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San Francisco

antirez.com

221–230 of 267 posts

Re: San Francisco

#221

Eh. They can keep it. • Average engineering salary in sf: 116K / year [1] • Average rent for a one bedroom: $2,700 / month [2] After taxes you're coming in around 72k / year - 32k / year for rent You'll have roughly 40k to play with. That may sound like a lot but factor in food, health care, travel, energy, internet, phone, and numerous miscellaneous expenses and you'll be hard pressed to save anything over 10k a yea…

Why do you have to live in SF? You can live in SJ/MV and save more than half on rent. You can use BART/Caltrain for commuting. Life is great in Bay Area doesn't matter if you are staying in SF or in other cities in the Bay. I seriously don't the understand whats so special in living in SF. I do commute to SF on weekends whenever I want and on weekdays for work.

Re: San Francisco

#222
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say 1.4k is a reasonable rent in DC, not in my experience at least. Not even if you move out to the nearby suburbs.

I agree that it's below average for a one bedroom in DC, but apartments do exist at that price. I've lived in DC for 9 years and I've never paid more than that. (Granted, my wife is a wizard-level Craigslist user.) I think the tricky part is that there really aren't many apartment buildings in DC to begin with, aside from the recently built and very overpriced luxury condo conversions, so the supply of one bedroom ap…

$1.4k is below average (but possible) in DC. I don't know anyone in SF who is paying $2.7k a month for a place (the high end condos go for that, but they're generally split by couples). The vast majority of people I know in SF pay under $1.4k a month for rent.

The rent is higher in SF, but the tradeoff is that you can walk or ride a bike everywhere, year round. It's possible to get by in SF without a car at all. In DC (or elsewhere) you're paying for parking, gas, insurance, and a monthly car payment. That starts to add up pretty quickly. There's not an $11k a year difference without that ($1.4k vs $2.7k isn't realistic), but factoring it in, SF really closes that gap, or likely becomes cheaper.

Re: San Francisco

#223
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is very common. But it's also the lifestyle that forces this. I was continually perplexed at how all of my colleagues seemed to be able to afford to go to all these conferences (not always on company dime), buy the most expensive coffee, upgrade their bleeding-edge laptop the moment Apple puts out a new one, and so on. I figured out later that they just weren't saving or investing any money, and often were even ac…

You're forgetting how much money people outside of San Francisco spend on their car. That makes expensive coffee, eating out, and computer upgrades look like pocket change.

I dunno. In other places, Teslas are an unusual site. I can't commute three miles without seeing one or two each day. BMWs might be more ubiquitous than Toyotas here. To be fair, I'm not in the city, I'm on the peninsula.

Re: San Francisco

#224

Eh. They can keep it. • Average engineering salary in sf: 116K / year [1] • Average rent for a one bedroom: $2,700 / month [2] After taxes you're coming in around 72k / year - 32k / year for rent You'll have roughly 40k to play with. That may sound like a lot but factor in food, health care, travel, energy, internet, phone, and numerous miscellaneous expenses and you'll be hard pressed to save anything over 10k a yea…

You are forgetting the weather. DC winters: cold, snow, sometimes blizzard, have to scrape your car free from ice if you don't have indoor parking. SF winters: sometimes you have to put in a jacket and sometimes it rains. That's it. This is just one example of many. It's pointless to compare two cities on rent and cost of living alone. Now, if the extra 11k is worth the winter challenges to you then I'm happy. Person…

I grew up in the Midwest, where we had all the seasons and often fairly bad summers (old people die if their air conditioners fail) and winters (can't leave the driveway without 4WD). Still, in San Francisco, I am personally uncomfortable due to weather far more often than I ever was in the Midwest. This is due primarily to the lack of air conditioning in housing (I have bay windows constantly open and a fan directly on my desk and bed, and am still almost always hot, often to the point of having difficulty sleeping for long stretches in the late summer), the lack of air conditioning in my office (an older building in the financial district), and being improperly dressed outside due to the lack of predictability in the weather. I really dislike San Francisco's weather, not because it looks bad on paper (it obviously looks great), but because it causes me discomfort much more frequently than I was used to in the Midwest.

Re: San Francisco

#225
post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF people have to stop quoting the weather. The summer's are miserable with fog. It's as annoying as snow or sleet.

SF people have to stop quoting the weather. SF weather is awesome: ~50-75 all year round with specific neighborhoods that stay warm and sunny all the time if you're into that sort of thing. Heavenly compared to Pittsburgh, Boston, NYC, or DC. The summer's are miserable with fog. It's as annoying as snow or sleet. Bizarre claim. Also, avoiding fog is simple: move to a different neighborhood. And let's not forget that…

> Also, avoiding fog is simple: move to a different neighborhood.

A 20+ hour a week job for a month, even if you can afford a place in the neighborhood you want to move to.

Re: San Francisco

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on lack of police? Have you been affected by the crime in Rockridge? I thought it was a pretty decent area the last time I visited.

Oakland has about 600 police officers for a population which requires around 1,100. There have been five robberies on my street in upper rockridge, where we rent. It's an incredibly beautiful neighborhood and we pay a pretty high rent to live there. In 2010, the police announced that for a long list of crimes (including burgularies) they will not come out. We have caught people casing our neighborhood, strangers sitt…

I've lived in Rockridge for about 10 years and can attest to everything you've seen: half a police force, restaurant "take over" robberies, broad daylight muggings at Rockridge BART station, many "solicitors" casing houses.

