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Castles That Are Cheaper Than an Apartment in San Francisco
- cgh 11y agoReminds me of Crack Shack or Mansion, a game of sorts to show the ridiculousness of real estate in Vancouver. These listings are several years old - the situation is much worse now: http://www.crackshackormansion.com/ http://www.crackshackormansion.com/
- pragone 11y agoSpoiler: Some apartments in SF are very expensive. I'm sure I can find castles cheaper than other absurdly expensive apartments in other places too. I thought this article was going to be about castles cheaper than the cheapest apartment you can buy in SF.
- BillTheCat 11y agoVery clickbait-y title. Only one of the "castles" is cheaper than an actual apartment. The rest are houses. Also does not factor in the cost of upkeep of a 200+ year-old castle. Yes, the housing market in SF is crazy but this is a pretty spurious article.
- brixon 11y agoThe lower cost castles tend to have a lot of delayed maintenance.
- rbanffy 11y agoThat and they often cannot be rebuilt with modern materials and techniques. And you may even go to jail if you try.
- sologoub 11y agoNot to mention the need for seriously competent landscapers for some of the examples. Maintaining just the gardens could easily pay for a small studio in SF, I'd imagine.
- acconrad 11y agoWhat a click-baity title. Yes, apartments are indeed expensive in San Francisco, but 2 of the 5 listings aren't even apartments: one is a mansion and the other is a 4,300+ sq ft home.
- usumoio 11y agoWas anyone else AMAZED that this article was NOT broken into 5 separate pages that you have to individually click through? The fact that this article was not obnoxiously split apart and overlaid with a popup each time was refreshing ( in a dystopian kind of way )...
- Someone1234 11y agoAs they say: Location, location, location. You are paying for the land. While building might cost a little more in the city due to permits, and labour's cost of living, in general it is mostly land. All this article tells us is: If land is cheap, you can buy a lot of it and built large structures on it. This is why, to me, it is surprising that so few companies offer "remote only" jobs. On the face of it there seems to be downsides (worse communication, VoIP costs, etc) and few upsides. But just because you could employ people from lower cost of living areas (who would accept lower pay), you'd save enough on salaries to make the venture worth considering. For example, let's say you're based out of NYC. You have to pay people in that area in the $80K+ ballpark so they can even make rent. However if you remain in NYC and employ people from Mississippi, Tennessee, or Idaho you could pay people in the 60K range and they'd have the same or better living standard than the 80K people in NYC.
- bsder 11y ago> This is why, to me, it is surprising that so few companies offer "remote only" jobs. Politics. Politics. Politics. How do you prove, as a manager, that you are doing your job when nobody can see half of your employees? As a side note, there are also good reasons to have your technical team co-located. It's sometimes really hard to drill into difficult technical problems without everybody standing in front of a whiteboard.
- vollmond 11y agoI think people can make lack of whiteboards work. The issue I have seen is when your team is partially co-located and partially remote -- the co-located people do the whiteboarding without bothering to involve the remote people, or the remote people do a lot more one-on-one discussions with other remote people. I think remote can work well, but the entire team needs to be remote to ensure communication.
- baddox 11y ago> How do you prove, as a manager, that you are doing your job when nobody can see half of your employees? I don't know if I buy it. How do you prove, as a manager, that you are doing your job when everyone can see all your employees? I fail to see how the visibility of you employees helps you prove that you're doing your job.
- stronglikedan 11y agoIt doesn't matter how much you can buy it for. What matters is how much you'll pay for mortgage + property taxes + maintenance + insurance. A lesson that I admittedly learned the hard way when purchasing my home.
- radnam 11y agoBesides other flaws, premise of this article assumes that castles are better living quarters than apartments which I don't think is necessarily true.
- rco8786 11y agoSince when is a "studio" actually 5 offices and 3 apartments?
- joshrotenberg 11y agoLooking at the Zillow listing it has 5 offices with a dedicated kitchen and bath and 3 apartments and is 8k sq/ft total with lots of updates. It isn't "cheap", but for that amount of rentable space right in the middle of SF that would be a pretty good investment.
- beachstartup 11y agoi think they mean actual studio, like production studio. really strange choice of words though.
- foreigner 11y agoNone of those examples are castles. If it's got windows on the ground floor it's a palace, not a castle. It's a castle if a foot-soldier sees it coming over a rise after trudging for hours through the freezing muck and thinks to himself "Oh man, this is going to suck."
- joshrotenberg 11y agoWhose castle is this? This is the castle of my master, Guy de Lombard.
- regularfry 11y agoWe don't really have an accurate translation of the word "chateau". It's a superset of what we'd call anything from "fort", "castle", "mansion", "palace", "manor house" and anything in between. That being said, the word "chateau" comes from the exact same etymological root as our word "castle", so it's not exactly unfair to use the word.
- azinman2 11y agoThey're not apartments, either!
- Mikeb85 11y agoCastle != Fortress
- zamalek 11y ago> 3... Or this mansion in Alamo Square for $6,400,000. Grew up in a 7+7 city house in Zimbabwe (5ha property). When we left it was sold for less than US$100000 (current day value). Given that perspective I'd have to venture a guess to the true meaning of the article: property values vary wildly depending on location to extreme scales. 9+9 is a mansion by modern standards? Bloody hell.
- martinshen 11y agoI'm the co-founder of UpOut and even I think this article is not super relevant for HN.
- cowardlydragon 11y agoWhat is the earthquake insurance on these apartments?
- yellowapple 11y ago"Win tix to unique SF events!" How about no. <close tab>
- lwhalen 11y agoYeah, but how's the internet connection at the castles compare to San Fran?