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> We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). Whoa, that's almost double the estimated mortgage for the 5 bedroom houses w

> We live in a 680 sq ft one-bedroom apartment in an older development ($2200/mo). Whoa, that's almost double the estimated mortgage for the 5 bedroom houses with an acre of land my family has been looking at purchasing. I'll never move to the SF Bay Area. I encourage others not to, either. Get the companies there to open up to remote employees instead.

the_gastropod 10y ago
Yes. Urban areas are typically more expensive than rural areas. Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink.
- frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
  >Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living What do you mean?
  - nothrabannosir 10y ago
    Tax deductibility of mortgage interest is essentially renters subsidising homeowners. Some countries in Europe do it, and the EU is not happy with it. I'm personally grateful they're shoving the repeal of this tax deductibility down the member nations' throats (very very controversial measure). Homeowners have a stranglehold on politics because renters don't vote enough :(
    - ghaff 10y ago
      That may be true (although there are tax deductions for renting in some places). However, people own property in cities and rent outside of cities so I'm not sure how relevant it is to the subsidy comment. (Which presumably is some variant of the oil/cars/roads claim because cities can apparently somehow exist in isolation of everything surrounding them.)
      - nothrabannosir 10y ago
        This is a good point. In retrospect, I think you are right, and I didn't understand what op meant.
  - Retric 10y ago
    There is huge cash flow to rural areas. The problem is the same infrastructure is cheaper when shared among large groups. You need more road per person when people have 80 acres vs 0.5 acres. Further, things like farm subsides, rural health care, and even poverty programs are just huge money sinks. IMO, it's important to separate things that must be in rural areas vs. things that are more expensive because they are in rural areas.
    - bluGill 10y ago
      It is easy to pick on rural subsidies when you have enough food to eat. It is to everyone's advantage to ensure that there is more than enough food so that in the worst case years nobody starves to death. How best to ensure that is debatable. However don't knock the rural subsidies unless you have a better plan to ensure that even in drought years there is enough to eat.
      - Retric 10y ago
        Producing 2x the food we need is reasonable for some value of reasonable. But, we so far that point it's a bad joke. If you want an efficient solution, zero meat subsides. A physical food bank with ultimate year reserve. Minor edibale plant subsidy, and nothing else.
  - danans 10y ago
    Urban areas generate more tax revenue and receive less benefits per capita than suburban and rural areas. Here's an article about a study confirming this phenomenon in Indiana: http://www.ibj.com/articles/15690-study-urban-tax-money-subsidizes-rural-counties http://www.ibj.com/articles/15690-study-urban-tax-money-subs...
    - ghaff 10y ago
      I would note that's specifically Indiana tax distribution within the state and the outflow vs. inflow delta is relatively small (single digits). That said, it was well documented in the last election that red states receive net money from (typically more urban) blue states. However, it's rather a leap to go from there to cities subsidize. There are also a lot of costs with supporting cities and some of those rural costs are needed to support things like a nationwide transportation system.
    - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
      Sure because a lot of those areas are poor. Surely, we're not talking about making it even harder to live in a rural area?
  - the_gastropod 10y ago
    Many things necessary (or common) for living in suburban and rural places is subsidized through taxes, flat-rate costs of goods/services, and several other means. I'll give a few examples: * Internet, electricity, or cable costs significantly more to provide to people living in single family homes with distant neighbors than it does to provide to residents of a highrise apartment building. The consumers, however, pay the same price. The highrise apartment dwellers subsidize the cost of the rural homeowner. * The postal service. One postal worker in NYC can walk a few blocks, and deliver more mail than one postal worker in a small rural town who must drive 10s of miles to complete the same task. * Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit. * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction. * Government backed home loans and home loan interest tax deductions. Owning a home in large cities is often cost-prohibitive, so urban dwellers do not often receive these tax breaks that suburban and rural residents receive. * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident. (edit): I wanted to add a book recommendation for anyone interested in this stuff. It's called Happy City by Charles Montgomery. It speaks to the history of suburban America, and explains why suburban cities are the way they are.
    - humanrebar 10y ago
      It's worth pointing out that, in some of those points, even "urban" and "suburban" communities are net-negative in their infrastructure planning. Let's not lay into rural areas but not insolvent municipalities. More details about these issues at https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/.
