This is a very valid point that almost nobody makes, and I still cannot understand why not. People screaming about how unaffordable the Bay Area is, seem to feel like living elsewhere would be some kind of death sentence.
Leaving the Bay Area is an appealing prospect in order to save on housing costs, but there are two issues that some people would need to consider in order to make that move:
1. There are some specialized types of jobs in the software industry where there are only a small handful of employers and where most of those employers are located in Silicon Valley. There are some areas in the software industry, such as web development and enterprise software, where there are plenty of jobs outside Silicon Valley and similar tech hubs. Plenty of businesses need custom applications, and the Microsoft software stack of Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET, Azure, and other products is commonly used outside of Silicon Valley, which seems to be focused on Linux. But suppose you work in the area of compilers, or you're an operating systems developer. The chances of moving to a place that isn't a tech hub and finding a compiler or operating systems development job is lower than finding a web development or Microsoft enterprise app development position. My line of work is in research in systems and AI, and it would be difficult for me to me to find similar work in most American metro areas outside of the Bay Area, Seattle, Austin, and New York, all of which (except for Austin) are expensive.
2. The Bay Area is famous for its acceptance of diverse cultures, lifestyles, and worldviews. The Bay Area's cosmopolitan atmosphere is one of my favorite aspects of living in the area. However, cosmopolitan urban areas in the United States tend to be expensive. New York, Boston, Seattle, and Los Angeles are still expensive places, even if they are not as expensive as the Bay Area. An exception to the correlation between cosmopolitanism and expense is Sacramento, a very diverse place which by California standards is also still affordable despite rising housing prices. I would not mind living there, but it's a very long commute to Silicon Valley, and there are not many jobs in my subfield of systems and AI research in the Sacramento area. If I couldn't live in or near a diverse, cosmopolitan area, my next preference would be a tourist town with a nice, laid-back atmosphere, such as many of the towns on the Central Coast of California. But, once again, those areas lack the jobs I want.
People in the first category can probably afford to find a place to live in Silicon Valley / San Diego. Their salaries account for housing and housing prices account for their salaries.
It depends on the companies these people work for, though. Someone who has worked for a company like Facebook or Google with large salaries and generous RSU grants will eventually be able to buy a house in Silicon Valley. The RSUs would be enough for a down payment, and their salaries are sufficiently high to cover the mortgage. Now, places like Cupertino and Sunnyvale may still be stretch goals because a house in those cities could exceed $2 million, but a $1 million house in Fremont, Milpitas, San Jose, or Redwood City is entirely in reach for people with that level of compensation.
But not all tech companies in Silicon Valley pay Facebook/Google levels of compensation. There are plenty of engineers in Silicon Valley who make low six-figure salaries (i.e., $100K-$150K) and who don't own five or six figures worth of stock. I fall in this category. While we can afford to rent apartments in Silicon Valley, buying a house within an hour commute from Silicon Valley in a safe neighborhood is definitely a stretch goal for us. If I want to buy at my current salary, it's either a 2-bedroom condo in South San Jose or in Alameda County, or it's a long commute from exurbs such as Tracy and Hollister.
Now, San Diego is much more affordable and would be a very appealing option for me since the housing prices are within reach, perhaps not in places like La Jolla, but in places a little further away like Oceanside and Escondido. I wouldn't mind relocating to either one of those places.
The Santa Cruz mountains would like a word with you. The very best of rural/non urban living, with <1 hour commute to the valley, and homes with acreage can be had in the 500-800k range
1) Doesn't only apply to the high-paid professionals. All sorts of ancillary jobs do not pay $engineer money, but are still very tightly attached to the tech sector. Those professionals are stuck between a rock and a hard place right now.
May i have to add one thing: don't you think that if the housing problem is solved (say by vastly liberalizing the zoning laws, permitting construction of a huge number of high-rise apartment buildings, and building appropriate public transport system to move all these people, and cracking down on cars), and Silicon Valley becomes a lot more affordable place to live in, it will stop working the way it does, because it will no longer be such an elite club it is now?
Salaries will become lower because there will be too much supply, as dev people will flock in. Conversations will become a lot less interesting because S/N ratio will decrease.
There will be less benefit from living in the Valley if you are one of the very best (if you make a salary in top 10% of the dev jobs, you are not concerned with the rents now, it is you who DRIVE the rents to where they are), and more benefit if you aren't so good.
VC will also have a much higher pool of founders to pick from. Non-funded founders are poor, many can't go to the Valley now, they will. VCs will get picky, and deals will become worse for everyone. Valley will just get watered down.
