or Yelp.
Even if we lower the standard to include fast food and/or greasy post-drunk food, the number jumps to perhaps 30, on a weekend night. So there might be a late-night restaurant in every neighborhood, but there's definitely no more than one. If you want something good, you need to eat before 9.
Also, get off your high horse for implying that a greasy spoon can't be good or have high standards.
Which you have to pay yearly, not as a one-time discounted cost. In fact even down at the very, very low-end of tech-related jobs (~$50k in PDX) the difference between SF and PDX is ~$18k.
There is literally no shape of tech-oriented business you could operate where having to spend only $15k per employee when they're onboarded isn't a net financial benefit compared to having to pay SF-area competitive salaries for the same positions.
You shouldn't need most of the rest of that, either. Make sure everyone has a 2nd monitor, and you'll need to buy a $30 webcam if they don't already have laptops. I wouldn't worry about the headset, either - cell phone headsets or earpods generally work fine and most everyone has a decent one nowadays. Wait for the folks who want something nicer to ask for one.
Cheap internet is fine. I worked from home with rock bottom residential service, the cheapest they would give me, and my connectivity was fantastic, better than anything I've ever had from an office. The secret is that nobody's on the Internet from home during the day, so you've got infrastructure that was meant to handle the whole world watching Netflix at 8pm more-or-less to yourself.
This is assuming a distributed team. mind. They have a tendency to self-assemble. Partial co-location is where things get messy and you start needing to worry about smart whiteboards and fancy videoconferencing equipment and all that crap. All that's really for is to make it an eensy bit more likely that the co-located folks will be willing to collaborate with the remote folks rather than forming a clique and forgetting that the rest of the team exists.
Speaking from far-too-much experience, partially colocated teams are a productivity suck.
But I really do mean a fully distributed team needs a way to properly sketch things out. One of the biggest weaknesses I've seen is that people get limited by the equipment. So long as that's a separate piece of equipment from your video conferencing, it should be fine.
0/10, would not try again.
I'm just saying: consider locating your company somewhere else. There are great engineers all over the world, and most of your customers are not here.
I routinely had good meals at 10pm or 11pm at night. Never once did I eat at a diner.
Lots of restaurants stay open later in NYC, and then there are plenty of gastropubs serving great food even later.
In NYC at 4am, I could Seemless any meal/quantity I wanted!
In Seattle, I can only get pizza past 2am.
Also, of course, few around here believe that there are good programmers outside of the city. Mostly, though, I think it's about 20-somethings who want to feel like they've made it because they're running a startup in the most expensive city in the country.
The cult is powerful, for such a group of disruptive, innovative thinkers.
The main requirement is that everyone communicate over the same channels. No planning sessions at the watercooler. Take it back to your desk and have the conversation in Slack instead.
PING!
You do now! Go for it!
-- The Naming Fairy
It's a combination of
1.) Wealthy Asian businesspeople who are looking for a place to park some of the foreign reserves they own overseas.
2.) Hedge funds, investing institutional capital in relatively "safe" investments with guaranteed revenue streams.
3.) Corporate prop-trading desks, parking corporate profits in tax-advantaged long-term assets until its needed. Google, for example, is a major owner of affordable housing developments.
This is what often happens after a speculative bubble bursts: all the folks who invested based on irrational exuberance get cleaned out of the market, and then assets are transferred to other investors who are generally much more prudent, often using spare cash that was sitting on the sidelines. In this case, the assets just happen to be where everybody lives.
Very interesting as Google will be expanding their offices in Boulder over the next few years. I believe they've broke ground on the campus here.
SF does need to build, badly, but I'm wary of the term NIMBY-ism. It is descriptive, but I think it invites false equivalence. There are degrees of NIMBY. I actually think that some of the burbs, like walnut creek or mountain view (especially the latter) have engaged in genuinely shocking levels of refusal to build housing. Mountain view's NIMBYism is especially objectionable since it actually green lighted the corporate construction that brings many new workers to the area, while almost with the same stroke of the pen banned new housing around those places of business. There's NIMBYism, and then there's actually generating the problems that you push out to other neighborhoods.
I'm always a little bummed to read statements by people who, probably out of frustration that I largely share, start to disparage SF's architectural and cultural heritage. It is absolutely possible to grow, dramatically, without tearing down some of the oldest neighborhoods west of the mississippi.