    - Amezarak 10y ago
      > * Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit. There is in fact a federal fuel tax, in addition to state fuel taxes. There is no direct gasoline subsidy. Some people argue that the tax deductions and structures used by drilling companies are a kind of subsidy, but that's debatable and most of them make sense. > * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction. Rural roads are also less trafficked, meaning they last much longer and don't require multiple lanes. > * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident. In most rural areas, there is no water service. You get a well put in. The cost of water infrastructure is zero. The larger argument that infrastructure is cheaper when population density is higher is, of course, trivially true. The general maligning of rural living, much of which is baseless, just bothers me. The idea that rural living is unsustainable is just silly - we got along quite well before massive megacities ever existed; if anything is unsustainable, it's the total population. Fortunately, in general, and throughout history, cities are population sinks - human reproduction falls below replacement rate in cities.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink. Rural areas produce, raise, and educate workers that end up working in cities. So small towns (and small countries, for that matter) make big investments in their children and they just move away. Cities don't grow solely due to birth rates, so they are only "sustainable" from a limited perspective. The rural/urban split is a give-and-take relationship at least as complex as figuring out what an "equivalent Bay-area" salary would be.
  - akiselev 10y ago
    I'm not so sure that's true. A not insignificant portion of those people move back out to rural (not suburban) areas to raise families, escape urban burnout, or because of evolving personal tastes. When they do, they often bring significantly more wealth back than they "cost" growing up because of the opportunities they had in the city. It seems that the life and death of a small town depends far more on economic factors like competition from globalization, or environmental fluctuations (droughts, hurricanes, etc). In the US many, if not most, big cities would easily grow from immigration alone. Obviously cities depend on rural areas since it's far more economical to grow food on cheap plots of land than in steel hydroponic skyscrapers and few cities are built on top of vast fresh water reserves. However, not all rural areas are alike and the majority of the land in the US isnt fertile enough to sustain a competitive agricultural industry like in California, which produces far more of the nation's food and other natural resources than it's share of the population.
nilkn 10y ago
If you can get a 5 bedroom house on an acre of land for $1100/month where you're looking, then honestly real estate prices in pretty much any city are going to be a shock.
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
  I said almost double, not exactly double. It comes up to about $1200 - $1600 depending on the property here. I live in Florida, to boot. Real estate isn't exactly cheap here.
drstewart 10y ago
>Whoa, that's almost double the estimated mortgage for the 5 bedroom houses with an acre of land my family has been looking at purchasing. Wow, I found a 20 bedroom house in rural Somalia that's half that price. I'll never move to Florida and encourage others not to, either. Get the people there to move somewhere cheaper instead.
- dionidium 10y ago
  You're responding to a comment comparing San Francisco to other parts of the United States with all of the baseline luxuries that implies. Florida's GDP per capita is $38,497. In Somalia it's about $600. I understand that you're making a point about quality of life, but there are no serious comparisons to be made between Somalia and Florida and it says a lot about the (erroneous) views of those in the Bay Area that comments like this one are pretty common on HN.
Epenthesis 10y ago
I mean, this is the fundamental crux of these CoL discussions: How much does the quality of your residence matter to you? People try and mechanically translate equivalent lifestyles from place to place, but that's probably not the best way of analyzing things. Yes, if you choose to have a midwestern lifestyle in SF, it will be ludicrously expensive. However, you don't have to. If instead, you're able to replace the utility you'd get for a nice place with the activities/amenities SF has and a small town doesn't, the cost differential is not nearly as stark. Obviously, some people do value a nice home much more than anything they could get from living in SF, and that's fine. But that's not everyone, which is important to keep in mind when understanding why people move to the bay (or big cities in general).
- davidjnelson 10y ago
  It's not about size or fanciness. Urban areas and housing have significant air, water, and noise pollution.
  - Woofles 10y ago
    Right, and what the poster above you was saying is that people will sacrifice in that regard (or they simply don't care) to gain the benefits of living in an urban area like the culture, food, close proximity to bars and nightlife, etc. This isn't a black and white issue and it always disheartens me when people are so quick to trash the Bay Area.
    - tropo 10y ago
