11 ms·
Can you imagine moving to the Bay Area in the 80s? To grow up when land was still cheap, before college competition was cutthroat and unaffordable, when relati
by supernova87a 6y ago
Can you imagine moving to the Bay Area in the 80s? To grow up when land was still cheap, before college competition was cutthroat and unaffordable, when relatively simple competence could get you a solid job and VC/PE firms weren't plundering and incentivizing the latest 30-second attention-span app to reach $1B?
It would be me living in Los Altos now, instead of the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family.
Oh well.
- JacobSuperslav 6y agothere's always an untapped place somewhere. in the 80s people were saying this about someplace else probably.
- warent 6y agoNew York city probably. That place has been huge and expensive for like 100 years now. The new untapped places to look at might be Austin TX and Boise ID
- echelon 6y agoAustin, definitely yes. Boise? No way. There's much more chatter about Miami.
- calvano915 6y agoBoise is booming but more focused toward retirees than young families. Miami and Austin seem to have a larger influx of all types.
- mxcrossb 6y agoIsn’t Miami literally sinking into the ocean (unlike Silicon Valley which is figuratively gone Atlantis) ?
- uS436aRs6BbC30c 6y agoMiami is sinking into the ocean, and I say this as someone who lives in a part of Florida that is sinking into the ocean at a much slower rate. On the other hand, isn’t California sliding into the ocean?
- WalterBright 6y agoI remember a lot of griping in the 70s about the boom in housing prices in Hawaii and California.
- linguae 6y agoI'm curious about the untapped potential of other parts of California. Now that the pandemic has made remote work a necessity, I'm wondering if regions of California outside Silicon Valley will benefit from remote tech workers having more options in terms of residences. For example, Sacramento is a very popular destination for ex-Bay Area residents, and it appears to be a good location for people working remotely for Silicon Valley companies who (post-pandemic) may need to make occasional trips to the office. Sacramento is still affordable, though it's becoming more expensive each year. Other areas that are intriguing to me include San Luis Obispo County and some of Southern California's exurbs like the Antelope Valley area and Lake Elsinore, where it's possible to buy a nice single-family house in a safe neighborhood for less than $500,000. California gets a bad rap in some circles due to its high cost of living and its taxes, but not everywhere in California has the Bay Area's high housing costs. There are many other areas of the state where people can still reasonably make a day trip to the Bay Area to enjoy its amenities while living in a place that is affordable on an average engineer's salary.
- beamatronic 6y agoThere are so many nice little towns in northern California. Any of them would be a fine place to live.
- gnicholas 6y agoI grew up in Sacramento and now live near Palo Alto. Sacramento has great public schools. I went to a public IB high school, whose science teams regularly placed in the top 3 in the US for Science Bowl/ Science Olympiad. In many parts of CA, the best schools are private (LA), or you have to pay millions of dollars for a house in the good districts (Palo Alto). In Sacramento, they have what is called 'open enrollment', which allows people to send their kids to school outside of their district, if there is a program there that isn't available locally. I had many classmates from across town, and one who lived halfway to Tahoe. I personally think that areas like Half Moon Bay and Scott's Valley will benefit from remote work. It's close enough to go into SV when needed, but farther than many people would have wanted to commute daily. And they're beautiful, with good weather. SLO will probably benefit also, and I imagine that schools will change in these areas, to become more like SV/LA. That's probably good for SF/LA families, though locals might not like the changes.
- mattlutze 6y agoGiven the time that's passed since then, you'd be one of the old rich person. Austin sounds like an up-and-coming Valley, as do a few other really gorgeous locations around the US. The trick is to pick one and settle in early.
- onethought 6y agoI think Shenzhen is the new valley of 1980. (Though to the GP you’re probably already priced out of the housing market there too )
- sgt 6y agoBut China is still rotten to its core. Eventually that'll backfire heavily on both Shenzhen and entrepreneurs trying their luck there.
- Ygg2 6y agoBeing rotten, never stopped anyone. The biggest problem is that money can get easily into China, but not so easily out of it.
- 411111111111111 6y agoThey love to export goods, so it's still easy enough. That will have complications in the future, but that's the next generations issue, not the person making the decision today that wants a nice bonus.