I think it ultimately boils down to what future does Silicon Valley want for itself. The Silicon Valley may be ideal for the top 10% of developers, who benefit from compensation that is high enough to be able to afford to live in central locations in Silicon Valley. But what about the remaining 90%? What about those who don't work for FAANGs, unicorns, or VC-funded high-growth startups? They will eventually have to leave as they won't be able to keep up with the ever-rising cost of living here, but will Silicon Valley still be an innovative place in their absence? Will those remaining in Silicon Valley want to strike it out on their own, or will they play it safe in order for them to afford their housing costs? Will pushing out the other 90% of developers led to missed opportunities by VCs, who may turn down an unconventional business idea that may turn out to be the next huge, lucrative industry? That's why I believe Silicon Valley should address its housing problems; its engine of innovation may be threatened if large amounts of engineers leave for cheaper places where they can afford to take risks and where they can afford to work for other types of companies.
There’s a lot of assumptions here on the things that you think would be able to fix the housing prices. Who’s to say any of those things would provide enough demand to make the area more affordable?
Also, it’s weird to say that with more people moving in it will lower the amount of competent people. That’s not necessarily true and there’s no evidence that the influx of people will affect the ratio of what it is now.
Being away from the valley has allowed me to recognize how odd most of the people there are and how much it’s affected my own thinking during my stay there. Elitist thinking like this runs rampant and when you move to other places you’ll see the people in the Bay Area aren’t all that elite after all.
That seems like a very inefficient mechanism even if it holds true. The supply and demand should grow over time in an absolute sense. It brings to mind stack ranking's flaws of needlessly discarding talent and discouraging cooperation.
As for salaries the point of Silicon Valley as a selling point is to try to pay for quality - a fixed housing SV would still be more expensive than generic office in a generic town or outsourcing to cheaper still.
I'm kind of in a similar position but have the option to work remote, so I will probably do it (although I haven't pulled the trigger). My takes on these issues, FWIW
1. specialized jobs. True, and you will miss out on some career options, as this is the center of the world for tech by far. But nowadays there are remote work possibilities in many areas and the lower cost of living as well as much lower taxes outside CA make up for higher salaries in the bay area (remote work jobs tend to pay a bit less).
2. "Diversity". Meh, you can find all the diversity/culture you need in any decently sized city. My closest friends have been from Eastern Europe/balkans and I find those guys wherever I go. Whatever you are into, you'll find it, but you just have to seek it out. It's like people who rave about being in a town with so many art galleries and symphonies, but they don't actually attend said galleries or symphonies. And most people can't tell the difference between the Santa Fe symphony and the SF Symphony, TBH. Sure, it's a step down, but you will get all the culture you need. In terms of tolerance, the bay area is not what I would call tolerant -- it's a pretty authoritarian place. Try wearing a MAGA hat to work and see how tolerant they are. I'm not talking about getting dirty looks, odds are good you will get physically assaulted. Having lived here for a while, I've seen the transition from a quirky place with a strong libertarian bent and that likes to experiment to one that is more of a monoculture constantly looking for something to be outraged about, and the overton window for what is tolerated is shrinking every day. Even a lot of the old style hippies which I used to hang out with have moved out, many heading to Portland or TX. Oddly, places like Palo Alto and Cupertino are much more tolerant of other worldviews. A good rule of thumb is that if you can find a neighborhood with a thriving pentecostal church, a presbyterian church, a catholic church, and a synagogue all in reasonable proximity, then you have truly discovered a place where there is diversity of opinions and worldviews. Also, if the state isn't deep blue or deep red, then there is some diversity of worldviews. Most people, however, only pretend to want that. What they want is to be surrounded by those who share their values, which is completely understandable. You can find that and lower cost of living in many places.
3. Don't overlook walkability and nice, old fashioned architecture. This is huge. It's the best thing San Francisco has going for it -- human scale architecture combined with density. That's the one thing you will miss the most. There are so many benefits from not needing a car, not only health benefits, but mental health benefits. Despite all the problems with homelessness in the city, which have gotten much worse over the years, there many nice walkable neighborhoods, as well as nice staircase hikes, viewspots. It's lovely.
In terms of places to look at, there are lots of nice places that, in my opinion, would provide much higher standards of living.
1. Miami/beach places in Florida.
2. Small towns on the east coast, like Asheville, Charleston, Charlottesville.
3. Washington DC is underrated, but also expensive and there are crime issues. But not as pricey as SF.
4. Chicago has low cost of living if you can put up with the cold. Crime issues tend to be isolated to bad neighborhoods so the headlines aren't as bad. One thing to be aware of is the horrible state finances in Illinois -- high income people are going to be soaked, so caveat emptor.
