NYC is also expensive. Spending 50% on rent for a 2BR. (That said, I elected to pay a little more to get a clean, modern place in a new building. A lot of NYC apartments look like something out of 1980s Russia, only not as nice.)
Employees at Airbnb, Square and Stripe Are Spending 50%+ of Income on SF Rent
241–250 of 288 posts
Re: Employees at Airbnb, Square and Stripe Are Spending 50%+ of Income on SF Rent
#242That's ok. When Airbnb, Square, and Stripe IPO in 12-36 months, all of the people currently flooding into SF to work for them will surely be able to sell their pre-IPO shares to ... Well, I don't know, honestly. I doubt that employee #1000 at Square would even be able to pay the down payment on a SF condo with their earnings. Also, just FYI: Seattle isn't that much cheaper than SF, the people are way meaner, traffic…
May be intended to be joke, but the weather is atrocious, and the traffic is worse than the Bay Area (but probably not worse than LA). People are nice though! Source: Lived there 22 years, moved to the Bay Area a dozen years ago, bought a house here, love it. Also, nobody complains about all the "outsiders" driving up housing costs here, whereas in the Northwest, blaming outsiders has been a mantra for decades.
Seattle has the third-worst traffic in the country[1], after Los Angeles[2] and San Francisco[3]. New York is #8 by comparison.[4]
[1] http://d2dtl5nnlpfr0r.cloudfront.net/tti.tamu.edu/documents/...
[2] http://d2dtl5nnlpfr0r.cloudfront.net/tti.tamu.edu/documents/...
[3] http://d2dtl5nnlpfr0r.cloudfront.net/tti.tamu.edu/documents/...
[4] http://d2dtl5nnlpfr0r.cloudfront.net/tti.tamu.edu/documents/...
Re: Employees at Airbnb, Square and Stripe Are Spending 50%+ of Income on SF Rent
#243Employees at these companies don't mind paying 50% of their salary for rent because their salary is at most only 60% of their total compensation. Lot of people are getting 1M + deals paid out over 4 years.
"lots of people"?
and, do you mean 4 years of salary + the equity grants, or just the equity grants, because not very many people get $250k/yr worth of equity [from any company]. A few do, but not the unwashed masses.
Re: Employees at Airbnb, Square and Stripe Are Spending 50%+ of Income on SF Rent
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is one of those things that is a great idea until it isn't. When your employer goes belly up, in SF, you have to fight off job offers. That's not going to be the case elsewhere. It's also much harder on the employers: if you think finding one good job is hard, try hiring an entire team of decent employees at once. Ultimately, it's worth the extra cost of staying where the tech is, prefixing your city name ala 'S…
Keep in mind that the job market is not predictable. For the moment, getting a job seems to be a little less painful than it usually is, but I will bet you any amount of money you want that this situation won't last. Remember 2007/2008... nobody was "fighting off job offers" back then.
I am certain it was much worse being a jobless techworker elsewhere at that time.
Re: Employees at Airbnb, Square and Stripe Are Spending 50%+ of Income on SF Rent
#245I recently turned-down a great job offer for a Bay area tech company. Their office was just too far outside my commute range. I even offered to remote-work part-time and be in the office some days a week (I had already been a 100% remote worker for 3+ years, so I had a proven track record as a remote worker). But the founder insisted everyone be on-site, daily, even though many aspects of the company were quite comfo…
I thought the example already was Atlassian.
If you're talking about their products, yeah that's my point. Plenty of products for remote/distributed collaboration. If you're talking about their workforce... not so much. Just checking their careers page, and every job I saw was tied to some location. Didn't see a single "Location: Anywhere" job posting.
Re: Employees at Airbnb, Square and Stripe Are Spending 50%+ of Income on SF Rent
#246Most people don't live by themselves in a 1 bedroom. They usually live 2+ people per room, so that they can afford it. For example, a 2 br apt might have 5 people living there, two couples and then one living in the living room. That's how they can afford the $5000/month rent.
By "most people" you mean mostly 20-somethings? It's hard to imagine people in their 30s and older, married and starting to have kids, living like that. I mean, great if you can pull it off, but you'd have to stagger the shower schedule not to mention maybe get a 2nd refrigerator?
This is the bigger problem. Companies like Google & Salesforce have been there long enough for their early hires to have grown up and gotten ready to lay down roots ... but they can't afford to buy a house and they don't want to raise a family in a small/crappy/inconvenient apartment or condo.
Re: Employees at Airbnb, Square and Stripe Are Spending 50%+ of Income on SF Rent
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is they explicitly had to create something like Bay Area. They needed the engineers to be @ place. And the same can happen anywhere if you recreate the Bay Area. Solution: remote work Honestly...160k salaries for some sw roles are silly. But there is need for them because the costs of living are so high. That's plain bs.
Solution: Concentrate your tech workers in a area that isn't hostile to expanding the housing supply when needed.
> Concentrate your tech workers in a area that isn't hostile to expanding the housing supply when needed.
Sure, you can try that.
But if the place doesn't offer the environmental features that make the Bay Area attractive, your going to have to offer them a premium to live there; lower housing costs may cover some of that so that you are only paying the same, but may not.
The Bay Area is expensive, more than anything else, because people want to live there.
Re: Employees at Airbnb, Square and Stripe Are Spending 50%+ of Income on SF Rent
#248I'm surprised it's only 40-50% now. That was the norm 10 years ago in SF.
Re: Employees at Airbnb, Square and Stripe Are Spending 50%+ of Income on SF Rent
#249Which is silly....honestly companies need to start opening offices in more affordable areas. Colorado (Blouder, Denver, The Springs), Texas (Austin, San Antonio), Missouri (Kansas City, Saint Louis)....there are so many places you can put your employees that saves them money as well as your company a lot of money not only in Salaries because you'll be able to employees less but your rent/power/etc.
Or even Oakland. I don't understand why there aren't as many startups on the eastern shore of the bay: same pool of candidates; often cheaper/quicker commute for people; cheaper housing.
Among other things, Oakland doesn't seem to like tech companies moving there.
Re: Employees at Airbnb, Square and Stripe Are Spending 50%+ of Income on SF Rent
#250I live in Detroit, own a 4bed/2bath and bike to work everyday for a mortgage that's less than 1/4 of the rent median SF 1br. SF is a cartoon world. Yes salaries are less here, but I feel so much more at ease owning my place and can live a pretty comfortable life. If worst comes to worst, there is always remote work.
There is a reason why it's cheap to live in Detroit, and why salaries are less. Cheap cost of living isn't unique to Detroit.
sure, a cheap cost of living can be had anywhere in the world. but I think it's unique in a 4 million+ person metro area in the united states. Especially with the history and architecture that Detroit has.