9 ms·

In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

87 points by tangled 3mo ago

TSiege 3mo ago
Everyone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism. Housing being this expensive is a choice. The economy and our society would be much healthier if we decided making sure there was ample housing in high demand areas. We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. We can't have plentiful affordable housing without decoupling this idea. Houses are a poor financial investment once you remove all the incentives involved like mortgage tax credits, fixed mortgage rates, and obstructive zoning rules. Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.
- lokar 3mo ago
  Even today the structure is a declining asset. It’s just that bad land use policy has forced land value up enough to overwhelm that.
- grttw11 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - duped 3mo ago
    Large asset managers aren't buying up significant amounts of property, this is basically an imagined problem that wants to demonize corporations/financiers for a problem created by local land use policy.
  - jadenPete 3mo ago
    > This is patently false. I think what they're trying to say is that housing being a good investment long-term is fundamentally incompatible with housing being affordable, and society should choose the latter. Within a given area, home values can only rise so much before: 1. New construction is permitted, thus increasing supply and lowering home values 2. Growth plateaus because demand shrinks—no one can afford homes or residents move away because property taxes become too financially burdensome This isn't the case with all investments, or at least the growth can be sustained for much longer with other investments. A successfully run company can grow for decades before the exponential becomes unsustainable. When growth stalls, it's a lot easier to sell the stock and buy another than it is to sell one's home and move to another area. > Moreover most home buyers do not view them as a cash flow generating asset - it’s literally their home. I don't think this is true. Western governments have subsidized homeownership so much precisely because it's marketed as an easy way to build generational wealth. I don't think most homebuyers view their home as primarily an investment, but growth potential is definitely considered by most during the homebuying process, and homeowners as a voting block often vehemently oppose development because their investments are so precious to them.
- everdrive 3mo ago
  >There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism What about fewer people with the same amount of housing stock? I'm not even arguing that this is the better solution, but I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.
  - mbgerring 3mo ago
    > I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it. Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution: Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters. Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!
    - joinjune 3mo ago
      Short term you might be right. Long term we have seen that western "education" results in declines in birthrates. Demographics are destiny.
      - KylerAce 3mo ago
        Birthrates go down in the east too whenever incomes increase (and sometimes without income increasing)
      - xnx 3mo ago
        ""education""?
    - Legend2440 3mo ago
      The US population may already be declining. In prior years the only thing keeping it increasing was immigration, and immigration has fallen considerably under Trump: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-scotus-immigration-trump https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-...
- crooked-v 3mo ago
  SF in particular is wild. There are so many people who oppose any and all new housing because "it isn't affordable", as if just not constructing anything, ever, will let anyone afford anything.
  - orangecat 3mo ago
    Yeah, it's a surprisingly resilient alliance of NIMBY homeowners who understand supply and demand, and "anti-gentification" types who don't.
    - crooked-v 3mo ago
      If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. You can see some of that already in areas under the recent round of city zoning changes, where housing prices shot up significantly in potentially upzonable areas the second the new law was passed, even with zero actual practical changes so far. To me it feels much more like just a significant cadre who resist any change, of any kind, for any reason, who can ignore the personal side effects because of Prop 13 and because their family bought a house in the 80s and they don't give a shit about anyone else who wants or has to live in the city.
      - pseudalopex 3mo ago
        People have non financial interests.
      - scoofy 3mo ago
        >If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. They get this anyway, it's just unrealized capital gains.
      - littlexsparkee 3mo ago
        Rent control is another potent disincentive for change, probably due to fears of OMI/Ellis Act or other downstream effects.
- bombcar 3mo ago
  If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so. Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.
  - scoofy 3mo ago
    >Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are. The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely. We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.
    - robocat 3mo ago
      > housing has been turned into a zero sum game Not really. Land has always been zero-sum because there is a limited amount to compete for. And location is status, even in high density developments (status is often seen as zero-sum). Book review of Bird's The Land Trap that contains nice detail of unobvious monetary implications: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-land-trap-by-mike https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-la...
      - scoofy 3mo ago
        >Not really. Land has always been zero-sum What? Yes, but you misunderstand. When you (intentionally) make expanding the housing supply illegal or practically impossible, then you've turned housing into a zero-sum game.
- rvz 3mo ago
  > We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. This conflation is a coping mechanism by home owners, especially the ones in SF (which the entire city from SF to San Jose) is sitting on a fault line. The main problem is that building is being blocked by several other homeowners who are petrified of the value of their homes falling. No wonder young people are beginning to look to this policy in China [0] - "Houses are for living, not for speculation". > Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in. In 2026, it is really a bad investment in the AI age and especially in HCOL areas like SF, given the layoffs and the jobs being off-shored. If you were part of the people who leveraged their RSUs to buy, well that is also a bad idea to do in 2026. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for_speculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
  - xnx 3mo ago
    China is a weird example because they massively overbuilt housing.
- gruntled-worker 3mo ago
  I agree with everything you wrote. I'd like to add the pyramid angle. Fancy mansions have always been overpriced. For property prices to grow faster than inflation, the pyramid needed to grow its bottom. Supply restrictionism was the ticket. Eventually, every shack was priced mansion-like. This required extracting ever larger fractions of the incomes of renters. Some renters wisened up and bought homes (when they still could). Changing sides, they beefed up the scheme's political backing. No one cares if mansions are expensive, but basic housing should be extremely cheap. This sounds like a handout but isn't. It's what an unadulterated market would provide. It's what the pre-1970 market used to provide. That's not to say that markets should be left alone. It's to say that the way this particular market was "regulated" was fundamentally corrupt. We could call it negative regulation.