This is out of date, and has been for a while. The voters of Mountain View responded to the housing crisis by voting in a much more pro-housing city council. There are now over 10,000 units planned for North Bayshore (the area around the Google and LinkedIn campuses):
http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2016/03/03/council-oks-plans-fo...
As a long-time resident and voter in Mountain View, it's exasperating to have people so fixated on the NIMBY narrative that they ignore the significant steps the city and voters have and are taking to address the housing crisis. Regardless of what Matt Yglesias said, or that article from the Washington Post said, the votes of the Mountain View citizenry, and the resulting choices of the City Council, should make it clear that we're not a bunch of anti-density NIMBYs.
That's why it's mostly brothels and growhouses (exaggeration).
Keep in mind, what I'm saying here is a thesis, not a conclusion.
SF is city that ranges from very high density to middle density, with a few expensive and relatively suburban neighborhoods west of twin peaks and/or near the coast (St Francis Wood, Forest Hill, Seacliff, etc)… It has also had a relatively stable population density for over 50 years, and in some of these neighborhoods considerably longer than that.
SF is also a relatively small geographical area that is a different municipality from the nearby cities. In many (most?) cities in the US, sections of SF and Oakland/Berkeley would be the urban core of a larger city, but those suburbs and even exurbs wouldn't be considered different cities in the same region, they would be part of the same municipality. As a result, construction in the hinterlands that doesn't count as growth within "San Francisco" does count in growth in a place like Seattle, where the "city" of Seattle encompasses a much larger geographical area.
So, hear me out - while SF can be excessively preservation minded, think about how people would react if you tried to bulldoze not just the French Quarter in New Orleans, but the garden district, Bayou St John, or even some of the shotgun houses in less famous districts. What would happen if you tried to tear down historic houses in Philadelphia or Boston, or replace entire city blocks of 100+ year old houses or apartments with modern high rises?
My thesis (again, not a conclusion, I'd need to see the data) is that if you identify regions similar to SF - medium density neighborhoods that have existed in this form for 60-100 years, it is very difficult to tear things down and build greater density in many places outside SF. I wouldn't be surprised if it's especially difficult in SF, but I suspect this would be a difference in degree, that SF would have an unusually strong preservation instinct, but that you'd find strong, similar preservation instincts in many other comparable regions - but that these similarities are not evident because we aren't comparing similar geographical regions, again because of the oddity of municipal boundaries in SF (which are a large contributor to the NIMBYism problem, to be sure).
A 500k house never gets torn down to become 3 400k condos. It becomes 3 600-800+k condos.
We should build more, because we need it. But "build more" can't be the only tool to lower prices, because simple observation shows us that it doesn't work.
...which explains a lot about why residents dislike this
Quite the contrary. A pretty simple reductio proof demonstrates that more housing lowers prices. All you need is to imagine a market in which there is one more apartment available than there are people to rent it.
Notice how these responses do absolutely nothing to address the issue. They exist only to express dissatisfaction with realistic options.
Again, you can either build to meet demand or expect higher prices. Those are the options.
Cities have been able to grow for centuries. The only thing stopping them from growing are zoning and restrictions prohibiting additional homes being built.
Even if a city government has liberal attitudes toward development, it still takes years to create new supply. In the mean time the process is displacing people.
The public transit system shuts off by 12 AM - 1PM, and most service workers would likely have to live outside of the city, as well as most people coming into SF to work. The city is forced to shutoff at a certain time because of the transit situation, even if not for any other reasons.
The current disparity certainly causes plenty of concerning issues, though SF's early closing has been a thing since at least 2007 when I first lived there, at which point cost of living was somewhat reasonable.
I moved here because it had a pleasant climate and (once had) a vibrant art/culture scene that provided ~80% of what you could get in bigger cities, at a discount. It was a city, but with a higher quality of life. For that, you might be willing give up some things.
That's no longer true. I don't know how new people rationalize the costs here, except as an "investment" into something else -- their career, real estate, whatever.
Even then, the jetlag only made it work for a week or two.
As others have noted, people who have the sorts of jobs that put them behind a register can't afford to live in SF, and public transportation shuts down at midnight or so. If you were working a restaurant it would have to close by 10:00 so you had time to clean up with a little buffer to make sure you were on the last train.
