12 ms·

I don't mean to be blunt, but if modest homes in your area are $1m, then you are in a VERY high-cost-of-living area and what you see here is not at all typical

I don't mean to be blunt, but if modest homes in your area are $1m, then you are in a VERY high-cost-of-living area and what you see here is not at all typical of the rest of the country. Where I live, a charming 1200sqft starter home in a blue collar neighborhood goes for $150-$200k.

vjk800 4y ago
Indeed. If your complaint is that you need to be a millionaire to get basic housing, it's because you live with other rich people. Since the overwhelming majority of humanity lives in houses with value far below 1M$, we can conclude that no-one really has to live in a place with only 1M$ houses, but you, for some reason, want to do so. Living in a posh neighbourhood is a luxury, like Ferrari (which, by the way, costs much less) or a golden watch. If you want rich people lifestyle, then you should be prepared to pay rich people money for it.
- ok_dad 4y ago
  > If your complaint is that you need to be a millionaire to get basic housing, it's because you live with other rich people. Hawaii would like to have a word with you, unless you suggest every single non-rich local would just have to move to the mainland. I believe the cheapest home I've seen available, where the neighbors aren't cooking meth, is probably in the $500-600k range and going up.
  - kyllo 4y ago
    That is also happening--lots of Hawaiians are being forced to move to the mainland because they can't afford housing in their home state. https://news.yahoo.com/native-hawaiians-flock-las-vegas-135728852.html https://news.yahoo.com/native-hawaiians-flock-las-vegas-1357...
- dinvlad 4y ago
  The sad reality of it is such expensive neighborhoods as we see on east and west coasts, don't actually _feel_ luxurious - there's barely enough infrastructure and convenience associated with them, compared to living far away. The standard of living just isn't as high as the price.
- olyjohn 4y ago
  Dude, this guy isn't talking about some posh high end part of Seattle. I just sold my "quaint 1200sqft starter house" in a remote South Seattle neighborhood for $675,000. It's 45+ minutes by transit to downtown. You know what I paid for that just 5 years earlier? $350,000. This is the part of town where the grocery store has security guards all over the place, and the bank has thick bulletproof glass between you and the teller, and the transit options such big time. If you want to live anywhere remotely near where the jobs are, every house is near $1m+ now. Conclude what you want, you're completely wrong and out of touch with current housing prices in a lot cities.
  - rootsudo 4y ago
    Going to the Safeway on Rainer is really on you. It does get dicey at night, but the day is okay. One reason I would never live in "South Seattle" it's a literal food desert. The WinCo being in Kent is it's only saving grace, but even the QFC a bit north of the Safeway on Rainer - yeah. The fun part is, all the good brands are routinely on sale/discounted heavily because the local population either does not like or can't afford it - e.g. cheeses. Always 20-40% discount on cheese. Not so common in north outside Seattle limits, or even along the border - but yeah to go back to point - "This is the part of town where the grocery store has security guards all over the place, and the bank has thick bulletproof glass between you and the teller, and the transit options such big time. If you want to live anywhere remotely near where the jobs are, every house is near $1m+ now." Is why the good houses cost 1,000,000+. Community and neighborhood alongside school district.
    - 8note 4y ago
      That's worth 350k though? The same as the whole house was 5 years ago?
  - angarg12 4y ago
    Funny reading some comments. I currently live in the northern part of Kirkland, in a very average suburb. This isn't rich people houses folks, these are middle (possibly lower middle) class houses. Most people here didn't pay 1M for their homes, they most likely paid a very affordable price many years ago. It's worth repeating that house prices increased an average of ~40% since the beginning of Covid. That should help to put prices on perspective.
- lumb63 4y ago
  “Rich” is highly relative. If someone lives in an area where everything costs on average twice as much as somewhere else, their money is effectively equivalent to half of what it would be somewhere else. The reality is they’re probably looking to afford a upper middle class lifestyle and make an upper middle class household income. They don’t sound “rich”.
  - AstralStorm 4y ago