- Volundr 3mo ago
  > We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. And it's a really, really shitty one. My house has roughly doubled in value since I bought it, but in practice that's useless to me. I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. If anything it reduces my mobility by making it harder to move, since I really need to coordinate the sale of my current home with buying the new one to help absorb that $500k or whatever price tag. My if house prices dropped by 50% or more drops my net worth on paper, but it doesn't actually change anything. I still have a place to live + my savings, investments, etc.
  - Infinitesimus 3mo ago
    > I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. HELOCs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit ) exist to solve the problem of cash being locked up in your house. You can take a line of credit using the property as collateral or other purchases.
    - beAbU 3mo ago
      Assuming the mortgage is paid off!
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo ago
      How does that help? If don't have enough cash now, then how will getting a loan that needs to be paid back with interest help with that. I will have cash for a little while, then I will have way way less as I have to make payments. Then I miss a few and they take my house and I'm homeless.
    - Volundr 3mo ago
      Sure, it increases one's borrowing power and that can be useful. But "I can use it to go deeper into debt" is pretty limited utility compared to other kinds of wealth.
  - pandaman 3mo ago
    > I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. Are you using some peculiar definition of "homeless" as someone who does not own real estate, like in Elon Musk had been homeless when he sold his California houses?
- tqi 3mo ago
  It's frustrating to see the NYT frame this as an AI vs everyone else story, pitting incumbent renters against newcomers, while landlords literally extract rent.
- gogobio 3mo ago
  You're right about one thing - housing being expensive is a choice, it's a choice of those who have moved to SF and despite it making no sense for their financial situation just "trying to make things happen" there to stay there. These are the people who drive property costs up. It's not about "just building more", that's literally never the answer. Building more is solving just for one factor and when you build more - guess what's gonna happen? More density, even higher costs of living because guess what - more people moving means more demand on local services, shops, transit, so higher costs. On top of it - folks who buy these newly built properties aren't going to be making minimum wage at a local coffee and avocado toast shop - they're business owners, entrepreneurs, founders, etc. Your cost of living will keep rising with every new property built and every new transplant. The real answer is taxes, taxing the shit out of these rich transplants and the corporations. You're in California I can't believe you lot aren't more progressive about jacking up the taxes on the rich to pave the way for a healthy society for the rest. But given that every single tech nerd that moves to SF sees themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire or a not-yet-founder - good luck with that, I genuinely do not see even the younger crowd being pro taxing the rich in a city full of tech leeches.
lokar 3mo ago
I always find it odd that stories like this focus on non-Eng roles. I know it’s not universal, but IME it was very common for new CS grads to make much then what is discussed here, and far more after a few years. And this was before COVID and the AI boom. The idea I see presented that even the highly paid tech workers at the big companies can’t afford SF is not really true.
mycall 3mo ago
Is that really true? https://www.craigslist.org/search/subarea/sfc?cat=apa&max_price=2250&min_price=900&parking=1&parking=2&parking=3&parking=4#search=2~gallery~33 https://www.craigslist.org/search/subarea/sfc?cat=apa&max_pr...
- forthwall 3mo ago
  Shared bedroom, Hercules (50 miles away), Santa Cruz (100 miles away), Shared housing, SRO, SRO, Microapartment, Low Income Housing Yup, looks true from this
- 650REDHAIR 3mo ago
  Of those some immediate standouts are: Scam listings. One that is >$2k a WEEK. A bunch of listings not actually in SF. Anecdotally; A friend of a friend just moved into an awful building on Ellis and is paying $1650/month for a small studio. 1br in my building are renting for $3,300+ and I'm not in a particularly desirable neighborhood, a new building, or a rent-controlled building. So yeah, it feels really true. Not really sure how rents are skyrocketing when every 3rd person I know in tech has been laid off in the last year.
  - crooked-v 3mo ago
    > Not really sure how rents are skyrocketing when every 3rd person I know in tech has been laid off in the last year. Simple: the amount of available housing really is just that low.
    - 650REDHAIR 3mo ago
      I don’t think it’s that simple at all. I see plenty of vacancies around me. I think we need to build higher density housing and I also think there is some amount of market manipulation happening.
      - crooked-v 3mo ago
        In SF, the apartment vacancy rate was approaching an absurdly low 3% earlier this year (https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-rent-surge-21322840.php https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-rent-surg...). Usual estimates put apartment vacancies at at least 5% just to accomodate people moving in and out of buildings in the first place.
GenseeAI 3mo ago
As an AI startup founder, my impression is that $180k in the Bay Area mostly gets you new grads or relatively junior talent these days. However, remote work has fundamentally changed the equation. Expanding hiring beyond the Bay Area, or even internationally (for example, hiring remotely from Canada), can dramatically broaden the talent pool while significantly reducing costs.
- apparent 3mo ago
  Totally agree. Lots of people want to work remotely, and in many companies that works fine for certain types of jobs.
- gruntled-worker 3mo ago
  There's strange kinship and signaling in proximity. It's similar to college degrees. Working in SF - either in person or locally remote - puts people in a separate bin. It's not just signaling. Once people move away the kinship factor fades, even when you already know them well past the signaling stage.
  - bombcar 3mo ago
    This kind of boils down to "I want to live and work with people like me" which is a common feeling, but sometimes veers dangerously.
    - DiscourseFan 3mo ago
      I refuse to move to SF because you guys are all dorks and I don't want to be surrounded by dorks all day
    - gruntled-worker 3mo ago
      It's more like being regulars at the same bar. It cuts through demos. It's easier here since almost everyone is from elsewhere.
- deleted 3mo ago
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Molitor5901 3mo ago
https://archive.ph/gD5K3 https://archive.ph/gD5K3
- striking 3mo ago
  NYT seems to have finally figured out how to block archive-today.
  - cryzinger 3mo ago
    This snapshot seems to work: http://archive.today/2026.06.29-174214/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/technology/san-francisco-tech-salaries.html http://archive.today/2026.06.29-174214/https://www.nytimes.c...
- OutOfHere 3mo ago
  Why post a garbage link that doesn't even have the article content? It defeats the purpose.
rich_sasha 3mo ago
