8 ms·

This doesn't mention a huge side effect of having so much of tech clustered in 3 regions - housing costs. It is so, so much cheaper to live in other places, and

This doesn't mention a huge side effect of having so much of tech clustered in 3 regions - housing costs. It is so, so much cheaper to live in other places, and at this point the bubble is such that most of my friends aren't aware of the difference in magnitude. Rent on a 1 bed in a cool part of Kansas City is $500 or so (actual rate my friend pays), my rent in Queens is 5 times that. It's such a huge difference that completely changes my long term planning, job choices, etc - it's crazy. SV has it even worse than we do, which is kind of unbelievable. I don't really see how anyone can bootstrap here, whereas it seems deeply doable in a low cost city, which is a critical part of the whole tech narrative.

pen2l 10y ago
I'd be so happy if some big entity (Google/Apple/YC) decided one day to relocate a big portion of their existence to a new place. That time when a city is just being born, when new things new restaurants new houses are being built is so special, it would be so different from dealing with the current line of rentiers waiting to pounce on inflated rent prices.
- DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
  I would think that once the relocation was public knowledge, well-funded property speculators would beat potential renters to the punch, leading to the same problem all over again. The first solution that comes to mind is to legislate that certain pieces of property must be the legal primary residence of the owner.
  - wbl 10y ago
    How about legalizing building? SF could easily accommodate far more people.
    - iamcasen 10y ago
      Even if it was easier to build in SF, the cost of investment is SO HUGE, that the only way to recoup it is to make it a luxury high-rise that does nothing for the non-wealthy residents of the city. Developers of new buildings absolutely do not want rents to drop, because otherwise there would be no reason to develop the area. The cost of land is extremely high.
      - refurb 10y ago
        This doesn't make sense. If I build a ton of luxury apartments and fill them with willing buyers, then won't those buyers be giving up their own housing? Overall, the total amount of housing increases which should drop prices.
        iamcasen 10y ago
        If it costs you 500,000,000 dollars to build a building, you need to charge a certain amount of rent for the investment to pan out. Hint: it won't be cheap.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    No, it wouldn't, for at least two big reasons. First: SFBA has geographical and political constraints that make housing particularly problematic. Other major US cities, and even college towns like Ann Arbor, don't have those same problems. Secondly, the Bay Area housing shortage is a phenomenon of hundreds of companies being located in the same area. No one company, even Google, could have that same impact on another metro area. You're only going to stand a chance of recreating the SFBA housing shortage (and it's a small chance) if the whole Bay Area market moves wholesale to a single new place.
    - pizzetta 10y ago
      The biggest constraint would seem to be political or specifically lack of willingness to update building codes in one of the largest cities by area in ca -SJ. Land is so very underutilized in San Jose. Its development on the surface looks more like an agglomeration of suburbs rather than a city proper. If they allowed for new code to allow density in the city of San Jose alone, it would go a good way to alleviating the housing shortage. SJ is over 3x the surface area of SF but has barely 20% more residents in that area. Imagine if they just doubled density --you'd allow for the absorption of an extra million residents. If they only upped the density by 50% they'd allow for over an extra 500,000 residents --that would alleviate the issue by itself. There is so much poorly built stock from the 60s and 70s that it would not only renew the city but it would become the undisputed powerhouse of the bay area.
      - 0x445442 10y ago
        Why not just encourage Facebook, Google et al. to move some divisions a little bit east to the San Joaquine Valley? I'm guessing the city governments of Stockton, Tracy, Fresno, Visalia would be amiable.
        pizzetta 10y ago
        For that matter they could move up to places with better weather like Eureka or Reading. However, given that companies prefer to stay in the local scene and there is underutilized land, it would seem like something worth looking into given the demand as well as availability, if not government willingness.
  - vostok 10y ago
    > The first solution that comes to mind is to legislate that certain pieces of property must be the legal primary residence of the owner. I am not sure I understand this solution. Are you saying that San Francisco's housing problems are not caused by demand that far outstrips supply? This proposal would just mean that prices stay high, but more people buy instead of rent.
  - yourapostasy 10y ago
