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> 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 housin
by 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 agoThis 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 agoTerrible for minorities also.
- toasterlovin 9y agoHow is it terrible for minorities?
- alistairSH 9y agoIn 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 agowouldn'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.
- refurb 9y agoAgree. It's a poor person problem, not a minority problem. The effort some people will put into pushing identity politics is astounding.
- alistairSH 9y agoWhile you aren’t wrong about it being a poor problem, it would be extremely naive to believe past policies in the US haven’t contributed to some minority groups being more likely to be poor.
- toasterlovin 9y agoWouldn’t it also follow then that the same policies have contributed to other minority groups being more likely to be rich (thinking mostly of Indians and Asians)? And if that’s the case, then maybe looking at this through a racial lens is largely irrelevant?
- alistairSH 9y agoMost of the data I can find deals with black and white, occasionally Latino, and almost never mentions Asians. So, I don't know if your suggestion is true. Anyways, I agree that viewing poverty solely through a racial lens is not productive. But, race does play a part. At the very minimum, blacks are more likely to be poor than whites. They are more likely to experience downward economic mobility. And more likely to experience multi-generational poverty.
- alistairSH 9y agoDown voted for answering somebody else’s question. Gee thanks.
- humanrebar 9y agoI'm also wondering about this. Texas is a majority-minority state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Texas
- Nicholas_C 9y agoThere are definitely a ton of Californians here in Austin. It seems like every third person I meet is from SF/LA.
- 0x445442 9y agoYeah, I wish more would come to Phoenix and drive up our real estate prices more. I left California right before the last housing bubble burst to take advantage of the real estate arbitrage. I'd love to do it again.
- Yank33Doodle 9y agoThere are no hard rules, but very few of my non-white friends are OK with Phoenix or most other red states. AZ especially given the papers-please laws employed 'randomly' on brown people. Besides jobs, California offers open minds and much a much friendlier atmosphere for brown people.
- seangrogg 9y agoAnecdotally, as one of the "brown people" that is okay with Arizona, I've never been hit by "your papers, please". Ironically, I feel that California offers much less in terms of "open minds" - I am strongly liberal on social matters and advocated for homosexual marriage rights in AZ. Here I feel legitimately scared to mention that I have conservative views on business affairs without fear of potentially losing a job given how quickly people are to lambaste anyone they can for any opinion that doesn't conform to the acceptable limits of non-conformity. I'm just keeping my head down and doing my job until I can go back to a more sensible location.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dcow 9y agoThis sounds more like it, but most Bay/LA Area Californians would never believe it's possible to e.g. have civil liberties, be spiritual/religious, and be socially liberal all at the same time.
- beatpanda 9y agoCan you name one person who was fired for "conservative views on business affairs", please?
- lisper 9y ago> California's housing crisis has repercussions all up and down the west coast. You're looking at it the wrong way. It's not that the situation in California has wider repercussions, it's that there is a wider problem whose symptoms happen to manifest themselves earliest in California because it's one of the nicer places to live: there are simply too many people and not enough space for them all to live in the nice places.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoThat could not be further from the truth. There are lots of cheap places to live in the US that are still very nice, you just don't want to live there.
- deadmetheny 9y agoThose places have trade-offs, just like anywhere else. For example, the Midwest is a very nice place to live, but the winters here are absolutely awful and we also tend to have at least a month in the summer where it's also extremely hot. The job market for tech is decent, but it's not nearly as lucrative as the coastal markets, although the low cost of living does make up for that to a degree. These things matter a lot for some people, even if not so much for you. As much as a lot of non-SV folks, myself included, enjoy ragging on California, the nice weather and good job prospects make it a very desirable place to live, and as such makes people far more tolerant of the hilariously awful housing situation and political climate.
- CyberDildonics 9y agoI'm not sure what part of that contradicts what I said. The OP said there are too many people and no places to live. That's not the same as "the weather isn't as nice in the cheaper places, I'm painted in to a corner"
- lisper 9y ago> There are lots of cheap places to live in the US that are still very nice For example? > you just don't want to live there. Obviously, it's not just me. If lots of people wanted to live in these supposed cheap, nice places they'd all be moving there instead of norcal.
- latencyloser 9y agoSeattle is quickly becoming 'bay area'-ish from what I can tell. Housing is certainly becoming difficult at incredible rates. Here in Bellevue, a colleague of mine bought a house for ~400k, it's now worth well over ~500k only a year later. Many houses in that area also sell for at least 700k+ assuming you can even get an offer in before a cash buyer grabs it. Don't even get me started on the traffic. I run as many of my errands before 8am as possible. I personally know I will never be able to afford housing close to work based on how things are now. Currently I'm just saving my pennies and hoping I can move to another job with a lower cost of living somewhere else in a few years. Edit: For reference, I am just a just above 'entry level' engineer at Microsoft. I'm paid well, but not well enough for the housing around here.
