Wow, this resonates with me. In 2013 my wife and I were living in the Bay Area and had just welcomed our third child into the family. I was making 105k/yr at Apple (which seemed like a ton at the time!) but I felt like I was saving very little of that.
I was approached on LinkedIn to take a job with matching pay but that was fully remote. I could live anywhere I wanted in the entire country. I jumped at the chance and felt like I became rich overnight! I miss working at Apple, and would definitely jump at the chance to work remotely for them, but I don't think I could ever afford to move back to California.
WARNING: The tech job market is pretty much non-existent. "more challenging" is an understatement. I would be prepared to answer 'can you lift 50 lbs' in your 'tech' interview. I am a remote dev.
Did the exact same thing 10 years ago. Couldn't take living in California any more. We moved to Colorado.
* My health, both physical and mental has increased tremendously.
* Our house is far cheaper in mortgage than our apartment was.
* Schools are far better than anything in California we could afford
* Crime is almost non-existent. Most people don't lock car or house doors.
* It is rare I drive more than 8 miles on any day, no more highways for me unless I'm skiing.
* The air & water are clean, the tap water tastes better than the bottle water I used to drink.
I'm a Texan looking to move out of state because I'm transgender and our legislature wants to make it impossible for people like me to exist.
Since that's the only reason I'm wanting to move, I'm looking for the most Texas-like place I can find. Unfortunately, the closest I can come is Southern California. I dragged my heels like crazy on admitting that SoCal was the only place that has most of what I wanted because the cost of living is so insanely high, but I really have no choice. Everything else either was outside the Sun Belt or not Asian enough. Unfortunately, that means I'm stuck hoping I get a job that pays $140k, because that's what I'll need to make to rent a house in SoCal, and I'll be in a position where if I ever lose my job and end up unemployed, I'll have less than a month to find a new job before I become homeless.
I have a friend of mine trying to sell me on the Vegas area, though. I'm considering it, particularly Spring Valley. But I also have another friend urging me to avoid Vegas because she says there's no tech industry there.
For the record, my main criteria are: must have transgender-inclusive non-discrimination protections at the state level, must be in the Sun Belt, must have high Asian and Hispanic populations (I'm looking for at least 15% of each in the suburb I'm moving to, preferably more), must be a sprawling suburb, must be able to afford to rent a house with central AC on the salary of a software engineer of my experience in the area. The only states that meet the first two criteria are California (and only SoCal, not NorCal), New Mexico, and Nevada. The third criterion eliminates New Mexico (almost no Asian people in the entire state)... and until a few days ago, I thought it eliminated Nevada as well.
For a family of 4. That's the critical bit left out of the article title. 104k is low income for a family of 4, in some areas.
Which makes sense when it's hard to find somewhere to live alone, in SF, even at 100k. Finding a place big enough for a family of 4 plus all the costs related to 4 humans? Not surprising in the least.
A lot of the unaffordability is due to the high price of housing in the area. Here are some concrete steps you can take to help lower the price of housing:
- The Brisbane City Council is deciding whether to build 4400 units of housing on 600 acres south of San Francisco, about the same number of units SF built in total last year. The Brisbane Planning Commission recommended building an office park instead. Contact them and ask them to build the housing version of the project.
- The Mountain View City Council is deciding whether to build 2000 units or 8000 units of housing next to Google. They are leaning toward the low end - 2000 units would be tough to support a grocery store or frequent transit. Contact them (or show up to their board meeting - tonight!) and ask them to build the high-housing version of the plan.
- The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a plan to require 28% of all new developments to be below market rate. When you consider the unit costs to build in SF, that would make it _extremely_ difficult to justify new housing starts here. Please contact your Supervisor and ask them to oppose the Peskin/Kim Prop C plan.
- Call your CA State Assemblymember and ask them to oppose AB 915 (makes it harder to build affordable units)
- Call your CA State Assemblymember and ask them to support AB 71 (higher property taxes on second homes, money goes to affordable housing)
- Call your CA State Senator and ask them to support SB 167, which would put teeth in the state's Housing Accountability Act. (for more on this see carlaef.org)
- Call your CA State Senator and ask them to support SB 35 (would remove the ability of local government to block projects that meet certain criteria - near transit, have a high % of affordable units, use union construction labor)
- Email your VC's and C-level executives and tell them how hard it is to find housing in the area. Tell them about your awful commutes and the difficulty of finding good school districts for your kids. Ask them to get more involved politically in pro-housing causes. Ron Conway is a good example here.
NIMBY's are really well organized and things don't change unless we do something about them. All of these changes listed above will go a long way to support the development of housing in the Bay Area, which should help lower prices, and help keep families here and teachers in our neighborhoods.
