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A fourth category: people who have lived here for a long time, and were able to buy property back before it became unaffordable. These are typically the manager

A fourth category: people who have lived here for a long time, and were able to buy property back before it became unaffordable. These are typically the managers or senior employees. It makes me wonder that as the young rockstars and H1B recipients age, where will they go? They certainly can't afford to buy a house. I imagine as time goes on, companies in the Bay Area will be awash with young junior talent but will struggle to attract more senior folks.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
> It makes me wonder that as the young rockstars and H1B recipients age, where will they go? They certainly can't afford to buy a house. I imagine as time goes on, companies in the Bay Area will be awash with young junior talent but will struggle to attract more senior folks. They leave for more affordable cities or head back home to be close to family when they decide to have kids. EDIT: May I offer up Tampa as a yet-to-get-expensive locale? I'm making SFBA wages in security, but bought a 4 bed 2.5 bath house with a pool on a quarter acre lot twenty minutes from my company's office for ~$200k (and I have fiber to the home for $45/month). The highest rated beach in the country is in Clearwater, ~30-45 minutes away, we have an amazing craft beer scene, lots of parks, beach/water recreation, very nice international airport (30 min away, $5/day (!!!) for parking), etc.
- pm90 9y ago
  This is exactly true. I've seen many senior engineers and H1B visa holders relocate from the Bay to Seattle/Austin/Colorado etc. I think its great that the major Tech companies are fanning out. Perhaps the other centers will become more or less like SV and ease the pressure somewhat. Or at least induce the landed SF residents to consider reasonable adjustments to accommodate the influx of people into the city.
- robbrit 9y ago
  Exactly. That is what I am doing after 3 years in the Bay Area.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  Which, btw, is not explicitly a bad thing as it means skills and talents will be spread across the country. It’s why Austin/Portland/etc grow in these areas.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    In fact, I’d go further and say it’s explicitly a good thing. While there are some advantages to concentration of industries, it’s unhealthy when taken to an extreme.
  - cat199 9y ago
    > It’s why Austin/Portland/etc grow in these areas. Realize you're being colloquial here, but I think it's a bit SF centric to credit SF with growth occurring in other areas of the country... In the case of ATX you have at least UTexas & Michael Dell not playing a small part in the tech growth there, for starters..
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      If you look at the migration patterns of people in NorCal it’s really not. Hell, just ask the locals - it’s a damn cliche in Austin or Portland that ppl moved in from NorCal to there. Also if you look at the businesses, networking, and where the VC money comes from, the SV connection is clear. Flight from the Bay Area has absolutely powered a lot of growth in those places. They were cool places in the first place of course, but that is why they were attractive to move to.
  - irrational 9y ago
    Didn't Portland (well, Hillsboro) have 5 huge Intel campuses, with all the tech talent that comes along with those, for a lot longer than Silicon Valley has been a thing?
    - abritinthebay 9y ago
      Portland has had two waves of growth - the first was due to Seattle’s tech scene. So yes they did - due to that one.
- santoriv 9y ago
  Yep! That's pretty much what happened with me. I worked in SF as a developer for about 4 years and then left. Back in the 00's and early 10's I was always paying less than $1000/month rent for a room in a house or apartment. It's a great place to live if you are young and don't have a lot of responsibilities or expenses. I would love to move back to the Bay Area but now I have a wife and a kid. I can buy a relatively affordable house here for about $150k (Northwest Arkansas) and be able to pay for private education for my child OR move back to Dublin/Pleasanton, spend an hour and a half on the BART every day, pay rent, and send her to public school. I make $70/hr doing remote work in my home. How much would I have to get paid in SF to get the same level of compensation? It's hard to justify moving back.
- Gargoyle 9y ago
  Tampa is one of the most underrated metro areas on the planet. Keep it that way. :-)
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    I hear you :) Its just so hard to see people throwing away so much money every month in SFBA without telling them other options that could make their quality of life so much better.
- alexanderstears 9y ago
  +1 I'm making 80% of the SFBA wages and I live in the rust belt. I had a 1 bedroom, 800 sq. ft apartment a block away from work for <$1000/mo - which is actually pretty high for the area. I can rent a house for ~1,200/mo if a 20 minute commute were fine. I've talked to a few recruiters in the Bay Area but the crime and cost of living are highly unfavorable. As far as I can tell, the only reason one would go out there is to do something state-of-the-art. I don't know why people would do anything else there unless they were already wealthy.
