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90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

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Re: 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

#231

Post by noir_lord »

d1zzy wrote: post #178
hesdeadjim wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they tried Colorado they’d change their mind quick. I always thought I’d end up in the valley, but after ten years here and seeing how bad the Bay Area has gotten, there isn’t enough money to convince me to make the switch.

It's highly subjective, I personally cannot stand temperatures below 15C or so, it's "painful" (yes, I'm a wuss). I haven't lived in Colorado but I did live in Europe and recently looked at the climate/temperature tables of Boulder to compare to Bay Area. It rather seems to me that it has weather similar to where I lived in Europe (hot summers, cold winters) with a large variation of daytime/nighttime temperature and…

I don't like anything over 15C, at 20C I'm uncomfortable, at 25C I'm miserable and at 30C I just want to crawl into a (cool) dark hole and die.

Funny how different people are.

Re: 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

#232

Post by jeffreyrogers »

ryanSrich wrote: post #68
thirduncle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the ridiculous salary and equity while I'm here would be foolish to pass up So - how much of the "ridiculous" salary is left after subtracting living costs and taxes, actually?

Average FANG salary is $200k with roughly another $200k in equity each year spread out over 4 years. So that's roughly $400k per year in total comp. Conservatively 40% of that is going to taxes, so take home is closer to $240,000. While $240,000 is a nice salary it's not even close to what you'd need to afford a house in SV. And that's just housing. All in all it feels like a bad deal.

It can still make sense to live there while you're young, save a bunch, and then move to a lower cost of living area later. I know a few people who did this. Then you can buy a house in a great neighborhood in a smaller city closer to things you like doing. Because of compound growth saving as much as you can when you're young and have few obligations really adds up later in life.

Re: 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

#233

Post by sjg007 »

conanbatt wrote: post #94
ProfessorLayton wrote: post #38

Part of me is still trying to understand why the housing shortage in the Bay Area is so severe. I understand NIMBYism from the homeowner's perspective, but there are a lot of renters in the SF Bay. SF is 63% renters, and should be able to outnumber NIMBY homeowners easily to have a lot more dense housing built. Alameda County is in 2nd place at 47% renters [1], so only a small percentage of homeowners need convincing…

Because renters dont vote. They either dont have residency, are foreigners, or live transiently. I think it is a terrible strategy to try to convince homeowners that its best for them to forego clear economic benefits for blurry future profits. The solution is land value tax: just remove city sales taxes and add a tax on land. That will make low density units more expensive, the tax burden is relieved from the renter…

You don't need residency to vote in the US. You just have to be a US citizen. Now you do register based on where you live but that's about it.

Re: 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

#234

Post by ghaff »

WhompingWindows wrote: post #24

This is increasingly common in the Boston area as well. Cambridge/MIT is a massive biotech hub, meanwhile we have huge companies with many large offices in the downtown or in surrounding suburbs. Many workers live in RI, NH, or Central Mass, and getting to work for 9 am consistently will involve leaving at 730 for many, many workers due to congestion, construction, and the god-awful mess that is Boston infrastructure…

Getting into the city has gotten significantly worse over the past handful of years. As you say, the congestion is such that even coming into the city from the west where I live after work is sufficiently slow that I've cut back on doing it.

>If Amazon came to Boston, it would be compound this problem exponentially, though whoever owns property currently would definitely make a good return.

The proposed location (Suffolk Downs) is sort of an odd one from a housing perspective. It is on the T but that's all very blue collar neighborhoods around there, some of which have gentrified a bit but still not places your typical software engineer would normally choose to live.

Re: 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

#235

Post by justboxing »

> Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabo...