And not just jobs, but other people who do the same thing that you can learn from. And full stack: from the people building javascript libs to new programming languages (swift, rust) to chips (Apple, Intel, hardware startups), etc.
Proximity to the outdoors. If you want great surfing, hiking, skiing (well, ex the drought years), climbing, camping, etc -- it's here. And the state is dry, so no mosquitos or flies. ie it's much more enjoyable to be outside than in the midwest. It's fun to be outside 340+ days/year.
Non-competes are invalid by state law. And this isn't a theoretical problem; I had a job offer withdrawn in NY because the new employer's counsel determined they were covered by then-current employers non-compete contract and they didn't want the hassle.
People who view quitting their jobs and starting companies as merely modestly crazy/risky, instead of something only a lunatic would do.
Oh, and as for your average rents: yes. You can get cheaper rents, but at the price of shitty public transport, a terrible commute, and a lack of local services where you live. Which is particularly punishing if you don't own a car. sf as a city is run by worthless idiots who decided to play city, so big pieces of it have terrible (unreliable, slow, unsafe, etc) public transport (yet it manages to be some of the most expensive transit in the nation as the cherry on top). Plus there are 3 public transport systems that essentially were built independently and operate without any coordination, two of which only serve pieces of the city (muni, bart, caltrain). And until the age of uber a taxi system that specialized in shitting on their customers. Because where, besides sf, would a taxi that actually comes be worth paying a 50% premium ala uber when it debuted? So yeah, wildly incompetent city government.
No doubt there are more startups/jobs in SF but at the same time it seems that its very exaggerated.
As for jobs, I disagree. see eg:
machine learning, nyc: 1 responsive ad (plus ads for jobs in sfbay, nonresponsive android stuff) http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/sof?query=machine+learn...
same search, sf: 10-15? http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof?query=machine+learnin...
indeed has similar ratios.
As for jobs in general, if you're a good js or rails engineer with a reasonable network of friends / former coworkers, starting now at 6pm Tuesday night you could have interviews on Friday, maybe even on Thursday. And start a new job next week. I believe there's a qualitative difference.
1 - there aren't that many techies in sf;
2 - many people don't vote;
3 - sf has a huge set of entrenched laws that would have to be overthrown, plus relatively dysfunctional state government (see, eg, proposition system)
4 - some of this genuinely isn't sf's fault, but rather the entire peninsula dumping their housing problems on sf and san jose. See eg mountain view approving 2-3 million ft2 of new office space and maybe potentially possibly pondering allowing a couple thousand new homes. They're gonna study it. And then there's environmental review. Ground will not be broken before 2025 is my guess. Meanwhile, where the hell are all those employees gonna live? Not in mv.
5 - sf is a spendthrift city, and it needs techies. Besides all the jobs supported indirectly, sf has a 1.4% payroll tax (well, it's complicated, but 1.1 - 1.4%).
Or enact preferential laws, or use vandalism in order to drive demand down, or make newcomers feel unsafe or unwelcome.
Those alternatives are not entirely rational, nor necessarily effective- but they are human nature, and not that rare.
Gas tax: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax#United_Kingdom
EDIT: To put that into perspective, the tax in the UK of "£2.19 per U.S. gallon" is far more than a gallon of gas costs most Americans right now. In addition, there's a 20% VAT on the gas price AND the duty, so Britons are being taxed at 20% on that duty.
VAT applies to hotels: "The exceptions are the UK and Slovakia where VAT stands at 20% for all goods and services including hotel accommodation" (https://www.instituteofhospitality.org/Publications/Insight_...)
Toll roads: https://www.gov.uk/uk-toll-roads
Electricity tax on certain usage levels: "The Climate Change Levy is a p/kWh tax on certain electricity use. Exempt supplies include domestic supplies and supplies using less than the de minimis threshold of 1,000 kWh / month" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_billing_in_the_UK)
TV licencing fee that I seem to always hear British taxpayers complaining about: "Since 1 April 2010 the annual licence fee has been £145.50 for colour and £49.00 for black and white." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...)
Alcohol and tobacco taxes: https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-shopping/alcohol-tobacco
I used to live in Boston (which at the time was the #2 tech scene in the country, but has probably been eclipsed by Seattle/NYC/Austin by now). There were startups and meetups and hacker spaces as well, including a number of famous ones.