    On the other hand, wealthy is not quite as relative. A person having a jet that costs $100 can do about as much with it as a person with one costing $100 billion. Same goes with housing, mostly, with some obvious wealth breakpoints. The confounder is location, as defined by time to travel and job availability. Quantization artifacts dominate. Having access to basics vs not has a much bigger effect than either quality or quantity. This is why having just one house is not an investment - you cannot afford to not have one unless you're so rich you could outright get multiples of them in some places, get there and live comfortably.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    But why does everything cost twice as much as somewhere else? Perhaps living there itself is the wealth. Access to high paying jobs, rubbing shoulders with other high achievers, the weather, the beach, the mountains, year round fruits and vegetables, better labor laws etc. As the saying goes “I would rather be dead in <X> than live in <Y>”.
- nvarsj 4y ago
  Not really true. Urban areas suffer from this everywhere due to chronic lack of building (due to government policies mostly driven by nimbyism and similar factors). As a result absolute dumps on the bad side of town go for ridiculous sums.
- fxleach 4y ago
  I don't think you are in touch with the reality of the housing market right now. That "posh" neighbourhood that you're referring to is most likely where people were born and raised and the first place you want to buy a home. I live in Etobicoke, Canada. My neighbour across the street growing up recalled a time they built the houses in the neighbourhood and it was previously farm fields. My parents bought their house, a cottage, and paid both off quickly. Property is now selling for almost $2 million. In 2 generations it went from field to affordable to completely unaffordable, and Etobicoke is far from any kind of "rich people lifestyle". Here's a fun game you can play: https://www.crackshackormansion.com/part2.html https://www.crackshackormansion.com/part2.html
  - ipaddr 4y ago
    I believe a plan exists to welcome 3 million more people through immigration over the next 10 years. That's going to push up prices.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  I live in rural BFE utah, (Cedar City, 45 minutes east of St George). Average home prices here have gone from 200k to 400k in 3 years. I'm a freelance dev, earn maybe 80k, but that fluctuates a lot, and 400k is a tough number to swallow when it was 200k a few years back, I keep hoping it'll go back to those days, but I doubt it will.
itsoktocry 4y ago
Yes, but unless you have a job that's open to fully remote work, you probably aren't going make 95-percentile household income in that city.
BurningFrog 4y ago
Well, the jobs that pay the high incomes are in the very high-cost-of-living areas. This is a huge problem for economic growth. If housing costs in the Bay Area were at US average, easily 10M more people could live here and get high paying jobs. But that path to a better life is very constrained.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  Alternatively, those jobs are only high paying because the red are very people who can fill them solely because of housing and far less so about skill. If 10M people could move to the Bay Area tomorrow, those jobs would pay a lot less. Also why people insisting on teleworking as a permanent option haven't really thought it through.
- jimmydddd 4y ago
  Back in the day, many of my friends and I lived a cool city life before we had kids. After kids we couldn't afford the city any more, and moved out to the boondocks with daily 3-4 hour round trip commutes that included cars, trains and subways. I know the problem is worse now, but city life being more expensive has always been a thing.
petsfed 4y ago
Great, if only there were adequate jobs in those places, so we could all own homes without needing $300K annual family income. The dissonance comes from the fact that a lot of hackernews readers make apparently high incomes, but the cost of living in their areas keeps them squarely working class. The best example I can give is in the Bay Area. I lucked out with $2850/month to rent a 1400 square foot house in San Leandro. Except that I worked in South San Francisco, and my commute was 45 minutes to 90 minutes each way, every day. I looked into it, even did the math with average commute times and Health and Human Services housing cost data, and found that if I wanted to cut 15 minutes off of that commute would cost me an extra $1000 a month, or I'd lose the yard and the other bedroom. With a kid, a stay-at-home spouse (a lot cheaper than child care given wages for my wife's field in the bay area) and a dog, that was just a non-starter. I knew people who drove in from Vacaville or Tracey, every day, just to keep the housing prices within their means. Prior to that experience, I honestly thought $140K a year was the best I could ever hope for. I was top 15% of individual wage earners in the country but I was considerably more stressed out than when I was making minimum wage at an office supply store in suburban Oregon.