  - cnorgate 9y ago
    Where in the Rust belt? I agree, much more affordable. Interested in which city you chose, and what your experience has been...?
    - alexanderstears 9y ago
      I've jumped between a few cities actually. I'll call out the things I wish I would have known: * winter isn't that bad if you have a heated garage at work and at least an insulated garage (if unheated) at home * winter is that bad if you park outside * the downtowns of most major rust belt cities are shockingly cosmopolitan with brunch joints, breweries, and art galleries * the art scenes are shockingly good because the costs are pretty low * the airfare can be kind of expensive * the spring and fall are very, very nice * the cities are generally managed poorly but the first / second ring suburbs (esp. the wealthier / more conservative ones) are really, really nice places to live I think Paul Graham made this point, but it's good to live in areas that used to be rich. St. Paul MN, Columbus OH, and Erie PA fit the bill - the old mansions and old town neighborhoods can be really really nice and shockingly affordable if you're used to coast prices. There's less ethnic food generally available but there is pretty authentic stuff in the immigrant neighborhoods and the prices are authentic too. The biggest 'quality of life' thing is the ease of getting around the low storage costs. In California, it seemed like people could really only have one or two hobbies - in the midwest it's not uncommon for folks to more than half of these items: kayaks, bicycles, motorcycles, boats, fishing rods, tents, cameras, skis/snowboards, hammocks, golf clubs etc. Having winter makes it easier to get outdoors during the warm months, and if you have kids, the schools in the richer areas tend to be very good. The downsides are the roads can be pretty bad (esp. in Illinois and Michigan), winter can be brutal, the salt can make car ownership expensive, car ownership is critical unless you make it otherwise, and it can be tough to find intellectual engagement.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  Definitely true. Even other nominally 'expensive' cities can attract away Bay Area expats if they're less comprehensively pricy. NYC has the same problem as SF: it's hell to get in and out, and no one is building new units with easy access to the city center. (LA likewise.) But Boston, DC, Houston, and other very big cities are way more forgiving to people willing to commute 20-50 minutes in return for some decently-priced housing.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    And in the case of Boston many/most of the tech jobs still aren’t in the city itself although that’s shifted a fair bit. That’s a big difference between cities. In the Bay Area it’s hard to get away from very high prices. 45 to 60 minutes out of Boston in many directions and you’re into relatively reasonably priced housing.
    - Bartweiss 9y ago
      Yep, exactly. Boston's financial tech is deep downtown (Harborside), but other big-name firms like Athena have set up shop in the outskirts and even run shuttles out from the city center. I suppose part of the reason is the number of colleges out past the densest part of the city, and the rest is the difficulty of building urban offices compared to expanding out into the cheaper Cambridge/Somerville/Watertown market. It's definitely cheaper than SF now, but even more interesting is that it doesn't look to be set for a price spike; there's plenty of land to develop further, and for all the stupid housing laws there's not too much NIMBYism. (Now if only the existing land wasn't so horrific to build on...)
      - cvwright 9y ago
        You know things have gotten bad in CA when people are saying Boston has "not too much NIMBYism" in comparison.
- chrisco255 9y ago
  Florida has few tech jobs, sadly. I say that as a Florida native that recently moved to Texas.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
They'll go to cities like Denver and Austin and promptly get to work turning them into the only thing they know, SV.
- jsonne 9y ago
  Live in Denver. This is a little too real. There's a very real irony to the people that move here that "hate the bay" then act, vote, and do everything in their power to make it exactly like SF.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    Just some self awareness and critical thought would be nice. Maybe all those little ways of doing things that you think are backwards immoral or inefficient are part of why the place had qualities that drew you there in the first place.
  - thetrb 9y ago
    Most people don't move because they "hate the bay". They might hate living in the Bay Area because of housing, traffic, etc.
  - santaclaus 9y ago
    > then act, vote, and do everything in their power to make it exactly like SF I won't lie, during my time in Portland I def experienced some schadenfreude when California-native drivers complained about tickets for failing to yield to pedestrians.
    - dasil003 9y ago
      Clearly they are not from Berkeley.
  - r00fus 9y ago
    Interested in specifics here, if you're willing to expound.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