Re: 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

#236

Post by ghaff »

ilamont wrote: post #114
WhompingWindows wrote: post #24

This is increasingly common in the Boston area as well. Cambridge/MIT is a massive biotech hub, meanwhile we have huge companies with many large offices in the downtown or in surrounding suburbs. Many workers live in RI, NH, or Central Mass, and getting to work for 9 am consistently will involve leaving at 730 for many, many workers due to congestion, construction, and the god-awful mess that is Boston infrastructure…

What I find amazing is companies insisting on being located near Kendall or the Seaport District (and paying massive amounts of money for the privilege) to be "innovative." Why aren't more companies in New England going to where the commercial real estate and housing are cheaper?

A lot of tech (outside of biotech) in MA is still outside Boston. After all, when Teradyne moved out (in the 90s?), they were at that point pretty much the last tech company in Boston. A lot of the new tech offices are the west coast company satellite offices.

My company does have an office in the Seaport but it's in Boston specifically because it makes more sense to have a customer briefing center there. Most MA employees are about 45 minutes west.

ADDED: And when biotech started going into Kendall Square that area was pretty much old warehouses. Of course, now it's some of the most expensive real estate in the Boston area. I know someone whose company moved out of Kendall Square to move to the Finance District because it was cheaper.

Re: 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

#237

Post by timr »

ummonk wrote: post #74
timr wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a tiresome argument. Even if you could suddenly build all of the housing required to reduce prices on a short timescale, you'd have to solve the infrastructural problems that come with it (roads and transit), and convince developers to build into a massive loss (i.e. I am a developer, and you expect me to build and finance at today's costs, and pay for it with tomorrow's lower rents). Construction is a s…

Even with a massive drop in rents, rents would still more than cover development costs. The limiting factor isn't the cost to construct high density housing units - it's the difficulty of getting permission to build high density housing units.

"Even with a massive drop in rents, rents would still more than cover development costs."

Citation needed. You might also want to tell the construction finance industry of your discovery.

Re: 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

#238

Post by mateo411 »

synaesthesisx wrote: post #25

A lot of companies have been moving to LA/SD recently for this reason. There are plenty of cities that offer more than the Bay Area without the NIMBY attitude toward building new housing.

NIMBYism isn't restricted to the Bay Area.

Re: 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

#239

Post by ghaff »

jasode wrote: post #215
raverbashing wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat and Canonical have achieved great success with a lot of remote workers. Heck pretty much the entirety of Linux and its ecosystem is remote. All I hear is excuses and lack of willingness to work remotely, coped with lack of experience on how to make it work. From all sides. The secret is following the procedure and working remotely even if the person is sitting next to you. (I don't mean get into a video chat…

>Heck pretty much the entirety of Linux and its ecosystem is remote. I'm a full 100% remote worker and I would never bring up "Linux development" as evidence for businesses to adopt remote work. If remote work evangelists want to argue for the benefits of work-from-home, please do not use Linux as an example because it undermines credible business thinking. As I've said before[1] and paste again here: Open source dev…

>E.g. open source project like Linux kernel where volunteers choose what they want to work on

The vast majority of Linux kernel contributors work for companies who pay them to work on the Linux kernel. Many of those developers do have some flexibility in what they spend their time on but it's not like they can do whatever they feel like.

Re: 90-minute ‘super commutes’ more common as Bay Area housing shortage intensifies

#240

Post by jasode »

d0lph wrote: post #229
jasode wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Heck pretty much the entirety of Linux and its ecosystem is remote. I'm a full 100% remote worker and I would never bring up "Linux development" as evidence for businesses to adopt remote work. If remote work evangelists want to argue for the benefits of work-from-home, please do not use Linux as an example because it undermines credible business thinking. As I've said before[1] and paste again here: Open source dev…

It does answer communication problems though right? Compared to any business project, the kernel is behemoth.

>Compared to any business project, the kernel is behemoth.

The Linux kernel's ~26 million lines-of-code[1] is much smaller than the proprietary code bases at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. E.g. Google had 2 billion LOC in 2015.[2] MS Windows is ~50 million LOC. All those companies have faster commit velocities to their repos than the Linux project.

[1] https://phoronix.com/misc/linux-2017/index.html

[2] https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stor...

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