7 ms·

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 pay

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.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      This is a hodgepodge of several different arguments. You should pick one and flesh it out. Do you mean to say: 1. That it's impossible to add 10,000 new housing units per year? That seems pretty unlikely. 2. If SF added 10,000 new housing units per year, housing prices wouldn't decline? Why not? 3. The politics of SF rule out the construction of 10,000 additional housing units per year? I agree, but think that needs to change; that's my whole argument. 4. That both politics and logistics would enable SF to add 10,000 additional new housing units per year, but that shouldn't happen because it would change the character of the city? That's an intellectually coherent argument, but one that I think a lot of people don't find compelling; I think if you're coming from a place of "save San Francisco's status as a postcard city", you should be up-front about that, rather than pretending that your argument is that fixing SF housing is somehow impossible. (I took the "10,000" notion from your comment).
      - ghaff 11y ago
        1.) Clearly not. Given the political will, it's technically possible (modulo earthquake safety) to make SF arbitrarily dense. 2.) Unclear. It's fairly well-established that building more roads leads to more traffic, for example. So building more housing--up to a point, of course--may just lead to that much greater a population. 3/4.) Politics (i.e. the preference of voters) do seem to rule out a mass increase in housing units and associated infrastructure. I don't have any opinion on what SF should or shouldn't do. I don't live there, don't particularly want to live there, and think the character of SF is a matter primarily for the existing residents.
        tptacek 11y ago
        I wasn't suggesting that I had four different rebuttals to your comment. I was saying that I didn't understand your comment because it seemed to hop from one argument to another, sometimes within the same sentence. (3) and (4) aren't the same argument. Argument (3) concedes that increasing housing supply in SF is a good thing, but that it can't happen because of political obstinacy. If you believe this, you're on the same page as I am, and we don't have much to debate. Argument (4) suggests instead that increasing the housing supply of SF is a bad thing, because it's more important to retain the character of San Francisco than it is to accommodate people who want to live there. There may be some argument (5) that I missed as well. We remain in a place where I still don't understand your objection to my argument that San Francisco should resolve its housing problems by drastically increasing the supply of housing units.
- arebop 11y ago
  London is about 2.7 times as dense as Silicon Valley [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/06/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-city-that-has-run-out-of-room/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/06/there...]. San Francisco has 18187/sq.mi while London has 14070 and Manhattan has 66940 [wikipedia]. Manhattan is a bit cheaper than San Francisco [http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/08/05/sfs_median_home_price_now_tops_manhattans_by_230k.php http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/08/05/sfs_median_home_pri...] so it seems population density does not explain the bay area's high prices.
  - WildUtah 11y ago
    Only supply and demand explains prices. Density is necessary to build more supply in the same area. Unless you have a plan to level mountains and use the rock to fill the bay, they aren't making any more land area. That's why density is the alternative to crazy impossible housing prices.
- marvin 11y ago
  London and New York are not good comparisons to San Francisco. Although SF is a global city which is well interconnected with the rest of the world, it doesn't come close to London and NY, which are the greatest metropolises in the world in terms of ease of access to just about any human capital or other trade good in the world. They are also many times larger than SF, both in total population and population density, + public transport is a lot better. It is unreasonable to expect that they would be cheaper in proportion to their density.
paulpauper 11y ago
there is a lot more at play here than NIMBY-ism http://greyenlightenment.com/why-bay-area-real-estate-keeps-going-up/ http://greyenlightenment.com/why-bay-area-real-estate-keeps-...
- drewg123 11y ago
  Economics is all about supply and demand. The article you quote lists several reasons for high demand (all of which I agree with). On the flipside, the prop-13 driven NIMBY-ism restricts the supply. Together they result in the perfect storm of an insane market where you have to submit a picture of your family along with an essay when you bid on a house. My theory is that prop 13 is the root of all evil. If it were repealed, and the old timers were forced to pay market rate taxes on their houses (and hence forced to sell out), it would change the voting demographics. Eventually, zoning rules and city plans would be relaxed to allow taller, higher density housing. This would gradually ease the supply side, and result in a larger supply, and hence lower prices. That's how it seems to work in many other markets.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    >the old timers were forced to pay market rate taxes on their houses (and hence forced to sell out) So, force people to move out of the neighborhoods where they've lived all their lives. I'm by no means a general gentrification opponent but arguing that people should be forced to move out of their homes so that wealthy techies can move in?
    - khaolak 11y ago
      Or stated differently, make everyone pay their fair share. The current system is "I got mine, screw you" for those fortunate enough to have bought property years ago. It's surprising to me that people can look at the millionaire SF property owners as being deserving of public subsidy in perpetuity. Where I live tax assessments are done regularly, tempered by a maximum 10% annual increase to prevent excessive shocks to the market. It seems like a reasonable compromise that puts all people on equal terms.
    - 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pacala 11y ago
Telecommuting is a sweet deal, congratulations! Realistically speaking, no amount of density housing would provide a 3000sqft house for 400k. Maybe a condo in a high rise, possibly skimping on "good school district". Density housing is not the path towards the 3000sqft SFH American dream, sorry.
soldergenie 11y ago
Did you have to take a salary cut when you moved to VA? (e.g.: so your salary would be more in line with VA norms than silicon valley norms?) That is the big problem with telecommuting for me - it seems hard to find companies which are willing to pay silicon valley level salaries to people living outside silicon valley, and if you take a pay cut, the savings in rent diminishes drastically. I suppose it is different when you start in silicon valley and move elsewhere while staying in the same company, rather than just starting out elsewhere. But that is still an concern since your salary gets reset if you ever change companies without moving back to silicon valley.
- tptacek 11y ago
  Those companies do exist, and they're getting more common.
- curun1r 11y ago
  Not the poster you're replying to, but I manage both remote employees and local devs. We do adjust salaries based on location, but the adjustment data we use seems skewed in favor of remote employees. As an example, an employee in Florida gets $140k which is only $30k less than we'd pay him if he were local. > But that is still an concern since your salary gets reset if you ever change companies without moving back to silicon valley. I'm not sure if this is true. If you're going to work for another SV company and remote, it's quite common for you to be able to quote a number higher than you got from your previous remote job and negotiate your way down to at or just above where you actually were in the previous job. The only time where I'd see you needing to adjust your salary down is if you took a job with a non-SV company in the interim. Just be aware that the salary data used by each company may be different. But it is probably helpful to come to SV/SF at some point in the beginning and transition to remote work initially because hiring out here is somewhat incestuous and having a well-known SV employer on your CV will help with getting past HR filters and ensure you get the necessary LI touches.
- drewg123 11y ago
  I changed jobs in order to return home from the Bay Area. With my old employer I would have taken a small pay cut, but that wasn't an option since my group did not have a presence in my home state, and the VP my group was under refused to consider telecommuters. I'm not certain what the pay cut would have been (since they were very secretive). There was a guerrilla salary survey which indicated that lower-cost areas did not have substantially lower salaries (maybe 20% less). With my current employer, I get paid the same regardless of where I live.