I suppose a big change over the past 50 years is that we really boosted jobs that must be done in big cities. Wanna earn a lot of money? Take on a lot of debt and become a lawyer/accountant/etc. But we didn't create more cities. There's more people competing for the same small amount of commutable real estate, and the winners are the top earners. I'm not sure how you fix it. The organic fix ought to be that businesses want to move out of the overpriced cities. But if that's also where their employment pool and investors are, that's tricky. UK has had the same issue. The salary gap between London and anywhere else is huge. So everyone aspiring for a high salary wants to move to London. So prices are drastically higher. And there's no rebalancing in sight. Maybe there's space for some government regulation? Tax cuts for companies hiring in lower CoL areas? No idea. But so long as an increasing pool of people is competing for a barely growing pool of housing, it's not going to get better.
- watershawl 3mo ago
  But people naturally want to live near water or other natural features and those areas are usually already developed. I suppose one could cross-reference all of the places where highway meets water meats geographic feature, but a city does not yet exist - and then propose one.
- orangecat 3mo ago
  Maybe there's space for some government regulation? The problem is largely due to government regulations that prevent people from building housing.
- wilkommen 3mo ago
  The root cause of the dynamic you're highlighting here is wealth inequality. The more unequal the distribution of wealth in a society, the more concentrated wealth becomes geographically, because as wealth inequality grows, society begins to reorganize into a system which serves ever more lopsidedly to the needs of the wealth holders. The wealth holders, being few, and being social creatures like the rest of us, tend to congregate in fewer and fewer geographical areas. They have the money, so anyone who wants money must live near them to get some. So rents skyrocket in the geographical areas surrounding the wealth holders, which they ironically benefit from, as it creates a smaller amount of land that they need to buy in order to own all the economically significant land in the country, which only intensifies the cost-of-living crisis. Housing regulation cannot fix this, not only because housing regulators can become captured by the wealthy, but also because the root cause of the phenomenon is not addressable by housing policy.
waffletower 3mo ago
I don't understand how $180k was enough in San Francisco at any time in the last 15 years -- unless you were partnered with someone with a comparable salary.
- slater 3mo ago
  > I don't understand how $180k was enough in San Francisco at any time in the last 15 years Inflation. $180k in 2010 USD is just shy of $300k in 2026 USD.
- closeparen 3mo ago
  It was enough for a single person in a good studio or middling 1BR with no kids, probably no car, and no desire to own property.
  - bombcar 3mo ago
    At some point the idea of working for $AI in SF just to enrich landlords and have a lifestyle that (at least materialistically) is greatly outclassed by some rural cashier at Walmart (3 bedroom house, family, car) needs to be thought about.
- nemomarx 3mo ago
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- bitbckt 3mo ago
  I was single, living alone (+ 2 cats, if they count) in a one bedroom apartment in North Beach 15 years ago on a $90k/year salary. I even had a parking space and a car! I can understand how people did it then - I was one of them - but I don't understand how they would do it now.
  - waffletower 3mo ago
    I guess you could rent something small. But could you afford a mortgage with $180,000 back then?
apparent 3mo ago
> Mr. Woodbury recently moved to Carnelian Bay, on Lake Tahoe, Calif., which is less expensive. Ms. Razniak remains in an apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, which she shares with two roommates and for which she pays $1,650 a month. They’re making the long-distance relationship work. It sounds like the fellow didn't actually want/need to be in SF. Living in Tahoe is pretty much the polar opposite in terms of urban/rural living. There are obviously places that are near SF that are much cheaper, like Oakland/Richmond/etc.
jrowen 3mo ago
Comparison is the thief of joy. I know plenty of people who live in SF on much lower salaries. Acting like you need AI bucks to survive is out of touch with the reality of the common man. A household that earns nearly 400k talking about "I'm not completely hopeless" is shameful. Take some lessons from people who earn a lot less and are more happy.
- archagon 3mo ago
  Seriously. I live in SF with a combined household income that's far less than that and have a pretty lavish lifestyle, eating out every day and whatnot. What are these people spending their money on? > But she said she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in. Let's assume $4000/m rent, $200/m utilities, eating out for $30 every day, and spending $700/m on groceries. That's only $70,000. Round up to $90,000 if you like. Where is the rest of the money going?
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - invalidptr 3mo ago
    Taxes and health insurance are the big ones you're missing
    - archagon 3mo ago
      I pay for health insurance basically out of pocket. The folks complaining in this article have health insurance subsidized by their employers.
  - jdefr89 3mo ago
    I am at a similar salary. I live in Kendal Square; nearly on MIt campus for convenience and due to the fact I relocated to Cambridge from PA when I took my research pos at MIT lab. I pay 4000k a month for a STUDIO. That includes no utilities or anything. Then add groceries and all that stuff. Then add supporting your significant other and various other things…. trust me it disappears fast. Yes there is some cash left over if you do absolutely nothing but stay in your home… Things get tight. I shouldn’t feel pressure given my salary but sometimes I think if things really went downhill… my salary isn’t leaving me room for a care/worry free life style. Not the way it would have 10 to 15 years ago. Things are too expensive…
BigTTYGothGF 3mo ago
Median household income in SF is $147k. If $180k isn't enough, $147k isn't either.
- deleted 3mo ago
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deleted 3mo ago
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farceSpherule 3mo ago
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light_triad 3mo ago
The article frames the cost of living issue mainly in terms of demand (...because of OpenAI and Anthropic...), which is an important factor, but has very little to say about supply. San Francisco is a major metropolis that looks like a mining town: there's very few high-rise buildings compared to other major cities. It's due to many factors including strict zoning, growth caps, seismic risks (compared to say Tokyo?) and landlords that don't have much incentive to decrease the value of their skyrocketing assets. Also some recent setbacks like our leaning Millennium Tower. It might take a political earthquake to change the status quo given how ossified everything is unfortunately.
- DiscourseFan 3mo ago
  I think Tokyo is not as bad as SF, since Tokyo is not directly exposed to the ocean
smb06 3mo ago
My rent has gone up by 15% over the last two years and it is reflective of the increase in salaries in AI startups.
jacobgold 3mo ago
Worth pointing out that someone making $180K/year in 2016 needs to make ~$250K/year just to keep up with inflation.
- deleted 3mo ago
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OutOfHere 3mo ago
[flagged]
fragmede 3mo ago
What's frustrating is that an estimated 10-15% of SF housing is empty, due to rent control. We'll see how the supreme court case about rent control goes.
- archagon 3mo ago