If I had the money, I'd just put a ballot measure on the ballot to raise the height ceiling for new buildings built within 2 blocks of a MUNI line to 100ft, no approval required. Also: legalize the unpermitted "in law" units.
I moved out of California 5 years ago and I think I won't consider back moving back at all. I enjoy my 1K/month 2 bedroom-2 bath apartment. 15 mins commute to work and a decent pay to manage my monthly expenses. I dont get paid in 6 figures, but close and I still leave a pretty decent life. I have a friend who works for vmware and gets paid in 6 figures, and still complains about how hard is to manage and do budgeting.
Most of the friends are in bay area in tech industry, tells me that tech scene here is amazing and I miss out on the cool dev meetups. I agree, but I think I got used to my life style now. Good work-life balance is hard to achieve.
And this is why tech jobs are going to continue to lead the charge to being mostly remote workers. Major tech hubs are crazy expensive, and the jobs are pretty amenable to remote work.
At some point, there's going to be another inflection point where a lot of people making comfortable upper middle-class incomes move out to, well, anywhere. Basically, someone's going to do the math, and recognize that remote workers are just as productive, and are a little cheaper then having a bunch of 20-somethings in the office physically. And the incentive for anyone who wants to have kids to work remote is just going to be really, really high.
We may also see more software engineers sticking around as engineers instead of becoming managers as well. Because the incentive to grow your income via management may be relieved.
I think it's investors holding up the movement at this point. I usually see most tech guys are mentally prepared for this shift, but finance guys are strongly opposed.
Interestingly similar discussion going around in the UK at the moment after a UK MP came out saying that '£70,000' salary makes you 'rich'.
70k as a single income won't get you a flat in London in any reasonable time and you'll most certainly be renting forever on that kind if money in London. Even if its triple the average UK wage.
Actually at a previous job (at the front page of HN today for CEO severance) I started developing sympathy for politicians who say things like that. I saw how out of touch upper management was with what was actually going on, and in something like government it's at a much higher order of magnitude.
Doesn't excuse them, but I can understand how they say such things.
Agreed that won't make you rich in London but you can very easily buy a house outside of London or a 1-bed in London. I have friends who are on less than that and are buying in decent zone 2/3 areas. Mortgages are actually pretty cheap if you can save up the 10% deposit and live with a 10/15 min walk to a station.
Only if you want to live in central London. You can still easily get a house on that income in London suburbs. For example you can get a 3-bed in Orpington (20 minutes by train to London Bridge) for around £400k which should be comfortably affordable to someone on 70k.
I must say that as someone who does NOT live in a crazy high-rent state or town, I am not well pleased by the idea of my federal tax dollars going to people who choose to live there but can't make ends meet, and this even though I'm generally pro-spending on social welfare.
You may say, "but the poor can't afford to move!". Well, if that's the case, the government should subsidize their move instead. It would be way cheaper and would incidentally drive real estate prices closer to the national median.
I'm not trying to cast any blame on people in this situation, as they are likely there through no fault of their own, but this can hardly be the most efficient way to solve the problem.
I feel like economics is screaming a message to people in the Bay Area: "There are too many people here! There's tons of land in the U.S.!", but no one is listening, just casting blame on the techies, gentrification, land policy, or whatever.
My federal income taxes (which treat me as though I am rich, because income taxes are not cost-of-living adjusted) buy:
- The diplomatic, covert, and military apparatus which dominates the world to the extent necessary to secure the flow of cheap oil for your car.
- The interstate highways you drive on.
- The stability of the mortgage-lending ecosystem (via bailouts), and FHA subsidies that privilege suburban single family homes over urban condos.
- Welfare so that unemployed people can stay in dead-end towns, instead of moving to where they are needed.
If these costs were instead embedded in the home prices and rents of the low-density regions they enable, those places wouldn't be cheap anymore.
I don't think we need to force everyone in to urban skyscrapers, but I do think the federal government ought to prop up urbanization at the expense of people in cheap areas at least as much as it props up sprawl at the expense of high COL city dwellers.
After two years in San Francisco, I had to move back to my small(er) home town city because I ultimately realized there's little to no future for me in a city like San Francisco, despite making 250k/yr. I'd have to make at minimum $1M per year for a similar lifestyle (and even then, the stress of living in the bay area will reduce years from your lifespan... what's each year of your life worth to you?).
I don't know much about SF salaries, but in NYC, 100K is really middle class. With enrage rent at 2k/mo, salaries have to be high in order to keep up with cost of living.
