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Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

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Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#401

Post by pm90 »

enraged_camel wrote: post #198
pm90 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Austin is a lot more progressive about accommodating new residents. Of course you do hear a lot of folks complaining about how the skyrocketing rents are destroying some long-time businesses, but like you said there is a LOT more land to expand and accomodate new residents. Also, the Domain development has somewhat eased the traffic situation by shifting a lot of new businesses slightly closer to the Northern Suburbs…

I live in Austin as well. I'm optimistic but not nearly as much as you. Traffic is strangling the city and slowing growth, especially of the downtown core. And the city is wasting time and money expanding highways (something proven to be useless in the long run) instead of investing in public transport like most successful cities have. I'm looking into buying a house but anything that is affordable is out in the subu…

You make good points. The only highway expansion I see is for Mopac though, right? After that disastrous experience (which is finally nearing completion), I think people have become a lot more against expanding the highways any more.

Austin does unfortunately have a terrible record when it comes to public transit. The rail system is a joke. Although, I am hoping that future infrastructure projects will focus more on creating a viable train/rail/subway system from suburbs to dt/domain. The density of dt is skyrocketing with recent developments, and I can only hope that it will spur a rethinking of transportation policy.

As for the cost of housing... unfortunately, all the outsiders coming in are flooding the market and driving prices ridiculously high. I don't really see an end to the boom... which is why I too have stayed away from considering purchasing a house for the time being.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#402

Post by rdtsc »

davidw wrote: post #59
robbrit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fourth category: people who have lived here for a long time, and were able to buy property back before it became unaffordable. These are typically the managers or senior employees. It makes me wonder that as the young rockstars and H1B recipients age, where will they go? They certainly can't afford to buy a house. I imagine as time goes on, companies in the Bay Area will be awash with young junior talent but will s…

> where will they go Other tech hubs. Portland, Seattle - even little Bend has plenty of people from California who are attracted by the (for them) low housing prices. They, in turn, put pressure on housing prices for 'ordinary' people here. California's housing crisis has repercussions all up and down the west coast.

The funny thing is these companies talk about digital connectivity moving to the cloud, editing files in the cloud, video conferencing in the cloud, make social networks in the cloud, buy things online without leaving your house, watch movies online etc. Everything is online, pretty, efficient, and convenient.

Then they turn right around and tell all their employees to move to the area, then to get in their cars, buses, trains and start commuting to a physical location, in one of the busiest, most expensive city every single day. So that these workers can then sit on chairs in a building and do probably the easiest thing to do with a remote connection -- write code, documents, email, monitor servers.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#403

Post by 5706906c06c »

dmode wrote: post #117
5706906c06c wrote: post #49

38, two kids and a wife. Have been living in a 900SQ/FT apt, I don't know how much longer I can take this before rage quitting and relocating somewhere else (don't know where). The sad part, as a ethnic-minority, I have just found our community for my kids, etc. It would be really tragic if I have to tear my kids away from that. Don't get me wrong, my daily 30 minute commute on BART isn't the worst. The worst part is…

I am curious where you are looking to buy. I bought 2 years back, 3000 sqft in Easy Bay close to a million. Have you looked at places like Hayward Hills, Union City, Dublin, San Ramon etc. ?

Yes, Castro Valley, Hayward Hills, etc. Selfishly speaking, the issue with moving further out means longer commute + plus distance from the kids school, etc. At that point, I might as well move out of state.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#404

Post by nerfhammer »

hpcjoe wrote: post #362
aantix wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100K down but the average salaried offer appears to be 140K? 140K, 40% for taxes, leaves with 84K, 3K a month for housing (assuming you don't want to shack up with some rando Craigslist'er), leaves 48K. Another 20K for food and booze, and you're left with 28K.

I did a similar analysis with more relevant (for me) numbers for BA recruiters that wanted me to move. Their responses were ... well ... sad. I don't blame them. Or the companies. I was amused by the offered salaries, after I explained the basic economics to them. Pointing out that the net income after taxes/expenses is so low as to effectively put me and my family into poverty. The smart ones responded positively to…

> Ponzi scheme

nitpick: Ponzi scheme = fraud, giving people fake investment accounts, like Bernie Madoff's operation.

It's more akin to a pyramid scheme, greater fool theory, speculative bubble, etc.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#405

Post by nightski »

maxxxxx wrote: post #266
irrational wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in Portland. A house down the street was purchased for 180k 2 years ago and recently sold for 520k. And that isn't some outlier. It seems all anyone wants to talk about is how quickly home prices have inflated.

It's funny that the Fed is still dreaming about having low inflation while the number one expense most people will have experiences rampant inflation.

Isn't it very localized?