      So, being one of those suburban family people, I'm curious. What is this "night life" you speak of, and do you actually enjoy it? Is it more theoretically enjoyable than actually enjoyable? My understanding is probably pretty bad: You pay about a hundred dollars each for a baby sitter, a taxi, and admission to the venue. ($300 so far, will be $400) There is very loud music that prevents conversation and may damage your ears, and you don't get to skip songs that you hate. You can get drinks, like beer for $10 and a cup/glass/whatever of wine for $30. You are expected to dance, by yourself or rubbing on a stranger's crotch/rear, but not traditional. Maybe you just stand near the bar and drink. That's it; this is how city folk enjoy nightlife. On your way home you get mugged. I picture the awful experiences of high school dances, but very drunk and very expensive and you don't know anybody. It seems so empty. You're with people, yet in a certain way it seems lonely. I'm also not sure what you mean by "the culture". It seems that there would be numerous cultures. If you meet a random person, the chance that they share your culture would be pretty low. This cuts down on empathy and creates misunderstandings. If you just like to gawk at other cultures, you'd do better to occasionally visit less-diluted places like Kyoto or rural Japan. You can also find American culture in many rural parts of the country. We do have bars in suburbia, sadly, though I've never been to one. I don't think I'm missing anything...? We also have food, not even counting the road kill. :-) Head over to Kentucky to experience a fried-brain sandwich. I guess you're implying that you actually get your meals at those places that charge tens or even hundreds of dollars per plate and then still expect tips? This too strikes me as odd and difficult to understand. You have to travel there. Most of those places won't let you eat barefoot, topless, or bottomless. Your kid screams and everybody gives you the hate-glare, or some other kid screams and you give them the hate-glare. The food contains ingredients that you wouldn't use. Maybe your allergies get ignored or your credit card gets stolen. You can't just relax in your own place, safe and secure and private. You can't pace around while you eat.
logfromblammo 10y ago
And here I am, like a schmuck, paying almost 11.5% of my gross income in rent, on a 3 bedr/2.5 bath freestanding house. I think I'd have to earn more than $360k to get even close to that in SF/SV. About the only places a median-priced house is more affordable than where I am now, relative to median income, are Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, and selected places in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York. And at the bottom of that home affordability list? San Jose. Anaheim, SF, LA, and SD round out the California contingent of places where the median income-earner does not make enough to afford to buy a median-priced home. The only other places in the US that can claim that are Naples, White Plains, and Honolulu. Don't move more employees to California, people. Move more satellite offices to the Rust Belt. Before all those factories closed, the workers educated their kids for better jobs, but now there's f'kall for them to do. There's a broad talent pool there, not even close to depletion, just waiting for someone to rescue them from their restaurant websites, online insurance forms, and line-of-business CRUD apps. I would move back there in a second if there were more decent employers around.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  A nice big detached house just isn't my priority, it's not something I want. In fact, they personally sicken me, is much rather have a more cozy apartment with one or two bedrooms. Oh, and nice weather and a thriving culture scene would be nice (yes, I live in California). If companies followed your advice, they would lose way too many employees, it turns out many tech people at the high end value different things and know exactly what they are doing. We already know where the big house people are.
  - logfromblammo 10y ago
    I presume from your tone that you are childless. "Cozy" gets really old, really quick when you have kids. And when they get larger, you really don't want them living right on top of you. As someone living outside of California, I value 40 hour work weeks and my kids sleeping in a different room. Thriving culture is nice, but a decent public school district is better. SV companies may not be losing employees now (other than to rampant poaching and job-hopping), but they certainly aren't attracting certain classes of employees for their on-site work. They can bring in the young singles who may be willing to work 80 hours a week and sleep in a broom closet for $1000/month. They can get the geniuses that can command the high salary that it takes to secure the sort of housing situation that the entire remainder of the continent takes for granted. They can't get the parents from middle America that think many SV tech employers are literally insane. Everyone in the US, aside from those specific places I already mentioned, can currently afford to buy a 2 bedr/1 bath house or condo on an income that is considered just mediocre in their area. Those are not "big houses". Our version of living in a broom closet under the stairs is a 1 bedr/1 bath apartment or manufactured home at $500/month or less. (Our version of living in a van down by the river is still living in a van down by the river.) Even a five-bedroom house is not "big" if you have four kids in it, or plan to put that many in it. If companies followed my advice, they would reduce their recruitment, labor, and facilities costs during their expansions. They wouldn't lose anyone unless they also decided to shut down offices in California.