Everyone makes a huge deal about the number but shouldn't it be more of a ratio? Like the cost of living to base salary? That should be a better statistic to judge quality of life.
I hear this sort of thing a lot and I have trouble reconciling it with my experiences. I live in SF and my total expenses (rent, food, entertainment, etc.) were ~$15,000 in 2016. I don't feel like I live a life of great deprivation.
I get that the article is talking about a family of four, but even if we assume there are no economies of scale, my costs would work out to $60,000 for a family of four.
I also get that I have some privileges: healthy enough to bike rather than drive/take transit, minimal medical expenses, no student loans. But I am surely not the only person in this position.
What's happening here? What are the other major expenses that people have?
(I understand this comment probably comes off as obnoxious, but I'm genuinely trying to understand. This incongruity makes it harder for me to understand/sympathize with others on this issue and I'd like to regain that ability.)
It's a low income if you are supporting a family of four and only one person is working. It doesn't mean the salary is in the low income bracket for a single tech worker on six figures.
Why would a young professional person want to live anywhere where earning 100k + is not enough when they could live in quite a few other states and earn a 100k + enjoying a cost of living that is 1/3 of what it is in SF or NYC?
My wife and I both make well into the 6 figures working at boring corporations enjoying a lifestyle where we would have to earn the equivalent of 7 figures in the Bay Area or NYC.
There are a lot of great boring corporations that pay extremely well. They don't provide couches or hammocks and you have to drink regular coffee and sure you have to sit in a cube (no open spaces) but it sure beats having to scrape by on 100k + a year.
Well, one reason is that it is possible to make a lot more than $100k in places like NYC and SF with a bit of luck/talent/hard work. Plenty of people in NYC make $1mm+ per year. But that is simply not going to happen in most parts of the country if you're not an entrepreneur. So you have to consider that "option value". Plus, NYC attracts some of the best and brightest, has great cultural offerings, is diverse in many respects, doesn't require driving, etc. It's a no brainer for me to live there.
Because when you're young you can live cheap and still have plenty of disposable income. There's also a huge benefit of spending a few years in the heart of the tech industry. Once you've been able to hack it there you can move wherever and take that experience/knowledge with you.
I'm in a similar situation but there are fewer opportunities in non tech hub cities. There may be 100 sr dev openings in my area vs 5000 in the bay for instance. When ever I'm on the market I usually see openings at the same 5-10 companies, and like you said most of them are boring.
Young people are likely to trade away living standards for living where they see the largest future potential, professional or otherwise. I think that's quite natural.
Other people want different things than you. The job market is better in SF than in most places in the country. There's more stuff to do and more diversity, leading to a bigger variety of things to do and things to eat.
I feel this pain everyday. Getting a house in the bay (because 3-4br apts are super rare) in a decent school district is right around a million dollars. That's a $5k/mo mortgage (not to mention every new development has some insane HOA fee). No way to afford that on a 100k salary. Even at a 200k salary that's pretty uncomfortable.
I make just over six figures in the southeast, and I definitely have a blessed and comfortable lifestyle (no kids, no debt). I can imagine the equation changes drastically once kids/family are involved. I've visited San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle, and LOVE the cities. But according to CNN's cost of living calculator, I'd have to make a base salary of almost $190k to have a similar lifestyle in San Fran and Seattle. That seems borderline absurd!
Even at $190k it wouldn't be completely comparable. Higher taxes eat up a lot of the additional income, and even then things like car ownership and house ownership that are taken for granted in most of the US carry huge costs in places like SF/NYC. To have a comparably sized home you would probably need 5-10 million in NYC for the home alone, as an example.
Cue the standard responses about lack of development, rampant NIMBYism, Prop 13 and rent control.
There's really nothing to add at this point.
All of this is also why I really prefer living in NYC, which actually has the infrastructure for this sort of thing (meaning if you're a lower to middle income earner in the tri-state area you're not totally hosed like you are in the Bay Area).
There is something to add, which is the tech community is remarkably complacent about all of it, and the leaders in our community aren't doing much to support pro-housing causes.
Higher up I posted a list of actions we can take today to help make housing more affordable in the Bay Area.
Recently moved to NYC from the bay myself and could not be happier with the decision. At almost any price point, NYC is a more ergonomic place to live.
One of my remote coworkers moved to rural Georgia and bought 6 acres of land with an 8 bedroom house on it for the same price a parking space would cost in my city.
Where do all the SV teachers, garbage truck drivers, police etc live? How long is the commute for a single person working at a grocery store checkout in SV?
I pay $2,500 a month in rent. I also get paid more by my employer to cover exactly that. I have plenty of money to live the way I want to live and still save money. If everyone is claiming just 2k in rent, how are they not making a living on 120k+ a year?