davidw 9y ago
> where will they go Other tech hubs. Portland, Seattle - even little Bend has plenty of people from California who are attracted by the (for them) low housing prices. They, in turn, put pressure on housing prices for 'ordinary' people here. California's housing crisis has repercussions all up and down the west coast.
- tkahnoski 9y ago
  This is a common complaint in Texas as well. Dallas and Austin growth has been crazy and California companies keep relocating. Great for those of us already with houses, terrible for those who don't and don't want to live in remote suburbia.
  - Yank33Doodle 9y ago
    Terrible for minorities also.
    - toasterlovin 9y ago
      How is it terrible for minorities?
      - alistairSH 9y ago
        In the US, they are (very) generally less affluent, so they are less able to absorb cost increases. This is particularly the case in areas that are rapidly gentrifying. It's a visible issue in some neighborhoods in DC. Blocks that were nearly 100% minority 15 years ago are predominantly young, white, and affluent. But, the corner church is still run by a minority pastor, with a largely minority congregation, all of whom want weekend parking on the street (as they now "commute" to church from the outer suburbs).
        rgbrenner 9y ago
        wouldn't it be more accurate to say poor people then? It's not just poor minorities who can't live in these areas.. poor whites, poor elderly, etc aren't living there either. And I'm sure Satya Nadella doesn't have a problem paying for a house anywhere, even though he's a minority.
cobookman 9y ago
I'm fairly early in my career at a company (< 30 years old). I'm currently able to afford a house in the bay area. Its not as crazy as it sounds. 80-10-10 mortgage on a 1mil home is only 100k down. And the monthly payments split by 2 people (aka a couple) is ~2k / person / month. That's 4k/month all in once you include the tax rebates.
- optimuspaul 9y ago
  100k down is probably out of reach for the vast majority of people.
  - s0rce 9y ago
    Seems reasonable, the vast majority of people in cities can live in more affordable higher density housing like apartments, condos and townhouses. Everyone won't be able to afford a house in dense cities, there simply isn't enough space so they become more expensive.
- danvasquez29 9y ago
  saving 50k while paying student loans off is often a very daunting task. I would imagine one would generally need to have a bay-area type salary to begin with to pull off such a thing in a timeframe less than a decade, which leads to a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Or find a way to make a decent engineering level salary while having little to no housing costs. This means having parents willing to support you who also live close enough to a job that pays well, and in your scenario having a significant other who is also in the same or similar enough situation; this is not extremely rare, but it's not the norm either.
- jorblumesea 9y ago
  Jesus, 2k / person a month is insane. This is what people are talking about. This is not acceptable or normal. I pay $900 / person a month for a large house in Seattle that's a 15 minute commute from downtown. Even with the bay's high salaries you're not doing very well. Throw in bills and other expenses and you're looking at ~40% of your monthly income, assuming a salary of 130k. That's ~50k per person, per year, in addition to 100k down. I'm good on that, thanks.
Blazespinnaker 9y ago
East, Pleasanton, Tracy, etc. sprawl
2845197541 9y ago
I used to live in Las Vegas, and before that SF. Downtown Las Vegas (not the strip) looks a lot like SF's bar rows. Once it became a tiny tech hub the usual culture was imported, grafted onto the surrounding Las Vegas milieu.
anonacct37 9y ago
I have friends who have moved there. They are married and their kids are young. Neither of them plan on staying there when it's time for their kids to go to school. They tell me about how guards have been placed at their local train stops to cut down on the number of suicide attempts by stressed out high school students who feel insane performance pressure.
StreamBright 9y ago
I have spent few years there but when it was time to have family just left. It is simple not feasible for multiple reasons to raise a child there.
- top256 9y ago
  what were the multiple reasons?
  - StreamBright 9y ago
    - lack of affordable housing with a garden where my kid can play - traffic - airport traffic is flying above residential areas, so even when you find something affordable you have to check - affordable creche for my kid - SFO is one of the worst airports to arrive from abroad
    - anarazel 9y ago
      > - SFO is one of the worst airports to arrive from abroad Interesting - I find it a lot better than a number of other large US airports. While the immigration queues aren't great they're better than JFK, EWR, IAD, LAX, DFW, ORD and much better than YYZ. And you usually can just hurry past a lot of the other flyers, to get at the front of the queue. And departing the security queues are less bad than a lot of other airports too. These days I've global entry, making this less painful...
      - StreamBright 9y ago
        Good to know, LAX was ok, no experience with the other airports. It might just suck to be a non-US citizen trying to enter the country.