    You're contending with some very intractable land use and land economics issues, and effectively addressing them will be very difficult without addressing some of these issues, like preferential access to capital over many other asset classes, preferential terms, preferential tax treatment, preferential infrastructure treatment, etc. This doesn't even start to get into the fact that out of all asset classes, property is an extremely common and popular asset class held and upholds a substantial portion of the wealth of most of the political class around the world. Legislating against property as wealth goes directly against their personal financial interests. Practical solutions that have a hope of actually taking effect within the next 2-3 years must be deployable without the aid of legislation. One way to mitigate speculators is to put up a credible threat that you (the company) wield the ability to unilaterally and virtually overnight make their speculation worthless. If you are able to structure a company town such that it is Google-level amenities and infrastructure attractive and physically entirely self-contained (even water sourcing, water treatment, energy generation, recycling/waste management, schools, parks, restaurants, and retail shops, etc., are part of the company town), then demonstrate the capability to move everything at a moment's notice within a month or two and leave behind just bare foundation ties, then after the first such move that bankrupts the speculators that call the company's bluff, future speculators will find it extraordinarily difficult to secure loans to speculate with. Lots and lots of details I'm leaving out, and this wouldn't be without its problems and challenges, but if you really want to slice the Gordian Knot of high property prices inflating employee compensation, then it will take an outside-the-box action of this magnitude to do so.
- maxsilver 10y ago
  > I'd be so happy if some big entity (Google/Apple/YC) decided one day to relocate a big portion of their existence to a new place. That's already been tried -- unfortunately, it just moves the problem to the new place. Housing costs rise sharply following wherever you move the company. It's the same exact problem, moved to a new place and hurting new groups of people. (See Portland, Seattle, Denver for examples)
  - deathanatos 10y ago
    No doubt bringing in tech workers will likely cause prices will rise, but will they rise to the current SF levels? If they don't, assuming that the pay also doesn't drop too much, then it might be worth it for some individuals, no? Glancing at Denver, downtown 1 bedroom ~700 sq ft apartments seem to run ~$1500/mo. That's ~$500/mo cheaper than way out in the suburbs of SF; and in my experience at least $1000/mo cheaper than SF itself. And the Denver area has houses for less than $1M, so home ownership might even be an option, whereas in the Bay it's been rendered all but a pipe dream.
    - maxsilver 10y ago
      > but will they rise to the current SF levels? Once you include salaries in the inclusion, it could be worse than SF. For example, Michigan's urban apartments are already often more expensive than Seattle (when measured as percent of median income needed to cover average urban rents). The sticker prices are vastly misleading because many folks get SF-level triple-figure salaries, and can pull those anywhere in the world. They can shop across entire housing markets. They see a $600k condo in say, Milwaukee, and think "wow, that would be so cheap (on my San Francisco salary)". But 99% of regular people can't do any of that, they have to afford local housing using local wages. And regular people still need housing just as much as developers do. A $600k house might as well cost 6-million dollars, because they are both equally impossible to ever afford for a regular person. > If they don't, assuming that the pay also doesn't drop too much, then it might be worth it for some individuals, no? For a few individuals, yes absolutely. When we promote this idea of "fix housing affordability by spreading the problem everywhere", we do alleviate a little bit of pain for technology workers and give them a shot of home ownership (which is great). But we do this at the expense of permanently hurting housing availability for a huge swath of other people -- something vitally important, but often gets overlooked when people talk about housing by hyper-focusing on just San Francisco's problem, and ignoring the crisis happening in all of the other cities nationwide.
- deleted 10y ago
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DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
If this accelerates the development and adoption of effective remote-work systems, perhaps it's a (longer-term) win?
- TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
  It might, unless those systems lead to increased outsourcing, which would hurt the US economy.
  - sologoub 10y ago
    That's possible now - you can absolutely have a fully remote developer workforce, but there are real human challenges that make outsourcing to another continent a lot harder. From language to cultural differences, these all erode end quality and add costs. If managed properly, it's possible to be very successful, but if management is lacking, results can be desasterous. Remote on-shore side-steps a lot of these differences, plus time zone is not as much of an issue. If the team speaks the same language well and shares basic norms, as well as has shared company culture understanding, management becomes less of an issue (less management and more autonomy is better in my experience).
NoCoastCoder 10y ago
Your friend either shares a one bedroom, does not live in a cool a place as he claims, or has the square footage of a cardboard box. KCMO is cheap but that rate is absurd.
- JBReefer 10y ago
  Swear to god - lives in a one bed in Hyde Park, perfectly fine, normal apartment. He's not in Westport/the River Market/the coolest neighborhood of the week, but Hyde Park is still pretty nice, and his place is definitely not a dump. No private parking, if that helps?
- dionidium 10y ago
  That seems a little bit under market to me, but absolutely not absurd. (I'm very familiar with the St. Louis rental market. My last one-bedroom in Tower Grove South (for those familiar with the area) was $625/mo. It was a decent apartment, too.)
davidf18 10y ago