The Bay Area is a huge difference in degree. The difference is that you had to find the "tech scene" in Boston, while in Silicon Valley, tech is the scene. If you go out for coffee, nearly everybody in the coffeeshop will be working on some tech startup. If you sit down at a restaurant, there's a good chance that the table next to you will have a group of engineers from some large tech company, or an investor being pitched by an entrepreneur, or a group of friends planning a startup. If you go to a random party - even ones thrown by non-techies - half the people there will work in tech.
What you describe is an unbearable nightmare.
It was great for my first couple years here, when I really wanted to go deep into the field and learn all I could. I had my "become a well-rounded person" phase in college, so by my 20s I was happy to specialize deeply. It was less great for years 3-5, when I ended up meeting and marrying a non-techie. It's been good again for me now, founding a startup, because of the huge number of potential customers everywhere. There's a huge difference between an abundance mentality vs. a scarcity mentality that having a large number of customers/employees/investors nearby creates.
Half sounds like an underestimate, probably more like 80%.
All of the above is why I left the Bay Area. I love tech, but geez. It's like loving chocolate and living in a chocolate house eating chocolate for every meal. I got about 6 months into that before a switch flipped and it became the most aggravating, insufferable thing ever.
Contrast this with a city like New York where you also have publishing, finance, advertising as well as solid tech.
man, it is freedom. Freedom of employment in this case. At any moment i can leave current employer and get another job. I'm not afraid about layoffs or pissing off my manager. Until you taste the freedom, it is hard to explain it. The same way like explaining general freedom that we still have some amount of here in the US to the people back in my old country.
to make clear closely related point - being free from fear makes for better employees than otherwise as such employees have an option of calling waste/stupidity/etc when they see it.
If you must know, dismissive phrases such as, "people like you", isn't a mature way to strengthen a counter argument.
The price for newcomers is far higher than the price for people who lived here 5 years ago.
Many more people commute into SF than out of it, about 150K net daily: http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/commute-patterns.
And they've all worked out, shopped for groceries, had breakfast, etc. before 9am.
http://cityobservatory.org/in-some-cities-the-housing-constr...
Things change, especially in the US.
"The immaculate conception theory of your neighborhood’s origins": http://cityobservatory.org/the-immaculate-conception-theory-...
And: if prices are going up that much, and you really want out, you can sell and move, to, say, Lakeview, Oregon.
But we should be wholly unsympathetic to that view. It's a reasonable thing to wish for, but it's not a reasonable demand to give in to.
This is a brilliant sentiment, and a brilliant quote. It applies in so many conversations...
I just wanted to express my appreciation (and my intention of stealing this quote many times in the future!).
Among many issues, the fundamental attractiveness of a particular neighborhood may be tied to low population density.
In which case ripping down the neighborhood and rebuilding makes neither resident Person A nor prospective buyer Person B happy.
Sooner or later, the US must confront the fact that not everyone can live in a single story ranch house with a big yard in an extremely desirable part of the country, without causing massive sprawl (LA).
As long as there is high demand, you can either build more or expect higher prices and more sprawl. I get that people don't like those choices, but that's what's on the table.
So you're kicking the marginal (in the economic sense) people out into marginal places where they have less access to what made the original area such a great place to have a job.
Rent control could do that for rent, but has its own problems. As for owners, how do you tell someone they aren't allowed to sell their house for what someone else is willing to pay them?
Sounds like it would work, until you realize most of the buildings are owned by landlords who want to cash in and get as much money as they can with the property they've invested in. They don't particularly care who is living in the property, just that somebody is there and that they're getting paid.
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Harvard+University,+Cambridg...
Also my dorm in Boston to Sunday River which is a huge ski area in upper Maine was just about 3 hours.
my oldest coworker, and this was at a < 10 person startup, was not a founder and was a line level search engineer and over 65.
This is causing rents to increase noticeably in nearly every major urban area. Couple that with relatively high pay for tech sector jobs that like to hire these younger folks and you get it even worse in SF, Seattle, etc.
[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-millennials-are-less...
I know a number of people here who are praying for a tech crash so they can afford housing again.
I moved to Mountain View in 2009. In late 2008 (as the crisis was hitting the stock market, but before landlords had realized it would affect them), a realtor was showing me around, and I asked about a swanky corporate apartment complex we drove by. "Oh, that's out of your price range - they charge $2000+/month." I ended up living there for $1400/month in 2009-2010, then they started jacking up the rent. When I left in 2013, they turned around and rented it for $2700/month.