    - malchow 9y ago
      "SFO is one of the worst airports to arrive from abroad" Explain?
      - 9y ago
TuringNYC 9y ago
>>> A fourth category: people who have lived here for a long time, and were able to buy property back before it became unaffordable. Very well said. So often, some (usually older) person will tell me, "well I know this [choose your civil servant profession] and they get by fine in SF on a 60k salary, so stop your whining." Yep, I'd get by fine with 60k and a TIME MACHINE.
- noonespecial 9y ago
  Yes, they don't understand that the house they bought for 80k in '86 Is now acting as a defacto million dollar savings account. It is quite easy to get along on 60k when you've already banked a megabuck.
  - pc86 9y ago
    To be fair whether your house is worth $100k or $10MM doesn't mean much unless you sell it, especially in SF where your taxes don't change with the increased value. Yes, you can spend more of your earned income if you plan on leaving as soon as you retire. But it doesn't mean $60k is easy to live on.
    - salviasloth 9y ago
      Isn't the largest contributor of COL recurring living expenses. I imagine 60k is probably what someone making a 100k has left over after paying their rent. Not to mention the peace of mind that comes from knowing that you can always sell off your home and move somewhere cheaper to live like a king.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
      I could live on $60k very easily if I didn't have a mortgage.
      - vasilipupkin 9y ago
        oh boy, how I envy you.
emerged 9y ago
God willing they'll do what I did -- move far away from the bay area and big cities in general. Working remotely, spreading the wealth outside of the few disproportionately wealthy cities. The technology to pull off decentralized organizations of remote employees has matured, and looks like it will become even better with the help of blockchains.
shmerl 9y ago
> They certainly can't afford to buy a house. It's not uncommon for people to rent. Buying just isn't affordable, if for example you prefer good public transportation. Forget about buying houses though - even rents are becoming crazy.
borkt 9y ago
There may be a 5th category, young families with dual income/no kids working in professions other than tech. My wife works in winemaking and I work as a Civil Engineer in the North Bay. Even with two career-type jobs we just barely were able to jump into the housing market in 2014. As house prices increase and housing stock goes down (especially after these fires) I think there will be a shortage of workers not just in the service industry but even in these professions. We had a senior level engineer move out here from Utah making ~150k a year move back within a year because he couldn't take living in a relatively small apartment and having his kids go to schools that were not up to the standard of where he moved from. Wine industry is similar, my wife gets a lot of interns from out of the country through an Ag exchange program. Between the lower pay and higher cost of living here, recent grads who are able to save up money working in Australia, NZ, ZA, or Argentina in the Southern Hemisphere harvest actually end up losing money just living up here for the Northern Hemisphere harvest. A lot of them are looking into ways to work for a more extended period of time in other countries as they are able to live much better in very similar regions climatically.
anonymous5133 9y ago
Assuming the companies don't increase wages even higher then they will just open up remote offices in Sacramento or surrounding areas.
cefthurston 9y ago
> where will they go? I'd change that to where _do_ they go. This trend is becoming more pronounced but has been around a while. As other posters note, they leave for other tech hubs, or other industries. Even if they could earn even more in the Bay Area they recognize that it's a long path to a quality of life that would be more accessible somewhere else. There's also a weariness folks in the industry get after a while. On the one hand, it's an amazing place to get 20 years of experience in 5. Put at some point the bubble grates on you.
BenElgar 9y ago
Speaking for at least some of the H1Bs and other non-immigrant visa holders, they'll leave—taking the savings from their Bay Area salary back to Europe, Asia, Central America or another place with reasonable living costs. I've always thought that that was one of the most compelling, pragmatic reasons to fast track the citizenship process.
kamaal 9y ago
>>It makes me wonder that as the young rockstars and H1B recipients age, where will they go? As somebody who worked in the US(Bay Area, CA) and then returned to India. The general idea among immigrants is to make it big via stocks and bonuses. Get a green card and move to somewhere in the east coast. For some people that takes forever. So you just get conditioned to stuff there and live forever. Plus most don't make it even to that phase, for most Indians and Chinese, green card never happens and they return to their countries. Those who survive do it due to a unique combination of work and luck, if you are that lucky already, and are ready to do the work- you will likely go further. Also whatever the situation is in the Bay Area, its always a huge upgrade from the home country you are coming.