The reason for the high cost of housing is "rent-seeking", a market inefficiency or market failure, which in this case is using zoning density restrictions to create artificial scarcity in housing. Scarcity causes higher prices. Eliminate the artificial scarcity and the housing costs will decrease. In general, a major way to fix the economy is to find and fix market inefficiencies which interfere with wealth creation. The rent-seeking benefits the wealthy landlords such as President Trump at the expense of renters and those who wish to purchase homes. Meanwhile it harms the economy (as market failures do) by taking income that should go towards construction of new housing and also to buy goods and services to give wealthy landowners far more income they would earn in a market without market failures. The fix is a simple one which is to remove these zoning law restrictions that benefit wealthy landowners. One solution which was implemented in Japan was passed in 2002 to remove zoning density restrictions from local authority making the federal Japanese government in control. The results: In 2014 140,000 housing units were built in Tokyo, vs. about 20,000 for NYC or about 90,000 for all of California. We need to lobby for a solution like that used in Japan. That will significantly stimulate the economy while helping to deal with a major cause of inequality. See writings of Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser or Economist and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford (book, "The Undercover Economist"). Also read about "Green Belts."
- xienze 10y ago
  > Eliminate the artificial scarcity and the housing costs will decrease. You sure about that? There's no shortage of people willing to move to SV or NYC to fill up all that extra housing. Funny how the same people that argue widening highways will have no effect because "more cars will just come along to fill it up" think additional housing supply won't similarly get filled up.
  - davidf18 10y ago
    Yes, I'm certain as are the expert economists as is the evidence presented in these articles. Tokyo's Affordable Housing Strategy: Build, Build, Build https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-affordable-housing-strategy-build-build-build/#3c442e7248d5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-af... What Liberals Don't Get About Affordable Housing: Filtering https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/02/19/what-liberals-dont-get-about-affordable-housing-filtering/#16f40bb22879 https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/02/19/what-libe...
winestock 10y ago
In terms of cash flow, the California tech industry is a means of moving money from venture capitalists to San Francisco landlords. That's right, for all the talk of disruption, innovation, and progressive thinking, the broad outlines of the economic structure of California IT is something that Hillaire Belloc or G.K. Chesterton would've recognized a hundred years ago. The posted article and the comments in this thread make allusions to President Trump, so allow me to further scare you with this scenario. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by ~2.7 million votes in the previous national election, but she won the state of California by 4 million votes. So the entirety of Clinton's lead came from California. Imagine how the Trump administration must think of "the Left Coast." Do you doubt that men like Bannon, Pence, and Sessions have plans for California? Or are trying to get ideas for plans? Put yourself in their shoes. "How can we divide and conquer California's most important power centers? Hmmm. The H-1B thing got us some votes. Yeah. What else can we do to set those nerds against each other? Hey, there's the fact that tech workers can barely afford rent even when they earn six figures. Let's see…" Don't forget. Donald Trump is/was a real estate developer. His grasp of issues such as affordable housing must be non-trivial. It's his bread & butter, after all. He made his pile in New York City real estate; not an easy venue. Think of what he could do to the Bay Area with the talent and knowledge earned from that front (plus the incidental help of a few executive orders). The housing situation in tech centers must be dealt with. If we nerds don't do it, then President Trump will do it for us. EDIT: Upon re-reading, I see that my tone may seem a little snarky. I apologize. I've given this problem a little thought and I needed to vent.
- e40 10y ago
  I've had similar thoughts (though not as well-fleshed out as yours) since the election. Conservatives hate liberals far more than we dislike them. I think there is revenge on their minds, for sure. I have no idea in what form it will take, but I'm pretty sure it's being plotted. Rents and housing prices in the Bay Area are insane and unless something is done, it will cause serious ripples in society and serious unintended consequences.
  - cvwright 10y ago
    > Conservatives hate liberals far more than we dislike them. You know, I've seen conservatives making the opposite claim a lot lately too. Maybe (hopefully) neither side really hates the other nearly as much as you both like to imagine. People need to chill the hell out.
shostack 10y ago
Let's not forget though that there are quite a few reasons why a lot of people would prefer to live in the Bay Area vs. Kansas City. Off the top of my head... - The weather - Stunning beaches, world-class skiing, hiking/camping, wine tasting, and more all within a couple hours drive - Incredibly liberal - A plethora of amazing food options representing pretty much every cuisine in existence - Easy transit to Asian countries and that half of the world - Strong concentration of tech jobs, giving employees leverage and reduced risk even in a down market Rent alone is not always a factor, and there are often many sound reasons for the differences in housing and demand.
deleted 10y ago
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pen2l 10y ago

