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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

#181

Post by archagon »

invalidptr wrote: post #153
archagon wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously. I live in SF with a combined household income that's far less than that and have a pretty lavish lifestyle, eating out every day and whatnot. What are these people spending their money on? > But she said she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in. Let's assume $4000/m rent, $200/m utilities, eating out for $3…

Taxes and health insurance are the big ones you're missing

I pay for health insurance basically out of pocket. The folks complaining in this article have health insurance subsidized by their employers.

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

#182

Post by scoofy »

robocat wrote: post #150
scoofy wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 landowner…

> housing has been turned into a zero sum game Not really. Land has always been zero-sum because there is a limited amount to compete for. And location is status, even in high density developments (status is often seen as zero-sum). Book review of Bird's The Land Trap that contains nice detail of unobvious monetary implications: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-la...

>Not really. Land has always been zero-sum

What? Yes, but you misunderstand.

When you (intentionally) make expanding the housing supply illegal or practically impossible, then you've turned housing into a zero-sum game.

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

#183

Post by John23832 »

apparent wrote: post #119
maxverse wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like both the point you quote and your response are valid, and not mutually exclusive. It's great that you were able to avoid lifestyle creep and that $200K felt like a lot of money that "had a huge impact on my later financial condition, and enabled me to do many things". And I think Katrine (from the article) feels like that should be a lot of money. I don't see lifestyle creep playing a role in her life. In…

I don't understand how rent, utilities, and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in unless you're vastly overspending in one category. If she's paying $60k in taxes then she's got $140k left. That's over $10k/mo. How can someone spend that much without lifestyle creep? I understand that one could feel pinched at that salary, when including saving for down payment, future kids, and retirement. But that's dif…

4k for rent 3k for retirement

3k for everything else. I’m not going to sit and itemize, but I could very easily see 3k getting eaten (figuratively)

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

#184

Post by fragmede »

archagon wrote: post #180
fragmede wrote: post #67

What's frustrating is that an estimated 10-15% of SF housing is empty, due to rent control. We'll see how the supreme court case about rent control goes.

Yes, I’m sure eliminating rent control will somehow make the city more affordable, not (catastrophically) less.

If you'd like to type out your priors and why believe yourself you be right, I'd love to hear them.

It's a complex topic and rent control's second order effect is that housing is going empty. People are living in tents when there are vacant apartments. That's a system's failure.

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

#185

Post by Schiendelman »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #177
Schiendelman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take is actively destructive. We need to let people CHOOSE to live WHERE they want to live - and let people who buy land CHOOSE to build housing for demand they perceive. That's it. That's the problem and the solution. It should be unconstitutional to limit housing production arbitrarily.

We can’t let everyone choose to live in the same place. There has to be some mechanism, hopefully market-based but it could also be a residency system, that ensures people spread out and live in different places. Even if you could get SF to support a billion people in living space, I’m sure infrastructure and resources like water would cut things off before it got to that many people.

There absolutely does not have to be in mechanism to spread people out. It is cheaper to provide infrastructure to people who are much closer together than it is to provide the same infrastructure to people who are spread farther out.

There's been a website for the last 20 years called Strong Towns that talks about this a lot if you're interested in learning more.

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

#186

Post by Schiendelman »

gogobio wrote: post #168
Schiendelman wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take is actively destructive. We need to let people CHOOSE to live WHERE they want to live - and let people who buy land CHOOSE to build housing for demand they perceive. That's it. That's the problem and the solution. It should be unconstitutional to limit housing production arbitrarily.

So go buy land and build a house, just CHOOSE to spend your money and buy land. What's so hard about that? Ah yes we conveniently forget in our youthfulness that we are not original and if thousands of software leeches choose to relocate en masse they will sky rocket the costs on just about everything - simple supply and demand.

The point here is that the existing owner of a house is often happy to build an apartment building, and almost always not allowed to.

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

#187

Post by Schiendelman »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #178
Schiendelman wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By letting people build upward. This is self solving, except for our arbitrary limits on how much housing a land owner is allowed to build.

Ah, I see you are a fan of the Kowloon Walled City. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kowloon_Walled_City

There's a great book called "City of Darkness" about it - a lot of what we believe about it was a campaign funded by the Hong Kong government to turn public opinion about it negative because they wanted the land back from China.

Most of the reason there were any problems there at all was that there was no legal jurisdiction over it, there are still buildings in Hong Kong that have nearly that density with none of the legal issues.

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

#188

Post by fragmede »

archagon wrote: post #112
jrowen wrote: post #34

Comparison is the thief of joy. I know plenty of people who live in SF on much lower salaries. Acting like you need AI bucks to survive is out of touch with the reality of the common man. A household that earns nearly 400k talking about "I'm not completely hopeless" is shameful. Take some lessons from people who earn a lot less and are more happy.

Seriously. I live in SF with a combined household income that's far less than that and have a pretty lavish lifestyle, eating out every day and whatnot. What are these people spending their money on? > But she said she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in. Let's assume $4000/m rent, $200/m utilities, eating out for $3…

going towards retirement is a much more acceptable answer than the yacht club, but probably both of them.

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

#189

Post by fragmede »

Balgair wrote: post #106
d4ng wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe trade volume is held down, but why would supply be held down? Surely if someone sells, they buy/rent elsewhere in quick succession?

The house they would be buying would come with a much higher tax bill. Personal anecdata: My folks bought their house for ~70k, it is now worth ~1.5M. The taxes are about 600/year for them, they have no mortgage, paid off decades ago. If they were to try to buy their house again, it would be ~8k/mo just in taxes and mortgage. Moving out of the metro isn't an option as no medical services really exist outside of metro…

The way New York does it is they create exemptions like SCHE for those over the age of 65.

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

#190

Post by Schiendelman »

robocat wrote: post #148
Schiendelman wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoning should always have been unconstitutional, and the court case enabling it proved that. The Supreme Court upheld it a hundred years ago, in 1926, after batting down previous efforts by the same people to explicitly ban black people from neighborhoods. They realized that since black families couldn't afford houses by themselves (they needed to buy houses with two or three families together), they could get around…

We have zoning in New Zealand and it wasn't started by segregation. Zoning has other reasons than racism. Oversimplifying things down to single causes is an error of thinking.

You've never heard of papakainga?

Zoning and land use code in New Zealand is one of the better examples of structural racism.

In housing law in the United States, we've figured out that because people often use feelings rather than clear statements for their reasoning, we had to pay attention to disparate impact, rather than discriminatory intent.

What you'll find is that in nearly every country, zoning and similar laws originate in or were dramatically expanded to exclude wealth generation by minority groups.

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