- irrational 9y agoSame in Portland. A house down the street was purchased for 180k 2 years ago and recently sold for 520k. And that isn't some outlier. It seems all anyone wants to talk about is how quickly home prices have inflated.
- maxxxxx 9y agoIt's funny that the Fed is still dreaming about having low inflation while the number one expense most people will have experiences rampant inflation.
- guelo 9y agoHousing is not experiencing rampant inflation when you look at the nation as a whole. We have one currency so the Fed has to try to strike a balance that works for everyone.
- teemwerk 9y agoThat's an interesting thought, does the government have cpi-like numbers for different localities, or just the one number? Rents are included in cpi, but home prices aren't. Now, of course they are correlated, but that's certainly one of the arguments against using cpi. edit: answered my own question, the bureau of labor statistics has more numbers than you can shake a stick at.
- swendoog 9y agoIt starts with an S and ends with an O, it's likely where tech talent will go! Sacramento!
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoFixes problem: sky high housing Leaves problems: very high housing costs, overly legislated lives, high taxes, traffic, etc.
- itomato 9y agoD/FW, Austin
- kakarot 9y ago:( Facebook recently opened a datacenter in Fort Worth. [0] I heard something like 100k people are moving into the DFW metroplex a month? I haven't verified that but the real estate market is definitely crushing right now. It's only a matter of time. [0] https://code.facebook.com/posts/1014459531921764/facebook-in-fort-worth-our-newest-data-center/ https://code.facebook.com/posts/1014459531921764/facebook-in...
- thesmallestcat 9y agoCalifornia is large. Drawing people "from California" is about as precise as drawing people "from the East Coast and Appalachia" and says nothing about Bay Area flight, apart from the broader trend of expensive real estate in CA. I applaud your persistent Bend boosting, but there's practically no software industry there, and it seems to have given up any illusion of being a startup hub. There are no tech jobs. You're right about Bend attracting people with its low housing costs. It mostly attracts retirees.
- AndrewBissell 9y agoThe runup in real estate prices is fundamentally driven by the huge amounts of money printing by the Fed earlier this decade. The Bay Area has just been the canary in the coal mine on this because the strong job growth and self-injurious housing policies caused the price pressures to show up earlier than elsewhere, but it will become an undeniably nationwide phenomenon soon enough. High real estate prices & rents are the price we're all paying for keeping JPMorgan & Goldman Sachs solvent during the financial crisis.
- nerfhammer 9y agoWhy do you need this indirect theory when much simpler numbers like the disparity between increase of population and lack of increase in housing units are available?
- ubernostrum 9y agoBecause that theory allows the person promoting it to cling to an assertion that markets are perfect and never produce a bad result, and anything bad that does happen must be the fault of a government which got in the way of the perfection of the market.
- AndrewBissell 9y agoYes, if there are two things that have been driven solely by laissez faire market dynamics in this country, they're mortgage credit extension and the construction of new housing in the Bay Area.
- conanbatt 9y agoI know this is not reddit, but I smell the charcoal from over here.
- icebraining 9y agoThis is a lazy response. One can criticize a specific governmental policy without being an anarcho-capitalist.
- rdtsc 9y agoThe funny thing is these companies talk about digital connectivity moving to the cloud, editing files in the cloud, video conferencing in the cloud, make social networks in the cloud, buy things online without leaving your house, watch movies online etc. Everything is online, pretty, efficient, and convenient. Then they turn right around and tell all their employees to move to the area, then to get in their cars, buses, trains and start commuting to a physical location, in one of the busiest, most expensive city every single day. So that these workers can then sit on chairs in a building and do probably the easiest thing to do with a remote connection -- write code, documents, email, monitor servers.
- softawre 9y agoIf that's really such a waste then where are all the remote-only companies eating everybody's lunch? Has it not yet been long enough since remote working has reached some workable peak?
- rdtsc 9y ago> If that's really such a waste then where are all the remote-only companies eating everybody's lunch? Maybe they are eating it? Facebook, Amazon, and Google just have a very large buffet and it would take a while for them to notice. Heck, I am taking little bytes (pun intended) every day ;-) But seriously, I believe that could be the next revolution in the economy. We had the industrial revolution, the technological one (internet and such). Maybe remote work can be the next one. If it starts happening and large employers start to adopt it, it could change how cities and whole regions evolve.