I'd be so happy if some big entity (Google/Apple/YC) decided one day to relocate a big portion of their existence to a new place. That time when a city is just being born, when new things new restaurants new houses are being built is so special, it would be so different from dealing with the current line of rentiers waiting to pounce on inflated rent prices.

DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
I would think that once the relocation was public knowledge, well-funded property speculators would beat potential renters to the punch, leading to the same problem all over again. The first solution that comes to mind is to legislate that certain pieces of property must be the legal primary residence of the owner.
- wbl 10y ago
  How about legalizing building? SF could easily accommodate far more people.
  - iamcasen 10y ago
    Even if it was easier to build in SF, the cost of investment is SO HUGE, that the only way to recoup it is to make it a luxury high-rise that does nothing for the non-wealthy residents of the city. Developers of new buildings absolutely do not want rents to drop, because otherwise there would be no reason to develop the area. The cost of land is extremely high.
    - refurb 10y ago
      This doesn't make sense. If I build a ton of luxury apartments and fill them with willing buyers, then won't those buyers be giving up their own housing? Overall, the total amount of housing increases which should drop prices.
      - iamcasen 10y ago
        If it costs you 500,000,000 dollars to build a building, you need to charge a certain amount of rent for the investment to pan out. Hint: it won't be cheap.
- tptacek 10y ago
  No, it wouldn't, for at least two big reasons. First: SFBA has geographical and political constraints that make housing particularly problematic. Other major US cities, and even college towns like Ann Arbor, don't have those same problems. Secondly, the Bay Area housing shortage is a phenomenon of hundreds of companies being located in the same area. No one company, even Google, could have that same impact on another metro area. You're only going to stand a chance of recreating the SFBA housing shortage (and it's a small chance) if the whole Bay Area market moves wholesale to a single new place.
  - pizzetta 10y ago
    The biggest constraint would seem to be political or specifically lack of willingness to update building codes in one of the largest cities by area in ca -SJ. Land is so very underutilized in San Jose. Its development on the surface looks more like an agglomeration of suburbs rather than a city proper. If they allowed for new code to allow density in the city of San Jose alone, it would go a good way to alleviating the housing shortage. SJ is over 3x the surface area of SF but has barely 20% more residents in that area. Imagine if they just doubled density --you'd allow for the absorption of an extra million residents. If they only upped the density by 50% they'd allow for over an extra 500,000 residents --that would alleviate the issue by itself. There is so much poorly built stock from the 60s and 70s that it would not only renew the city but it would become the undisputed powerhouse of the bay area.
    - 0x445442 10y ago
      Why not just encourage Facebook, Google et al. to move some divisions a little bit east to the San Joaquine Valley? I'm guessing the city governments of Stockton, Tracy, Fresno, Visalia would be amiable.
      - pizzetta 10y ago
        For that matter they could move up to places with better weather like Eureka or Reading. However, given that companies prefer to stay in the local scene and there is underutilized land, it would seem like something worth looking into given the demand as well as availability, if not government willingness.
- vostok 10y ago
  > The first solution that comes to mind is to legislate that certain pieces of property must be the legal primary residence of the owner. I am not sure I understand this solution. Are you saying that San Francisco's housing problems are not caused by demand that far outstrips supply? This proposal would just mean that prices stay high, but more people buy instead of rent.
- yourapostasy 10y ago
  You're contending with some very intractable land use and land economics issues, and effectively addressing them will be very difficult without addressing some of these issues, like preferential access to capital over many other asset classes, preferential terms, preferential tax treatment, preferential infrastructure treatment, etc. This doesn't even start to get into the fact that out of all asset classes, property is an extremely common and popular asset class held and upholds a substantial portion of the wealth of most of the political class around the world. Legislating against property as wealth goes directly against their personal financial interests. Practical solutions that have a hope of actually taking effect within the next 2-3 years must be deployable without the aid of legislation. One way to mitigate speculators is to put up a credible threat that you (the company) wield the ability to unilaterally and virtually overnight make their speculation worthless. If you are able to structure a company town such that it is Google-level amenities and infrastructure attractive and physically entirely self-contained (even water sourcing, water treatment, energy generation, recycling/waste management, schools, parks, restaurants, and retail shops, etc., are part of the company town), then demonstrate the capability to move everything at a moment's notice within a month or two and leave behind just bare foundation ties, then after the first such move that bankrupts the speculators that call the company's bluff, future speculators will find it extraordinarily difficult to secure loans to speculate with. Lots and lots of details I'm leaving out, and this wouldn't be without its problems and challenges, but if you really want to slice the Gordian Knot of high property prices inflating employee compensation, then it will take an outside-the-box action of this magnitude to do so.
maxsilver 10y ago
> I'd be so happy if some big entity (Google/Apple/YC) decided one day to relocate a big portion of their existence to a new place. That's already been tried -- unfortunately, it just moves the problem to the new place. Housing costs rise sharply following wherever you move the company. It's the same exact problem, moved to a new place and hurting new groups of people. (See Portland, Seattle, Denver for examples)
- deathanatos 10y ago
  No doubt bringing in tech workers will likely cause prices will rise, but will they rise to the current SF levels? If they don't, assuming that the pay also doesn't drop too much, then it might be worth it for some individuals, no? Glancing at Denver, downtown 1 bedroom ~700 sq ft apartments seem to run ~$1500/mo. That's ~$500/mo cheaper than way out in the suburbs of SF; and in my experience at least $1000/mo cheaper than SF itself. And the Denver area has houses for less than $1M, so home ownership might even be an option, whereas in the Bay it's been rendered all but a pipe dream.
  - maxsilver 10y ago
    > but will they rise to the current SF levels? Once you include salaries in the inclusion, it could be worse than SF. For example, Michigan's urban apartments are already often more expensive than Seattle (when measured as percent of median income needed to cover average urban rents). The sticker prices are vastly misleading because many folks get SF-level triple-figure salaries, and can pull those anywhere in the world. They can shop across entire housing markets. They see a $600k condo in say, Milwaukee, and think "wow, that would be so cheap (on my San Francisco salary)". But 99% of regular people can't do any of that, they have to afford local housing using local wages. And regular people still need housing just as much as developers do. A $600k house might as well cost 6-million dollars, because they are both equally impossible to ever afford for a regular person. > If they don't, assuming that the pay also doesn't drop too much, then it might be worth it for some individuals, no? For a few individuals, yes absolutely. When we promote this idea of "fix housing affordability by spreading the problem everywhere", we do alleviate a little bit of pain for technology workers and give them a shot of home ownership (which is great). But we do this at the expense of permanently hurting housing availability for a huge swath of other people -- something vitally important, but often gets overlooked when people talk about housing by hyper-focusing on just San Francisco's problem, and ignoring the crisis happening in all of the other cities nationwide.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