  Yes, I’m sure eliminating rent control will somehow make the city more affordable, not (catastrophically) less.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    If you'd like to type out your priors and why believe yourself you be right, I'd love to hear them. It's a complex topic and rent control's second order effect is that housing is going empty. People are living in tents when there are vacant apartments. That's a system's failure.
    - archagon 3mo ago
      Thing is, social media discussions on the subject are completely pointless. No one ever changes their mind and nothing gets resolved. But I'll give my spiel anyway: I live in rent-controlled housing in SF. When I was apartment hunting circa 2023, it was fairly easy to find rent-controlled listings if you were diligent. In objective terms, my rent is high, but it's also locked in. Rent can only increase a few percentage points a year. In the past year, a bunch of wealthy AI workers moved into the city, increasing rents catastrophically. You could find people in the SF subreddit complaining with disturbing regularity about 50% rent spikes and similar. We had new tenants move in to the upstairs apartment recently and they're literally paying $2000/m more than us for the same floor plan. If we had to pay the same amount — if our rent increased arbitrarily due to circumstances outside our control — I think we'd be kicked out of the city. It's just not possible to build a stable, adult life unless you have some security around your housing expenses (or you're filthy rich). Rent control detractors suggest that eliminating rent control will lead to lower housing costs eventually. That does not help me in the present. Why would I support a policy that will kick me out of my house today, replace everyone in my historically working class neighborhood with millionaires, and then maybe, many years down the line, lead to lower rents? (With a giant "citation needed" on that argument to boot.) It's a non-starter. Fortunately, building more housing does not require eliminating rent control. We can have both. And if enough housing gets built, rent goes down anyway and rent control largely becomes a moot point. I regularly hear about acquaintances getting kicked out of their apartments elsewhere in the country due to sudden rent spikes and thank my lucky stars we're not subject to that horror.
apparent 3mo ago
> “I thought when I’d make $200k I would be able to basically not worry about money at all,” she said, adding that she and her friends stopped going out to restaurants last year and shifted to potlucks and reality-TV nights. $200k is a lot of money, but I'm glad that when I started making money like that I continued to live my prior life for several years. The savings accumulated during that period has had a huge impact on my later financial condition, and enabled me to do many things (career-wise and otherwise) that I would not have been able to do had I shifted into "stop worrying about money, eat out all the time" mode. Many people I knew did that, and most of them are fine. But golden handcuffs can really lock you into a career/track that you might not want to be on long term.
- maxverse 3mo ago
  I feel like both the point you quote and your response are valid, and not mutually exclusive. It's great that you were able to avoid lifestyle creep and that $200K felt like a lot of money that "had a huge impact on my later financial condition, and enabled me to do many things". And I think Katrine (from the article) feels like that should be a lot of money. I don't see lifestyle creep playing a role in her life. Instead, another person they quote says: > [Ms. Gan]she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in.
  - prewett 3mo ago
    I'm confused about the quote, because the numbers do not add up to me. Elsewhere in the discussion SV apartments are quoted at $3500/month. When I rent, utilities tend to be under $100, and groceries are about $400. Let's be generous and say "utilities and groceries" are $1000. So "rent, utilities and groceries" are $4500/month, at total federal + CA state tax rate of 40% (estimating high), that means $90k/year to break even. I'm not sure what Ms. Gan filtered via the reporter thinks "consum[ing] nearly everything that comes in" means, but lets say 80% of income that's $112k, although that would still be a $20k/yr surplus (and a 5 month cushion). So there's quite a lot of room "earning below $200,000" and financial distress. If the article meant "less than $100k" I could believe it. Or perhaps Ms. Gan's friends' "rent, utilities and groceries" comprises more things than it literally means?
jleyank 3mo ago
Remote work or satellite offices would permit working where housing was more affordable and it would encourage 2 professional families. It would also encourage families as spare resources might be available for munchkins. But this seems to be the opposite of what the money wants. Edit: and nobody talks about climate or commuting costs.
- ponector 3mo ago
  Remote work from South America or from satellite office in Bangalore. That is exactly what the money wants.
  - jleyank 3mo ago
    They've had several decades to do this and it's not dominating the industry. Might keep at it and make it work. Or, it might be looking to AI to get rid of staff. But essentially all of N America is inaccessible to the tech barons if they want butts in seats.
dlcarrier 3mo ago
I've met multiple people who commuted to the peninsula via airplane, because it was much, much cheaper than living there.
- pfannkuchen 3mo ago
  I know someone who did that in the 90s to Palo Alto, even though he could have stretched to afford a house there back then. If he had he would be in a much better position today.
Balgair 3mo ago
Prop 13 y'all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 Any discussion of the cost of housing in CA has to include this. Want to know why the property market there is so distorted? It's Prop 13. TLDR: Property taxes only increase 2%/yr (sorta, its complicated) and reset upon sale of the property. So current owners are highly incentivized to stay in place and not move. Supply is held down, so prices rise.
- d4ng 3mo ago
  Maybe trade volume is held down, but why would supply be held down? Surely if someone sells, they buy/rent elsewhere in quick succession?
  - Balgair 3mo ago
    The house they would be buying would come with a much higher tax bill. Personal anecdata: My folks bought their house for ~70k, it is now worth ~1.5M. The taxes are about 600/year for them, they have no mortgage, paid off decades ago. If they were to try to buy their house again, it would be ~8k/mo just in taxes and mortgage. Moving out of the metro isn't an option as no medical services really exist outside of metros in CA anymore. Same for many other services. Many older homeowners in CA cannot afford to live there anymore, essentially. They are in a gap/trap. Yes, you could revoke Prop 13 and let things adjust, but even incremental steps would cause wild swings in property values as the market readjusted, likely causing knock on economic effects in the whole US economy.
    - fragmede 3mo ago
      The way New York does it is they create exemptions like SCHE for those over the age of 65.
- jason_oster 3mo ago
  FWIW, San Francisco was one of only three counties that voted against Prop 13.
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Rekindle8090 3mo ago
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zzgo 3mo ago
They put all the good jobs in a city surrounded on three sides by a mile or more of water, IDK how this doesn't get mentioned every time a "San Francisco has gotten too expensive to live in" article gets posted since the late 90s.
deleted 3mo ago
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frays 3mo ago
The question is how much worse will it be in another 5 years? Probably a $250k tech salary won't be enough.

