10 ms·

What it’s like to house-hunt in Silicon Valley, the nation’s priciest market

71 points by trusche 11y ago

paulbaumgart 11y ago
This is mind-numbingly inefficient. We really need to build up.
- colechristensen 11y ago
  As is the tech world being so concentrated in a single area.
  - melling 11y ago
    Back to first principles: Location, location, location. Either build more concentrated housing like Manhattan or make commuting from a longer distance more efficient. Perhaps a little of both. Google has $60 billion in overseas cash. Negotiate a tax deal to build the Google Maglev from SF to San Jose, turning the 50 mile journey into a 20 minute commute.
    - fijal 11y ago
      Note that 50 mile in 20min is a (relatively modest for european standards) 240 km/h. The fastest links in europe can sustain 270-300km/h, using traditional, overground trains. Since you would probably need to dig, you don't care as much about noise and you could easily go at top speeds using 70s technology.
      - sokoloff 11y ago
        However, you probably can't succeed with just two terminals 50 miles apart from each other. It'll likely be more successful with 3-4 outlying stations, meaning you won't be at "cruise" for the entire 50 mile journey. Still, 30 minutes is also a win over the current status, especially if it's direct to the campus where you work (no "last mile" problem on that end).
      - walshemj 11y ago
        Those are long distance TGV trains not commuter services - though I can get from 65 miles out of London to work (near st Pauls) in just over an hour.
    - briandear 11y ago
      Why not run the Maglev the other direction into Stockton or even Sacramento? The last thing San Fran needs is even more housing competition. Stockton is dirt cheap, San Fran is still crazy expensive. But "Mag lev to Stockton" doesn't sound so sexy despite being a more rational idea. Maybe Google instead ought to learn about remote work instead of blowing billions on a Mag Lev.
      - Rapzid 11y ago
        Yeah, even as far out as Dublin is still very pricey.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
      - unusximmortalis 11y ago
        Remote work is the cheapest most efficient way if you really look at it. It is the future. The culture is growing and slowly and organically we'll get there.
        edwinnathaniel 11y ago
        Hopefully it's a future of options: not mandatory to work remotely. I'm with the majority though: I prefer to work from the office most of the time
    - mooreds 11y ago
      If you want to make commuting more efficient, wouldn't it make more sense to have the maglev run from the east bay (or somewhere much more affordable) than SF? I haven't read great things about real estate affordability in that market. How would such a maglev will help affordability in SV? I think more likely alternatives are: * build up if a high density coalition can be assembled (unlikely, but possible) Or * people stop moving to the bay area or leave when they are ready to settle down. Remote work becoming more acceptable may be part of this. We face some of the same issues where I am (Boulder), but of course nothing near the intensity. We have huge chunks of uninhabited plains to our east that are being built out. If we have the water for it, and can handle the in commute traffic, we are good to go. (I realize those are big ifs!)
      - spiralpolitik 11y ago
        Good luck trying to get any high capacity public transport built in California in less than 20 years. That's the main problem, everybody is fine with stuff being built just not in their back yard or with their tax dollars.
    - tluyben2 11y ago
      Why not make working from home more efficient instead? We run from home and it works fine. Meet once every few minths somewhere nice (as you save all those costs for an office, expensive housing etc). I did both scenario's multiple times and I have not found more efficiency in sitting in an office together /most/ of the time.
      - WalterBright 11y ago
        The D programming language dev team is all over the world, every continent but Antarctica. I initially worried that it would be a mess to work together, but with github/Skype/email/forums and the annual D conference it works surprisingly well.
      - walshemj 11y ago
        Doesn't work as well as collocated teams even more so for a start-up where team collaboration is key.
        ghaff 11y ago
        Life is about tradeoffs. There are certainly successful startups that are significantly distributed. But I don't really disagree with your general point. I suspect that we'll see startups for which collocation is a priority increasingly looking outside the Bay area.
        tluyben2 11y ago
        We are a startup. We collaborate fine; I think this is a myth and/or it depends on getting the right people. And to that point; you can sit in an office in another city or state which costs a fraction. You are not in silicon valley just because you need to sit together in your startup right?
        walshemj 11y ago
