Live data from Hacker News

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

cnet.com

161–170 of 195 posts

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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? At what income level in California are you paying half your income in taxes?

From what I've seen I think it's around 38-40% state+federal when you reach about $200-300k then about 50% by $1m annual income... Might be better or worse this year with the new tax bill, not sure.

> Might be better or worse this year with the new tax bill, not sure.

Much better for those who can arguably restructure their salary as business income (e.g., real estate developers, some contractors), then they only get a 15% tax. Far worse for those who cant make that argument and live in high tax states like NY, CA, and many others.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? At what income level in California are you paying half your income in taxes?

When comparing alternatives you want to look at marginal rate. Above $82k, your marginal tax rate is: 24% federal income + 6.3% social security + 1.45% medicare + 9.3% California + 1.5% San Francisco for a total of 43%. This is not the same thing as paying half your income in taxes, but it is paying (nearly) half the additional income in taxes.

What’s the 1.5% SF tax here ? Never heard of it. Isn’t SSN and Medicare only apply to 100k of income ? Also, you have deductions for mortgage, state taxes, property taxes that lower your tax liability quite a bit. I would be surprised if anyone paid more than 30% effective tax rate on their income

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

#163

On one hand, it’s a very high price. On the other hand, no one is entitled to a one bedroom unit in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world. Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements. There are several reasons why the prices have gotten so high (lack of supply, politics, etc). But don’t expect to move your Texas ranch or Midwestern single-family-house lifestyle to SF with no compr…

> Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements.

Is “alternate living arrangements” a euphemism for homelessness?

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

#164
Where I live in Atlantic Canada you can rent the same for $550 USD, or just buy a brand new modern home for $180k USD. People here work remotely for companies like Google. The government will also help fund your startup’s product development through various programs (hundreds of thousands of dollars).

Always wanted to move to San Fran but starting to feel pretty grateful about being here.

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

#165

I think high rent prices are bad for a number of reasons: Less flexibility in starting a company: You can't choose to bootstrap unless you do it as a side hustle at a megacorp, and it's hard to not compete with a megacorp because it does everything. You have to take VC funding and follow VC rules to some degree, and it may not be a direction you wish to follow. This is a feedback loop. Oligopsony employment condition…

> 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.

“Shelter as a basic human right” means that we have a moral imperative to organise and structure our societies so that that right is fulfilled. If your society is structured so that not enough housing is being created, or so that housing is left empty while there are people without shelter, then that society is running on incorrect axioms and the people who make it up have a moral imperative to change how they do things.

There’s no force involved, it’s a potential principle of self-organisation.

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not about whether any specific person deserves to live in a specific place. I never said anything about if someone deserves to live somewhere. A 1-bedroom apartment is a very specific type of unit and that's part of what I wanted to point out. You can also rent studios, converted rooms, or get roommates in a bigger place with more rooms. There's a lot of other options I'm leaving out too, but I reject the prem…

The price for a studio isn't going to be far behind a 1 bedroom, and rooms in houses aren't really an option for for people who aren't single in most cases. Even if you wanted to cram multiple people into one 12x12 room, most cheap rooms for rent are explicit about 1 person only. Look at median household income, San Francisco is effectively off limits to most people.

Point taken. We definitely have a problem but I really don’t see any solution anytime soon. Even if we committed to building a ton of new supply tomorrow, it’d still take years to get approved and actually physically built.

I’ll push back a little on your point back alternatives not being too far behind the price of a 1 bedroom though. I know several people with units <$1800. Some converted rooms go for <$1500.

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

#167

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…

Irony isn’t your strongest suit, huh?

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

#168

On one hand, it’s a very high price. On the other hand, no one is entitled to a one bedroom unit in the heart of one of the human epicenters in the world. Many people here have roommates or alternate living arrangements. There are several reasons why the prices have gotten so high (lack of supply, politics, etc). But don’t expect to move your Texas ranch or Midwestern single-family-house lifestyle to SF with no compr…

This only applies if you’re a single person. How is someone supposed to start a family and afford to live anywhere near that area?

I think we are reaching a really depressing future if only the wealthy can afford to have a family.

Bay Area is the most extreme example but we see it everywhere with no government mandated leave policies and childcare costs are insane. Again, only the wealthy get these services because they work at companies that use them for recruiting purposes and to retain talent.

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

#169
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gotta ask, because this issue comes up in many major cities: And what if the service workers who make substantially less than the higher earners who so rely on them? Does the cost go down that much for a 4 bedroom split between four people on minimum wage? In a lot of places it doesn’t.

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

Is that happening? Are service workers in SF paid a living wage?

Or are people like fast food workers being paid minimum wage and commuting 2 hours?

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

#170
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

If that would actually be the case you would have these salaries all around the world, but you don't. Because it's mainly a few big highly profitable companies (FAANG) that can afford these salaries and a big VC and stock market funded bubble around them. And even FAANG pays much lower salaries in cheaper regions, because hightech employers have to give a shit about housing. You can't compare it to teachers. I think…

It absolutely is what FAANG (and newer companies like AirBnB/Uber/Lyft/Stripe/DropBox etc) can afford to pay. And what FAANG can afford to pay is not going to change if more housing gets built in the Bay Area. And yes, for many companies devs at that price point are not economically sustainable, but that's why FAANG are sucking all the oxygen out of the startup developers market and maintaining their oligopsony.

(Also, while there's some variance for cost-of-living in FAANG salaries in different regions, it's not that much. Google developers make less in Beijing than they do in Mountain View, but their salary still looks much more like a Google salary than a Beijing salary.)

Post reply on HN