- vel0city 4y ago
  Ever thought about maybe not living in California? You don't need to be on the West Coast to have a tech job.
  - avmich 4y ago
    This is the thought which comes around often. The problem is, for an intellectual, it's important to live in an environment rich with mental talent. Bay Area is the intellectual capital of the world, and while Einstein could maintain his patent clerkship and have famous physicists visit him in Bern (http://norvig.com/performance-review.html http://norvig.com/performance-review.html) for the lesser minds in another era settling on another place is a loss.
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      <s>Yes, because all universities in the US are in 5 places only. </s>
narrator 4y ago
[flagged]
- inconceivable 4y ago
  i'd say you're describing something that's pretty obvious on its face. what's not obvious is this dynamic has been going on for over a century and a half in california and the greater american west in general. the white native reaction was at first the chinese exclusion act, then japanese internment / asset seizure. the difference is this time the legacy white property owners are cashing out (cashing in?) in a huge way in both sales and rent as asians move in, so you can expect it to continue. it's white flight, but financially inverted. in other words.... asian gentrification.
  - bumby 4y ago
    It arguably dates back further, with Hispanics rather than Asians
- cronix 4y ago
  > The reason that I think the Bay Area and other tech hubs are so expensive is that asians with PHDs who fly in for their $500k/year machine learning tech job want to live around other asians. They do not want to live in rural Utah where you can get a nice house for $200k and remote work, but there are no asians around and there's probably more discrimination. You can probably safely extrapolate that to all races who move to a foreign country. They tend to want to live amongst themselves. Not necessarily for racist reasons, but because it's a bit more familiar and you have an easier time communicating with others speaking your dialect, as well as having similar customs and social norms.
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krferriter 4y ago
A lot of jobs are in high cost of living areas. The reason they're high cost of living is because there are jobs there, the demand to live there is high, and they haven't built nearly enough housing. Some bay area municipalities have essentially not added any housing in the last 50 years. They made it illegal, because incumbent property owners don't want more people to be allowed to live there. And it's not just the bay area. The populations of Cambridge and Boston have gone down since 1950, because a series of laws were passed that put tight restrictions on residential construction that reduced the allowed density and effectively made almost all of the existing housing stock illegal (but it was grandfathered in) and anything more dense than that, like even building a 5 story residential building in a lot zoned for 4 stories, when that lot is surrounded by 4 and 5 story buildings, is an expensive, long process of arguing with the zoning board and going through arbitrarily subjective design review processes.
- khazhoux 4y ago
  I would rather Google and Facebook and the other mega-hire companies would build up outside the bay area, rather than continuing to pack more people in.
  - dayvid 4y ago
    They are. Durham, NC; Pittsburgh, PH; Atlanta. They already have facilities or will grow. Remote will also have an impact. Housing prices will still grow with more tech jobs, though certain areas can absorb that impact better than others. The remote push from COVID also drew a lot of housing increases across the country.
  - jdminhbg 4y ago
    The Bay Area isn’t remotely “packed in.” It’s good that the state of California is starting to take steps to prevent its current inhabitants from pulling the ladder up behind them.
    - khazhoux 4y ago
      There’s not an acre of open land between San Jose and SF that doesn’t have a building structure on it. Compare with most other US states where land is plentiful and they could use the economic boost of additional residents.