        But from experience a collocated team works better - some types of work are more suited to remote working LOB support for a mature system for example.
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      > Either build more concentrated housing like Manhattan Manhattan is not affordable either. Especially considering that getting kids in good schools is famously challenging.
      - bane 11y ago
        But one could argue that Manhattan's ultra density tends to geographically consolidate lots of the craziness to a small area. The outer boroughs are quite reasonable in comparison to either the article, SF or Manhattan, but are still within NYC boundaries.
    - rtpg 11y ago
      another solution is to spread out the interesting stuff more. I think higher-density zoning is an easier thing to do in real life, but if this were Sim City I'd concentrate on making more areas be somewhat independent, so we don't all feel the need to go to the same spot
- briandear 11y ago
  No, that doesn't help much either: see New York city. Besides the point of buying a house is to have a yard and not have neighbors bouncing on your ceilings or leaving trash in the hallways or stealing your bike. What's actually needed is more remote working and a departure of the colocation mentality for businesses that don't actually need colocated employees. Software engineers rarely ever need to be in an office. A hardware engineer almost certainly does. SaaS sales people: no need for an office. Customer support -- no office needed there either. Even many lawyers don't need an office (by office, I mean a traditional office, not a home office.) I was a plaintiff in a lawsuit and never once did I even see my attorney face-to-face.. And it was complex litigation.. And we won. Doctors obviously do, content marketers obviously do not. Accountants.. Definitely not. My point is that the problem isn't housing, it's the density of tech companies that seem to think physical proximity to Sand Hill Road actually matters. The problem is also that Sand Hill Road also seems to think it matters. But it doesn't. Cases in point Basecamp and Github. Commuting to an office only to use Slack as the primary day-to-day communication. THAT'S mind numbingly inefficient. Commuting to an office only to stand in a circle for standup and then going back to a desk to work all day.. That's inefficient. Marissa Mayer is wrong.
  - morgante 11y ago
    > No, that doesn't help much either: see New York city. NYC manages to have cheaper housing than SF despite having radically more demand, thanks mostly to the ability to add supply at a reasonable rate.
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      I think the point is already lost if NYC is an example of affordable housing. Houston is probably a better example if you want to talk about affordable housing in a major city. But commutes in Houston are getting pretty crazy even.
      - morgante 11y ago
        > I think the point is already lost if NYC is an example of affordable housing. NYC is actually quite affordable though. If you're willing to have a ~30 minute commute, you can easily live in some affordable places. There are even more affordable options internationally though. Berlin, for example.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  I'm in a wheelchair - I wonder if you can still build in accessibility while constrained to tiny apartments.
  - Symbiote 11y ago
    Of course. There won't be any internal stairs, and you may well prefer to take a ground floor apartment. If it's a new building, it's more likely to have wider doors and a completely level floor. If the housing is reasonably dense, there should be useful shops close by. (In the UK, two friends of mine get an allowance from the state for their disabilities — one uses a wheelchair, the other is blind. It might be £56/week, I'm not sure, but it is paid even though they both have good jobs. Part of the purpose is so they can afford to live a little closer to a station, or in a larger apartment, or whatever.)
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    The ground floor could be reserved for wheelchair bound people. I'm surprised that isn't more or less a rule anyway, it seems to make perfect sense. In NL elevators are pretty rare in the inner cities so we have these things called staircase elevators, little platforms that you can roll onto with a wheelchair which will then take just about forever to go up one floor.
    - voltagex_ 11y ago
      The problem with this is that there are often more disabled people in an area than there are ground floor units. I absolutely loathe staircase elevators although in 2015 they proved more reliable than the standard elevators I had to use.
- Deadlyaxd 11y ago
  Ahan
- Deadlyaxd 11y ago
  Ahan
- peferron 11y ago
  One of the things that make Silicon Valley unique is its low density. Almost all other tech hubs are located in extremely dense cities: NYC, London, Seoul, Tokyo... Rather than turning Silicon Valley into another one of these, I'd prefer to see other tech hubs flourish and offer viable alternatives. (I don't own a house in Silicon Valley, nor can afford one.)
