[WillEngler]

Let me try and complicate this :)

First, I submit that $430,000 is still expensive. Instead of buying the median home in Pittsburg and commuting 60+ minutes on BART to downtown SF, I could add an h and buy a huge home in my favorite neighborhood in Pittsburgh PA for about the same price and have a chill bicycle commute: https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/Pittsburgh-PA/pmf,pf_p... (Obvious and legitimate objections: fewer job options, snow.) This is just me trying to say, $430k for that arrangement does not strike me as "cheap" given alternatives in other metros.

I agree that with a tech salary it's possible to save up for a down payment and buy in the Bay Area. But the risk seems unacceptable to me. Paying ~$1M for a house is a big bet that the Bay Area housing market stays hot. I don't want my wealth to be so tied up in a hyperlocal bet like that. I see things going one of two ways (and this is probably over-simplistic).

Option 1: A $1M starter home is the new normal. Prices stay flat or keep rising over the long haul. In that case my investment is sound. But I don't want to live in that kind of place. Where will my kids' teachers live? How will I cope with the moral ickiness of living in a place where housing costs create extreme spatial segregation of the professional class from the service class?

Option 2: The vision painted above is unsustainable. Something has to give (maybe a big financial crash; maybe just state-mandated upzoning that quickly increases housing supply) and the value of my investment drops by a lot.

Either way, I'm planning to save up on the West Coast and use my nest egg back in the Rust Belt.

[joefranklinsrs]

You make compelling arguments. For me, a house isn't an investment but it's a place where I house my family. (sure, houses in silicon valley have gone up 1.5-2X in a few years. However, stocks have gone up 2-10X). If you're young, there's no point of getting a house. If you are close to have a family, one of the most important thing is KEEPING your job. If you are remote in Pittsburg, and you have to get a new job, it might take a few months of interviewing and flying in for interviews to find a remote job that pays your old salary. Do you want to risk that even to your family? most likely you wouldn't. You have 18 years of mortgage and college tuitions to pay for.

[WillEngler]

Agreed on most of what you're saying here.

> For me, a house isn't an investment but it's a place where I house my family.

I really want to view the world this way :) I wish housing were a boring commodity that depreciates in value over time like a car. With prices being what they are, I am _forced_ to think of housing as an investment because of how much of my net worth will be tied up in it.

[eldavido]

Your view on this broadly aligns with mine (33-year old, live in Oakland).

We bought a cheap (for the area, about 670k) condo just off of BART. It's a pure consumption expense in that I expect to get 1-2% appreciation/year while carrying a manageable debt load. It might go up a bit but that's not the point. We're right off a train line, not paying too much in interest, and building equity. Plus it's a great place to live, lots of young people moving in and we're doing a lot to improve it (lots of deferred maintenance we're working through). Worst-case scenario, we'll rent it our or sell if we move somewhere else; there will always be demand as it's a small, convenient unit in a renter-friendly building, just off of transit.

I share your negative view of the Option 1 dystopia. I have absolutely zero interest in living somewhere on the peninsula like Belmont, Atherton, or even most of San Mateo at this point, where you're basically walled off from anyone of lower socioeconomic class who's your age. Not sure "moral ickiness" is the world I'd choose (maybe just bland? do you really want all your neighbors to have the same job as you?) but it does indeed suck.

I think people who are banking on tons of appreciation buying today in the SFBA really need a reality check. There's just not much higher these prices can go. The common perception is that everyone in tech makes like $300k, which is so far from reality to be laughable.

[closeparen]

Socioeconomic integration sounded great from afar, but I don't know how how much more sidewalk urine/feces I can take. I'm learning that I'd much rather deal with traffic and drab suburbia than in-your-face extreme poverty every time I try to take advantage of walkability and transit.

[anothergoogler]

> there will always be demand as it's a small, convenient unit in a renter-friendly building, just off of transit.

I hope you're right, but those are famous last words! Look at a city like Chicago, with huge sections that are just like you described, but where even well-maintained properties command a fraction of their peak value, and others are almost unsellable at any price. Oakland hasn't exactly experienced uninterrupted prosperity, so it's not an unreasonable risk to consider.

[woolvalley]

Depends what is driving the housing appreciation. You can end up like Toronto & Vancouver where it keeps on going up anyway despite local incomes being far far away from those purchase prices, for a decade+

[closeparen]

+1. Between unicorn RSUs and salary, I have more than enough long exposure to the Bay Area tech industry’s fortunes. I’m not sure that my anxiety about homeownership even makes sense.