toomuchtodo 9y ago

> It makes me wonder that as the young rockstars and H1B recipients age, where will they go? They certainly can't afford to buy a house. I imagine as time goes on, companies in the Bay Area will be awash with young junior talent but will struggle to attract more senior folks. They leave for more affordable cities or head back home to be close to family when they decide to have kids. EDIT: May I offer up Tampa as a yet-to-get-expensive locale? I'm making SFBA wages in security, but bought a 4 bed 2.5 bath house with a pool on a quarter acre lot twenty minutes from my company's office for ~$200k (and I have fiber to the home for $45/month). The highest rated beach in the country is in Clearwater, ~30-45 minutes away, we have an amazing craft beer scene, lots of parks, beach/water recreation, very nice international airport (30 min away, $5/day (!!!) for parking), etc.

pm90 9y ago
This is exactly true. I've seen many senior engineers and H1B visa holders relocate from the Bay to Seattle/Austin/Colorado etc. I think its great that the major Tech companies are fanning out. Perhaps the other centers will become more or less like SV and ease the pressure somewhat. Or at least induce the landed SF residents to consider reasonable adjustments to accommodate the influx of people into the city.
robbrit 9y ago
Exactly. That is what I am doing after 3 years in the Bay Area.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
abritinthebay 9y ago
Which, btw, is not explicitly a bad thing as it means skills and talents will be spread across the country. It’s why Austin/Portland/etc grow in these areas.
- ghaff 9y ago
  In fact, I’d go further and say it’s explicitly a good thing. While there are some advantages to concentration of industries, it’s unhealthy when taken to an extreme.
- cat199 9y ago
  > It’s why Austin/Portland/etc grow in these areas. Realize you're being colloquial here, but I think it's a bit SF centric to credit SF with growth occurring in other areas of the country... In the case of ATX you have at least UTexas & Michael Dell not playing a small part in the tech growth there, for starters..
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    If you look at the migration patterns of people in NorCal it’s really not. Hell, just ask the locals - it’s a damn cliche in Austin or Portland that ppl moved in from NorCal to there. Also if you look at the businesses, networking, and where the VC money comes from, the SV connection is clear. Flight from the Bay Area has absolutely powered a lot of growth in those places. They were cool places in the first place of course, but that is why they were attractive to move to.
- irrational 9y ago
  Didn't Portland (well, Hillsboro) have 5 huge Intel campuses, with all the tech talent that comes along with those, for a lot longer than Silicon Valley has been a thing?
  - abritinthebay 9y ago
    Portland has had two waves of growth - the first was due to Seattle’s tech scene. So yes they did - due to that one.
santoriv 9y ago
Yep! That's pretty much what happened with me. I worked in SF as a developer for about 4 years and then left. Back in the 00's and early 10's I was always paying less than $1000/month rent for a room in a house or apartment. It's a great place to live if you are young and don't have a lot of responsibilities or expenses. I would love to move back to the Bay Area but now I have a wife and a kid. I can buy a relatively affordable house here for about $150k (Northwest Arkansas) and be able to pay for private education for my child OR move back to Dublin/Pleasanton, spend an hour and a half on the BART every day, pay rent, and send her to public school. I make $70/hr doing remote work in my home. How much would I have to get paid in SF to get the same level of compensation? It's hard to justify moving back.
Gargoyle 9y ago
Tampa is one of the most underrated metro areas on the planet. Keep it that way. :-)
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  I hear you :) Its just so hard to see people throwing away so much money every month in SFBA without telling them other options that could make their quality of life so much better.
alexanderstears 9y ago
