131–140 of 195 posts
I do t want to install the app just to find out: hasn’t this been true in Palo Alto for some time? My ex pays more than that and her place is hardly de luxe.
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.
Either way, I always avoid phrasing things as positive rights. But they can usually be rephrased as “I believe it would be in the interest of our society and the well being of our people to provide housing for all people.”
For those who live in SF - what's the cost of a one bedroom rent 1 hour from most jobs in SF? I know in NYC you can reliably get that for around 1500.
The Bay Area is particularly problematic in this regard. There are quite a few cities—Boston I’m most familiar with—where you go an hour out and prices are pretty reasonable. Not Rust Belt reasonable but reasonable. Not so much in the Bay Area.
But even with that commutes are soul sucking. I pay $2.7k for a tiny apartment but not having to deal with a commute longer than 5 minutes walking is amazing for my overall well being.
You just have to pay attention. Last year this time people said it was $3400, but I rented for $2300 that May.
Are these luxury places?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Apparently, you even need to apply for permits to change your windows. Needing a permit to install windows is a thing everywhere. Because if you want a really good way to ruin a house, installing windows wrong is a great way to do it.
Everywhere in the world or everywhere in California? If the former, I find it amazing that house owners ruining their house by replacing windows is a universal problem and that requiring permits solves it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Walnut Creek is about 40m away from SF on Bart. So door-to-door that'd be about an hour commute. Safe, picturesque, good schools and vibrant downtown. The rent there would be about $1800 for a 1BDR. EDIT: As noted by the sibling post, the reason it is cheap is because Walnut Creek does not have very many tech jobs. Also, the peculiar thing about the Bay Area is that about 15 years or so the tech industry oscillates i…
> Safe, picturesque, good schools and vibrant downtown It's completely dead and devoid of culture.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 wa…
I think it's a dangerous attitude to think the salaries in CA are the actual worth of a software developer's work. It's just what FAANG can afford to pay. For many companies devs at that price point are not economically sustainable.
You just have to pay attention. Last year this time people said it was $3400, but I rented for $2300 that May.
It makes me mildly annoyed that people are getting cheaper rents than me in SF than I am near Boston. Are these luxury places?
* No Washer/Dryer in the unit. You'll usually share.
* No parking spot.
* No-one will be around to pick up parcels for you.
* You'll have to put the rubbish bins out for the bin man.
* The stove and fridge and heating won't be using the latest stuff. You're not expecting to have a Nest or a Viking but you won't get a nice stove either, it'll be very basic.
Honestly, it's a downgrade in standard of living for me but not to the point that it annoys me. Those things were just luxuries. Really the washer/dryer being in my unit is the one thing I really miss.
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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…
Part of the cost is that tech companies have to find more and more money to pay staff in order to maintain the growth their investors demand, which leads them to do less and less ethical things like spying on people.
While such a large portion of tech company revenue is going to landlords (via staff wages) tech companies will continue to get worse at things like privacy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Outside of the prison system, legal coercive labor isn't really a thing in the US. The people building houses are working because they are paid and they prefer that to the existing social safety net.
Right, but housing as a basic human right is not something that exists in the US, at most it is a high priority. If it was really treated like a basic right our society would be unrecognizably distorted around that one thing. A human right is not something you can let slip on a bad day, and that fact has big implications. If you are allowed to say, "our budget isn't adding up today so some people will have to stay on…
Housing could be a right in that sense: the government shall make no law preventing the construction of housing. Of course, like all other rights, it would be balanced against reasonable government interests like ensuring that the housing is safe.