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#406

Post by bking »

wil421 wrote: post #288
NonEUCitizen wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you buying?

Atlanta and in an area that has exploded in the past 5 years. Comparable to Austin, Houston and maybe Portland. Maybe not so comparable for Portland anymore. Bankrate calculator says it’s $700k more expensive for the same house in SF.

Yeah, ATL is adding a number of tech jobs (hopefully Amazon too). Cost of living is increasing, but relative to everywhere else it is cheap to live in the city center. Developments of apartments and condos has exploded, which is making for a nice urban feel.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#407

Post by [deleted] »

dragontamer wrote: post #283
5706906c06c wrote: post #49

38, two kids and a wife. Have been living in a 900SQ/FT apt, I don't know how much longer I can take this before rage quitting and relocating somewhere else (don't know where). The sad part, as a ethnic-minority, I have just found our community for my kids, etc. It would be really tragic if I have to tear my kids away from that. Don't get me wrong, my daily 30 minute commute on BART isn't the worst. The worst part is…

> The sad part, as a ethnic-minority, I have just found our community for my kids, etc. California has a number of Asian communities, but depending on which culture you want... there are plenty of other cities out there. Filipinos are basically everywhere in the USA as far as I can tell... Vietnamese and Koreans are a bit more rare but still exist in virtually every major Metropolian area in the USA (New York, DC, Au…

[deleted]

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#408

Post by passthefist »

dboreham wrote: post #136
client4 wrote: post #14

Montana, a land of National parks, natural beauty, fast internet, and a low cost of living has a number of high tech jobs open. Full disclosure, I own an internet company here and want more tech savvy people in the area ;) Social Finanace (SoFi) | Helena, MT Oracle | Bozeman, MT OnXMaps | Missoula, MT Zaneray Group | Whitefish, MT Submittable | Missoula, MT Applied Materials | Kalispell, MT

In 1999 I bailed out of the valley and moved to Livingston, MT. I had to build my own ISP to get connectivity to my house but otherwise it's been a success. Interesting to watch how the tech "scene" has changed over that time. I used to know all the developers in this half of the state personally!

I'd love to hear about what you had to do to get connectivity to your house and what was involved with being your own ISP.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#409

Post by borkt »

robbrit wrote: post #31
nimbius wrote: post #16

Most of the bay area employees are divided into 3 categories from anecdotal experience: young rockstars that are willing to live in relative squalor for a chance to prove themselves, vested and moneyed elites (CEO's, presidents, VC funded overlords) who are so out of touch with the average employee its best they not show up to the office that frequently, and H1B visa recipients that endure the soul-crushing San Jose…

A fourth category: people who have lived here for a long time, and were able to buy property back before it became unaffordable. These are typically the managers or senior employees. It makes me wonder that as the young rockstars and H1B recipients age, where will they go? They certainly can't afford to buy a house. I imagine as time goes on, companies in the Bay Area will be awash with young junior talent but will s…

There may be a 5th category, young families with dual income/no kids working in professions other than tech. My wife works in winemaking and I work as a Civil Engineer in the North Bay. Even with two career-type jobs we just barely were able to jump into the housing market in 2014. As house prices increase and housing stock goes down (especially after these fires) I think there will be a shortage of workers not just in the service industry but even in these professions. We had a senior level engineer move out here from Utah making ~150k a year move back within a year because he couldn't take living in a relatively small apartment and having his kids go to schools that were not up to the standard of where he moved from.

Wine industry is similar, my wife gets a lot of interns from out of the country through an Ag exchange program. Between the lower pay and higher cost of living here, recent grads who are able to save up money working in Australia, NZ, ZA, or Argentina in the Southern Hemisphere harvest actually end up losing money just living up here for the Northern Hemisphere harvest. A lot of them are looking into ways to work for a more extended period of time in other countries as they are able to live much better in very similar regions climatically.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#410

Post by mccoyspace »

zcdziura wrote: post #179
cobookman wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly early in my career at a company ( 80-10-10 mortgage on a 1mil home is only 100k down. And the monthly payments split by 2 people (aka a couple) is ~2k / person / month. That's 4k/month all in once you include the tax rebates.

How much land and house does that $1M buy you? In New Hampshire where I live, $1M buys you quite a bit: several thousand square feet of house, several acres of land, an excellent local public school system, great views... Heck, I even imagine that in the greater Boston metro area you'll get a similar bang for your buck. Your normal family property (approx 1500 - 2000 ft/sq, ~1 acre land) goes for $200k - $250k. Still…

$1M doesn't buy you the time of day where I live in northern Brooklyn. And it's $1250 minimum per person in a rental share, often more.
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