+1 I'm making 80% of the SFBA wages and I live in the rust belt. I had a 1 bedroom, 800 sq. ft apartment a block away from work for <$1000/mo - which is actually pretty high for the area. I can rent a house for ~1,200/mo if a 20 minute commute were fine. I've talked to a few recruiters in the Bay Area but the crime and cost of living are highly unfavorable. As far as I can tell, the only reason one would go out there is to do something state-of-the-art. I don't know why people would do anything else there unless they were already wealthy.
- cnorgate 9y ago
  Where in the Rust belt? I agree, much more affordable. Interested in which city you chose, and what your experience has been...?
  - alexanderstears 9y ago
    I've jumped between a few cities actually. I'll call out the things I wish I would have known: * winter isn't that bad if you have a heated garage at work and at least an insulated garage (if unheated) at home * winter is that bad if you park outside * the downtowns of most major rust belt cities are shockingly cosmopolitan with brunch joints, breweries, and art galleries * the art scenes are shockingly good because the costs are pretty low * the airfare can be kind of expensive * the spring and fall are very, very nice * the cities are generally managed poorly but the first / second ring suburbs (esp. the wealthier / more conservative ones) are really, really nice places to live I think Paul Graham made this point, but it's good to live in areas that used to be rich. St. Paul MN, Columbus OH, and Erie PA fit the bill - the old mansions and old town neighborhoods can be really really nice and shockingly affordable if you're used to coast prices. There's less ethnic food generally available but there is pretty authentic stuff in the immigrant neighborhoods and the prices are authentic too. The biggest 'quality of life' thing is the ease of getting around the low storage costs. In California, it seemed like people could really only have one or two hobbies - in the midwest it's not uncommon for folks to more than half of these items: kayaks, bicycles, motorcycles, boats, fishing rods, tents, cameras, skis/snowboards, hammocks, golf clubs etc. Having winter makes it easier to get outdoors during the warm months, and if you have kids, the schools in the richer areas tend to be very good. The downsides are the roads can be pretty bad (esp. in Illinois and Michigan), winter can be brutal, the salt can make car ownership expensive, car ownership is critical unless you make it otherwise, and it can be tough to find intellectual engagement.
Bartweiss 9y ago
Definitely true. Even other nominally 'expensive' cities can attract away Bay Area expats if they're less comprehensively pricy. NYC has the same problem as SF: it's hell to get in and out, and no one is building new units with easy access to the city center. (LA likewise.) But Boston, DC, Houston, and other very big cities are way more forgiving to people willing to commute 20-50 minutes in return for some decently-priced housing.
- ghaff 9y ago
  And in the case of Boston many/most of the tech jobs still aren’t in the city itself although that’s shifted a fair bit. That’s a big difference between cities. In the Bay Area it’s hard to get away from very high prices. 45 to 60 minutes out of Boston in many directions and you’re into relatively reasonably priced housing.
  - Bartweiss 9y ago
    Yep, exactly. Boston's financial tech is deep downtown (Harborside), but other big-name firms like Athena have set up shop in the outskirts and even run shuttles out from the city center. I suppose part of the reason is the number of colleges out past the densest part of the city, and the rest is the difficulty of building urban offices compared to expanding out into the cheaper Cambridge/Somerville/Watertown market. It's definitely cheaper than SF now, but even more interesting is that it doesn't look to be set for a price spike; there's plenty of land to develop further, and for all the stupid housing laws there's not too much NIMBYism. (Now if only the existing land wasn't so horrific to build on...)
    - cvwright 9y ago
      You know things have gotten bad in CA when people are saying Boston has "not too much NIMBYism" in comparison.
chrisco255 9y ago
Florida has few tech jobs, sadly. I say that as a Florida native that recently moved to Texas.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

