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anything within 45 minutes of your office in palo alto (where you are mandated to show up 5 days a week). this will get you a 1300sqft piece of shit built in 19
by 0x00000000 1y ago
anything within 45 minutes of your office in palo alto (where you are mandated to show up 5 days a week). this will get you a 1300sqft piece of shit built in 1964 with asbestos and lead paint and lead pipes and a cracked foundation (also some dipshit realtor had them paint all the original wood beams and paneling inside gloss white and replace the original wood and slate floors with grey vinyl) from some baby boomer forklift driver or mailman who paid 40k for it (you will pay 40k per year in property taxes for it), all for the privilege of “only” spending an hour of your life a day commuting so you can sit in your assigned area of your open concept office with noise canceling headphones on zoom meetings for 4 hours a day surrounded by other people on zoom meetings who also just expended a collective 5000 man hours and countless CO2 emissions to be there.
- dcow 1y agoI think you just illegally accessed my brain…
- sgerenser 1y agoAnd here I thought I had it bad when houses went from 400k to 800k for the same house pre- vs post-pandemic in Raleigh, NC.
- antonymoose 1y agoI remember being a young junior engineer, my manager had just bought a nice house in the good part of town (Charleston, SC) for about 350k. We had a good “be smart with your money and this could be you too in 5 years” conversation. I think by the time I was ready to buy that house had jumped to 600k valuation, these days it’s close to $1M in valuation. Only way to get a nice house for 300k now is to work remote in some podunk town for a big city salary.
- supportengineer 1y agoAll of this
- kstrauser 1y agoOr you could spend half that in the heart of SF and have a nice place in a decent neighborhood: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1265-Union-St-San-Francisco-CA-94109/2101508161_zpid/ https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1265-Union-St-San-Francis... It's not that it's cheap here, not by any measure, but it's not nearly so dire as y'all want to claim.
- nimos 1y agoThat is a tenancy in common 2 bedroom apartment not a house. Shared ownership of a 100+ year old building with "leased" parking 2 blocks away. Not exactly the home ownership dream.
- stouset 1y agoI own one unit in a 2-unit condo built in the 1910s in SF. It’s pretty fucking dreamy if you ask me.
- socalgal2 1y agodifferent strokes for different folks. I can't fucking stand hearing every breath of every neighbor in a 100yr old SF house and having to tiptoe at all times so as not to upset the other tenents
- stouset 1y agoI am almost never aware of my upstairs neighbors, through two pairs of them, including a dog and a baby.
- kstrauser 1y agoThen click around to find something more your liking. There are a lot of places for sale for under $3M that aren’t exactly a tent under a bridge.
- bluedevilzn 1y agoThat too for $1.5 million. 99% of Americans would picture a mansion when they think of a $1.5 million home.
- labster 1y agoYou should have bought in when Prop 13 went into effect, you’d only be paying $3k in property taxes today instead of $40k.
- gammarator 1y agoOr inherit the Prop 13 rate from your parents.
- mjcohen 1y agoI voted against prop 13, but now I like it living in a house in Westchester for 44 years.
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoThere’s some restrictions on this now though. It’s not as great as it was before.
- frankus 1y agoEvery now and then I dream about how much more money I'd be making if I lived in the Bay Area, but then I read something like this and realize that earning ~half as much working remotely from a cheaper (at least when I bought) city maybe isn't so bad.
- kstrauser 1y agoThey are greatly exaggerating. One tangible advantage to living somewhere expensive with higher salaries is that anything you can buy online is effectively that much cheaper. An iPhone costs the same in Arkansas as in San Jose, so you'd end up working many more hours to buy one in AR than in CA, on average. Yes, housing is more expensive. A lot more. Everything else is way cheaper.
- hollerith 1y agoServices are also more expensive because the person performing the service must pay the high rents, too.
- kstrauser 1y agoNot proportionally more, in my experience, and surely not for people moving here for the kinds of jobs we’re talking about.
- anonym29 1y agoThe trick is to rent cheap and live like a college student in SF/bay area while young, save aggressively, invest intelligently, then move somewhere comfortable but more affordable (CO's front range is lovely) for your 30s/40s.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoJust watch you don't get overly acclimated to the weather, or you'll end up with a single-digit number of cities in the world you find comfortable
- 1y ago
- thatfrenchguy 1y agoAre you the kind of person who refuses to go to the east bay or live next to middle class Asian Americans or Latinos? Because there are plenty of nice places for 3m 45 minutes from Palo Alto. Arguably you could get a house on the south side of the city and be 45 minutes from downtown PA by car or Caltrain.
