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Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

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Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#361

Post by alistairSH »

toasterlovin wrote: post #299
Yank33Doodle wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terrible for minorities also.

How is it terrible for minorities?

In the US, they are (very) generally less affluent, so they are less able to absorb cost increases. This is particularly the case in areas that are rapidly gentrifying.

It's a visible issue in some neighborhoods in DC. Blocks that were nearly 100% minority 15 years ago are predominantly young, white, and affluent. But, the corner church is still run by a minority pastor, with a largely minority congregation, all of whom want weekend parking on the street (as they now "commute" to church from the outer suburbs).

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#362

Post by hpcjoe »

aantix wrote: post #168
cobookman wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly early in my career at a company ( 80-10-10 mortgage on a 1mil home is only 100k down. And the monthly payments split by 2 people (aka a couple) is ~2k / person / month. That's 4k/month all in once you include the tax rebates.

100K down but the average salaried offer appears to be 140K? 140K, 40% for taxes, leaves with 84K, 3K a month for housing (assuming you don't want to shack up with some rando Craigslist'er), leaves 48K. Another 20K for food and booze, and you're left with 28K.

I did a similar analysis with more relevant (for me) numbers for BA recruiters that wanted me to move.

Their responses were ... well ... sad. I don't blame them. Or the companies.

I was amused by the offered salaries, after I explained the basic economics to them. Pointing out that the net income after taxes/expenses is so low as to effectively put me and my family into poverty.

The smart ones responded positively to "keep me where I am, have me hop a plane N times per month."

The dumb ones said "but BA real estate only goes up." Which, is a large part (but not the root cause) of the problem. If this were true, then BA real estate would be little more than a barely concealed Ponzi scheme. Which, maybe, it is. I dunno.

What is interesting to me is that the rest of the country has been wising up for a while. So now you can get the benefits of BA salary/comps working locally. This is a welcome development, though rent seeking behavior seems to follow this, so it is only good for a while.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#363

Post by lisper »

Gargoyle wrote: post #233
lisper wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> California's housing crisis has repercussions all up and down the west coast. You're looking at it the wrong way. It's not that the situation in California has wider repercussions, it's that there is a wider problem whose symptoms happen to manifest themselves earliest in California because it's one of the nicer places to live: there are simply too many people and not enough space for them all to live in the nice p…

This is what people tell themselves in order to make their suffering tolerable. But the best places to live even just in California are amazingly underpopulated.

The best places to live are the best in no small measure because they are underpopulated. The SF peninsula is one of the most desirable (and expensive) areas in the greater bay area in no small measure because very few people live there, so we have less traffic, hiking trails, horse properties, peace and quiet.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#364

Post by projectramo »

WalterSear wrote: post #341
projectramo wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually hopeful since there are so many secondary and tertiary tech cities. This means: we should all buy houses in the secondary tech hubs that are still affordable so our kids can afford to have families at tech firms when housing becomes unaffordable.

Self-driving cars are going to be rewriting the commute paradigm. It's important to factor that in.

This is a good point.

Note only will that time become productive time, but it might reduce traffic on the roads and reduce congestion.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#365

Post by duderific »

twobyfour wrote: post #106
nimbius wrote: post #16

Most of the bay area employees are divided into 3 categories from anecdotal experience: young rockstars that are willing to live in relative squalor for a chance to prove themselves, vested and moneyed elites (CEO's, presidents, VC funded overlords) who are so out of touch with the average employee its best they not show up to the office that frequently, and H1B visa recipients that endure the soul-crushing San Jose…

What about the low-paid hourly employees who make food, mop floors, and stand behind cash registers?

What they do is have multiple family members per household. It's not that unusual to see two or more families living in what would normally be a single family dwelling.

Across the street from my old house in San Mateo (Silicon Valley mid-peninsula), there were what appeared to be a husband and wife, the wife's sister, a cousin, three or four children, the sister or cousin's live in boyfriend, and a renter, all in a two bedroom, one bath house that was about 1200 square feet. Oh and a couple of dogs as well. It was notable because there were six or seven cars for the household, and there were only a couple of parking spots in front of each house, so they ended up parking their cars in front of our house often, forcing us to park down the street somewhere.