  - wavefunction 11y ago
    NYC, a tech hub? London, a tech hub? Perhaps you have some persuasive arguments to the contrary but in my direct experience there is far more "tech" going on in places like Seattle, Portland, Denver and Austin than these places which have some tech work.
    - peferron 11y ago
      My few examples were not meant to be sorted nor exhaustive. They were meant to illustrate the fact that places that offer a lot of tech jobs tend to be high-density cities, rather than a collection of comparatively lower-density areas like Silicon Valley. The places you mention all seem to be high-density cities as well. Maybe I shouldn't have written "extremely dense" then, I guess Austin isn't that dense compared to NYC—but still much denser than Silicon Valley surely?
      - rpedela 11y ago
        The bay area is quite dense. SF, Oakland, San Jose combined come close to the population of Chicago. Austin and Denver are much less dense than the bay area.
        pilom 11y ago
        Denver is only recorded as "not dense" because the city technically includes all the land around the airport where there is very little built. If you don't include the airport property the density is pretty close to San Jose.
- drewg123 11y ago
  It is nearly impossible to build up in Silicon Valley, due to prop-13 driven NIMBY-ism. Thanks to prop-13, most of the people that bought their houses in the 60s and 70s have not been forced to sell due to real estate taxes on their absurdly overpriced homes. These people vote, and they are dead-set against anything that "changes the character of the neighborhood". That translates to anything other than single-story, single family housing. Add to that the fact that most of the "new" people who would benefit from an increased housing supply are in multiple non-voting demographics (young, non-citizen immigrants of various visa statuses), and the old-timers hold all the political power. Why would they ever vote for anything that might decrease their property values? If you talk to them in person, they will occasionally grumble about traffic, or that they have to drive 1.5 hours to visit their grandchildren (because their children cannot afford to live in the area), but they will not actually do anything to change it. The reliably vote against universal mass transit in the valley, and against dense housing. The only logical choice is not to play the game at all. Most large employers with satellite offices in other areas of the company do not give an appropriate salary penalty for living in a low-cost area of the company -- at least nothing that resembles the actual cost of living difference between silicon valley and other markets. So the best option is to work for a company where you can transfer to an satellite office in a low cost city (eg, Google Pittsburgh), or to just work for a company that allows telecommuting (which is what I did).
  - ghaff 11y ago
    >Most large employers with satellite offices in other areas of the company do not give an appropriate salary penalty for living in a low-cost area of the company -- at least nothing that resembles the actual cost of living difference between silicon valley and other markets. This has been the case forever though. Back in the 1980s, northern California jobs didn't compensate for higher cost of living even relative to fairly expensive east coast cities. And the cost of living in crappy apartments in Manhattan was a trope back then as well.
hijinks 11y ago
I went through this but was lucky enough to do it 3 years ago. Our price point wasn't above a million but was around 600-700k. For good schools that pushed us out to the Tri-Valley area of the east bay where we finally bought a house. We looked for 18 months. It got to the point where I'd leave work if a house came on the market on a Thursday so we could have our offer in on Friday. We were out-bid 12 times for all cash offers, mostly from overseas investors I was told. We finally found a house where an older lady was selling the house where she raised her kids in and after I saw it I went back the next day and knocked on her door and showed her some pictures of my family and almost begged her to pick our offer. We ended up having to bid +45k over asking. The funny part is if I sold the house right now, I wouldn't be able to afford to buy it back.
- nailer 11y ago
  > We were out-bid 12 times for all cash offers, mostly from overseas investors I was told. I understand this is the case, but I don't know why it's better for the seller if the buyer pays cash: say the buyer takes out a mortgage to buy their house, doesn't the buyer's bank pay the seller in cash?
  - krampian 11y ago
    Things tend to go faster with cash buyers. In particular, no risk the bank will decline them for a mortgage. I suppose there's less difference if they're preapproved.
    - spiralpolitik 11y ago
      Even preapprovals can fall through as the bank can decline to fund when they see the home in question or the valuation comes in lower than the sale price. In a hot market cash is king as it removes 2 of 3 most common contingencies people have. For the seller this is two less weeks where things can fall through.