[+] [-] archeantus|9 years ago|reply
I was approached on LinkedIn to take a job with matching pay but that was fully remote. I could live anywhere I wanted in the entire country. I jumped at the chance and felt like I became rich overnight! I miss working at Apple, and would definitely jump at the chance to work remotely for them, but I don't think I could ever afford to move back to California.
[+] [-] ransom1538|9 years ago|reply
1) no state income tax,
2) public schools in my neighborhood are equivalent to a private school in sf [i]
4) weather is great 8 months out of year,
5) beaches you can swim in,
6) rent is ~1/4 of what it was in SF,
7) cuban food,
8) as a resident, kids have year round disney passes
[i] http://school-ratings.com/Florida/schools/Carillon_Elementar...
WARNING: The tech job market is pretty much non-existent. "more challenging" is an understatement. I would be prepared to answer 'can you lift 50 lbs' in your 'tech' interview. I am a remote dev.
[+] [-] nosequel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amyjess|9 years ago|reply
Since that's the only reason I'm wanting to move, I'm looking for the most Texas-like place I can find. Unfortunately, the closest I can come is Southern California. I dragged my heels like crazy on admitting that SoCal was the only place that has most of what I wanted because the cost of living is so insanely high, but I really have no choice. Everything else either was outside the Sun Belt or not Asian enough. Unfortunately, that means I'm stuck hoping I get a job that pays $140k, because that's what I'll need to make to rent a house in SoCal, and I'll be in a position where if I ever lose my job and end up unemployed, I'll have less than a month to find a new job before I become homeless.
I have a friend of mine trying to sell me on the Vegas area, though. I'm considering it, particularly Spring Valley. But I also have another friend urging me to avoid Vegas because she says there's no tech industry there.
For the record, my main criteria are: must have transgender-inclusive non-discrimination protections at the state level, must be in the Sun Belt, must have high Asian and Hispanic populations (I'm looking for at least 15% of each in the suburb I'm moving to, preferably more), must be a sprawling suburb, must be able to afford to rent a house with central AC on the salary of a software engineer of my experience in the area. The only states that meet the first two criteria are California (and only SoCal, not NorCal), New Mexico, and Nevada. The third criterion eliminates New Mexico (almost no Asian people in the entire state)... and until a few days ago, I thought it eliminated Nevada as well.
[+] [-] Dangeranger|9 years ago|reply
Come and enjoy the outdoors, food, and amazing beer with us.
[+] [-] gshulegaard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevenwoo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ShakataGaNai|9 years ago|reply
Which makes sense when it's hard to find somewhere to live alone, in SF, even at 100k. Finding a place big enough for a family of 4 plus all the costs related to 4 humans? Not surprising in the least.
[+] [-] kevinburke|9 years ago|reply
- The Brisbane City Council is deciding whether to build 4400 units of housing on 600 acres south of San Francisco, about the same number of units SF built in total last year. The Brisbane Planning Commission recommended building an office park instead. Contact them and ask them to build the housing version of the project.
- The Mountain View City Council is deciding whether to build 2000 units or 8000 units of housing next to Google. They are leaning toward the low end - 2000 units would be tough to support a grocery store or frequent transit. Contact them (or show up to their board meeting - tonight!) and ask them to build the high-housing version of the plan.
- The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a plan to require 28% of all new developments to be below market rate. When you consider the unit costs to build in SF, that would make it _extremely_ difficult to justify new housing starts here. Please contact your Supervisor and ask them to oppose the Peskin/Kim Prop C plan.
- Call your CA State Assemblymember and ask them to oppose AB 915 (makes it harder to build affordable units)
- Call your CA State Assemblymember and ask them to support AB 71 (higher property taxes on second homes, money goes to affordable housing)
- Call your CA State Senator and ask them to support SB 167, which would put teeth in the state's Housing Accountability Act. (for more on this see carlaef.org)
- Call your CA State Senator and ask them to support SB 35 (would remove the ability of local government to block projects that meet certain criteria - near transit, have a high % of affordable units, use union construction labor)
- Email your VC's and C-level executives and tell them how hard it is to find housing in the area. Tell them about your awful commutes and the difficulty of finding good school districts for your kids. Ask them to get more involved politically in pro-housing causes. Ron Conway is a good example here.
NIMBY's are really well organized and things don't change unless we do something about them. All of these changes listed above will go a long way to support the development of housing in the Bay Area, which should help lower prices, and help keep families here and teachers in our neighborhoods.
https://kev.inburke.com/kevin/sf-housing-politics/
[+] [-] 1024core|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 120bits|9 years ago|reply
Most of the friends are in bay area in tech industry, tells me that tech scene here is amazing and I miss out on the cool dev meetups. I agree, but I think I got used to my life style now. Good work-life balance is hard to achieve.
