San Francisco Tech Firms See Workers Flee from $4,500 Rents • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by yazaddaruvala » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 3:56 AM UTC

cylinder wrote: post #423

nunez wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in SF, but I wouldn't make the choice to move here today. It simply isn't worth Manhattan prices to live in a city full of tech bros where you can't get a good meal after 9:30. This one took me by surprise when I visited SF for the first time five years ago. I thought it would be booming with activity just like NYC, so I thought nothing of trying to find food when I arrived at ~11pm. NOTHING. Nothing was ope…

NYC is not that different. The only things open 24hrs are bodegas and diners, which serve shitty food. Even the Whole Foods in Union Square, the busiest in the nation, closes at 11pm, which is later than the grocery stores in suburban TX. I guess bars can stay open late.

Its not just about the stuff in your neighborhood.

In NYC at 4am, I could Seemless any meal/quantity I wanted!

In Seattle, I can only get pizza past 2am.

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

#442

Post by Cacti » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 3:57 AM UTC

kabes wrote: post #208

vinay427 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's similarly worth noting that CA has the highest income tax rates of any state in the nation for most individuals. For instance, for incomes between around $51k and $263k the rate is 9.30%. My state's rate is 4.25%, which is closer to not having a tax at all.

As a guy from Europe I don't know much about the US tax system. If somebody mentions he earns $120k, I assume that's gross salary? What does he usually end up with net? From what I understand it depends on the state. Is that 4.25% you talk about the only tax there is?

Taxes are roughly 50% for someone making 120k. Maybe closer to 45% when its all said and done. There's state income taxes, federal income, Medicare and social security, sales tax, property tax, real estate taxes, and then special taxes on stuff like gas, guns, phone bills, hotels and car rentals, airplane tickets, etc.

For all our complaints about how evil taxes are we sure have a whole lot of them!

If you are normal. If you're particularly rich then it'll be different because the majority of your assets aren't from income and there's all kinds of loopholes. If you're particularly poor taxes will be significantly lower but the threshold is pretty low... The poverty line for a family of 4 is shockingly low.

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

#443

Post by cylinder » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 4:02 AM UTC

qntty wrote: post #213

sfotoatx wrote: post #130

Lots of naysayers on HN, but I left SF last year and moved to Austin. I have zero regrets. In SF, my 1 bedroom, 650 square foot apartment in SOMA went from $2,600 to $3,200 over 3 years. In Austin, my salary went down $10k to $120k/yr. My 2 bedroom, 1,100 square foot apartment is $1,150/mo. The tech scene here isn't as vibrant as SF, but there's still plenty of great meet ups. All in all, yes there are some things I…

Sorry if this is off-topic (and maybe a bit personal), but as a recent graduate, I'm not sure what I would do with all that extra money. What do you (or most people) generally spend it on? I make less than that, but if I didn't have student loans, I wouldn't know what to do with it besides leave it in the bank.

You save and invest.

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

#444

Post by aetherson » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 4:02 AM UTC

morgante wrote: post #438

aetherson wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that in-fill development could have possibly made a drastic change in rents in San Francisco is genuinely crazy . I see people making that claim all the time, and it's madness, guys. Even if literally every density-increasing project was rubber-stamped with zero money or time cost, how many housing units do you think that this city could possibly have added in the last fifteen years? Unless you're proposing…

NYC adds more capacity in a year than SF adds in a decade. You don't need eminent domain to build high rises. Developers can easily make very compelling offers to those currently in small houses to get them to move.

Well, NYC is also 10x bigger than SF.

This article http://newyorkyimby.com/2015/01/the-yimby-report-2014-adds-a... suggests that in 2014, NYC added 44.8k units and in 2013 it added 22.9k units -- call it an average of 34k units.

This article http://sf.curbed.com/2015/7/16/9939720/sf-is-set-to-add-more... suggests that SF is adding about 3.6k units per year right now.

And NYC is 10x the population of SF. So. Sounds like they're expanding at around the same rate. (NYC is only 6.2x the land area of SF).

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

#445

Post by kyllo » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 4:10 AM UTC

stouset wrote: post #439

timr wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 have remained very reasonable, despite the rapid economic growth. This would have prevented exactly this problem where tech workers are forced to…

> Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence. Sorry, but this is flawed logic. Tech, more than seemingly any other industry I can think of, has a winner-takes-all model of success. Given this, starting a tech company anywhere other than where the overwhelming majority of the most capable employees live is virtually suicide. And this seems to pan out in the data as…

You missed the point, parent commenter is saying that communication technology should enable you to build a successful tech company with a geographically distributed team.

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

#446

Post by HillaryBriss » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 4:14 AM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #436

BurningFrog wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a system where it's easy to build new housing, you don't need eminent domain. The developer simply buys two-storey homes for much more than they're worth as houses. You also don't need to limit yourself to the existing local developers with political connections. Construction workers from all over the world could move here, just like software people do.

It's not easy to buy up entire blocks of houses. You get hold-outs, either people who understand that they're in a position to block a potentially lucrative deal and get a big payout, or just people who have a sentimental attachment to their homes or whatever. The idea that there's a lot of elasticity to the construction trade is also naïve. Construction workers from "all over the world" can't move here -- we have an…

> Construction workers from "all over the world" can't move here -- we have an immigration process, and it's not one that's favorable to construction workers.

Process, shmawsess.

Look what actually happened during the real estate bubble years: a large number of laborers just simply came to California from foreign countries to build houses and condos.

A large number of these workers went to California when they felt like it and left when the bubble burst. The government was scarcely able to impose anything resembling a "process."

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

#447

Post by scurvy » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 4:15 AM UTC

jdminhbg wrote: post #419

scurvy wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But no one wants to live in the Sunset. You can build out there all you want. The weather is crummy and it takes an hour to get downtown on the bus. That's why it's mostly brothels and growhouses (exaggeration).

A quick Zillow perusal showing 2BRs going for around $3.5-4k per month would seem to suggest that plenty of people are willing to live there (not me though).

Sadly, these are multi-family homes in a single family home. It's a lot of 7-8 people (multi-generation) families under one roof. Not stereotyping, that's the demographic. It's also why you get a lot of growhouses and brothels out there. Immigrant families almost never call the police.

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

#448

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 4:16 AM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#449

Post by nether » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 4:19 AM UTC

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…

Coming from LA, whenever I visit SF I always use transit. With Google Maps on phone it works amazingly well, comparably to NYC MTA. I don't miss my car in SF at all.

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

#450

Post by stouset » Wed, Apr 06, 2016, 4:19 AM UTC

kyllo wrote: post #445

stouset wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Increasingly, the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence. Sorry, but this is flawed logic. Tech, more than seemingly any other industry I can think of, has a winner-takes-all model of success. Given this, starting a tech company anywhere other than where the overwhelming majority of the most capable employees live is virtually suicide. And this seems to pan out in the data as…

You missed the point, parent commenter is saying that communication technology should enable you to build a successful tech company with a geographically distributed team.

Parent commenter claimed that "the choice not to locate your company in SF is a sign of competitive intelligence". I argued against that, and in my opinion the available data appears to back me up on this.

Communication technology hasn't so far enabled, at least in the general case, geographically-distributed tech companies – otherwise we would be seeing an increasing trend of successful tech companies headquartered elsewhere. I don't think we are. Put another way, whatever advantage is conferred upon SF by physically housing an outsized share of tech workers is clearly giving it a competitive advantage that other locations have yet to overcome.