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.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    This is a hodgepodge of several different arguments. You should pick one and flesh it out. Do you mean to say: 1. That it's impossible to add 10,000 new housing units per year? That seems pretty unlikely. 2. If SF added 10,000 new housing units per year, housing prices wouldn't decline? Why not? 3. The politics of SF rule out the construction of 10,000 additional housing units per year? I agree, but think that needs to change; that's my whole argument. 4. That both politics and logistics would enable SF to add 10,000 additional new housing units per year, but that shouldn't happen because it would change the character of the city? That's an intellectually coherent argument, but one that I think a lot of people don't find compelling; I think if you're coming from a place of "save San Francisco's status as a postcard city", you should be up-front about that, rather than pretending that your argument is that fixing SF housing is somehow impossible. (I took the "10,000" notion from your comment).
    - ghaff 11y ago
      1.) Clearly not. Given the political will, it's technically possible (modulo earthquake safety) to make SF arbitrarily dense. 2.) Unclear. It's fairly well-established that building more roads leads to more traffic, for example. So building more housing--up to a point, of course--may just lead to that much greater a population. 3/4.) Politics (i.e. the preference of voters) do seem to rule out a mass increase in housing units and associated infrastructure. I don't have any opinion on what SF should or shouldn't do. I don't live there, don't particularly want to live there, and think the character of SF is a matter primarily for the existing residents.
      - tptacek 11y ago
        I wasn't suggesting that I had four different rebuttals to your comment. I was saying that I didn't understand your comment because it seemed to hop from one argument to another, sometimes within the same sentence. (3) and (4) aren't the same argument. Argument (3) concedes that increasing housing supply in SF is a good thing, but that it can't happen because of political obstinacy. If you believe this, you're on the same page as I am, and we don't have much to debate. Argument (4) suggests instead that increasing the housing supply of SF is a bad thing, because it's more important to retain the character of San Francisco than it is to accommodate people who want to live there. There may be some argument (5) that I missed as well. We remain in a place where I still don't understand your objection to my argument that San Francisco should resolve its housing problems by drastically increasing the supply of housing units.
arebop 11y ago
London is about 2.7 times as dense as Silicon Valley [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/06/there-is-no-such-thing-as-a-city-that-has-run-out-of-room/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/06/there...]. San Francisco has 18187/sq.mi while London has 14070 and Manhattan has 66940 [wikipedia]. Manhattan is a bit cheaper than San Francisco [http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/08/05/sfs_median_home_price_now_tops_manhattans_by_230k.php http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2015/08/05/sfs_median_home_pri...] so it seems population density does not explain the bay area's high prices.
- WildUtah 11y ago
  Only supply and demand explains prices. Density is necessary to build more supply in the same area. Unless you have a plan to level mountains and use the rock to fill the bay, they aren't making any more land area. That's why density is the alternative to crazy impossible housing prices.
marvin 11y ago
London and New York are not good comparisons to San Francisco. Although SF is a global city which is well interconnected with the rest of the world, it doesn't come close to London and NY, which are the greatest metropolises in the world in terms of ease of access to just about any human capital or other trade good in the world. They are also many times larger than SF, both in total population and population density, + public transport is a lot better. It is unreasonable to expect that they would be cheaper in proportion to their density.