the_gastropod 10y ago

Yes. Urban areas are typically more expensive than rural areas. Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink.

frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
>Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living What do you mean?
- nothrabannosir 10y ago
  Tax deductibility of mortgage interest is essentially renters subsidising homeowners. Some countries in Europe do it, and the EU is not happy with it. I'm personally grateful they're shoving the repeal of this tax deductibility down the member nations' throats (very very controversial measure). Homeowners have a stranglehold on politics because renters don't vote enough :(
  - ghaff 10y ago
    That may be true (although there are tax deductions for renting in some places). However, people own property in cities and rent outside of cities so I'm not sure how relevant it is to the subsidy comment. (Which presumably is some variant of the oil/cars/roads claim because cities can apparently somehow exist in isolation of everything surrounding them.)
    - nothrabannosir 10y ago
      This is a good point. In retrospect, I think you are right, and I didn't understand what op meant.
- Retric 10y ago
  There is huge cash flow to rural areas. The problem is the same infrastructure is cheaper when shared among large groups. You need more road per person when people have 80 acres vs 0.5 acres. Further, things like farm subsides, rural health care, and even poverty programs are just huge money sinks. IMO, it's important to separate things that must be in rural areas vs. things that are more expensive because they are in rural areas.
  - bluGill 10y ago
    It is easy to pick on rural subsidies when you have enough food to eat. It is to everyone's advantage to ensure that there is more than enough food so that in the worst case years nobody starves to death. How best to ensure that is debatable. However don't knock the rural subsidies unless you have a better plan to ensure that even in drought years there is enough to eat.
    - Retric 10y ago
      Producing 2x the food we need is reasonable for some value of reasonable. But, we so far that point it's a bad joke. If you want an efficient solution, zero meat subsides. A physical food bank with ultimate year reserve. Minor edibale plant subsidy, and nothing else.
- danans 10y ago
  Urban areas generate more tax revenue and receive less benefits per capita than suburban and rural areas. Here's an article about a study confirming this phenomenon in Indiana: http://www.ibj.com/articles/15690-study-urban-tax-money-subsidizes-rural-counties http://www.ibj.com/articles/15690-study-urban-tax-money-subs...
  - ghaff 10y ago
    I would note that's specifically Indiana tax distribution within the state and the outflow vs. inflow delta is relatively small (single digits). That said, it was well documented in the last election that red states receive net money from (typically more urban) blue states. However, it's rather a leap to go from there to cities subsidize. There are also a lot of costs with supporting cities and some of those rural costs are needed to support things like a nationwide transportation system.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 10y ago
    Sure because a lot of those areas are poor. Surely, we're not talking about making it even harder to live in a rural area?
- the_gastropod 10y ago
  Many things necessary (or common) for living in suburban and rural places is subsidized through taxes, flat-rate costs of goods/services, and several other means. I'll give a few examples: * Internet, electricity, or cable costs significantly more to provide to people living in single family homes with distant neighbors than it does to provide to residents of a highrise apartment building. The consumers, however, pay the same price. The highrise apartment dwellers subsidize the cost of the rural homeowner. * The postal service. One postal worker in NYC can walk a few blocks, and deliver more mail than one postal worker in a small rural town who must drive 10s of miles to complete the same task. * Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit. * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction. * Government backed home loans and home loan interest tax deductions. Owning a home in large cities is often cost-prohibitive, so urban dwellers do not often receive these tax breaks that suburban and rural residents receive. * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident. (edit): I wanted to add a book recommendation for anyone interested in this stuff. It's called Happy City by Charles Montgomery. It speaks to the history of suburban America, and explains why suburban cities are the way they are.
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    It's worth pointing out that, in some of those points, even "urban" and "suburban" communities are net-negative in their infrastructure planning. Let's not lay into rural areas but not insolvent municipalities. More details about these issues at https://www.strongtowns.org/ https://www.strongtowns.org/.
  - Amezarak 10y ago
    > * Gas. The Federal government subsidizes gasoline. Suburban/Rural residents drive more and consume more gas than urban residents who are more likely to use public transit. There is in fact a federal fuel tax, in addition to state fuel taxes. There is no direct gasoline subsidy. Some people argue that the tax deductions and structures used by drilling companies are a kind of subsidy, but that's debatable and most of them make sense. > * Roads. The road surface per resident in rural locations is significantly higher than road surface per resident in urban areas. State and federal taxes contribute (not all, but some) of the funding for road construction. Rural roads are also less trafficked, meaning they last much longer and don't require multiple lanes. > * Water. Water sanitization, plumbing, etc. are all much more expensive due to, for example, the amount of pipe and construction labor required per resident. In most rural areas, there is no water service. You get a well put in. The cost of water infrastructure is zero. The larger argument that infrastructure is cheaper when population density is higher is, of course, trivially true. The general maligning of rural living, much of which is baseless, just bothers me. The idea that rural living is unsustainable is just silly - we got along quite well before massive megacities ever existed; if anything is unsustainable, it's the total population. Fortunately, in general, and throughout history, cities are population sinks - human reproduction falls below replacement rate in cities.
humanrebar 10y ago
> Maybe if urban residents stopped subsidizing unsustainable rural living, this price gap would shrink. Rural areas produce, raise, and educate workers that end up working in cities. So small towns (and small countries, for that matter) make big investments in their children and they just move away. Cities don't grow solely due to birth rates, so they are only "sustainable" from a limited perspective. The rural/urban split is a give-and-take relationship at least as complex as figuring out what an "equivalent Bay-area" salary would be.
- akiselev 10y ago
  I'm not so sure that's true. A not insignificant portion of those people move back out to rural (not suburban) areas to raise families, escape urban burnout, or because of evolving personal tastes. When they do, they often bring significantly more wealth back than they "cost" growing up because of the opportunities they had in the city. It seems that the life and death of a small town depends far more on economic factors like competition from globalization, or environmental fluctuations (droughts, hurricanes, etc). In the US many, if not most, big cities would easily grow from immigration alone. Obviously cities depend on rural areas since it's far more economical to grow food on cheap plots of land than in steel hydroponic skyscrapers and few cities are built on top of vast fresh water reserves. However, not all rural areas are alike and the majority of the land in the US isnt fertile enough to sustain a competitive agricultural industry like in California, which produces far more of the nation's food and other natural resources than it's share of the population.