87 points by tangled 3mo ago

Everyone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism. Housing being this expensive is a choice. The economy and our society would be much healthier if we decided making sure there was ample housing in high demand areas. We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. We can't have plentiful affordable housing without decoupling this idea. Houses are a poor financial investment once you remove all the incentives involved like mortgage tax credits, fixed mortgage rates, and obstructive zoning rules. Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.

lokar 3mo ago
Even today the structure is a declining asset. It’s just that bad land use policy has forced land value up enough to overwhelm that.
grttw11 3mo ago
[flagged]
- duped 3mo ago
  Large asset managers aren't buying up significant amounts of property, this is basically an imagined problem that wants to demonize corporations/financiers for a problem created by local land use policy.
- jadenPete 3mo ago
  > This is patently false. I think what they're trying to say is that housing being a good investment long-term is fundamentally incompatible with housing being affordable, and society should choose the latter. Within a given area, home values can only rise so much before: 1. New construction is permitted, thus increasing supply and lowering home values 2. Growth plateaus because demand shrinks—no one can afford homes or residents move away because property taxes become too financially burdensome This isn't the case with all investments, or at least the growth can be sustained for much longer with other investments. A successfully run company can grow for decades before the exponential becomes unsustainable. When growth stalls, it's a lot easier to sell the stock and buy another than it is to sell one's home and move to another area. > Moreover most home buyers do not view them as a cash flow generating asset - it’s literally their home. I don't think this is true. Western governments have subsidized homeownership so much precisely because it's marketed as an easy way to build generational wealth. I don't think most homebuyers view their home as primarily an investment, but growth potential is definitely considered by most during the homebuying process, and homeowners as a voting block often vehemently oppose development because their investments are so precious to them.
everdrive 3mo ago
>There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism What about fewer people with the same amount of housing stock? I'm not even arguing that this is the better solution, but I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.
- mbgerring 3mo ago
  > I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it. Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution: Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters. Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!
  - joinjune 3mo ago
    Short term you might be right. Long term we have seen that western "education" results in declines in birthrates. Demographics are destiny.
    - KylerAce 3mo ago
      Birthrates go down in the east too whenever incomes increase (and sometimes without income increasing)
    - xnx 3mo ago
      ""education""?
  - Legend2440 3mo ago
    The US population may already be declining. In prior years the only thing keeping it increasing was immigration, and immigration has fallen considerably under Trump: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-scotus-immigration-trump https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-...
crooked-v 3mo ago
SF in particular is wild. There are so many people who oppose any and all new housing because "it isn't affordable", as if just not constructing anything, ever, will let anyone afford anything.
- orangecat 3mo ago
  Yeah, it's a surprisingly resilient alliance of NIMBY homeowners who understand supply and demand, and "anti-gentification" types who don't.
  - crooked-v 3mo ago
    If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. You can see some of that already in areas under the recent round of city zoning changes, where housing prices shot up significantly in potentially upzonable areas the second the new law was passed, even with zero actual practical changes so far. To me it feels much more like just a significant cadre who resist any change, of any kind, for any reason, who can ignore the personal side effects because of Prop 13 and because their family bought a house in the 80s and they don't give a shit about anyone else who wants or has to live in the city.
    - pseudalopex 3mo ago
      People have non financial interests.
    - scoofy 3mo ago
      >If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. They get this anyway, it's just unrealized capital gains.
    - littlexsparkee 3mo ago
      Rent control is another potent disincentive for change, probably due to fears of OMI/Ellis Act or other downstream effects.
bombcar 3mo ago
If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so. Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.
- scoofy 3mo ago
  >Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are. The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps." The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely. We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.
  - robocat 3mo ago
    > housing has been turned into a zero sum game Not really. Land has always been zero-sum because there is a limited amount to compete for. And location is status, even in high density developments (status is often seen as zero-sum). Book review of Bird's The Land Trap that contains nice detail of unobvious monetary implications: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-land-trap-by-mike https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-la...
    - scoofy 3mo ago
      >Not really. Land has always been zero-sum What? Yes, but you misunderstand. When you (intentionally) make expanding the housing supply illegal or practically impossible, then you've turned housing into a zero-sum game.
rvz 3mo ago
> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. This conflation is a coping mechanism by home owners, especially the ones in SF (which the entire city from SF to San Jose) is sitting on a fault line. The main problem is that building is being blocked by several other homeowners who are petrified of the value of their homes falling. No wonder young people are beginning to look to this policy in China [0] - "Houses are for living, not for speculation". > Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in. In 2026, it is really a bad investment in the AI age and especially in HCOL areas like SF, given the layoffs and the jobs being off-shored. If you were part of the people who leveraged their RSUs to buy, well that is also a bad idea to do in 2026. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for_speculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
- xnx 3mo ago
  China is a weird example because they massively overbuilt housing.
gruntled-worker 3mo ago
I agree with everything you wrote. I'd like to add the pyramid angle. Fancy mansions have always been overpriced. For property prices to grow faster than inflation, the pyramid needed to grow its bottom. Supply restrictionism was the ticket. Eventually, every shack was priced mansion-like. This required extracting ever larger fractions of the incomes of renters. Some renters wisened up and bought homes (when they still could). Changing sides, they beefed up the scheme's political backing. No one cares if mansions are expensive, but basic housing should be extremely cheap. This sounds like a handout but isn't. It's what an unadulterated market would provide. It's what the pre-1970 market used to provide. That's not to say that markets should be left alone. It's to say that the way this particular market was "regulated" was fundamentally corrupt. We could call it negative regulation.
Volundr 3mo ago
> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. And it's a really, really shitty one. My house has roughly doubled in value since I bought it, but in practice that's useless to me. I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. If anything it reduces my mobility by making it harder to move, since I really need to coordinate the sale of my current home with buying the new one to help absorb that $500k or whatever price tag. My if house prices dropped by 50% or more drops my net worth on paper, but it doesn't actually change anything. I still have a place to live + my savings, investments, etc.
- Infinitesimus 3mo ago
  > I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. HELOCs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit ) exist to solve the problem of cash being locked up in your house. You can take a line of credit using the property as collateral or other purchases.
  - beAbU 3mo ago
    Assuming the mortgage is paid off!
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 3mo ago
    How does that help? If don't have enough cash now, then how will getting a loan that needs to be paid back with interest help with that. I will have cash for a little while, then I will have way way less as I have to make payments. Then I miss a few and they take my house and I'm homeless.
  - Volundr 3mo ago
    Sure, it increases one's borrowing power and that can be useful. But "I can use it to go deeper into debt" is pretty limited utility compared to other kinds of wealth.
- pandaman 3mo ago
  > I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. Are you using some peculiar definition of "homeless" as someone who does not own real estate, like in Elon Musk had been homeless when he sold his California houses?
tqi 3mo ago
It's frustrating to see the NYT frame this as an AI vs everyone else story, pitting incumbent renters against newcomers, while landlords literally extract rent.
gogobio 3mo ago
You're right about one thing - housing being expensive is a choice, it's a choice of those who have moved to SF and despite it making no sense for their financial situation just "trying to make things happen" there to stay there. These are the people who drive property costs up. It's not about "just building more", that's literally never the answer. Building more is solving just for one factor and when you build more - guess what's gonna happen? More density, even higher costs of living because guess what - more people moving means more demand on local services, shops, transit, so higher costs. On top of it - folks who buy these newly built properties aren't going to be making minimum wage at a local coffee and avocado toast shop - they're business owners, entrepreneurs, founders, etc. Your cost of living will keep rising with every new property built and every new transplant. The real answer is taxes, taxing the shit out of these rich transplants and the corporations. You're in California I can't believe you lot aren't more progressive about jacking up the taxes on the rich to pave the way for a healthy society for the rest. But given that every single tech nerd that moves to SF sees themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire or a not-yet-founder - good luck with that, I genuinely do not see even the younger crowd being pro taxing the rich in a city full of tech leeches.