  - bobby_9x 11y ago
    Less paperwork and a quicker closing date.
fma 11y ago
Two days ago I just closed on my second house. Brand new, gorgeous 3500 square feet house for $363k. Great schools and good commute. The company I work has over 10,000 IT workers world wide with four major hub offices in the US. None of the hubs are in SV because of reasons like this.
- krampian 11y ago
  Which city are you in, out of curiosity?
  - fma 11y ago
    Atlanta
- benihana 11y ago
  Good for you champ! Thanks for sharing.
- chrisseaton 11y ago
  Is being brand new a good thing in houses in the US? In the UK few people would prioritise a new house as it means no period features, no fireplaces, no history, almost invariably thinner walls, no established garden etc
  - HarryHirsch 11y ago
    Generally speaking, construction in the US is of very poor quality. Houses, even at the high end of the price scale, are invariably wood frame construction since at least the 1940s. That explains the preference for single-family housing (because noise insulation is so poor) and also the 30-year mortgage (without maintenance we are looking at a lifetime of ~ 25 years). There's also the US way of dealing with crime - you move away from it. City centers are not desirable to live in, neither are inner-ring suburbs. These two factors really explain the exurban appeal.
  - yardie 11y ago
    In France a new house means you don't have to pay the notaire, which adds 7-10% to the price. A new house doesn't have liens or inheritance disputes. A friend took 18months to close on a building in Paris. The notaire had to track down family in the US, Uruguay, Australia, and the U.K. and ask them to approve the sale and split the sale accordingly.
drewg123 11y ago
The Bay Area is real estate insane. Prop 13 driven NIMBY-ism prevents any reasonable density housing from being built. After living there for 2 years and paying insane rent (more than $5K/mo on a 1200sqft house), I now telecommute for a Bay Area company, and live in central VA in a 3000sqft house in a good school district with a community pool, etc, which cost less than $400K. I telecommute most of the time, and I fly to CA 5-6 times per year (on the company's dime). My quality of life is so much better. I mostly miss the weather and the food, but not the traffic & the crowds and the prices. Not to mention that I'm using one of my 5 bedrooms as a private office, which is so, so, so much better than a low-walled cube in an open office environment.
- ghaff 11y ago
  While it's perfectly reasonable to criticize housing policies that restrict density, there are plenty of densely-built areas of the world that also have very high real estate prices (NY, London). Silicon Valley/SF has become this perceived mecca of the tech world both because of the concentration of certain types of tech companies and the other nice features of northern California. But the reality is that there's an upper limit to how many people can live in a given area--even if more housing and transportation were built.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    Contrary to popular opinion, San Francisco is nowhere within the line of sight of an "upper limit to how many people can live in a given area".
    - ghaff 11y ago
      Housing prices would seem to disagree with you given that waving a magic wand to create 10s or 100s of thousands of housing units in SF (and transit, etc. infrastructure to support them) isn't going to happen in less than decades even if the residents wanted it. Obviously, the technology exists to remake SF into a much denser city. But that's a different city.
paulpauper 11y ago
I just bought my palo alto house http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/monopoly/images/4/4b/Monopoly1-_house.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20061224003237 http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/monopoly/images/4/4b/Mon...
skyhatch1 11y ago
Sidenote: Eichler homes look very modern. Definitely better looking than your standard SV brick-and-wood-paneling matchboxes.
walshemj 11y ago
Compared to central London SV is cheaper and London does' not pay as well for techies. Id love to live in say fitzrovia or one of the lovely Georgian houses in the city near st pauls - but unless I win the lottery that's not going to happen.
bobosha 11y ago
What is the market like in the East (Oakland) or North Bay (Sausalito and north?
city41 11y ago
There is no doubt Silicon Valley real estate is expensive. But this article is extreme. For starters, Los Gatos is an upscale city nestled down at the bottom of SV. Bentleys and Ferraris are everywhere and the Tesla Model S is a downright common car. It's not representative. If you look around in San Jose, Campbell, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, etc, the prices come down and quality goes up. No, they don't approach the national average, not even close. But 1.5 million for a fixer upper is ridiculous.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