I've been bullish on Oakland for a long time. It could be a great city. It has an international airport, a major shipping port, easy BART access to SF, cheaper real estate than SF, near UC Berkeley and a number of smaller colleges. But Oakland's crime waves, understaffed police force, history of police abuse, and years of do-nothing city government is taking its toll.

You may be interested in joining the "Rockridge Neighborhood Watch Network" Yahoo group:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RockridgeNeighborhoodWatchNetw...

Re: San Francisco

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF people have to stop quoting the weather. The summer's are miserable with fog. It's as annoying as snow or sleet.

It's never very foggy east of Fillmore street, even in the summer. YMMV but SF weather is only miserable to people from LA.

Foggy mornings and evenings aren't rare even as far east as 3rd St, although it usually burns off during the day.

Re: San Francisco

#228
post #117

Eh. They can keep it. • Average engineering salary in sf: 116K / year [1] • Average rent for a one bedroom: $2,700 / month [2] After taxes you're coming in around 72k / year - 32k / year for rent You'll have roughly 40k to play with. That may sound like a lot but factor in food, health care, travel, energy, internet, phone, and numerous miscellaneous expenses and you'll be hard pressed to save anything over 10k a yea…

Are you sure that the average rent for 1 bedroom is $2,700? I lived on Market street in a studio apartment with a pool and a gym in our building and I paid only $1500, that was couple years ago tho, but I dont think that the average rent is $2,700...sorry

People would kill to pay $1500 a month in the tiniest studio apartment possible anywhere in the city.

Re: San Francisco

#229
post #213
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your theory is sound except for one little problem: the Bay Area's transportation system is fucked. FUCKED. Completely, utterly, irredeemably fucked. BART is a joke, MUNI is like a fevered bad dream, Caltrain woefully inadequate. A little hyperbolic, I think.

Bay Area mass transit is far from fucked. There's a lot of infrastructure there that, with minor upgrades, could massively improve the situation. Take BART, for example. Not enough trains. Upgrade the system to support more trains and then BUY MORE TRAINS. Suddenly living in Daly City and commuting to SF is feasible.

"Upgrade the system to support more trains" is easier said than done.

For one thing, BART is running ancient rolling stock that's already well pasts its original designed service lifetime - the bulk of the fleet is now sixteen years over its original 25-year service life. The system breaks down frequently because of this, and over the years the system has lost enough cars (and cannibalized enough for parts) that there is no longer sufficient spare capacity to rotate into service when trains break down.

Couple that with track and control design that does not permit bypasses, and you've got yourself a recipe for trouble. A train stuck in the tube cannot be bypassed - unlike other subway systems - and thus every single minor trouble cascades into a major cockup of everyone's day.

So you have a system that is prone to magnifying small failures into big ones, and you combine that with trains that are way past their service life and running on proverbial fumes.

Bonus also: BART hasn't purchased any new rolling stock in a very, very long time, and all of its rolling stock will come up to the end of their service lifetimes by 2019 (with 65% of the fleet already past service life). Instead of spreading the capital cost of new vehicles over decades, BART is now placed in a position where it needs to replace its 670+ car fleet in the span of about six years. In all likelihood this will mean even more of the fleet going into "beyond service life" territory and wreaking havoc on everyone's commute.

BART can be improved. But before BART can be improved you first need to catch up on 20 years of complete neglect. It's billions of dollars that has no hope of ever getting spent in the current political and economic climate, and that's just to get BART to the point where it's reasonably good at accomplishing its current stated purpose. At that point you can think about expanding the system, increasing capacity beyond its current scope, etc etc.

Actually, I just looked this up, the current plan is to phase in new vehicles beginning 2017, over a 15-20 year period. That's going to be quite a treat, considering even the newest trains in the current fleet will be 44 years old by the time BART is done with their rolling stock refresh - 18 years past its expected service life.

Bonus also: large parts of BART track are actually substantially damaged, reducing speed and increasing noise (to unsafe levels, even). You can't hope to begin adding capacity until you fix this. Between the fleet, the antiquated control systems, and damaged track, BART doesn't need minor fixes, it needs deep overhauls of nearly every aspect of its infrastructure.

MUNI isn't much better off: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/report-on-munis-light...

Ancient equipment, ancient infrastructure, a fleet stretched thin to the breaking point, decades of under-funding and mismanagement, all of these descriptors apply just as much to MUNI (if not more) than to BART.

The regional and city transportation infrastructure in the SF Bay Area is a complete mess. This is, unfortunately, not hyperbole. We are over a decade, and billions of dollars of additional spending, away from even restoring these transit systems to proper function, much less go after expanding their scope.

Re: San Francisco

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are forgetting the weather. DC winters: cold, snow, sometimes blizzard, have to scrape your car free from ice if you don't have indoor parking. SF winters: sometimes you have to put in a jacket and sometimes it rains. That's it. This is just one example of many. It's pointless to compare two cities on rent and cost of living alone. Now, if the extra 11k is worth the winter challenges to you then I'm happy. Person…

in SF, summer is often colder than winter. I've never lived in DC, but - presence of good chinese food - weather (even though I love winter weather, DC summers would not be worth it) - jobs (which companies have large presences in SF vs DC-area) all conspire to make me completely incurious as to whether DC is "$11k/year" nicer than SF.

> in SF, summer is often colder than winter.

A common misconception, even among residents, easily debunked by paying attention or doing a quick Google search:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Climate

http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;q=san%20francisco

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