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San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

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Re: San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

#351

Post by binarysolo »

I'm a contrarian voice here, but I strongly value my day-to-day encounters and connections with exceptional individuals who I cross paths with in daily life... moreso than the exorbitant cost-of-living in the area. The access to opportunities, collaborations, and community here is unparalleled (comparisons: Taipei, New York City, Boston, and London, all of which I've spent prolonged periods due to business).

Spend one weekend hiking in Yosemite, another working on a digital arts project in Oakland, and you still got plenty of bandwidth to sip your fancy coffees and swing by Stanford for some lectures and run into competent friends to solve some business problems for fun and profit... life is pretty damn good for work and play.

Caveat: Of course, this is coming from a position of privilege: that I spent both undergrad and grad in the area and have built up a strong base of connections here within the profession world and academia, and that the $10k-20k net salary optimization does not meaningfully affect my quality of life.

Re: San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

#352

Post by whitenoice »

x0x0 wrote: post #331
whitenoice wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up-voted, Are average SF rents that high? Boston is probably less than half that cost, with salaries comparable to the west coast and similar cultural events and excellent public and private schools. Weather is not that great though. Genuinely asking - So what makes SF so worth it, that it justifies its high cost of living? in comparison to other top class states, is it just the weather?

jobs. You can be a half-assed engineer here and be employed; if you're good, you have dozens of choices of place to work. Whenever I ponder leaving (and I'm a data scientist, so more specialized) I look around at cities like Salt Lake or Denver or other places close to good skiing and see like 3 employers. Total. What happens if I don't like my job / my boss changes / whatever? I'd probably have to move. It's just a…

thanks but I find none of those unique to SF, you can get the same in other top cities. I don't know about Denver but in Boston/NY you have tons of good job opportunities, excellent engineering and scientific community with top firms/startups and excellent eng, business, and med schools. Close proximity to outdoors (New Hamshire, Maine).

No doubt there are more startups/jobs in SF but at the same time it seems that its very exaggerated.

Re: San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

#353

Post by BurningFrog »

thegayngler wrote: post #170

This is the result of people trying to get rich quick by simply having stuff rather than producing and maintaining stuff. I don't know what the answer is. I do think that San Francisco is poorly planned out based on my observations last year when I visited to see if I could live there. There is no mass transit system on the scale of NYC or one that's even trying to be. Everything seems really spread out. I felt like…

A car won't help you much in SF. You can get to where you want to go, but not park there. People end up using Uber.

Re: San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

#354

Post by nostrademons »

wott wrote: post #267
nostrademons wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious if you've lived in the Bay Area for any length of time. I used to live in Boston (which at the time was the #2 tech scene in the country, but has probably been eclipsed by Seattle/NYC/Austin by now). There were startups and meetups and hacker spaces as well, including a number of famous ones. The Bay Area is a huge difference in degree. The difference is that you had to find the "tech scene" in Boston, wh…

> If you go out for coffee, nearly everybody in the coffeeshop will be working on some tech startup. If you sit down at a restaurant, there's a good chance that the table next to you will have a group of engineers from some large tech company, or an investor being pitched by an entrepreneur, or a group of friends planning a startup. If you go to a random party - even ones thrown by non-techies - half the people there…

Depends who you are and what you want, like most things in life.

It was great for my first couple years here, when I really wanted to go deep into the field and learn all I could. I had my "become a well-rounded person" phase in college, so by my 20s I was happy to specialize deeply. It was less great for years 3-5, when I ended up meeting and marrying a non-techie. It's been good again for me now, founding a startup, because of the huge number of potential customers everywhere. There's a huge difference between an abundance mentality vs. a scarcity mentality that having a large number of customers/employees/investors nearby creates.

Re: San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

#355

Post by BurningFrog »

jjtheblunt wrote: post #216
whack wrote: post #111

It's hard to overstate the impact this is going to have on San Francisco, long-term. As Technology becomes the most important industry in America, a well-governed San Francisco could have positioned itself as the next NYC. The hub where all of tech gathers, the same way all of finance gathered in Wall St. Replace the 70 year old 2-storey homes with Manhattan style apartment buildings, and rent in San Francisco would…

That's implausible: San Francisco is overbuilt to the extent that green areas are sparse, though those which exist are decent, rather than distributed throughout the city. That contrasts in the extreme with the other cities you mentioned, and matters to many people.

You don't need to build on any green areas to double the housing capacity of SF.

Compared to actual dense cities in the world, SF is nearly empty.