vjk800 4y ago

Indeed. If your complaint is that you need to be a millionaire to get basic housing, it's because you live with other rich people. Since the overwhelming majority of humanity lives in houses with value far below 1M$, we can conclude that no-one really has to live in a place with only 1M$ houses, but you, for some reason, want to do so. Living in a posh neighbourhood is a luxury, like Ferrari (which, by the way, costs much less) or a golden watch. If you want rich people lifestyle, then you should be prepared to pay rich people money for it.

ok_dad 4y ago
> If your complaint is that you need to be a millionaire to get basic housing, it's because you live with other rich people. Hawaii would like to have a word with you, unless you suggest every single non-rich local would just have to move to the mainland. I believe the cheapest home I've seen available, where the neighbors aren't cooking meth, is probably in the $500-600k range and going up.
- kyllo 4y ago
  That is also happening--lots of Hawaiians are being forced to move to the mainland because they can't afford housing in their home state. https://news.yahoo.com/native-hawaiians-flock-las-vegas-135728852.html https://news.yahoo.com/native-hawaiians-flock-las-vegas-1357...
dinvlad 4y ago
The sad reality of it is such expensive neighborhoods as we see on east and west coasts, don't actually _feel_ luxurious - there's barely enough infrastructure and convenience associated with them, compared to living far away. The standard of living just isn't as high as the price.
olyjohn 4y ago
Dude, this guy isn't talking about some posh high end part of Seattle. I just sold my "quaint 1200sqft starter house" in a remote South Seattle neighborhood for $675,000. It's 45+ minutes by transit to downtown. You know what I paid for that just 5 years earlier? $350,000. This is the part of town where the grocery store has security guards all over the place, and the bank has thick bulletproof glass between you and the teller, and the transit options such big time. If you want to live anywhere remotely near where the jobs are, every house is near $1m+ now. Conclude what you want, you're completely wrong and out of touch with current housing prices in a lot cities.
- rootsudo 4y ago
  Going to the Safeway on Rainer is really on you. It does get dicey at night, but the day is okay. One reason I would never live in "South Seattle" it's a literal food desert. The WinCo being in Kent is it's only saving grace, but even the QFC a bit north of the Safeway on Rainer - yeah. The fun part is, all the good brands are routinely on sale/discounted heavily because the local population either does not like or can't afford it - e.g. cheeses. Always 20-40% discount on cheese. Not so common in north outside Seattle limits, or even along the border - but yeah to go back to point - "This is the part of town where the grocery store has security guards all over the place, and the bank has thick bulletproof glass between you and the teller, and the transit options such big time. If you want to live anywhere remotely near where the jobs are, every house is near $1m+ now." Is why the good houses cost 1,000,000+. Community and neighborhood alongside school district.
  - 8note 4y ago
    That's worth 350k though? The same as the whole house was 5 years ago?
- angarg12 4y ago
  Funny reading some comments. I currently live in the northern part of Kirkland, in a very average suburb. This isn't rich people houses folks, these are middle (possibly lower middle) class houses. Most people here didn't pay 1M for their homes, they most likely paid a very affordable price many years ago. It's worth repeating that house prices increased an average of ~40% since the beginning of Covid. That should help to put prices on perspective.
lumb63 4y ago
“Rich” is highly relative. If someone lives in an area where everything costs on average twice as much as somewhere else, their money is effectively equivalent to half of what it would be somewhere else. The reality is they’re probably looking to afford a upper middle class lifestyle and make an upper middle class household income. They don’t sound “rich”.
- AstralStorm 4y ago
  On the other hand, wealthy is not quite as relative. A person having a jet that costs $100 can do about as much with it as a person with one costing $100 billion. Same goes with housing, mostly, with some obvious wealth breakpoints. The confounder is location, as defined by time to travel and job availability. Quantization artifacts dominate. Having access to basics vs not has a much bigger effect than either quality or quantity. This is why having just one house is not an investment - you cannot afford to not have one unless you're so rich you could outright get multiples of them in some places, get there and live comfortably.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  But why does everything cost twice as much as somewhere else? Perhaps living there itself is the wealth. Access to high paying jobs, rubbing shoulders with other high achievers, the weather, the beach, the mountains, year round fruits and vegetables, better labor laws etc. As the saying goes “I would rather be dead in <X> than live in <Y>”.
nvarsj 4y ago
Not really true. Urban areas suffer from this everywhere due to chronic lack of building (due to government policies mostly driven by nimbyism and similar factors). As a result absolute dumps on the bad side of town go for ridiculous sums.
fxleach 4y ago
I don't think you are in touch with the reality of the housing market right now. That "posh" neighbourhood that you're referring to is most likely where people were born and raised and the first place you want to buy a home. I live in Etobicoke, Canada. My neighbour across the street growing up recalled a time they built the houses in the neighbourhood and it was previously farm fields. My parents bought their house, a cottage, and paid both off quickly. Property is now selling for almost $2 million. In 2 generations it went from field to affordable to completely unaffordable, and Etobicoke is far from any kind of "rich people lifestyle". Here's a fun game you can play: https://www.crackshackormansion.com/part2.html https://www.crackshackormansion.com/part2.html
- ipaddr 4y ago
  I believe a plan exists to welcome 3 million more people through immigration over the next 10 years. That's going to push up prices.
gremlinsinc 4y ago
I live in rural BFE utah, (Cedar City, 45 minutes east of St George). Average home prices here have gone from 200k to 400k in 3 years. I'm a freelance dev, earn maybe 80k, but that fluctuates a lot, and 400k is a tough number to swallow when it was 200k a few years back, I keep hoping it'll go back to those days, but I doubt it will.

itsoktocry 4y ago

Yes, but unless you have a job that's open to fully remote work, you probably aren't going make 95-percentile household income in that city.

BurningFrog 4y ago

Well, the jobs that pay the high incomes are in the very high-cost-of-living areas. This is a huge problem for economic growth. If housing costs in the Bay Area were at US average, easily 10M more people could live here and get high paying jobs. But that path to a better life is very constrained.