If art and culture are so valuable to us why are those who create these things so poor? Why do people cringe at buying an album for $9 but then spend $11 on a coffee and a biscuit?
But there is also artistry in creating a coffee or dining experience, and hopefully that money spent on the meal and coffee goes more to the chef artist who prepared the meal, the architect artist who designed the space, and the line cook, waitress and dishwasher.
If anything music is overvalued. I'm surprised we haven't automated Skrillex and all that house crap yet. ;-)
Why is a Picasso worth more than paint?
The artists shouldn't have balked at taking a class in economics.
I've seen quite a few people here wanting high-rise residential buildings in San Francisco to alleviate the high rents there. A skyscraper is at least 40 floors, according to wikipedia and one rule of thumb I've seen puts the construction time for them at 1 month per floor, from ground breaking to completion. That's about 4 years in construction, plus design and planning time, plus site acquisition. That's five, six years (more?), total, even in the most positive political atmosphere.
Someone who wanted to alleviate SF's high rents today, assuming you could do that by building high-rise apartment buildings, would had to have started at the height of the construction bust. That would be, I think, before San Francisco proper's tech boom, i.e. before there was a problem evident.
And if you started building one today,... Once upon a time, Intel planned to build a 10 story office building in downtown Austin. They stopped, with nothing but the structure of the building up, in 2001. The incomplete building was demolished in 2007.
Meanwhile, in the real world, if attitudes and policies were to start shifting, 15 to 20 years is probably a more realistic planning horizon.
I'm also surprised that you would still think the math does not apply. A 100 unit building taking up the space of 12 SFH $1.5mm homes will sell many more $800k 2 bedroom apartments comparing what houses and apartments sell for Build about 1000 of the buildings close to bart and muni tunnel stations and you would get 100'000 units for the price of 3000 SFH / in law units and a larger city budget to fund the new required transit system capacity.
Then again, another thing with Vancouver (that I think I've heard said a bit about SF, but less-so) is that there's no night life. The bars close at midnight. (Actually, you can't even get a license to operate a "bar" here; you have to build a sit-down restaurant in order to serve alcohol.) I wonder if the correlation is actually between this sort of Victorian-era teetotaling "healthy living" sensibility, and the sort of generalized NIMBYism that prevents highrises from deflating housing pressure.
I think you're onto something with the Victorian "healthy living" bit. There is some hypocrisy as well: the way Vancouverites talk down about alcohol drinkers or tobacco smokers all the time but meanwhile promote the pot trade and never talk about the rampant heroin problem in that city.
Really sad to hear that Vancouver and San Francisco are plagued by real estate siphoning out all the potential of what those cities could be. Feudalism seems to be a trend everywhere though.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-14/millennial...
All the great things that Vancouver has to offer happen in the day or afternoon. The only thing I'm sad about is the Jazz Cellar closing down. RIP Ross Taggart.
That said, nightlife closing at 2AM is a plus and a minus. I kind of like there being a defined end to the evening, I'd rather not stay out too too late and this way I don't have to be the party pooper :)
I've spent 8 months looking for a technical position. The only interviews I've managed to get are in Roanoke/Blacksburg, VA. Every interview I've had (not many because the market is dry), either drastically undercuts my experience (one company tried to write down my experience below the length of my last job) or otherwise offers a very meager salary, 30-50% lower than even the cost of living adjusted figure from my last job where I was living SoMa.
Also due to infrastructure, and partially the company who marked down my experience because they don't consider remote experience, I'm no longer interested in remote positions.
I can't find food after 10pm.
Morgantown also has late hours in my experience, though you might have to walk to High St.
I'm there fairly frequently.
The Asylum serves regular bar food til about 11 I think. Still later than what I was seeing in SF.
In my case, definitely.
Thanks for the clarification.
Yes and to finish my OP thought, I would argue that this was without a doubt the worse of it as well.
The people here are poor, and my perception is that they don't have much hope and/or desire to affect any kind of change in their life. They just seem not to give a crap.
I don't live in a nice part of town, and I suppose it could just be culture shock for me personally having moved from Irvine to Not-Summerlin, Vegas, but that's my perception.