[+] [-] froindt|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_tristan|9 years ago|reply
At some point, there's going to be another inflection point where a lot of people making comfortable upper middle-class incomes move out to, well, anywhere. Basically, someone's going to do the math, and recognize that remote workers are just as productive, and are a little cheaper then having a bunch of 20-somethings in the office physically. And the incentive for anyone who wants to have kids to work remote is just going to be really, really high.
We may also see more software engineers sticking around as engineers instead of becoming managers as well. Because the incentive to grow your income via management may be relieved.
[+] [-] majani|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RDeckard|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geggam|9 years ago|reply
No car payment, No credit card debt,
130k will let you live and eat with a bit of room to go do things once a month.
If you have a car payment and or credit cards kiss that once a month thing goodbye
150k will let you have a car and do things
Source : I left that area recently
[+] [-] rogy|9 years ago|reply
70k as a single income won't get you a flat in London in any reasonable time and you'll most certainly be renting forever on that kind if money in London. Even if its triple the average UK wage.
Location means everything.
[+] [-] praneshp|9 years ago|reply
Doesn't excuse them, but I can understand how they say such things.
[+] [-] calvinv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user5994461|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ig1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xaa|9 years ago|reply
You may say, "but the poor can't afford to move!". Well, if that's the case, the government should subsidize their move instead. It would be way cheaper and would incidentally drive real estate prices closer to the national median.
I'm not trying to cast any blame on people in this situation, as they are likely there through no fault of their own, but this can hardly be the most efficient way to solve the problem.
I feel like economics is screaming a message to people in the Bay Area: "There are too many people here! There's tons of land in the U.S.!", but no one is listening, just casting blame on the techies, gentrification, land policy, or whatever.
[+] [-] closeparen|9 years ago|reply
- The diplomatic, covert, and military apparatus which dominates the world to the extent necessary to secure the flow of cheap oil for your car.
- The interstate highways you drive on.
- The stability of the mortgage-lending ecosystem (via bailouts), and FHA subsidies that privilege suburban single family homes over urban condos.
- Welfare so that unemployed people can stay in dead-end towns, instead of moving to where they are needed.
If these costs were instead embedded in the home prices and rents of the low-density regions they enable, those places wouldn't be cheap anymore.
I don't think we need to force everyone in to urban skyscrapers, but I do think the federal government ought to prop up urbanization at the expense of people in cheap areas at least as much as it props up sprawl at the expense of high COL city dwellers.
[+] [-] anon374939|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bardworx|9 years ago|reply
Everyone makes a huge deal about the number but shouldn't it be more of a ratio? Like the cost of living to base salary? That should be a better statistic to judge quality of life.
[+] [-] coltalk|9 years ago|reply
I get that the article is talking about a family of four, but even if we assume there are no economies of scale, my costs would work out to $60,000 for a family of four.
I also get that I have some privileges: healthy enough to bike rather than drive/take transit, minimal medical expenses, no student loans. But I am surely not the only person in this position.
What's happening here? What are the other major expenses that people have?
(I understand this comment probably comes off as obnoxious, but I'm genuinely trying to understand. This incongruity makes it harder for me to understand/sympathize with others on this issue and I'd like to regain that ability.)
[+] [-] chrisseaton|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leesalminen|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hourislate|9 years ago|reply
My wife and I both make well into the 6 figures working at boring corporations enjoying a lifestyle where we would have to earn the equivalent of 7 figures in the Bay Area or NYC.
There are a lot of great boring corporations that pay extremely well. They don't provide couches or hammocks and you have to drink regular coffee and sure you have to sit in a cube (no open spaces) but it sure beats having to scrape by on 100k + a year.
[+] [-] eigenvalue|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ng12|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] southphillyman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thomasahle|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] istorical|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s73ver|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tezzer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enknamel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wakkaflokka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billmalarky|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cletus|9 years ago|reply
There's really nothing to add at this point.
All of this is also why I really prefer living in NYC, which actually has the infrastructure for this sort of thing (meaning if you're a lower to middle income earner in the tri-state area you're not totally hosed like you are in the Bay Area).
[+] [-] kevinburke|9 years ago|reply
Higher up I posted a list of actions we can take today to help make housing more affordable in the Bay Area.
[+] [-] obstinate|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] make3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackermailman|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alkonaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taternuts|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevinburke|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvelagal|9 years ago|reply