paulpauper 11y ago

there is a lot more at play here than NIMBY-ism http://greyenlightenment.com/why-bay-area-real-estate-keeps-going-up/ http://greyenlightenment.com/why-bay-area-real-estate-keeps-...

drewg123 11y ago
Economics is all about supply and demand. The article you quote lists several reasons for high demand (all of which I agree with). On the flipside, the prop-13 driven NIMBY-ism restricts the supply. Together they result in the perfect storm of an insane market where you have to submit a picture of your family along with an essay when you bid on a house. My theory is that prop 13 is the root of all evil. If it were repealed, and the old timers were forced to pay market rate taxes on their houses (and hence forced to sell out), it would change the voting demographics. Eventually, zoning rules and city plans would be relaxed to allow taller, higher density housing. This would gradually ease the supply side, and result in a larger supply, and hence lower prices. That's how it seems to work in many other markets.
- ghaff 11y ago
  >the old timers were forced to pay market rate taxes on their houses (and hence forced to sell out) So, force people to move out of the neighborhoods where they've lived all their lives. I'm by no means a general gentrification opponent but arguing that people should be forced to move out of their homes so that wealthy techies can move in?
  - khaolak 11y ago
    Or stated differently, make everyone pay their fair share. The current system is "I got mine, screw you" for those fortunate enough to have bought property years ago. It's surprising to me that people can look at the millionaire SF property owners as being deserving of public subsidy in perpetuity. Where I live tax assessments are done regularly, tempered by a maximum 10% annual increase to prevent excessive shocks to the market. It seems like a reasonable compromise that puts all people on equal terms.
  - 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pacala 11y ago

Telecommuting is a sweet deal, congratulations! Realistically speaking, no amount of density housing would provide a 3000sqft house for 400k. Maybe a condo in a high rise, possibly skimping on "good school district". Density housing is not the path towards the 3000sqft SFH American dream, sorry.

soldergenie 11y ago

Did you have to take a salary cut when you moved to VA? (e.g.: so your salary would be more in line with VA norms than silicon valley norms?) That is the big problem with telecommuting for me - it seems hard to find companies which are willing to pay silicon valley level salaries to people living outside silicon valley, and if you take a pay cut, the savings in rent diminishes drastically. I suppose it is different when you start in silicon valley and move elsewhere while staying in the same company, rather than just starting out elsewhere. But that is still an concern since your salary gets reset if you ever change companies without moving back to silicon valley.

tptacek 11y ago
Those companies do exist, and they're getting more common.
curun1r 11y ago
Not the poster you're replying to, but I manage both remote employees and local devs. We do adjust salaries based on location, but the adjustment data we use seems skewed in favor of remote employees. As an example, an employee in Florida gets $140k which is only $30k less than we'd pay him if he were local. > But that is still an concern since your salary gets reset if you ever change companies without moving back to silicon valley. I'm not sure if this is true. If you're going to work for another SV company and remote, it's quite common for you to be able to quote a number higher than you got from your previous remote job and negotiate your way down to at or just above where you actually were in the previous job. The only time where I'd see you needing to adjust your salary down is if you took a job with a non-SV company in the interim. Just be aware that the salary data used by each company may be different. But it is probably helpful to come to SV/SF at some point in the beginning and transition to remote work initially because hiring out here is somewhat incestuous and having a well-known SV employer on your CV will help with getting past HR filters and ensure you get the necessary LI touches.
drewg123 11y ago
I changed jobs in order to return home from the Bay Area. With my old employer I would have taken a small pay cut, but that wasn't an option since my group did not have a presence in my home state, and the VP my group was under refused to consider telecommuters. I'm not certain what the pay cut would have been (since they were very secretive). There was a guerrilla salary survey which indicated that lower-cost areas did not have substantially lower salaries (maybe 20% less). With my current employer, I get paid the same regardless of where I live.