Re: San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

#356

Post by fencepost »

derefr wrote: post #284
jimminy wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that everything closed so early blew me away, when I moved there. Compared to the middle of nowhere WV it made zero sense. Even the grocery stores closed by midnight in SF. In WV, you can find food at most places until 12-1am 7 days a week. And the major local grocery is a Walmart, which is open 24 hours. Last Easter I had no clue nothing would be open, and didn't prepare for that. So I just had some crap pi…

Everything closing at 9PM is pretty much par for the course here in Vancouver, another city with the skyrocketing cost-of-living thing going on. I wonder if there's a correlation. Maybe everyone is rich enough to pay delivery services or maids or something to get their shopping done while they're at work, so there's no demand for 24-hour businesses? Then again, another thing with Vancouver (that I think I've heard sa…

It might also be that for restaurants and retail the employees have been so completely priced out of living in the area that many of them have a 2+ hour commute with all the limitations that entails (quitting time determined by transit availability, etc.).

Re: San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

#357

Post by x0x0 »

whitenoice wrote: post #352
x0x0 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jobs. You can be a half-assed engineer here and be employed; if you're good, you have dozens of choices of place to work. Whenever I ponder leaving (and I'm a data scientist, so more specialized) I look around at cities like Salt Lake or Denver or other places close to good skiing and see like 3 employers. Total. What happens if I don't like my job / my boss changes / whatever? I'd probably have to move. It's just a…

thanks but I find none of those unique to SF, you can get the same in other top cities. I don't know about Denver but in Boston/NY you have tons of good job opportunities, excellent engineering and scientific community with top firms/startups and excellent eng, business, and med schools. Close proximity to outdoors (New Hamshire, Maine). No doubt there are more startups/jobs in SF but at the same time it seems that i…

I don't know about Boston, but Maine is not in any sense close to nyc. I think the difference is distance. In sf, world class skiing is 3 hours away; the beach is 20 minutes in much of the city; great hiking is across the bridge in Marin or south along 1, well under an hour away. It's not a trip; enjoying the outdoors takes an afternoon. I have an acquaintance who works near the presidio and surfs over lunch. When I lived in Manhattan, you could definitely get to the outdoors, but it wasn't anything like this close.

As for jobs, I disagree. see eg:

machine learning, nyc: 1 responsive ad (plus ads for jobs in sfbay, nonresponsive android stuff) http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/sof?query=machine+learn...

same search, sf: 10-15? http://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof?query=machine+learnin...

indeed has similar ratios.

As for jobs in general, if you're a good js or rails engineer with a reasonable network of friends / former coworkers, starting now at 6pm Tuesday night you could have interviews on Friday, maybe even on Thursday. And start a new job next week. I believe there's a qualitative difference.

Re: San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

#358

Post by mtanski »

zzz157 wrote: post #131
tryitnow wrote: post #110

Yes, rents are high, but if you invest even a little bit of time you can find a fine residence in the Bay Area for a lot less than $4,500. I rent a two bedroom house in Oakland for $2,200. My commute is not too much longer than it would be if I live in certain parts of San Francisco. There's simply little advantage to living right in the heart of a major city. You have to ask yourself: "Instead of renting in a high-p…

Well you also have a significantly higher probability of getting shot when you live in Oakland. So there's always that.

What's the probability of being shot in Oakland in a year as a white male? Esp if you don't have any associations with crime yourself.

I lived in both good, bad and transitioning neighborhoods and I feel like people over estimate how much impact this will have on life.

Fact is, shit happens everywhere. Happens more often where there is density. You can be mugged in a good part of town (well because that's where people with money are at) and bad part of town. Before I moved back to NYC, my wife would regularly get harassed in SOMA on the street walking to her job.

Re: San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

#359

Post by [deleted] »

MrMullen wrote: post #301
msoad wrote: post #235

I live in a high rise in SF and pay $4400 for a one bedroom. Although it sounds expensive but it's like $800 more than the least expensive place we could find near this place but it's a well built apartment with lots of amenities. I thought about moving out of SF but I don't have any social connection outside of San Francisco. Plus weather is very nice here and there are lots of diverse cultural events happening in S…

That is a bit surprising. I think I have an expensive Condo in San Diego, and your rent on a one bedroom is still $1400 more than my 2 bedroom condo off of Balboa Park, 2 minutes from Downtown and 10 minutes from the beach.

[deleted]

Re: San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents

#360

Post by msoad »

mahyarm wrote: post #315
msoad wrote: post #235

I live in a high rise in SF and pay $4400 for a one bedroom. Although it sounds expensive but it's like $800 more than the least expensive place we could find near this place but it's a well built apartment with lots of amenities. I thought about moving out of SF but I don't have any social connection outside of San Francisco. Plus weather is very nice here and there are lots of diverse cultural events happening in S…

Why not move to oakland or similar? Rent is like half in the nice areas, and even less in the not so nice areas.

Because I don't want to commute. 2 hours a day worths more than $2000/mo to me. -----
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