5 ms·
1. Commute 2. Cost of living 3. Income potential Pick two. Like everyone else, everyone wants everything. There's no place on Earth that has a short commute,
by tabeth 9y ago
1. Commute
2. Cost of living
3. Income potential
Pick two. Like everyone else, everyone wants everything. There's no place on Earth that has a short commute, low cost of living and amazing income potential. Compromise is the name of the game. Public transportation can help, but even still you'll have a commute. The only solace there is that you can do other things while you commute.
It'll be very interesting if commutes become on average 1.5+ hours each way and employers count time spent working while commuting.
- akanet 9y agoI don't see any theoretical reason to only choose two, and reject it. We can choose three. Building more housing to lower the cost of living probably has very little to do with the bay area's tech income potential.
- tabeth 9y agoNew York, the only example I can think of, has plentiful housing and it's still more expensive (yes, all boroughs) than most of the country. Will more housing help? Sure. The question really is whether or not increasing housing supply will or will not increase demand more than the newly available supply. Why not just move to another area? If there's something uniquely good about the Bay Area perhaps it's that same thing that makes the incumbents not want to let more people in. It's kind of a geopolitical problem.
- mahyarm 9y agoLook at Seattle, it has built a lot more than SF in response to the demand and as a result, the price of housing has not gone up nearly as much. So yes, increasing supply does lower price.
- tabeth 9y agoHuh? Seattle's median home price has doubled from five years ago. [1] [1] http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-home-prices-hit-700000-for-first-time-after-doubling-in-five-years/ http://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/seattle-hom...
- pxeboot 9y agoHaven't prices in Seattle been going up at a faster rate then SF during the past 5 years?
- mahyarm 9y agohttp://www.seattletimes.com/business/will-seattle-really-become-the-next-san-francisco/ http://www.seattletimes.com/business/will-seattle-really-bec... https://goo.gl/images/xYPfR8 https://goo.gl/images/xYPfR8
- asabjorn 9y agoI do not think NYC is a great example as it is also supply constrained due to zoning. NYC is rezoning to allow more supply, unlike SF, due to its density friendly culture. As a bay area resident I look around and I see incredibly low density in SF, and most other bay area municipalities are extended suburbs. We do not have to build NYC density to meet supply as building Paris-style 5-6 story buildings on a subset of the properties would largely meet the demand.
- bpodgursky 9y agoPeople will crowd into an area until the misery and housing price equalize out the earning potential. Only way around it is to limit migration or to have a hard cap on rent (which of course causes its own chaos).
- akanet 9y agoThis is a very Malthusian attitude that hasn't really been borne out by the data. Many metro areas with similar earnings potential to SF do not experience nearly the level of crowding and rent gouging that we have here.
- tabeth 9y agoWhich ones? - Boston? Super expensive. - LA? Super expensive. - Seattle? Super expensive. - New York? Super expensive. Etc. You can just settle for a long commute to mitigate the problem, but then it comes back to pick 2.
- akanet 9y agoAll of those places are certainly expensive, but for instance in Seattle, 1BRs rent for a bit over half what they rent in SF. There's a ton of wiggle room in "expensive".
- bpodgursky 9y agoSeattle developer pay tops out at maybe 60-70% of bay area salary.
- vorotato 9y agoInstead join an up and coming city and have rent (and cost of living) be the least of your worries. I pay 1$ per square foot and have a 15 minute commute. How much would you need to earn to have that same commute (subtracting housing costs) in SF?
- macinjosh 9y agoI think remote work will become much more prevalent especially as our economy continues to move away from making physical things. i dont see employers counting time on a crowded train or bus full of distractions amytime soon. People who live outside the big city are much more likely to have a place in their home that can serve as a distraction free office. There are so many benefits to remote work for humanity I don't know why it isn't the norm already. No commuting means less CO2 emissions, saner people, more flexibility, arguably more productivity, and the opportunity for the company to hure from a much larger and diverse talent pool. Rmote work will soon be a competitive advantage.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoThis isn't a three-way tradeoff, though. Cost of living and income directly interact; where one is high, so is the other. Commute is independent of both in a strict sense, or in a better sense it's just one component of "cost of living".
- sien 9y agoHere is Robert Shiller on these issues: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/real-estate-prices-housing-inequality-by-robert-j--shiller-2017-07 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/real-estate-pri... and the demographia survey he refers to: http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf http://www.demographia.com/dhi.pdf You can get all three of these things. Become a lawyer or doctor and move to Cleveland, buy a house near your work and you have it. Or Washington DC or Berlin or Canberra. Restrictions on supply in some places as in the Bay Area is what is stopping all three being chosen. If more apartments were allowed then affordability would rise.