nilkn 10y ago

If you can get a 5 bedroom house on an acre of land for $1100/month where you're looking, then honestly real estate prices in pretty much any city are going to be a shock.

CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
I said almost double, not exactly double. It comes up to about $1200 - $1600 depending on the property here. I live in Florida, to boot. Real estate isn't exactly cheap here.

drstewart 10y ago

>Whoa, that's almost double the estimated mortgage for the 5 bedroom houses with an acre of land my family has been looking at purchasing. Wow, I found a 20 bedroom house in rural Somalia that's half that price. I'll never move to Florida and encourage others not to, either. Get the people there to move somewhere cheaper instead.

dionidium 10y ago
You're responding to a comment comparing San Francisco to other parts of the United States with all of the baseline luxuries that implies. Florida's GDP per capita is $38,497. In Somalia it's about $600. I understand that you're making a point about quality of life, but there are no serious comparisons to be made between Somalia and Florida and it says a lot about the (erroneous) views of those in the Bay Area that comments like this one are pretty common on HN.

Epenthesis 10y ago

I mean, this is the fundamental crux of these CoL discussions: How much does the quality of your residence matter to you? People try and mechanically translate equivalent lifestyles from place to place, but that's probably not the best way of analyzing things. Yes, if you choose to have a midwestern lifestyle in SF, it will be ludicrously expensive. However, you don't have to. If instead, you're able to replace the utility you'd get for a nice place with the activities/amenities SF has and a small town doesn't, the cost differential is not nearly as stark. Obviously, some people do value a nice home much more than anything they could get from living in SF, and that's fine. But that's not everyone, which is important to keep in mind when understanding why people move to the bay (or big cities in general).

