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According to the "salary buying power" section, Silicon Valley's cost of living is 23% higher than that of NYC. Having lived in both, I'd be very surprised if t
by karzeem 15y ago
According to the "salary buying power" section, Silicon Valley's cost of living is 23% higher than that of NYC. Having lived in both, I'd be very surprised if that's not actually the wrong way around.
- Jd 15y agoNYC to most people includes all the bureaus and sometimes even Jersey City, etc. There are lots of more affordable options (e.g. Astoria) than downtown Manhattan, whereas such options do not exist in Silicon Valley.
- jamesteow 15y agoYep, I'd say most creatives live in Brooklyn due to affordability. Over here, would an equivalent be Oakland?
- hugh3 15y agoMeh, in San Francisco the starving creative types just live in squalor in the scummier parts of San Francisco.
- rdouble 15y agoIt depends on what you mean by "creatives." There's a difference between web designers, sculptors and painters. By and large, artists working with physical media have been moving to LA in droves for the past decade. Large studio spaces simply don't exist in the Bay Area at any price - suitable buildings are turned into condos or office space. The situation is similar for NYC artists. Even Jeff Dietch moved to LA, sort of a bellwether for art trends in the country. For the creatives who stay in SF, the other comment by hugh3 is correct. Most live where you'd expect: the mission, the tenderloin, 6th and Market, etc. Oakland is also popular but not as much as the people who choose to live there make it seem. Artists in SF aren't necessarily living in squalor (or at least any worse squalor than hipster web programmers). My neighbor made a good living painting cartoon robot monsters.
- jamesteow 15y agoCreatives also include illustrators, typographers, motionographers, musicians... they are mostly in Brooklyn. Physical media artists are still around, just further pushed to east in Bushwick and East Williamsburg, though I think quite a number have moved to Philly, Seattle, or as you mentioned, LA.
- _delirium 15y agoIf you're willing to include the kind of 60-minute commutes that New Yorkers living in outlying areas have, you can live in all sorts of cheap satellites of SV too, depending on where in the valley your job is. For example, if you work in Cupertino, you can live in Gilroy; for other parts of the valley, you can live in Livermore. There are also cheap parts of the southern East Bay that are pretty nearby. Even the central part of SV is quite cheap compared to NY for some living profiles. Buying a house is expensive, but renting one is relatively cheap. Going rate for a 2-bedroom house in a tract development in Santa Clara is maybe $1500/mo, while even out in Queens you're not going to find a house at $1500/mo. I'm not sure where they got the $2250/mo average apartment price from; that seems high. Perhaps it's skewed as a mean, by a few really high-end apartments? It'd be interesting to see how the median compares.
- Jd 15y agoSure, but that's a 60 minute driving commute vs. a 60-minute public transit commute, which makes a big difference to a lot of people (e.g. I can read a book on public transit). A lot of the statistics are questionable, most certainly including the average apartment cost.
- brianmwang 15y agoAnd that's not even factoring in the cost of car ownership, which is at least 4-5x what you pay for a monthly subway pass.
- iqster 15y agoCompletely agreed! I moved from the Bay area to NYC last year and was pretty shocked at how cheap the Bay area was (in relative terms).