They'll go to cities like Denver and Austin and promptly get to work turning them into the only thing they know, SV.

jsonne 9y ago
Live in Denver. This is a little too real. There's a very real irony to the people that move here that "hate the bay" then act, vote, and do everything in their power to make it exactly like SF.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  Just some self awareness and critical thought would be nice. Maybe all those little ways of doing things that you think are backwards immoral or inefficient are part of why the place had qualities that drew you there in the first place.
- thetrb 9y ago
  Most people don't move because they "hate the bay". They might hate living in the Bay Area because of housing, traffic, etc.
- santaclaus 9y ago
  > then act, vote, and do everything in their power to make it exactly like SF I won't lie, during my time in Portland I def experienced some schadenfreude when California-native drivers complained about tickets for failing to yield to pedestrians.
  - dasil003 9y ago
    Clearly they are not from Berkeley.
- r00fus 9y ago
  Interested in specifics here, if you're willing to expound.
- Bartweiss 9y ago

davidw 9y ago

> where will they go Other tech hubs. Portland, Seattle - even little Bend has plenty of people from California who are attracted by the (for them) low housing prices. They, in turn, put pressure on housing prices for 'ordinary' people here. California's housing crisis has repercussions all up and down the west coast.

tkahnoski 9y ago
This is a common complaint in Texas as well. Dallas and Austin growth has been crazy and California companies keep relocating. Great for those of us already with houses, terrible for those who don't and don't want to live in remote suburbia.
- Yank33Doodle 9y ago
  Terrible for minorities also.
  - toasterlovin 9y ago
    How is it terrible for minorities?
    - alistairSH 9y ago
      In the US, they are (very) generally less affluent, so they are less able to absorb cost increases. This is particularly the case in areas that are rapidly gentrifying. It's a visible issue in some neighborhoods in DC. Blocks that were nearly 100% minority 15 years ago are predominantly young, white, and affluent. But, the corner church is still run by a minority pastor, with a largely minority congregation, all of whom want weekend parking on the street (as they now "commute" to church from the outer suburbs).
      - rgbrenner 9y ago
        wouldn't it be more accurate to say poor people then? It's not just poor minorities who can't live in these areas.. poor whites, poor elderly, etc aren't living there either. And I'm sure Satya Nadella doesn't have a problem paying for a house anywhere, even though he's a minority.

cobookman 9y ago

I'm fairly early in my career at a company (< 30 years old). I'm currently able to afford a house in the bay area. Its not as crazy as it sounds. 80-10-10 mortgage on a 1mil home is only 100k down. And the monthly payments split by 2 people (aka a couple) is ~2k / person / month. That's 4k/month all in once you include the tax rebates.

optimuspaul 9y ago
100k down is probably out of reach for the vast majority of people.
- s0rce 9y ago
  Seems reasonable, the vast majority of people in cities can live in more affordable higher density housing like apartments, condos and townhouses. Everyone won't be able to afford a house in dense cities, there simply isn't enough space so they become more expensive.
danvasquez29 9y ago
saving 50k while paying student loans off is often a very daunting task. I would imagine one would generally need to have a bay-area type salary to begin with to pull off such a thing in a timeframe less than a decade, which leads to a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Or find a way to make a decent engineering level salary while having little to no housing costs. This means having parents willing to support you who also live close enough to a job that pays well, and in your scenario having a significant other who is also in the same or similar enough situation; this is not extremely rare, but it's not the norm either.
jorblumesea 9y ago
Jesus, 2k / person a month is insane. This is what people are talking about. This is not acceptable or normal. I pay $900 / person a month for a large house in Seattle that's a 15 minute commute from downtown. Even with the bay's high salaries you're not doing very well. Throw in bills and other expenses and you're looking at ~40% of your monthly income, assuming a salary of 130k. That's ~50k per person, per year, in addition to 100k down. I'm good on that, thanks.

Blazespinnaker 9y ago

East, Pleasanton, Tracy, etc. sprawl

2845197541 9y ago

I used to live in Las Vegas, and before that SF. Downtown Las Vegas (not the strip) looks a lot like SF's bar rows. Once it became a tiny tech hub the usual culture was imported, grafted onto the surrounding Las Vegas milieu.

anonacct37 9y ago

I have friends who have moved there. They are married and their kids are young. Neither of them plan on staying there when it's time for their kids to go to school. They tell me about how guards have been placed at their local train stops to cut down on the number of suicide attempts by stressed out high school students who feel insane performance pressure.

StreamBright 9y ago

I have spent few years there but when it was time to have family just left. It is simple not feasible for multiple reasons to raise a child there.

top256 9y ago
what were the multiple reasons?
- StreamBright 9y ago
  - lack of affordable housing with a garden where my kid can play - traffic - airport traffic is flying above residential areas, so even when you find something affordable you have to check - affordable creche for my kid - SFO is one of the worst airports to arrive from abroad
  - anarazel 9y ago
    > - SFO is one of the worst airports to arrive from abroad Interesting - I find it a lot better than a number of other large US airports. While the immigration queues aren't great they're better than JFK, EWR, IAD, LAX, DFW, ORD and much better than YYZ. And you usually can just hurry past a lot of the other flyers, to get at the front of the queue. And departing the security queues are less bad than a lot of other airports too. These days I've global entry, making this less painful...
    - StreamBright 9y ago
      Good to know, LAX was ok, no experience with the other airports. It might just suck to be a non-US citizen trying to enter the country.
  - malchow 9y ago
    "SFO is one of the worst airports to arrive from abroad" Explain?
    - 9y ago