- kortilla 1y agoPitching a 45 minute commute as as something as acceptable for $3 million is insane. It has nothing to do with class. That’s a shit life driving that every day.
- all2 1y agoI do a minimum of 2 hours a day. I think people in this particular conversation might be just a little divorced from reality.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- grego 1y agoI've spent all my working life in jobs with the rule that the commute should not be more than 30 minutes by bike. I'm now 62, and that's one life choice I've never regretted.
- kortilla 1y agoSo? My point is that’s a miserable life to put up with when you can afford a $3 million dollar home. 8% of your waking life going to and from work without getting paid for it is dumb
- all2 1y agoI honestly don't have a lot of options. I've got bills to pay.
- latentsea 1y agoAnd those who live in Silicon Valley are the supposed winners. It just doesn't stack up. This world is cooked. The steak used to be medium rare once upon a time, but now it's pure charcoal.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ashdksnndck 1y agoRedwood City is 20 mins from Palo Alto and has a lot of houses for $1-1.5M. $3M means you are paying extra for something optional. It’s not the minimum requirement. Lots of people are paying millions extra just to live up winding roads on a hill, where the commute is longer, and you need a geotechnical engineer to design your patio.
- 0x00000000 1y agoit’s more like 30-50 min with traffic
- ashdksnndck 1y ago30 mins - possible with traffic, especially to a far corner of Palo Alto. 50 mins - what on earth? Take the train. Even a bicycle would be faster.
- dfadsadsf 1y agoRedwood City has terrible schools (relatively) and many people consider excellent schools for their kids as hard requirement.
- ashdksnndck 1y agoSchool quality in the Bay Area is a red queen’s race, and a pressure cooker environment is not good for the kids. Apparently the solution is grade-separating Caltrain.
- zeroonetwothree 1y agoThe median income in the Bay Area is around 120-180k. You aren’t buying a 3m house for that, so how is it all those people somehow survive?
- coredog64 1y agoSome anecdotal data points from a guy who lived in the Bay Area when poor people could afford Redwood City and just returned from a family event. 1. The neighborhood I grew up in in San Jose has 3, 4, or even 5 cars in front of every house. My working thesis is that despite being small, these are multi-generational homes, probably with the notional homeowners being the ones that were living there back in the mid-80s. 2. My aunt lives in a much nicer part of San Jose in the house that her husband inherited from his parents. Many of the other neighborhood homeowners are in the same situation, although there has been some flipping going on. 3. Three more boomers at the family event are all living in inherited houses, including one couple that has a pair of houses that they each inherited from their respective parents. They're not renting out the surplus, but instead have turned both into animal rescue sites. All of these folks are grandfathered in to extremely low Prop 13 property taxes.
- paradox460 1y agoI don't think of it this way often, but damn am I glad I left the bay area
- ian-g 1y agoI can’t help but miss it, even though I desperately needed to get out too. I miss knowing where the darkest place is for 50 miles in all directions. I never got to bike highway 1 from SF to Big Sur. My boyfriend and I would have an easier time finding jobs there. There’s better roads for car enthusiasts. There was a lot of depressing tech saturation in the Bay Area, but there’s still good pockets of the pre-software culture around there if you’re willing to live towards the edges and look for the weirdness.
- paradox460 1y ago5 plus years on, all that I really miss consistently is some of the food options there. Everything else you can get elsewhere, for cheaper, and in a lot of cases better. And I know I can't go back to my food options there because half the restaurants I used to like are gone and the other half have changed ownership
- amy214 1y agoThis a wonderful summary of the unfair dystopia that is the Bay Area real estate market. I would also add, the forklift driver who bought the house for 40k in 1971, by state law (Proposition 13), is still paying 1971 valuation property taxes and contributing essentially nothing to local school funding, funding which is mostly covered by you according to a "new guy has to hold the bag" type scheme. In a state obsessed with fairness, a most unfair policy. Should you wish to modify the property, conventional area wisdom is to just do so unpermitted. Boomers don't like construction because it increases supply and they want no supply, only demand, home price go brrrr. Environmentalists don't like construction because the more nature the better. Others don't like construction because they make it their business to set the vibe of the area as static and frozen. These political interests culminate in a construction permitting process that basically autorejects everything, paradoxically increasing public danger because everyone now does everything unpermitted. Even the famously wealthy Steve Jobs ran afoul of it and couldn't buy his way out. He had a property he wanted to modify but they wouldn't let him touch it at all. So he just let it sit and rot to make a point. Ultimately the government agreed his plan was better than a rotting house.