71 points by trusche 11y ago

paulbaumgart 11y ago

This is mind-numbingly inefficient. We really need to build up.

colechristensen 11y ago
As is the tech world being so concentrated in a single area.
- melling 11y ago
  Back to first principles: Location, location, location. Either build more concentrated housing like Manhattan or make commuting from a longer distance more efficient. Perhaps a little of both. Google has $60 billion in overseas cash. Negotiate a tax deal to build the Google Maglev from SF to San Jose, turning the 50 mile journey into a 20 minute commute.
  - fijal 11y ago
    Note that 50 mile in 20min is a (relatively modest for european standards) 240 km/h. The fastest links in europe can sustain 270-300km/h, using traditional, overground trains. Since you would probably need to dig, you don't care as much about noise and you could easily go at top speeds using 70s technology.
    - sokoloff 11y ago
      However, you probably can't succeed with just two terminals 50 miles apart from each other. It'll likely be more successful with 3-4 outlying stations, meaning you won't be at "cruise" for the entire 50 mile journey. Still, 30 minutes is also a win over the current status, especially if it's direct to the campus where you work (no "last mile" problem on that end).
    - walshemj 11y ago
      Those are long distance TGV trains not commuter services - though I can get from 65 miles out of London to work (near st Pauls) in just over an hour.
  - briandear 11y ago
    Why not run the Maglev the other direction into Stockton or even Sacramento? The last thing San Fran needs is even more housing competition. Stockton is dirt cheap, San Fran is still crazy expensive. But "Mag lev to Stockton" doesn't sound so sexy despite being a more rational idea. Maybe Google instead ought to learn about remote work instead of blowing billions on a Mag Lev.
    - Rapzid 11y ago
      Yeah, even as far out as Dublin is still very pricey.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - unusximmortalis 11y ago
      Remote work is the cheapest most efficient way if you really look at it. It is the future. The culture is growing and slowly and organically we'll get there.
      - edwinnathaniel 11y ago
        Hopefully it's a future of options: not mandatory to work remotely. I'm with the majority though: I prefer to work from the office most of the time
  - mooreds 11y ago
    If you want to make commuting more efficient, wouldn't it make more sense to have the maglev run from the east bay (or somewhere much more affordable) than SF? I haven't read great things about real estate affordability in that market. How would such a maglev will help affordability in SV? I think more likely alternatives are: * build up if a high density coalition can be assembled (unlikely, but possible) Or * people stop moving to the bay area or leave when they are ready to settle down. Remote work becoming more acceptable may be part of this. We face some of the same issues where I am (Boulder), but of course nothing near the intensity. We have huge chunks of uninhabited plains to our east that are being built out. If we have the water for it, and can handle the in commute traffic, we are good to go. (I realize those are big ifs!)
    - spiralpolitik 11y ago
      Good luck trying to get any high capacity public transport built in California in less than 20 years. That's the main problem, everybody is fine with stuff being built just not in their back yard or with their tax dollars.
  - tluyben2 11y ago
    Why not make working from home more efficient instead? We run from home and it works fine. Meet once every few minths somewhere nice (as you save all those costs for an office, expensive housing etc). I did both scenario's multiple times and I have not found more efficiency in sitting in an office together /most/ of the time.
    - WalterBright 11y ago
      The D programming language dev team is all over the world, every continent but Antarctica. I initially worried that it would be a mess to work together, but with github/Skype/email/forums and the annual D conference it works surprisingly well.
    - walshemj 11y ago
      Doesn't work as well as collocated teams even more so for a start-up where team collaboration is key.
      - ghaff 11y ago
        Life is about tradeoffs. There are certainly successful startups that are significantly distributed. But I don't really disagree with your general point. I suspect that we'll see startups for which collocation is a priority increasingly looking outside the Bay area.
      - tluyben2 11y ago
        We are a startup. We collaborate fine; I think this is a myth and/or it depends on getting the right people. And to that point; you can sit in an office in another city or state which costs a fraction. You are not in silicon valley just because you need to sit together in your startup right?
        walshemj 11y ago
        But from experience a collocated team works better - some types of work are more suited to remote working LOB support for a mature system for example.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    > Either build more concentrated housing like Manhattan Manhattan is not affordable either. Especially considering that getting kids in good schools is famously challenging.
    - bane 11y ago
      But one could argue that Manhattan's ultra density tends to geographically consolidate lots of the craziness to a small area. The outer boroughs are quite reasonable in comparison to either the article, SF or Manhattan, but are still within NYC boundaries.
  - rtpg 11y ago
    another solution is to spread out the interesting stuff more. I think higher-density zoning is an easier thing to do in real life, but if this were Sim City I'd concentrate on making more areas be somewhat independent, so we don't all feel the need to go to the same spot
briandear 11y ago
No, that doesn't help much either: see New York city. Besides the point of buying a house is to have a yard and not have neighbors bouncing on your ceilings or leaving trash in the hallways or stealing your bike. What's actually needed is more remote working and a departure of the colocation mentality for businesses that don't actually need colocated employees. Software engineers rarely ever need to be in an office. A hardware engineer almost certainly does. SaaS sales people: no need for an office. Customer support -- no office needed there either. Even many lawyers don't need an office (by office, I mean a traditional office, not a home office.) I was a plaintiff in a lawsuit and never once did I even see my attorney face-to-face.. And it was complex litigation.. And we won. Doctors obviously do, content marketers obviously do not. Accountants.. Definitely not. My point is that the problem isn't housing, it's the density of tech companies that seem to think physical proximity to Sand Hill Road actually matters. The problem is also that Sand Hill Road also seems to think it matters. But it doesn't. Cases in point Basecamp and Github. Commuting to an office only to use Slack as the primary day-to-day communication. THAT'S mind numbingly inefficient. Commuting to an office only to stand in a circle for standup and then going back to a desk to work all day.. That's inefficient. Marissa Mayer is wrong.