lokar 3mo ago

I always find it odd that stories like this focus on non-Eng roles. I know it’s not universal, but IME it was very common for new CS grads to make much then what is discussed here, and far more after a few years. And this was before COVID and the AI boom. The idea I see presented that even the highly paid tech workers at the big companies can’t afford SF is not really true.

mycall 3mo ago

Is that really true? https://www.craigslist.org/search/subarea/sfc?cat=apa&max_price=2250&min_price=900&parking=1&parking=2&parking=3&parking=4#search=2~gallery~33 https://www.craigslist.org/search/subarea/sfc?cat=apa&max_pr...

forthwall 3mo ago
Shared bedroom, Hercules (50 miles away), Santa Cruz (100 miles away), Shared housing, SRO, SRO, Microapartment, Low Income Housing Yup, looks true from this
650REDHAIR 3mo ago
Of those some immediate standouts are: Scam listings. One that is >$2k a WEEK. A bunch of listings not actually in SF. Anecdotally; A friend of a friend just moved into an awful building on Ellis and is paying $1650/month for a small studio. 1br in my building are renting for $3,300+ and I'm not in a particularly desirable neighborhood, a new building, or a rent-controlled building. So yeah, it feels really true. Not really sure how rents are skyrocketing when every 3rd person I know in tech has been laid off in the last year.
- crooked-v 3mo ago
  > Not really sure how rents are skyrocketing when every 3rd person I know in tech has been laid off in the last year. Simple: the amount of available housing really is just that low.
  - 650REDHAIR 3mo ago
    I don’t think it’s that simple at all. I see plenty of vacancies around me. I think we need to build higher density housing and I also think there is some amount of market manipulation happening.
    - crooked-v 3mo ago
      In SF, the apartment vacancy rate was approaching an absurdly low 3% earlier this year (https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-rent-surge-21322840.php https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-rent-surg...). Usual estimates put apartment vacancies at at least 5% just to accomodate people moving in and out of buildings in the first place.

GenseeAI 3mo ago

As an AI startup founder, my impression is that $180k in the Bay Area mostly gets you new grads or relatively junior talent these days. However, remote work has fundamentally changed the equation. Expanding hiring beyond the Bay Area, or even internationally (for example, hiring remotely from Canada), can dramatically broaden the talent pool while significantly reducing costs.

apparent 3mo ago
Totally agree. Lots of people want to work remotely, and in many companies that works fine for certain types of jobs.
gruntled-worker 3mo ago
There's strange kinship and signaling in proximity. It's similar to college degrees. Working in SF - either in person or locally remote - puts people in a separate bin. It's not just signaling. Once people move away the kinship factor fades, even when you already know them well past the signaling stage.
- bombcar 3mo ago
  This kind of boils down to "I want to live and work with people like me" which is a common feeling, but sometimes veers dangerously.
  - DiscourseFan 3mo ago
    I refuse to move to SF because you guys are all dorks and I don't want to be surrounded by dorks all day
  - gruntled-worker 3mo ago
    It's more like being regulars at the same bar. It cuts through demos. It's easier here since almost everyone is from elsewhere.
deleted 3mo ago
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Molitor5901 3mo ago

https://archive.ph/gD5K3 https://archive.ph/gD5K3

striking 3mo ago
NYT seems to have finally figured out how to block archive-today.
- cryzinger 3mo ago
  This snapshot seems to work: http://archive.today/2026.06.29-174214/https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/29/technology/san-francisco-tech-salaries.html http://archive.today/2026.06.29-174214/https://www.nytimes.c...
OutOfHere 3mo ago
Why post a garbage link that doesn't even have the article content? It defeats the purpose.

rich_sasha 3mo ago

I suppose a big change over the past 50 years is that we really boosted jobs that must be done in big cities. Wanna earn a lot of money? Take on a lot of debt and become a lawyer/accountant/etc. But we didn't create more cities. There's more people competing for the same small amount of commutable real estate, and the winners are the top earners. I'm not sure how you fix it. The organic fix ought to be that businesses want to move out of the overpriced cities. But if that's also where their employment pool and investors are, that's tricky. UK has had the same issue. The salary gap between London and anywhere else is huge. So everyone aspiring for a high salary wants to move to London. So prices are drastically higher. And there's no rebalancing in sight. Maybe there's space for some government regulation? Tax cuts for companies hiring in lower CoL areas? No idea. But so long as an increasing pool of people is competing for a barely growing pool of housing, it's not going to get better.