TuringNYC 9y ago

>>> A fourth category: people who have lived here for a long time, and were able to buy property back before it became unaffordable. Very well said. So often, some (usually older) person will tell me, "well I know this [choose your civil servant profession] and they get by fine in SF on a 60k salary, so stop your whining." Yep, I'd get by fine with 60k and a TIME MACHINE.

noonespecial 9y ago
Yes, they don't understand that the house they bought for 80k in '86 Is now acting as a defacto million dollar savings account. It is quite easy to get along on 60k when you've already banked a megabuck.
- pc86 9y ago
  To be fair whether your house is worth $100k or $10MM doesn't mean much unless you sell it, especially in SF where your taxes don't change with the increased value. Yes, you can spend more of your earned income if you plan on leaving as soon as you retire. But it doesn't mean $60k is easy to live on.
  - salviasloth 9y ago
    Isn't the largest contributor of COL recurring living expenses. I imagine 60k is probably what someone making a 100k has left over after paying their rent. Not to mention the peace of mind that comes from knowing that you can always sell off your home and move somewhere cheaper to live like a king.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 9y ago
    I could live on $60k very easily if I didn't have a mortgage.
    - vasilipupkin 9y ago
      oh boy, how I envy you.

emerged 9y ago

God willing they'll do what I did -- move far away from the bay area and big cities in general. Working remotely, spreading the wealth outside of the few disproportionately wealthy cities. The technology to pull off decentralized organizations of remote employees has matured, and looks like it will become even better with the help of blockchains.

shmerl 9y ago

> They certainly can't afford to buy a house. It's not uncommon for people to rent. Buying just isn't affordable, if for example you prefer good public transportation. Forget about buying houses though - even rents are becoming crazy.

borkt 9y ago

There may be a 5th category, young families with dual income/no kids working in professions other than tech. My wife works in winemaking and I work as a Civil Engineer in the North Bay. Even with two career-type jobs we just barely were able to jump into the housing market in 2014. As house prices increase and housing stock goes down (especially after these fires) I think there will be a shortage of workers not just in the service industry but even in these professions. We had a senior level engineer move out here from Utah making ~150k a year move back within a year because he couldn't take living in a relatively small apartment and having his kids go to schools that were not up to the standard of where he moved from. Wine industry is similar, my wife gets a lot of interns from out of the country through an Ag exchange program. Between the lower pay and higher cost of living here, recent grads who are able to save up money working in Australia, NZ, ZA, or Argentina in the Southern Hemisphere harvest actually end up losing money just living up here for the Northern Hemisphere harvest. A lot of them are looking into ways to work for a more extended period of time in other countries as they are able to live much better in very similar regions climatically.

anonymous5133 9y ago

Assuming the companies don't increase wages even higher then they will just open up remote offices in Sacramento or surrounding areas.

cefthurston 9y ago

> where will they go? I'd change that to where _do_ they go. This trend is becoming more pronounced but has been around a while. As other posters note, they leave for other tech hubs, or other industries. Even if they could earn even more in the Bay Area they recognize that it's a long path to a quality of life that would be more accessible somewhere else. There's also a weariness folks in the industry get after a while. On the one hand, it's an amazing place to get 20 years of experience in 5. Put at some point the bubble grates on you.

BenElgar 9y ago

Speaking for at least some of the H1Bs and other non-immigrant visa holders, they'll leave—taking the savings from their Bay Area salary back to Europe, Asia, Central America or another place with reasonable living costs. I've always thought that that was one of the most compelling, pragmatic reasons to fast track the citizenship process.

kamaal 9y ago

>>It makes me wonder that as the young rockstars and H1B recipients age, where will they go? As somebody who worked in the US(Bay Area, CA) and then returned to India. The general idea among immigrants is to make it big via stocks and bonuses. Get a green card and move to somewhere in the east coast. For some people that takes forever. So you just get conditioned to stuff there and live forever. Plus most don't make it even to that phase, for most Indians and Chinese, green card never happens and they return to their countries. Those who survive do it due to a unique combination of work and luck, if you are that lucky already, and are ready to do the work- you will likely go further. Also whatever the situation is in the Bay Area, its always a huge upgrade from the home country you are coming.