davidjnelson 10y ago
It's not about size or fanciness. Urban areas and housing have significant air, water, and noise pollution.
- Woofles 10y ago
  Right, and what the poster above you was saying is that people will sacrifice in that regard (or they simply don't care) to gain the benefits of living in an urban area like the culture, food, close proximity to bars and nightlife, etc. This isn't a black and white issue and it always disheartens me when people are so quick to trash the Bay Area.
  - tropo 10y ago
    So, being one of those suburban family people, I'm curious. What is this "night life" you speak of, and do you actually enjoy it? Is it more theoretically enjoyable than actually enjoyable? My understanding is probably pretty bad: You pay about a hundred dollars each for a baby sitter, a taxi, and admission to the venue. ($300 so far, will be $400) There is very loud music that prevents conversation and may damage your ears, and you don't get to skip songs that you hate. You can get drinks, like beer for $10 and a cup/glass/whatever of wine for $30. You are expected to dance, by yourself or rubbing on a stranger's crotch/rear, but not traditional. Maybe you just stand near the bar and drink. That's it; this is how city folk enjoy nightlife. On your way home you get mugged. I picture the awful experiences of high school dances, but very drunk and very expensive and you don't know anybody. It seems so empty. You're with people, yet in a certain way it seems lonely. I'm also not sure what you mean by "the culture". It seems that there would be numerous cultures. If you meet a random person, the chance that they share your culture would be pretty low. This cuts down on empathy and creates misunderstandings. If you just like to gawk at other cultures, you'd do better to occasionally visit less-diluted places like Kyoto or rural Japan. You can also find American culture in many rural parts of the country. We do have bars in suburbia, sadly, though I've never been to one. I don't think I'm missing anything...? We also have food, not even counting the road kill. :-) Head over to Kentucky to experience a fried-brain sandwich. I guess you're implying that you actually get your meals at those places that charge tens or even hundreds of dollars per plate and then still expect tips? This too strikes me as odd and difficult to understand. You have to travel there. Most of those places won't let you eat barefoot, topless, or bottomless. Your kid screams and everybody gives you the hate-glare, or some other kid screams and you give them the hate-glare. The food contains ingredients that you wouldn't use. Maybe your allergies get ignored or your credit card gets stolen. You can't just relax in your own place, safe and secure and private. You can't pace around while you eat.

logfromblammo 10y ago

And here I am, like a schmuck, paying almost 11.5% of my gross income in rent, on a 3 bedr/2.5 bath freestanding house. I think I'd have to earn more than $360k to get even close to that in SF/SV. About the only places a median-priced house is more affordable than where I am now, relative to median income, are Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, and selected places in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and upstate New York. And at the bottom of that home affordability list? San Jose. Anaheim, SF, LA, and SD round out the California contingent of places where the median income-earner does not make enough to afford to buy a median-priced home. The only other places in the US that can claim that are Naples, White Plains, and Honolulu. Don't move more employees to California, people. Move more satellite offices to the Rust Belt. Before all those factories closed, the workers educated their kids for better jobs, but now there's f'kall for them to do. There's a broad talent pool there, not even close to depletion, just waiting for someone to rescue them from their restaurant websites, online insurance forms, and line-of-business CRUD apps. I would move back there in a second if there were more decent employers around.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago
A nice big detached house just isn't my priority, it's not something I want. In fact, they personally sicken me, is much rather have a more cozy apartment with one or two bedrooms. Oh, and nice weather and a thriving culture scene would be nice (yes, I live in California). If companies followed your advice, they would lose way too many employees, it turns out many tech people at the high end value different things and know exactly what they are doing. We already know where the big house people are.
- logfromblammo 10y ago
  I presume from your tone that you are childless. "Cozy" gets really old, really quick when you have kids. And when they get larger, you really don't want them living right on top of you. As someone living outside of California, I value 40 hour work weeks and my kids sleeping in a different room. Thriving culture is nice, but a decent public school district is better. SV companies may not be losing employees now (other than to rampant poaching and job-hopping), but they certainly aren't attracting certain classes of employees for their on-site work. They can bring in the young singles who may be willing to work 80 hours a week and sleep in a broom closet for $1000/month. They can get the geniuses that can command the high salary that it takes to secure the sort of housing situation that the entire remainder of the continent takes for granted. They can't get the parents from middle America that think many SV tech employers are literally insane. Everyone in the US, aside from those specific places I already mentioned, can currently afford to buy a 2 bedr/1 bath house or condo on an income that is considered just mediocre in their area. Those are not "big houses". Our version of living in a broom closet under the stairs is a 1 bedr/1 bath apartment or manufactured home at $500/month or less. (Our version of living in a van down by the river is still living in a van down by the river.) Even a five-bedroom house is not "big" if you have four kids in it, or plan to put that many in it. If companies followed my advice, they would reduce their recruitment, labor, and facilities costs during their expansions. They wouldn't lose anyone unless they also decided to shut down offices in California.