5. Although NY is expensive, Long Island is relatively inexpensive still.
6. The entire desert southwest is awesome -- New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, are all gorgeous states with wonderful cities. Take a look at Flagstaff, Arizona.
7. New Hampshire is underrated, if you can take the cold.
For walkability, which is key for me, one option is to find a small town -- those tend to be walkable. It needs to be not dead and close to a big town. Access to healthcare is a real issue in small towns, so you will end up driving to big towns to see your doctor.
Asheville, Raleigh-Durham, and Charlotte are all pretty nice. RDU has a growing tech sector and is pretty bumping for jobs; Charlotte to a lesser degree.
DC the city is nice for the most part; crime and rough areas are concentrated mostly in South East DC. The DC suburbs are literally the overall richest counties (Loudoun VA, Fairfax VA, PGC Maryland, etc.). Lot of tech around there, in those 'burbs, but also expensive. To unlock the SF-FAANG level salaries around DC you need to do cleared work -- with all the headaches that security clearances imply.
Really liked Salt Lake City, Utah. Mormon presence is lower compared to other parts of the city and a beer isn't too expensive. Weather and people are nice.
“and give up on my dream of being a tech billionaire? no thanks”. Also popular is “the bay area has one of the greatest collection of minds ever assembled in the history of the world”. If they are really that smart and money flows so freely, then they should have no problem solving this little problem.
I understand the futility of reasoning against snark, but I still feel compelled to mention that no collection of minds in the history of anything has ever really succeeded in solving the problem of dysfunctional politics.
I think the real question is "Are the politics dysfunctional"? I would argue they are working exactly as intended. The people who already own property and who have influence are getting the exact results they desire. Good or bad depends on whether you are an owner or a renter. A very large portion of political outcomes can be traced to money and those who can apply it to get their desired outcomes. This is politics as normal for a large portion of the uS and the world.
Tell that to all my brilliant friends stuck in the Midwest or other countries.. that work harder than I ever have, but can't fall into a high paying job like i can simply because of geography.
Living in the Midwest myself, I don't think there's any shortage of work available. Doesn't pay as well as living in California, but I also paid $100k for my house.
Curious, but have you (or anyone else reading this) tried out working as a developer online? I've got this nagging dream of moving to Kentucky, buying 20 acres and a mansion for $250K, and finishing out my career working online in my underwear.
Yes, but I typically wear pants as I frequently need to hop on video calls. I suppose they can only see the chest up, but you never know if the laptop will fall off the table.
We have a fully remote team and all our devs live in locations cheaper than the Bay Area as does most of the rest of the team. We have more than one person living in a ski resort and some living in fairly rural areas as well as some living in cheaper cities.
Anecdotally, it's easier for established developers. If you've been with a company for a while, or you have in-demand skills, it's easier to find remote work.
Once you're established a reputation in a company and been there for a while, it is relatively easy to go remote with them. It is always a temptation.
The risk is what happens when that job is done and you find yourself in the boonies with no meaningful tech work within hundreds of miles?
I was at Sun during the era when they made a big push to get people to give up their offices (save on real estate) and go remote, work from anywhere! It was so tempting to move to Hawaii and keep the silicon valley salary. I'm glad I didn't. I know many people who did. When Sun was over, they found themselves owning farmland in the middle of nowhere, no job and no possibility of getting one in the area.
I've made this point several times on HN. As soon as you suggest that this is caused by the 249 NASDAQ-traded companies insisting on being within shouting distance from each other, the downvotes come.
North America is vast and largely empty. This is a planning issue in that cities allow this sort of demand to grow unchecked.
That's pretty much exactly how most Americans ended up on this continent. Someone in your ancestry faced exactly the same question and made the choice to come here. It's been a good run but sometimes you have to make the hard choice.
I had to move from my hometown because it's a pit of economic misery where the primary industry is caring for a shrinking, aging population. You gotta do what you gotta do.
Oh man I feel so sorry for my artist friends who were forced out and can never move home again. One of them is slowly succumbing to depression due to ending up in Seattle and I really hope he can figure out how to get out of there before the winter blahs drive him to suicide.
Grey and rainy forever is really bad for people prone to seasonal depression. Rents following the same path that SF took for similar reasons don’t help either, it is no longer the affordable place for art scenes to flourish that it was in the grunge era.