watershawl 3mo ago
But people naturally want to live near water or other natural features and those areas are usually already developed. I suppose one could cross-reference all of the places where highway meets water meats geographic feature, but a city does not yet exist - and then propose one.
orangecat 3mo ago
Maybe there's space for some government regulation? The problem is largely due to government regulations that prevent people from building housing.
wilkommen 3mo ago
The root cause of the dynamic you're highlighting here is wealth inequality. The more unequal the distribution of wealth in a society, the more concentrated wealth becomes geographically, because as wealth inequality grows, society begins to reorganize into a system which serves ever more lopsidedly to the needs of the wealth holders. The wealth holders, being few, and being social creatures like the rest of us, tend to congregate in fewer and fewer geographical areas. They have the money, so anyone who wants money must live near them to get some. So rents skyrocket in the geographical areas surrounding the wealth holders, which they ironically benefit from, as it creates a smaller amount of land that they need to buy in order to own all the economically significant land in the country, which only intensifies the cost-of-living crisis. Housing regulation cannot fix this, not only because housing regulators can become captured by the wealthy, but also because the root cause of the phenomenon is not addressable by housing policy.

waffletower 3mo ago

I don't understand how $180k was enough in San Francisco at any time in the last 15 years -- unless you were partnered with someone with a comparable salary.

slater 3mo ago
> I don't understand how $180k was enough in San Francisco at any time in the last 15 years Inflation. $180k in 2010 USD is just shy of $300k in 2026 USD.
closeparen 3mo ago
It was enough for a single person in a good studio or middling 1BR with no kids, probably no car, and no desire to own property.
- bombcar 3mo ago
  At some point the idea of working for $AI in SF just to enrich landlords and have a lifestyle that (at least materialistically) is greatly outclassed by some rural cashier at Walmart (3 bedroom house, family, car) needs to be thought about.
nemomarx 3mo ago
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bitbckt 3mo ago
I was single, living alone (+ 2 cats, if they count) in a one bedroom apartment in North Beach 15 years ago on a $90k/year salary. I even had a parking space and a car! I can understand how people did it then - I was one of them - but I don't understand how they would do it now.
- waffletower 3mo ago
  I guess you could rent something small. But could you afford a mortgage with $180,000 back then?

apparent 3mo ago

> Mr. Woodbury recently moved to Carnelian Bay, on Lake Tahoe, Calif., which is less expensive. Ms. Razniak remains in an apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, which she shares with two roommates and for which she pays $1,650 a month. They’re making the long-distance relationship work. It sounds like the fellow didn't actually want/need to be in SF. Living in Tahoe is pretty much the polar opposite in terms of urban/rural living. There are obviously places that are near SF that are much cheaper, like Oakland/Richmond/etc.

jrowen 3mo ago

Comparison is the thief of joy. I know plenty of people who live in SF on much lower salaries. Acting like you need AI bucks to survive is out of touch with the reality of the common man. A household that earns nearly 400k talking about "I'm not completely hopeless" is shameful. Take some lessons from people who earn a lot less and are more happy.

archagon 3mo ago
Seriously. I live in SF with a combined household income that's far less than that and have a pretty lavish lifestyle, eating out every day and whatnot. What are these people spending their money on? > But she said she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in. Let's assume $4000/m rent, $200/m utilities, eating out for $30 every day, and spending $700/m on groceries. That's only $70,000. Round up to $90,000 if you like. Where is the rest of the money going?
- deleted 3mo ago
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- invalidptr 3mo ago
  Taxes and health insurance are the big ones you're missing
  - archagon 3mo ago
    I pay for health insurance basically out of pocket. The folks complaining in this article have health insurance subsidized by their employers.
- jdefr89 3mo ago
  I am at a similar salary. I live in Kendal Square; nearly on MIt campus for convenience and due to the fact I relocated to Cambridge from PA when I took my research pos at MIT lab. I pay 4000k a month for a STUDIO. That includes no utilities or anything. Then add groceries and all that stuff. Then add supporting your significant other and various other things…. trust me it disappears fast. Yes there is some cash left over if you do absolutely nothing but stay in your home… Things get tight. I shouldn’t feel pressure given my salary but sometimes I think if things really went downhill… my salary isn’t leaving me room for a care/worry free life style. Not the way it would have 10 to 15 years ago. Things are too expensive…

BigTTYGothGF 3mo ago

Median household income in SF is $147k. If $180k isn't enough, $147k isn't either.

deleted 3mo ago
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farceSpherule 3mo ago

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light_triad 3mo ago

The article frames the cost of living issue mainly in terms of demand (...because of OpenAI and Anthropic...), which is an important factor, but has very little to say about supply. San Francisco is a major metropolis that looks like a mining town: there's very few high-rise buildings compared to other major cities. It's due to many factors including strict zoning, growth caps, seismic risks (compared to say Tokyo?) and landlords that don't have much incentive to decrease the value of their skyrocketing assets. Also some recent setbacks like our leaning Millennium Tower. It might take a political earthquake to change the status quo given how ossified everything is unfortunately.