- elcomet 6y agoWhen they export, money gets in. But they don't import much , if you look at china's trade balance, it's at + 421 billion dollars [1] (money going in) while USA is at -616 B [2]. So it's in fact hard to get money out of china. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263632/trade-balance-of-china/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/263632/trade-balance-of-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/220041/total-value-of-us-trade-balance-since-2000/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/220041/total-value-of-us...
- WalterBright 6y ago> To grow up when land was still cheap People didn't think it was cheap at the time. The 70's had seen a boom in real estate prices, especially in California, due to the boomers moving into their home buying years. (And that was before Prop 13, which was a response to high home prices.) > the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family. Supply & demand economics won't deliver the result you want even if your wish for everyone over 60 to drop dead is fulfilled.
- barry-cotter 6y ago> Supply & demand economics won't deliver the result you want even if your wish for everyone over 60 to drop dead is fulfilled. Depends. If building housing were legal it would. Tokyo’s population has increased 50% over the last twenty years and property prices have been flat. If supply is allowed to rise to reach demand property prices don’t go up on a never ending spiral.
- jfk13 6y agoOn the other hand, if building were entirely unregulated, I'm not sure how long it would remain a desirable place to live.
- bryanrasmussen 6y agoI sometimes feel we're not living in the fully realized cyberpunk dystopia we were promised without a bunch of ramshackle buildings piled on top of each other and stolen data flowing through it all.
- barry-cotter 6y agoBuilding is very much regulated in Tokyo and throughout Japan. Just pointing out that unaffordable housing is a policy choice, not a law of nature.
- zepto 6y ago
- Taniwha 6y agoI moved to the Bay Area in '84, bought a house in ~89 - house prices had just run up to what people considered then as high levels - Real Estate then leveled out and stopped rising for half a decade - it's done that on and off for 40 years - it was never 'cheap' at the time. Prop 13 was already in place in '84 - the only way to get rid of it is to vote it out, it's long past time
- WalterBright 6y agoProp 13 was passed in 1978.
- ghaff 6y agoI had a couple companies interested in recruiting me to the Valley in the mid 90s or so. One of the reasons I decided not to pursue was cost of living relative to the not inexpensive Boston area. And the companies even acknowledged that was the case.
- phil21 6y agoYep, I also had a job offer in the bay area in either '99 or 00' (time flies!) I was seriously considering. After doing the math, I'd have had to make almost triple my flyover state job at the time so I didn't pull the trigger. That was probably an accidentally smart decision since months later the world imploded, and the company giving the offer went up in even more spectacular fashion that most.
- coldtea 6y ago>It would be me living in Los Altos now, instead of the old rich people who I curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family. Yeah, you would then be the "rich [person] who others curse for refusing to die or reform Prop 13 and free up some affordable place to raise a new family"
- bloqs 6y agoThats the joke
- skavi 6y agoIs that not their implication?
- machello13 6y agowhoosh
- twelvechairs 6y agoMaybe you should just be thankful for the benefits you have. Most of the world is not lucky enough to be capable of working in tech in the Bay area.
- anonymoushn 6y agoI don't think people should be happy to be fleeced by wealthy landowners, at least because if they were fleeced slightly less then they could give the difference to people living in poverty.
- ramphastidae 6y agoTelling someone to always accept and be thankful for injustice and exploitation because someone somewhere else is experiencing worse injustice and exploitation is not as noble as you may think.
- mikerg87 6y agoCalifornia in the early 80s wasn’t fun. We left SF in ‘83. Interest rates around 15%. Minimum wage around $2.50/hr. Gas rationing. you could only buy gas on certain days based on your license plate. There was an apartment above a garage in SF that sold for $200,000 that was fixup and the garage wasn’t part of the deal. My parents moved us to they east coast where they did finally purchase their own home.
- bcrosby95 6y agoMy parents almost had to leave in the late 70s. They moved to San Jose to work in tech. Bought a house in 72 or so. Their home value tripled in around 6 years and so did their property taxes.
- ghaff 6y agoWhich is why Prop 13 got passed. It may have bad features and bad side effects but IMO you really don't want to force people to sell their homes because their property taxes have rapidly gone up.