I lived there for several years and got out, and it’s really nice to be living somewhere I know I won’t spend half the year with a little voice in the back of my head suggesting suicide as the solution to every other problem because I am tragically low on sunlight and vitamin D even with a 2’ square sun lamp and lots of pills, and I see the symptoms of the same shit in the friend I’m talking about who ended up there after SF’s insane rents pushed him out.
He has. So did I when I was living there. It helps but it is by no means providing everything that Seattle lacks, in my experience of most of a decade living there with a body optimized for warmer climates.
Yes? Why not? I mean, if it no longer makes sense financially for you to be there and you don't like it anymore, moving somewhere else seems like a great idea to me.
They should, they really should. It's just "spitting into the wind" to live anywhere that is below sea level and near a coastline. Flooding is Nature's way of telling you to move.
Sure we admire their ingenuity and hard-work ethic and how they recovered the land from the sea but that same energy probably could have been applied with more productive results somewhere else. Look what the Mormons have done with Utah. Maybe the Dutch could have done something similar with Montana (or even Minnesota). I'm certain they would have done a better job with San Francisco than we've done.
Sounds like you feel entitled to live in the Bay. Since we live in a capitalistic society, our actions are determined by what we can afford monetary wise.
But on a brighter note, trust me, there’s a lot of great places in the US! Many people from around the world immigrate to America to make it and I think those who are lucky enough to be able to stay in America due to citizenships (just cause you happened to be born on American soil) or via the Visa lottery should be grateful for the opportunities that they have.
If the free market was less constrained, there would be less of a housing problem, because the pursuit of money by developers would cause more housing to be built. Acting like the artificial scarcity of housing has nothing to do with it and telling people to just reduce demand because it's a market problem is a weird solution, since the first thing everyone learns about markets is that their is supply and demand which together affect prices.
This looks like there’s an assumption that there’s a lot of space in the Bay Area to grow in terms of houses which isn’t necessarily a correct premise. The Bay Area does have a lot of housing, there are always new developments being made around the area, and it is actually crowded. I don’t think an artificial scarcity is involved.
There are plenty of limits on what types of housing can be built in what areas. How many stories high can you build? Can it be multi-family housing (condos, apartments)? Can you subdivide a larger property into smaller ones, and what rules are imposed on that? These are the types of things that are used to limit housing. Sometimes there are good reasons for the rule, sometimes not. Sometimes there's a good reason for the general rule, but not the current limits it enforces.
It's not an issue of building out, or even necessarily of building up, but just allowing and/or encouraging more building and allowing some building to replace existing low-density housing.
I've lived an hour North of SF my entire life. I've seen how housing policies affects SF as well as where I live (which is also very expensive, but not quite to the same level). People don't like to allow too much change into a neighborhood because it changes the nature of the community. News flash, so does allowing housing prices to double or triple over a couple decades. The only difference is that the existing land owners get to capitalize on that, so it's not just about change, it's also about people controlling the flow of benefits of an area to maximize their own benefits.
Trust me you don't want to live in a city where developers are allowed to build as much as they want. This is how you end up in 2nd word megapolis which is hardly pleasant to be in. Past certain size incentives should exist to spread people across other cities/metro.
My inability to not afford housing in the places that I want to live in are not an outcome based on “efficient markets”.
The cost of housing in major American cities is largely determined by whether they can build more housing to meet demand and lower costs. The new housing is blocked most often by people who already live there.
So now the question is how different groups with opposing interests might apply power to get their desired outcome.
No, he's right, he absolutely should be able to live anywhere he wants.
He simply needs to take the personal responsibility to make it achievable vs capitulate to some strange reasoning of "it's not my fault I can't afford it, it's their fault because XYZ".
I live in Manhattan. I can afford to live literally anywhere in the world, probably more comfortably than where I am now.
The question is whether the people who cook my food, do my laundry, plumb my home, deliver seltzer to my bodega, butcher chicken in my grocery store should be able to afford to live within a reasonable distance of my home. We can choose to build cities that make it nearly impossible for them to do so and for them to live in constant fear of homelessness (with many eventually sliding into it) or we can build ones where they can comfortably afford a modest home.
In a booming city, developers with the capital and the technology should be allowed to deploy it to accomodate me, just as they have done to accomodate everyone who already lives there.
NYT has an editorial up now by a woman who moved to a small town in Arkansas where the town council wouldn’t approve a $25/hour salary for a head librarian because who needs that much money, what is she greedy, fancy college graduates think they run everything ... That’s extreme, but it’s generally true that salaries are better in cities than rural areas.
