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San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

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Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#111
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The service workers move somewhere else where they can afford to live. The ones that remain can demand a higher price for their work

...When they are actually working. But if you are fired from the job, you still need to pay rent for the time it takes to find a new job. Having high rent reduces your personal “runway”. This makes bootstrapped startups hard and it makes like as a lower-income worker very risky/stressful

If you don't like the risk/stress there are plenty of other places to live. If you choose to live in SF when you can't afford it then that just not a wise decision. Eventually the prices will even out and you will just have to pay $30 for a sandwich.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#112
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all people deserve shelter as a basic human right I hear this a lot and it still makes absolutely no sense. Where will they get the shelter from? What if the builder doesn't want to build a house for that person? Is the plan to force the labor out of them? Every positive right that I have ever seen comes along with an implicit demand that somebody else become a slave.

What will you do when it happens to you? That you have no place to live? Because it will.

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Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#113
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will you do when it happens to you? That you have no place to live? Because it will.

What makes you think that will happen to them? Most people don't end up homeless at some point in their life.

More people than you think and it gets more common over time.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why "just scoff"? There's a salary that would allow you to live comfortably and get more net income in the Bay Area - you'd want to see if the jobs can pay that salary

Looking at salary data from several places, even a $200k base seems pretty rare, most developers are not making that much in the bay area. People in the bay area are going to have less purchasing power than developers in most other places around the country.

$3690/month * 12 months = $44280. If you're making ($44280 - current rent in your city) more for a SF job, you net out ahead, even without considering stock options.

(It's also significantly more reasonable in the South Bay - my family pays about $2650/month for a 2BR, and most of the fat Facebook/Apple/Netflix/Google salaries are in Silicon Valley proper.)

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#115
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are entitled to build whatever they want on their property. As Silicon Valley is ruled by rent seekers who make building illegal, people have every right to complain.

> People are entitled to build whatever they want on their property Not in a world where zoning and nuisance laws exist, with good reasons.

No one's proposing to build a sewage treatment plant on this land. It's just more housing, in a city where people go without a roof over their head because it's too expensive. There's no "nuisance" here, only landowners trying to assert rights over their neighbors' property.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#116
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about whether any specific person deserves to live in a specific place. There is a cost to society in effectively pricing out half of the population from an entire city. Is the benefit of mitigating that worth the cost? For what it's worth, I think that it probably is.

What is that cost? There's an enclave in my city where I can't afford to live, and I live in a neighborhood where others can't afford to live. Now in my case, the people who are shut out of my neighborhood arguably have less access to things like good schools, so in principle I'm uncomfortable with exclusionary zoning and economic segregation. But I don't know if that's the case in SF. Are the elementary schools in S…

> What is that cost?

By some estimates it's double digit percentage points off US GDP

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/opinion/housing-regulatio...

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Rent seeking" is a specific term in economics referring to people who seek to extract wealth from the economy without adding to it in any way, e.g. "make building illegal" in order to force up the value of their own property. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking

Thanks for sharing, did not know of that term, but I must say it's a rather confusing choice of words!

You're welcome! I went down a wikipedia black hole on economics a while back. The most memorable term I learned was moral hazard, which also sounds confusing.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised that people like that exist! Clarification: people who think they need "smart" neighbours as if they are going to play chess with neighbours 24 x 7

Sorry smartness is not only about "playing chess" and I failed to clarify by what I mean smart. It's about seeing your benefit and the group's benefit at the same time. Many people are incapable of this. They only act either in their own best benefit or benefit of none. Having lived and worked at many places, those who don't see how they or their group can benefit from something are simply incapable of bringing anyth…

I don't think this tragedy of the commons type of behavior you're describing only applies to the "no n smart" people, it happens in SF and rich neighborhoods as well.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#119
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it depends. I'll agree with you that if you work at a rando tech startup, the costs of living are going to be quite high, and make it probably not worth it. But , the whole equation changes if you are working for a big 5 tech company, or hot unicorn company. These companies will pay you double what the rando startups pay. Who really cares if you are paying 40k a year on rent, if your total compensation breaks 25…

But the cost of living is so high there that the inflated salaries are pretty much required to bring anyone out there. A company wants to have competitive hiring so they offer a little bit more than competition so what was a $200k job is now $220k. Prices increase to what these inflated salaried workers can afford and the cycle continues. It will be incredible to watch when SF finally starts to allow for more high de…

This gets causality backwards. Employers don't give a shit about whether employees can afford housing - if they did, we wouldn't have such a big homelessness problem, and our teachers/firefighters/policemen wouldn't live over the mountains in Pleasanton. Employers pay enough to prevent employees from going to a competitor. The reason FANG salaries now hit $300-400K is because Facebook refused to play ball with the wage-fixing cartel that Schmidt/Jobs/et al had worked out, then the DoJ cracked down, and so now that's what you need to pay to keep your software engineers from working for someone else. Then you have a lot of tech workers with extremely fat salaries and not enough housing for everyone who wants to live here, so they bid up rents & housing prices until they're unaffordable for all the middle-income folks who used to live here.

If more high-density housing was built, then rents would fall, middle-income people could live here again, and tech workers could pocket their fat salaries as savings (or live extremely lavish lifestyles). They would still be paid a lot, because there'd always be another tech company around the corner willing to bid up wages to their current level. For the salary "bubble" to pop, a lot of these companies would have to go out of business at once. This was exactly what happened in 2001 and 2009, and it had the predicted results: unemployment spiked, wages fell, rents fell, and people moved out of the Bay Area back to wherever they came from.

Re: San Francisco median one bedroom apartment rent hits a new peak of $3,690

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at salary data from several places, even a $200k base seems pretty rare, most developers are not making that much in the bay area. People in the bay area are going to have less purchasing power than developers in most other places around the country.

$3690/month * 12 months = $44280. If you're making ($44280 - current rent in your city) more for a SF job, you net out ahead, even without considering stock options. (It's also significantly more reasonable in the South Bay - my family pays about $2650/month for a 2BR, and most of the fat Facebook/Apple/Netflix/Google salaries are in Silicon Valley proper.)

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