If you have four or five adult wage earners at low wages you can make it work. Otherwise you have to live very far away from your job.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#366

Post by taysic »

adventured wrote: post #268
StreamBright wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You kidding right? 100k down? 2K mortgage? These are insane numbers that very few people can afford even in the tech community.

A $2,000 mortgage is not insane. A lot of people in the US can in fact afford a $2k mortgage. The median full-time job in the US pays near $45,000. The median household income is near $60,000 today. There are 127 million full-time employees in the US. Or put another way, approximately 39% of all people in the labor force (~161 million) are earning at least $45,000 per year. If you're in the top 1/3 of all full-time e…

I’ve heard housing should ideally not cost more than 1/3 of your income to live comfortably. That would mean you’d have to make 72k after taxes a year to afford such a mortgage.

I think it is crazy that two high earning people would be spending possibly 50% or more of what they make on housing.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#367

Post by AndrewBissell »

davidw wrote: post #59
robbrit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fourth category: people who have lived here for a long time, and were able to buy property back before it became unaffordable. These are typically the managers or senior employees. It makes me wonder that as the young rockstars and H1B recipients age, where will they go? They certainly can't afford to buy a house. I imagine as time goes on, companies in the Bay Area will be awash with young junior talent but will s…

> where will they go Other tech hubs. Portland, Seattle - even little Bend has plenty of people from California who are attracted by the (for them) low housing prices. They, in turn, put pressure on housing prices for 'ordinary' people here. California's housing crisis has repercussions all up and down the west coast.

The runup in real estate prices is fundamentally driven by the huge amounts of money printing by the Fed earlier this decade. The Bay Area has just been the canary in the coal mine on this because the strong job growth and self-injurious housing policies caused the price pressures to show up earlier than elsewhere, but it will become an undeniably nationwide phenomenon soon enough.

High real estate prices & rents are the price we're all paying for keeping JPMorgan & Goldman Sachs solvent during the financial crisis.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#368

Post by [deleted] »

cobookman wrote: post #109
robbrit wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fourth category: people who have lived here for a long time, and were able to buy property back before it became unaffordable. These are typically the managers or senior employees. It makes me wonder that as the young rockstars and H1B recipients age, where will they go? They certainly can't afford to buy a house. I imagine as time goes on, companies in the Bay Area will be awash with young junior talent but will s…

I'm fairly early in my career at a company ( 80-10-10 mortgage on a 1mil home is only 100k down. And the monthly payments split by 2 people (aka a couple) is ~2k / person / month. That's 4k/month all in once you include the tax rebates.

[deleted]

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#369

Post by nfriedly »

My wife and I lived in the Bay Area for a year. It was great - beautiful weather (San Mateo), incredible farmers market, and we met some really cool people.

I'm glad we did it, but I'm also glad that I moved back to Ohio now.

Beyond having my extended family around here, it just feels like a better place to raise a family and be part of a community, whereas SF seemed more geared towards single or childless folks who were very focused on their carriers.

The Bay Area is also incredibly expensive. After moving back, I went to a movie with a friend, asked for two tickets, then tried to correct the attendant because the price was so low that I thought she must have rung me up for a single ticket. That's just one example, but nearly everything costs more in SF.

Oh, and our house in Ohio cost slightly less than my current annual salary - I had an apartment and the mortgage overlapping for a couple of months here, and even paying both was less than what my rent was in San Mateo.

Re: Bay Area hammered by loss of jobs: Lack of affordable housing strangles hiring

#370

Post by projectramo »

pc86 wrote: post #325
projectramo wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually hopeful since there are so many secondary and tertiary tech cities. This means: we should all buy houses in the secondary tech hubs that are still affordable so our kids can afford to have families at tech firms when housing becomes unaffordable.

Or perhaps actually trying to fix the root issue rather than scrambling for the "F you, I got mine" route and buying property you don't need now on the speculation that its value will increase over the next decades. Companies should be incentivized (by us, software developers) to hire remote workers for jobs that don't need to be physically in an office.

Please lay out your plan in more detail.

I just want to see the logic of this. You think I can put downward pressure on property prices by insisting on a remote job?

I don't think hiring companies take joy in making your life difficult. They would hire more remote workers if they felt it could work. I prefer working remotely but find it much harder to manage.

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