One of the people quoted in the article was incensed that a public employee would make around $41K per year. He’s a public employee making about $45K per year. There’s a definite “pull up the drawbridge” mentality in effect there.
I read the same article and felt that conclusion the NYT was trying to portray was off/I took away a different perspective from the article. The first point being that a small town librarian one doesn't require a master's degree in the field. (Research libraries/big city libraries might differ) On paper she's overqualified to run a small town library and just because she has a degree doesn't mean that she should get paid more.
Another factor is that the average wage in the area is around 12/13 dollars. For someone to be paid twice the average private sector wage for the area is quite significant. Especially when this is a small town and money that is paid for the librarian comes out of their budget and means an reallocation of resources from elsewhere.
Tl;dr I'm not saying that the librarian should not get a pay raise to 25 an hour. What I am saying is that just b/c people are skeptical about wages doesn't mean that it's a direct correlation with them hating on college graduates/ect.
Whether someone is overqualified or overpaid depends on the other people available to do the job. For librarians, MA is not overqualified. It is qualified. As for $25/hr, the point of my argument was that in most of the USA, $25/hr is not an extravagant wage. It's pretty solidly middle class. It would be a lot if you're 22 and not much if you're 55. It's weird if rural America, this is consider "too much" for a head librarian. That shows that rural wages are way out of line with urban wages.
The problem is less one of many people not living in the SF Bay Area than that of those who do live or work there, there simply isn't available, affordable, or adjacent housing.
For some industries (viz: YCombinator, startups, and VC) there really aren't many options outside the SF-SJ corridor, NYC, Seattle, and Austin being among the few, though largely of vastly smaller scope.
There's also the matter of those who've grown up or raised families in the region who find that they either can no longer live their themselves or that their children must move elsewhere. Fair or not, this destroys relationships and community cohesion.
"Working from home" often means "meeting with people" either at your home or, more often, at their office (or home). Which means that whilst you're somewhat unmoored from the tribulations of office real estate and commutes, you're not fully divorced from spacial reality.
Cities exist for reasons, and facilitating encounters and interactions between people (and organisations) is chief among these.
The US has over 300 cities with a population of more than 100,000 people. I’ve lived in a few of these, as well as San Francisco. It’s nonsense to say that none of these places have good, diverse food options or opportunities to make a great income.
In fact, if you pull up the 25 best places to live list that US news does, you’ll find that other than Santa Rosa and San Jose, nothing else in the Bay Area makes the list.
>>>* Pockets of STD's spikes that happen every few years
These seem like "those who live in glass houses should not throw bricks" positions to me. [1][2][3] And if you look at the STI maps by region, it's the poor Southeast states with the highest disease rates, not the Flyover Country interior (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nebraska, Missouri, etc...)
You literally actively went out of your way to ignore information easily accessible within 15 seconds of a simple google search, directly from the CDC.
It's actually kind of funny you devoted that much effort into making yourself feel right, while not even being able to negate what was said with any kind of substantial source.
This was so so easy to find, yet you somehow managed to accomplish not finding it. You then went through the effort of creating a post on HN pretending that this information didn't exist. Just to make some point because you got insufferably offended about data.
I didn't notice this comment sooner, but as you know from previous accounts, attacking others like you did in this thread is a bannable offense on HN. If you keep breaking the site guidelines this way, we're going to have to ban you again.
Are these things true of Chicago & Austin as well, or is the the common misconception that "non-coastal" regions means "rural"?
In any case, you cite
> * Lower incomes
> * Less savings
in response to an article about a person who is miserable living in a garage. Is it strange to consider that some would rather be "worse" off living in a larger purpose-built dwelling somewhere else? Perhaps they can get paid on an SF pay scale and buy housing in cheaper markets?
> * Higher suicide rates
SF is literally building a suicide barrier on its iconic bridge.
TL;DR; It's okay that people want to live where they want to live. People thrive in different environments.
Good point! If we're stretching the definition of "coastal" to include proximity to bodies of water, we could also include cities adjacent to rivers and other lakes as "coastal." Then, we can add Austin, San Antonio, Memphis, Dallas, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, and of course Detroit to the ranks of coastal cities. (Depending on who draws the metro area, Atlanta could also be a coastal city using this definition.)
But that's not the grouping of cities commonly referred to as being "coastal." I obviously know that non-coastal != rural, but that equivalence is frequently used in American discourse. See also: "flyover country", etc.
No, I think the original statement is wrong, the Great Lakes coastline that Chicago is on is the longest contiguous coastline in the 48 contiguous states, not the whole US.