- morgante 11y ago
  > No, that doesn't help much either: see New York city. NYC manages to have cheaper housing than SF despite having radically more demand, thanks mostly to the ability to add supply at a reasonable rate.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    I think the point is already lost if NYC is an example of affordable housing. Houston is probably a better example if you want to talk about affordable housing in a major city. But commutes in Houston are getting pretty crazy even.
    - morgante 11y ago
      > I think the point is already lost if NYC is an example of affordable housing. NYC is actually quite affordable though. If you're willing to have a ~30 minute commute, you can easily live in some affordable places. There are even more affordable options internationally though. Berlin, for example.
voltagex_ 11y ago
I'm in a wheelchair - I wonder if you can still build in accessibility while constrained to tiny apartments.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  Of course. There won't be any internal stairs, and you may well prefer to take a ground floor apartment. If it's a new building, it's more likely to have wider doors and a completely level floor. If the housing is reasonably dense, there should be useful shops close by. (In the UK, two friends of mine get an allowance from the state for their disabilities — one uses a wheelchair, the other is blind. It might be £56/week, I'm not sure, but it is paid even though they both have good jobs. Part of the purpose is so they can afford to live a little closer to a station, or in a larger apartment, or whatever.)
- jacquesm 11y ago
  The ground floor could be reserved for wheelchair bound people. I'm surprised that isn't more or less a rule anyway, it seems to make perfect sense. In NL elevators are pretty rare in the inner cities so we have these things called staircase elevators, little platforms that you can roll onto with a wheelchair which will then take just about forever to go up one floor.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    The problem with this is that there are often more disabled people in an area than there are ground floor units. I absolutely loathe staircase elevators although in 2015 they proved more reliable than the standard elevators I had to use.
Deadlyaxd 11y ago
Ahan
Deadlyaxd 11y ago
Ahan
peferron 11y ago
One of the things that make Silicon Valley unique is its low density. Almost all other tech hubs are located in extremely dense cities: NYC, London, Seoul, Tokyo... Rather than turning Silicon Valley into another one of these, I'd prefer to see other tech hubs flourish and offer viable alternatives. (I don't own a house in Silicon Valley, nor can afford one.)
- wavefunction 11y ago
  NYC, a tech hub? London, a tech hub? Perhaps you have some persuasive arguments to the contrary but in my direct experience there is far more "tech" going on in places like Seattle, Portland, Denver and Austin than these places which have some tech work.
  - peferron 11y ago
    My few examples were not meant to be sorted nor exhaustive. They were meant to illustrate the fact that places that offer a lot of tech jobs tend to be high-density cities, rather than a collection of comparatively lower-density areas like Silicon Valley. The places you mention all seem to be high-density cities as well. Maybe I shouldn't have written "extremely dense" then, I guess Austin isn't that dense compared to NYC—but still much denser than Silicon Valley surely?
    - rpedela 11y ago
      The bay area is quite dense. SF, Oakland, San Jose combined come close to the population of Chicago. Austin and Denver are much less dense than the bay area.
      - pilom 11y ago
        Denver is only recorded as "not dense" because the city technically includes all the land around the airport where there is very little built. If you don't include the airport property the density is pretty close to San Jose.
drewg123 11y ago
It is nearly impossible to build up in Silicon Valley, due to prop-13 driven NIMBY-ism. Thanks to prop-13, most of the people that bought their houses in the 60s and 70s have not been forced to sell due to real estate taxes on their absurdly overpriced homes. These people vote, and they are dead-set against anything that "changes the character of the neighborhood". That translates to anything other than single-story, single family housing. Add to that the fact that most of the "new" people who would benefit from an increased housing supply are in multiple non-voting demographics (young, non-citizen immigrants of various visa statuses), and the old-timers hold all the political power. Why would they ever vote for anything that might decrease their property values? If you talk to them in person, they will occasionally grumble about traffic, or that they have to drive 1.5 hours to visit their grandchildren (because their children cannot afford to live in the area), but they will not actually do anything to change it. The reliably vote against universal mass transit in the valley, and against dense housing. The only logical choice is not to play the game at all. Most large employers with satellite offices in other areas of the company do not give an appropriate salary penalty for living in a low-cost area of the company -- at least nothing that resembles the actual cost of living difference between silicon valley and other markets. So the best option is to work for a company where you can transfer to an satellite office in a low cost city (eg, Google Pittsburgh), or to just work for a company that allows telecommuting (which is what I did).
- ghaff 11y ago
  >Most large employers with satellite offices in other areas of the company do not give an appropriate salary penalty for living in a low-cost area of the company -- at least nothing that resembles the actual cost of living difference between silicon valley and other markets. This has been the case forever though. Back in the 1980s, northern California jobs didn't compensate for higher cost of living even relative to fairly expensive east coast cities. And the cost of living in crappy apartments in Manhattan was a trope back then as well.

