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In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

nytimes.com

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Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#51

Post by rienbdj »

wilkommen wrote: post #27
rich_sasha wrote: post #18

I suppose a big change over the past 50 years is that we really boosted jobs that must be done in big cities. Wanna earn a lot of money? Take on a lot of debt and become a lawyer/accountant/etc. But we didn't create more cities. There's more people competing for the same small amount of commutable real estate, and the winners are the top earners. I'm not sure how you fix it. The organic fix ought to be that businesse…

The root cause of the dynamic you're highlighting here is wealth inequality. The more unequal the distribution of wealth in a society, the more concentrated wealth becomes geographically, because as wealth inequality grows, society begins to reorganize into a system which serves ever more lopsidedly to the needs of the wealth holders. The wealth holders, being few, and being social creatures like the rest of us, tend…

Plus the only group with any disposable incomes increasingly becomes the super rich. So all the support functions of this… restaurants, high end boutiques, wellness clinics, tailors, … start to cluster. The servant class then push prices up further by trying to live a commutable distance to work.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#52

Post by rich_sasha »

wilkommen wrote: post #27
rich_sasha wrote: post #18

I suppose a big change over the past 50 years is that we really boosted jobs that must be done in big cities. Wanna earn a lot of money? Take on a lot of debt and become a lawyer/accountant/etc. But we didn't create more cities. There's more people competing for the same small amount of commutable real estate, and the winners are the top earners. I'm not sure how you fix it. The organic fix ought to be that businesse…

The root cause of the dynamic you're highlighting here is wealth inequality. The more unequal the distribution of wealth in a society, the more concentrated wealth becomes geographically, because as wealth inequality grows, society begins to reorganize into a system which serves ever more lopsidedly to the needs of the wealth holders. The wealth holders, being few, and being social creatures like the rest of us, tend…

At some point, if there are enough incentives, you should see businesses and employees moving to lower CoL areas, as you saw the mini exodus from SV to Texas. What exactly is the government motivation for relieving the pressure on startup SEs, I'm not sure.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#53

Post by bombcar »

gruntled-worker wrote: post #24
GenseeAI wrote: post #9

As an AI startup founder, my impression is that $180k in the Bay Area mostly gets you new grads or relatively junior talent these days. However, remote work has fundamentally changed the equation. Expanding hiring beyond the Bay Area, or even internationally (for example, hiring remotely from Canada), can dramatically broaden the talent pool while significantly reducing costs.

There's strange kinship and signaling in proximity. It's similar to college degrees. Working in SF - either in person or locally remote - puts people in a separate bin. It's not just signaling. Once people move away the kinship factor fades, even when you already know them well past the signaling stage.

This kind of boils down to "I want to live and work with people like me" which is a common feeling, but sometimes veers dangerously.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#54

Post by waffletower »

bitbckt wrote: post #50
waffletower wrote: post #31

I don't understand how $180k was enough in San Francisco at any time in the last 15 years -- unless you were partnered with someone with a comparable salary.

I was single, living alone (+ 2 cats, if they count) in a one bedroom apartment in North Beach 15 years ago on a $90k/year salary. I even had a parking space and a car! I can understand how people did it then - I was one of them - but I don't understand how they would do it now.

I guess you could rent something small. But could you afford a mortgage with $180,000 back then?

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#55

Post by saulpw »

mbgerring wrote: post #14
everdrive wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism What about fewer people with the same amount of housing stock? I'm not even arguing that this is the better solution, but I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.

> I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it. Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution: Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a le…

> or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth

People are quite naturally controlling their own quantity of offspring, to the dismay of our leaders who insist on perpetual growth. If we limit immigration (not my preferred approach, but here we are), then the population will naturally start to fall, as is happening in other places.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#56

Post by scoofy »

bombcar wrote: post #44
TSiege wrote: post #2

Everyone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism. Housing being this expensive is a choice. The economy and our society would be much healthier if we decided making sure there was ample housing in high demand areas. We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. We can't have plen…

If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so. Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.

>Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country

This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are.

The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps."

The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely.

We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#57

Post by DiscourseFan »

mbgerring wrote: post #40
Legend2440 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US population may already be declining. In prior years the only thing keeping it increasing was immigration, and immigration has fallen considerably under Trump: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-...

That’s correct, and to my point above, driving immigration down to this degree required a level of violence and cruelty so extreme that even the people who voted for it now disapprove of it. And that’s before the profound economic consequences really hit.

I think its also quite apparent that building new housing is a whole lot cheaper than killing and forcibly removing people, its just that it also destroys the value of an asset that the majority of families still hold. I mean its very basic of course: capitalism has a tendency to destroy the family unit, home ownership is a means of maintaining the family unit, and force against the destruction of the family requires violence, which is overall unproductive and wasteful. But anything that is unproductive is also freely determined, which is where the vulgarity of fascism lies, in its conflation of freedom with "letting off steam," so-to-speak.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#59

Post by jltsiren »

rich_sasha wrote: post #18

I suppose a big change over the past 50 years is that we really boosted jobs that must be done in big cities. Wanna earn a lot of money? Take on a lot of debt and become a lawyer/accountant/etc. But we didn't create more cities. There's more people competing for the same small amount of commutable real estate, and the winners are the top earners. I'm not sure how you fix it. The organic fix ought to be that businesse…

Larger cities would help more, as the root issues are education and specialization.

A city should be large enough to have multiple potential employers to minimize the risk of getting trapped in a bad job. If you are single, a smaller city can be viable if there is a concentration of businesses in your field. But that won't work for an educated couple, if they are in different fields.

Re: In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough

#60

Post by crooked-v »

orangecat wrote: post #28
crooked-v wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF in particular is wild. There are so many people who oppose any and all new housing because "it isn't affordable", as if just not constructing anything, ever, will let anyone afford anything.

Yeah, it's a surprisingly resilient alliance of NIMBY homeowners who understand supply and demand, and "anti-gentification" types who don't.

If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. You can see some of that already in areas under the recent round of city zoning changes, where housing prices shot up significantly in potentially upzonable areas the second the new law was passed, even with zero actual practical changes so far.

To me it feels much more like just a significant cadre who resist any change, of any kind, for any reason, who can ignore the personal side effects because of Prop 13 and because their family bought a house in the 80s and they don't give a shit about anyone else who wants or has to live in the city.

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