DoofusOfDeath 10y ago

If this accelerates the development and adoption of effective remote-work systems, perhaps it's a (longer-term) win?

TheAdamAndChe 10y ago
It might, unless those systems lead to increased outsourcing, which would hurt the US economy.
- sologoub 10y ago
  That's possible now - you can absolutely have a fully remote developer workforce, but there are real human challenges that make outsourcing to another continent a lot harder. From language to cultural differences, these all erode end quality and add costs. If managed properly, it's possible to be very successful, but if management is lacking, results can be desasterous. Remote on-shore side-steps a lot of these differences, plus time zone is not as much of an issue. If the team speaks the same language well and shares basic norms, as well as has shared company culture understanding, management becomes less of an issue (less management and more autonomy is better in my experience).

NoCoastCoder 10y ago

Your friend either shares a one bedroom, does not live in a cool a place as he claims, or has the square footage of a cardboard box. KCMO is cheap but that rate is absurd.

JBReefer 10y ago
Swear to god - lives in a one bed in Hyde Park, perfectly fine, normal apartment. He's not in Westport/the River Market/the coolest neighborhood of the week, but Hyde Park is still pretty nice, and his place is definitely not a dump. No private parking, if that helps?
dionidium 10y ago
That seems a little bit under market to me, but absolutely not absurd. (I'm very familiar with the St. Louis rental market. My last one-bedroom in Tower Grove South (for those familiar with the area) was $625/mo. It was a decent apartment, too.)