hijinks 11y ago

I went through this but was lucky enough to do it 3 years ago. Our price point wasn't above a million but was around 600-700k. For good schools that pushed us out to the Tri-Valley area of the east bay where we finally bought a house. We looked for 18 months. It got to the point where I'd leave work if a house came on the market on a Thursday so we could have our offer in on Friday. We were out-bid 12 times for all cash offers, mostly from overseas investors I was told. We finally found a house where an older lady was selling the house where she raised her kids in and after I saw it I went back the next day and knocked on her door and showed her some pictures of my family and almost begged her to pick our offer. We ended up having to bid +45k over asking. The funny part is if I sold the house right now, I wouldn't be able to afford to buy it back.

nailer 11y ago
> We were out-bid 12 times for all cash offers, mostly from overseas investors I was told. I understand this is the case, but I don't know why it's better for the seller if the buyer pays cash: say the buyer takes out a mortgage to buy their house, doesn't the buyer's bank pay the seller in cash?
- krampian 11y ago
  Things tend to go faster with cash buyers. In particular, no risk the bank will decline them for a mortgage. I suppose there's less difference if they're preapproved.
  - spiralpolitik 11y ago
    Even preapprovals can fall through as the bank can decline to fund when they see the home in question or the valuation comes in lower than the sale price. In a hot market cash is king as it removes 2 of 3 most common contingencies people have. For the seller this is two less weeks where things can fall through.
- bobby_9x 11y ago
  Less paperwork and a quicker closing date.