HWR_14 4y ago
Alternatively, those jobs are only high paying because the red are very people who can fill them solely because of housing and far less so about skill. If 10M people could move to the Bay Area tomorrow, those jobs would pay a lot less. Also why people insisting on teleworking as a permanent option haven't really thought it through.
jimmydddd 4y ago
Back in the day, many of my friends and I lived a cool city life before we had kids. After kids we couldn't afford the city any more, and moved out to the boondocks with daily 3-4 hour round trip commutes that included cars, trains and subways. I know the problem is worse now, but city life being more expensive has always been a thing.

petsfed 4y ago

Great, if only there were adequate jobs in those places, so we could all own homes without needing $300K annual family income. The dissonance comes from the fact that a lot of hackernews readers make apparently high incomes, but the cost of living in their areas keeps them squarely working class. The best example I can give is in the Bay Area. I lucked out with $2850/month to rent a 1400 square foot house in San Leandro. Except that I worked in South San Francisco, and my commute was 45 minutes to 90 minutes each way, every day. I looked into it, even did the math with average commute times and Health and Human Services housing cost data, and found that if I wanted to cut 15 minutes off of that commute would cost me an extra $1000 a month, or I'd lose the yard and the other bedroom. With a kid, a stay-at-home spouse (a lot cheaper than child care given wages for my wife's field in the bay area) and a dog, that was just a non-starter. I knew people who drove in from Vacaville or Tracey, every day, just to keep the housing prices within their means. Prior to that experience, I honestly thought $140K a year was the best I could ever hope for. I was top 15% of individual wage earners in the country but I was considerably more stressed out than when I was making minimum wage at an office supply store in suburban Oregon.

vel0city 4y ago
Ever thought about maybe not living in California? You don't need to be on the West Coast to have a tech job.
- avmich 4y ago
  This is the thought which comes around often. The problem is, for an intellectual, it's important to live in an environment rich with mental talent. Bay Area is the intellectual capital of the world, and while Einstein could maintain his patent clerkship and have famous physicists visit him in Bern (http://norvig.com/performance-review.html http://norvig.com/performance-review.html) for the lesser minds in another era settling on another place is a loss.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    <s>Yes, because all universities in the US are in 5 places only. </s>

narrator 4y ago

[flagged]

inconceivable 4y ago
i'd say you're describing something that's pretty obvious on its face. what's not obvious is this dynamic has been going on for over a century and a half in california and the greater american west in general. the white native reaction was at first the chinese exclusion act, then japanese internment / asset seizure. the difference is this time the legacy white property owners are cashing out (cashing in?) in a huge way in both sales and rent as asians move in, so you can expect it to continue. it's white flight, but financially inverted. in other words.... asian gentrification.
- bumby 4y ago
  It arguably dates back further, with Hispanics rather than Asians
cronix 4y ago
> The reason that I think the Bay Area and other tech hubs are so expensive is that asians with PHDs who fly in for their $500k/year machine learning tech job want to live around other asians. They do not want to live in rural Utah where you can get a nice house for $200k and remote work, but there are no asians around and there's probably more discrimination. You can probably safely extrapolate that to all races who move to a foreign country. They tend to want to live amongst themselves. Not necessarily for racist reasons, but because it's a bit more familiar and you have an easier time communicating with others speaking your dialect, as well as having similar customs and social norms.
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krferriter 4y ago

A lot of jobs are in high cost of living areas. The reason they're high cost of living is because there are jobs there, the demand to live there is high, and they haven't built nearly enough housing. Some bay area municipalities have essentially not added any housing in the last 50 years. They made it illegal, because incumbent property owners don't want more people to be allowed to live there. And it's not just the bay area. The populations of Cambridge and Boston have gone down since 1950, because a series of laws were passed that put tight restrictions on residential construction that reduced the allowed density and effectively made almost all of the existing housing stock illegal (but it was grandfathered in) and anything more dense than that, like even building a 5 story residential building in a lot zoned for 4 stories, when that lot is surrounded by 4 and 5 story buildings, is an expensive, long process of arguing with the zoning board and going through arbitrarily subjective design review processes.

khazhoux 4y ago
I would rather Google and Facebook and the other mega-hire companies would build up outside the bay area, rather than continuing to pack more people in.
- dayvid 4y ago
  They are. Durham, NC; Pittsburgh, PH; Atlanta. They already have facilities or will grow. Remote will also have an impact. Housing prices will still grow with more tech jobs, though certain areas can absorb that impact better than others. The remote push from COVID also drew a lot of housing increases across the country.
- jdminhbg 4y ago
  The Bay Area isn’t remotely “packed in.” It’s good that the state of California is starting to take steps to prevent its current inhabitants from pulling the ladder up behind them.
  - khazhoux 4y ago
    There’s not an acre of open land between San Jose and SF that doesn’t have a building structure on it. Compare with most other US states where land is plentiful and they could use the economic boost of additional residents.