- dragonwriter 6y agoThe bad features and bad side effects are the point, avoiding forcing people on limited incomes out of their homes was a convenient leverage point that could be much better served by more targeted policy. Like, for one, if that was actually your policy goal, the policy would only apply to primary residences, not all real property.
- ghaff 6y agoTotally agree. I have no personal stake in it but Prop 13 certainly seems to be overly broad for its goal as I understand it of not forcing people out of their homes and neighborhood if they gentrify or otherwise shoot up in value. (Mind you, you can also make points about a long-time neighborhood restaurant that's forced to close because of taxes.)
- 6y ago
- kkylin 6y agoMy extended family moved to the Bay Area in the early to mid 80s (some a little earlier). No one ever thought it cheap, and what they said then about cost of living is not that different from what everyone says now.
- tasty_freeze 6y agoYou have a distorted picture. I moved to the bay area in 85, stayed 20 years, then left. If you moved there and were already well established, sure, real estate would have been more affordable then than now. But as a young engineer, things were still pretty expensive. My starting salary as a BSEE working for a minicomputer company was $30,000. Two weeks after arriving they had layoffs. They were nice to the new hires and said we'll keep you on for a bit, but you should start looking for new jobs, plus there is a 10% pay cut, so $27K/year ($65.3K in 2020 dollars). My shared apartment was off Maude and Mathilda was nothing special. It was 700 sq ft and was $750/month, which works out to $1800/month in 2020 dollars. Palo Alto, Los Altos Hills, and Atherton were all expensive addresses, even then.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoNow that is perspective I’d like to hear more about, considering how much my peers whine about how things would’ve been better if they moved to the bay area long ago and it’s all crappy nowadays. That’s not nearly as much change as I would’ve expected in inflation-adjusted dollars. I do wonder how typical your case is though. I would love to hear more data points from others in similar situations. With all the old rent controlled apartment in San Francisco, it certainly feels like people who moved here a decade or two ago are locked into to paying basically nothing by modern standards. I personally know a couple people who still live with their exes because their rent-controlled apartment is too good a deal to give up.
- dkarl 6y ago> when land was still cheap Twenty years from now, you will be able to tell the same story about wherever high-earning, highly educated young people settle in the meantime. All you have to do is predict and buy in.
- giantrobot 6y agoLand was cheap in the Santa Clara valley in the past. Huge portions were still orchards and farms that were selling out for new subdivisions. The issue is it's a valley. There's no more open land unless you move impractically far away. Growth in any area will raise prices but here the issue was compounded by a lack of extra land available after the cheap land was sold.
- tdiggity 6y agoMy parents purchased a house in Milpitas in the 80s. Inexpensive, yes, and they told me that Palo Alto was still considered expensive and out of reach for them at the time. My father worked at HP for 25 years. Solid middle class lifestyle, no complaints.
- DSingularity 6y agoWtf. Why do you curse old people for not dying? What is wrong with you? Do you feel the same about your parents? In 30 years when you are old, are you gonna move to Kansas and sell your property under market value to some younger people?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pkaye 6y agoDon't worry in 25 years the next generation will be cursing your generation for having all the advantages.
- JKCalhoun 6y agoHa ha. So many BBS's a local-call away.... I moved to the Bay Area in the 90's and Fry's was still a destination for the hardware hacker — selling wire-wrapping sockets and Playboy magazine. (I know - wut?) Disk Drive Depot, Computer Literacy Bookstore, Weirdstuff Warehouse, HSC.... I would do the electronics-surplus run on Saturday morning and see the same HAM's and "home brewers" picking through old alphanumeric LED displays, etc.... It's definitely a different place now. Sigh.
- smnrchrds 6y agoCombination of high income and low cost of living is ever elusive. We saw the dream get a glimmer of hope with remote work, only to be soon crushed by CoL adjustment announcements. You would be hard-pressed to find, anytime in history and anywhere on planet earth, a time and place where salaries are really high and CoL is really low.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago>You would be hard-pressed to find, anytime in history and anywhere on planet earth, a time and place where salaries are really high and CoL is really low. US, Germany and most of western europe in the post war boom till the late 80's. A factory assembly worker at VW could buy an apartment and feed his family on a single income back then. Fat chance of doing anything like that now.