davidf18 10y ago

The reason for the high cost of housing is "rent-seeking", a market inefficiency or market failure, which in this case is using zoning density restrictions to create artificial scarcity in housing. Scarcity causes higher prices. Eliminate the artificial scarcity and the housing costs will decrease. In general, a major way to fix the economy is to find and fix market inefficiencies which interfere with wealth creation. The rent-seeking benefits the wealthy landlords such as President Trump at the expense of renters and those who wish to purchase homes. Meanwhile it harms the economy (as market failures do) by taking income that should go towards construction of new housing and also to buy goods and services to give wealthy landowners far more income they would earn in a market without market failures. The fix is a simple one which is to remove these zoning law restrictions that benefit wealthy landowners. One solution which was implemented in Japan was passed in 2002 to remove zoning density restrictions from local authority making the federal Japanese government in control. The results: In 2014 140,000 housing units were built in Tokyo, vs. about 20,000 for NYC or about 90,000 for all of California. We need to lobby for a solution like that used in Japan. That will significantly stimulate the economy while helping to deal with a major cause of inequality. See writings of Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser or Economist and Financial Times columnist Tim Harford (book, "The Undercover Economist"). Also read about "Green Belts."

xienze 10y ago
> Eliminate the artificial scarcity and the housing costs will decrease. You sure about that? There's no shortage of people willing to move to SV or NYC to fill up all that extra housing. Funny how the same people that argue widening highways will have no effect because "more cars will just come along to fill it up" think additional housing supply won't similarly get filled up.
- davidf18 10y ago
  Yes, I'm certain as are the expert economists as is the evidence presented in these articles. Tokyo's Affordable Housing Strategy: Build, Build, Build https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-affordable-housing-strategy-build-build-build/#3c442e7248d5 https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/08/12/tokyos-af... What Liberals Don't Get About Affordable Housing: Filtering https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/02/19/what-liberals-dont-get-about-affordable-housing-filtering/#16f40bb22879 https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottbeyer/2016/02/19/what-libe...

winestock 10y ago

In terms of cash flow, the California tech industry is a means of moving money from venture capitalists to San Francisco landlords. That's right, for all the talk of disruption, innovation, and progressive thinking, the broad outlines of the economic structure of California IT is something that Hillaire Belloc or G.K. Chesterton would've recognized a hundred years ago. The posted article and the comments in this thread make allusions to President Trump, so allow me to further scare you with this scenario. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by ~2.7 million votes in the previous national election, but she won the state of California by 4 million votes. So the entirety of Clinton's lead came from California. Imagine how the Trump administration must think of "the Left Coast." Do you doubt that men like Bannon, Pence, and Sessions have plans for California? Or are trying to get ideas for plans? Put yourself in their shoes. "How can we divide and conquer California's most important power centers? Hmmm. The H-1B thing got us some votes. Yeah. What else can we do to set those nerds against each other? Hey, there's the fact that tech workers can barely afford rent even when they earn six figures. Let's see…" Don't forget. Donald Trump is/was a real estate developer. His grasp of issues such as affordable housing must be non-trivial. It's his bread & butter, after all. He made his pile in New York City real estate; not an easy venue. Think of what he could do to the Bay Area with the talent and knowledge earned from that front (plus the incidental help of a few executive orders). The housing situation in tech centers must be dealt with. If we nerds don't do it, then President Trump will do it for us. EDIT: Upon re-reading, I see that my tone may seem a little snarky. I apologize. I've given this problem a little thought and I needed to vent.

e40 10y ago
I've had similar thoughts (though not as well-fleshed out as yours) since the election. Conservatives hate liberals far more than we dislike them. I think there is revenge on their minds, for sure. I have no idea in what form it will take, but I'm pretty sure it's being plotted. Rents and housing prices in the Bay Area are insane and unless something is done, it will cause serious ripples in society and serious unintended consequences.
- cvwright 10y ago
  > Conservatives hate liberals far more than we dislike them. You know, I've seen conservatives making the opposite claim a lot lately too. Maybe (hopefully) neither side really hates the other nearly as much as you both like to imagine. People need to chill the hell out.

shostack 10y ago

Let's not forget though that there are quite a few reasons why a lot of people would prefer to live in the Bay Area vs. Kansas City. Off the top of my head... - The weather - Stunning beaches, world-class skiing, hiking/camping, wine tasting, and more all within a couple hours drive - Incredibly liberal - A plethora of amazing food options representing pretty much every cuisine in existence - Easy transit to Asian countries and that half of the world - Strong concentration of tech jobs, giving employees leverage and reduced risk even in a down market Rent alone is not always a factor, and there are often many sound reasons for the differences in housing and demand.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]