DiscourseFan 3mo ago
I think Tokyo is not as bad as SF, since Tokyo is not directly exposed to the ocean

smb06 3mo ago

My rent has gone up by 15% over the last two years and it is reflective of the increase in salaries in AI startups.

jacobgold 3mo ago

Worth pointing out that someone making $180K/year in 2016 needs to make ~$250K/year just to keep up with inflation.

deleted 3mo ago
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OutOfHere 3mo ago

[flagged]

fragmede 3mo ago

What's frustrating is that an estimated 10-15% of SF housing is empty, due to rent control. We'll see how the supreme court case about rent control goes.

archagon 3mo ago
Yes, I’m sure eliminating rent control will somehow make the city more affordable, not (catastrophically) less.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  If you'd like to type out your priors and why believe yourself you be right, I'd love to hear them. It's a complex topic and rent control's second order effect is that housing is going empty. People are living in tents when there are vacant apartments. That's a system's failure.
  - archagon 3mo ago
    Thing is, social media discussions on the subject are completely pointless. No one ever changes their mind and nothing gets resolved. But I'll give my spiel anyway: I live in rent-controlled housing in SF. When I was apartment hunting circa 2023, it was fairly easy to find rent-controlled listings if you were diligent. In objective terms, my rent is high, but it's also locked in. Rent can only increase a few percentage points a year. In the past year, a bunch of wealthy AI workers moved into the city, increasing rents catastrophically. You could find people in the SF subreddit complaining with disturbing regularity about 50% rent spikes and similar. We had new tenants move in to the upstairs apartment recently and they're literally paying $2000/m more than us for the same floor plan. If we had to pay the same amount — if our rent increased arbitrarily due to circumstances outside our control — I think we'd be kicked out of the city. It's just not possible to build a stable, adult life unless you have some security around your housing expenses (or you're filthy rich). Rent control detractors suggest that eliminating rent control will lead to lower housing costs eventually. That does not help me in the present. Why would I support a policy that will kick me out of my house today, replace everyone in my historically working class neighborhood with millionaires, and then maybe, many years down the line, lead to lower rents? (With a giant "citation needed" on that argument to boot.) It's a non-starter. Fortunately, building more housing does not require eliminating rent control. We can have both. And if enough housing gets built, rent goes down anyway and rent control largely becomes a moot point. I regularly hear about acquaintances getting kicked out of their apartments elsewhere in the country due to sudden rent spikes and thank my lucky stars we're not subject to that horror.

apparent 3mo ago

> “I thought when I’d make $200k I would be able to basically not worry about money at all,” she said, adding that she and her friends stopped going out to restaurants last year and shifted to potlucks and reality-TV nights. $200k is a lot of money, but I'm glad that when I started making money like that I continued to live my prior life for several years. The savings accumulated during that period has had a huge impact on my later financial condition, and enabled me to do many things (career-wise and otherwise) that I would not have been able to do had I shifted into "stop worrying about money, eat out all the time" mode. Many people I knew did that, and most of them are fine. But golden handcuffs can really lock you into a career/track that you might not want to be on long term.

maxverse 3mo ago
I feel like both the point you quote and your response are valid, and not mutually exclusive. It's great that you were able to avoid lifestyle creep and that $200K felt like a lot of money that "had a huge impact on my later financial condition, and enabled me to do many things". And I think Katrine (from the article) feels like that should be a lot of money. I don't see lifestyle creep playing a role in her life. Instead, another person they quote says: > [Ms. Gan]she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in.
- prewett 3mo ago
  I'm confused about the quote, because the numbers do not add up to me. Elsewhere in the discussion SV apartments are quoted at $3500/month. When I rent, utilities tend to be under $100, and groceries are about $400. Let's be generous and say "utilities and groceries" are $1000. So "rent, utilities and groceries" are $4500/month, at total federal + CA state tax rate of 40% (estimating high), that means $90k/year to break even. I'm not sure what Ms. Gan filtered via the reporter thinks "consum[ing] nearly everything that comes in" means, but lets say 80% of income that's $112k, although that would still be a $20k/yr surplus (and a 5 month cushion). So there's quite a lot of room "earning below $200,000" and financial distress. If the article meant "less than $100k" I could believe it. Or perhaps Ms. Gan's friends' "rent, utilities and groceries" comprises more things than it literally means?

jleyank 3mo ago

Remote work or satellite offices would permit working where housing was more affordable and it would encourage 2 professional families. It would also encourage families as spare resources might be available for munchkins. But this seems to be the opposite of what the money wants. Edit: and nobody talks about climate or commuting costs.

ponector 3mo ago
Remote work from South America or from satellite office in Bangalore. That is exactly what the money wants.
- jleyank 3mo ago
  They've had several decades to do this and it's not dominating the industry. Might keep at it and make it work. Or, it might be looking to AI to get rid of staff. But essentially all of N America is inaccessible to the tech barons if they want butts in seats.

dlcarrier 3mo ago

I've met multiple people who commuted to the peninsula via airplane, because it was much, much cheaper than living there.

pfannkuchen 3mo ago
I know someone who did that in the 90s to Palo Alto, even though he could have stretched to afford a house there back then. If he had he would be in a much better position today.

Balgair 3mo ago

Prop 13 y'all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13 Any discussion of the cost of housing in CA has to include this. Want to know why the property market there is so distorted? It's Prop 13. TLDR: Property taxes only increase 2%/yr (sorta, its complicated) and reset upon sale of the property. So current owners are highly incentivized to stay in place and not move. Supply is held down, so prices rise.

d4ng 3mo ago
Maybe trade volume is held down, but why would supply be held down? Surely if someone sells, they buy/rent elsewhere in quick succession?
- Balgair 3mo ago
  The house they would be buying would come with a much higher tax bill. Personal anecdata: My folks bought their house for ~70k, it is now worth ~1.5M. The taxes are about 600/year for them, they have no mortgage, paid off decades ago. If they were to try to buy their house again, it would be ~8k/mo just in taxes and mortgage. Moving out of the metro isn't an option as no medical services really exist outside of metros in CA anymore. Same for many other services. Many older homeowners in CA cannot afford to live there anymore, essentially. They are in a gap/trap. Yes, you could revoke Prop 13 and let things adjust, but even incremental steps would cause wild swings in property values as the market readjusted, likely causing knock on economic effects in the whole US economy.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    The way New York does it is they create exemptions like SCHE for those over the age of 65.
jason_oster 3mo ago
FWIW, San Francisco was one of only three counties that voted against Prop 13.
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Rekindle8090 3mo ago

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zzgo 3mo ago

They put all the good jobs in a city surrounded on three sides by a mile or more of water, IDK how this doesn't get mentioned every time a "San Francisco has gotten too expensive to live in" article gets posted since the late 90s.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

frays 3mo ago

The question is how much worse will it be in another 5 years? Probably a $250k tech salary won't be enough.