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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

#561
post #325

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.

How did you fix the root issue?

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

#562
post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So I still won't be able to see my kids awake because of a 1.5 hour commute each way, but I'll be able to read the newspaper on the way to work? No thanks.

you could videochat with your kids on the way to work, or spend less time in office because you work during commute

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

#563
post #14

Montana, a land of National parks, natural beauty, fast internet, and a low cost of living has a number of high tech jobs open. Full disclosure, I own an internet company here and want more tech savvy people in the area ;) Social Finanace (SoFi) | Helena, MT Oracle | Bozeman, MT OnXMaps | Missoula, MT Zaneray Group | Whitefish, MT Submittable | Missoula, MT Applied Materials | Kalispell, MT

Theorem LP (YC 14) | Hamilton, MT Hillmap.com | Hamilton, MT (I work for the first remotely and founded the second so the presence isn't big but we're here!).

Hillmap is pretty sweet. Totally nerding out about it. Geospatial stuff like this is what I really enjoy. What are you looking to do with it in the future?

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

#564
post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They all do have 100K up front? Most software engineers I know have this much in student debt.

Of course most would need to save for at least several years, but I think that’s the case for most people.

[deleted]

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

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theorem LP (YC 14) | Hamilton, MT Hillmap.com | Hamilton, MT (I work for the first remotely and founded the second so the presence isn't big but we're here!).

Hillmap is pretty sweet. Totally nerding out about it. Geospatial stuff like this is what I really enjoy. What are you looking to do with it in the future?

Mostly I plan to use it to ski and climb all over Montana!

Its actually a few years old and I was thinking of trying to make it more of a money maker at one point but other interests have proven more profitable so I'm not sure I'll ever really push for it to become a true business.

I and many of my friends do get a ton of pleasure out of trips planed with it which is its own reward.

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

#566
post #538
post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like wild grass And that is the problem. You're not the only one. Yes, if we turned the San Francisco Bay area into a clone of Manhattan or Hong Kong or Tokyo we could accommodate a lot more people. But a lot of people would not consider that a good outcome. People who like that kind of lifestyle can have it in any of the dozens of dense cities on the planet. The SFBay area is desirable precisely because it is no…

> But a lot of people would not consider that a good outcome. If they didn't consider that a good outcome, they would stop paying money to move there, or move out, and cause housing prices to drop, thus solving the problem.

personal incentives don't "solve" social problems. People compete themselves into subsistence -- not motivated to improve a situation until it's too miserable to bear, and then back off just to the edge. This is the "tragedy of the commons" coordinate problem

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

#567
post #556
post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fort Bragg and Redding are cold and foggy much of the time. Silicon Valley is in an ideal location. There are low-lying hills that keep the fog away, but it still gets enough ocean influence that it doesn't get too hot.

> Fort Bragg and Redding are cold and foggy much of the time Fort Bragg is on the coast, and Redding is inland - they have wildly different climates. Redding is pretty damn hot, actually, and supposedly very sunny: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redding,_California#Climate The politics are probably not something most SF people would like, though (nor I, really). There are a ton of beautiful places around there, though…

Sorry, I somehow got Redding confused with Eureka.

Yes, Redding is uncomfortably hot.

In fact, that's generally true: everything inland is hot, and everything on the coast is cold. In between there's a narrow strip that is "just right". SV just happens to be in this sweet spot.

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

#568
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It's been 10 years since the housing bubble burst! (Except in constrained markets where it never burst. It's been 20 years of Fed printing money and pumping up housing prices.

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

#569
post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are free to buy the redwood forests, pay a yearly land value tax on them (which goes up as demand increases, unlike Prop 13) and then restrict access as you wish. But redwood forests are a distraction. The main problem is SFH which can and would be replaced with duplexes and fourplexes if the market were allowed to work.

> You are free to buy the redwood forests Much of the forest land on the peninsula is privately owned, not by individuals, but by conservation organizations. > The main problem is SFH Except that people like their yards and pools. All else being equal, denser housing is better. But all else is rarely equal. Almost invariably, increased density comes with increased population. The SFH it replaces doesn't get turned ba…

I don't have a moral objection to SFH. If people like they can keep paying for their SFH via increased property taxes. But Prop 13 breaks that feedback loop.

Immigration is not a problem. It is an opportunity.

N people live in a place. K people want to move there. You can either find ways to accommodate N+K people, or you can choose not to and have the richest people drive out the poorest (or the middle class if you start building affordable housing). Only one of those two options is classist and xenophobic. Take your pick.

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

#570
post #168

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.

18k for retirement, and that leaves 10k per year saved towards a down payment / kids’ college, create-your-own-startup, etc.
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