fma 11y ago

Two days ago I just closed on my second house. Brand new, gorgeous 3500 square feet house for $363k. Great schools and good commute. The company I work has over 10,000 IT workers world wide with four major hub offices in the US. None of the hubs are in SV because of reasons like this.

krampian 11y ago
Which city are you in, out of curiosity?
- fma 11y ago
  Atlanta
benihana 11y ago
Good for you champ! Thanks for sharing.
chrisseaton 11y ago
Is being brand new a good thing in houses in the US? In the UK few people would prioritise a new house as it means no period features, no fireplaces, no history, almost invariably thinner walls, no established garden etc
- HarryHirsch 11y ago
  Generally speaking, construction in the US is of very poor quality. Houses, even at the high end of the price scale, are invariably wood frame construction since at least the 1940s. That explains the preference for single-family housing (because noise insulation is so poor) and also the 30-year mortgage (without maintenance we are looking at a lifetime of ~ 25 years). There's also the US way of dealing with crime - you move away from it. City centers are not desirable to live in, neither are inner-ring suburbs. These two factors really explain the exurban appeal.
- yardie 11y ago
  In France a new house means you don't have to pay the notaire, which adds 7-10% to the price. A new house doesn't have liens or inheritance disputes. A friend took 18months to close on a building in Paris. The notaire had to track down family in the US, Uruguay, Australia, and the U.K. and ask them to approve the sale and split the sale accordingly.

drewg123 11y ago

The Bay Area is real estate insane. Prop 13 driven NIMBY-ism prevents any reasonable density housing from being built. After living there for 2 years and paying insane rent (more than $5K/mo on a 1200sqft house), I now telecommute for a Bay Area company, and live in central VA in a 3000sqft house in a good school district with a community pool, etc, which cost less than $400K. I telecommute most of the time, and I fly to CA 5-6 times per year (on the company's dime). My quality of life is so much better. I mostly miss the weather and the food, but not the traffic & the crowds and the prices. Not to mention that I'm using one of my 5 bedrooms as a private office, which is so, so, so much better than a low-walled cube in an open office environment.

ghaff 11y ago
While it's perfectly reasonable to criticize housing policies that restrict density, there are plenty of densely-built areas of the world that also have very high real estate prices (NY, London). Silicon Valley/SF has become this perceived mecca of the tech world both because of the concentration of certain types of tech companies and the other nice features of northern California. But the reality is that there's an upper limit to how many people can live in a given area--even if more housing and transportation were built.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Contrary to popular opinion, San Francisco is nowhere within the line of sight of an "upper limit to how many people can live in a given area".
  - ghaff 11y ago
    Housing prices would seem to disagree with you given that waving a magic wand to create 10s or 100s of thousands of housing units in SF (and transit, etc. infrastructure to support them) isn't going to happen in less than decades even if the residents wanted it. Obviously, the technology exists to remake SF into a much denser city. But that's a different city.

paulpauper 11y ago

I just bought my palo alto house http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/monopoly/images/4/4b/Monopoly1-_house.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20061224003237 http://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/monopoly/images/4/4b/Mon...

skyhatch1 11y ago

Sidenote: Eichler homes look very modern. Definitely better looking than your standard SV brick-and-wood-paneling matchboxes.

walshemj 11y ago

Compared to central London SV is cheaper and London does' not pay as well for techies. Id love to live in say fitzrovia or one of the lovely Georgian houses in the city near st pauls - but unless I win the lottery that's not going to happen.

bobosha 11y ago

What is the market like in the East (Oakland) or North Bay (Sausalito and north?

city41 11y ago

There is no doubt Silicon Valley real estate is expensive. But this article is extreme. For starters, Los Gatos is an upscale city nestled down at the bottom of SV. Bentleys and Ferraris are everywhere and the Tesla Model S is a downright common car. It's not representative. If you look around in San Jose, Campbell, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, etc, the prices come down and quality goes up. No, they don't approach the national average, not even close. But 1.5 million for a fixer upper is ridiculous.

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