71–80 of 264 posts
Obviously it’s not sustainable for California to be a top growing state forever.
As someone who lives in a city with about the same pop as Boise, cities that size can be quite nice.
My general view after travelling to Denver is that one of America's biggest issues is underpopulation. There is so much land in these areas and actually lots of infrastructure relative to population. It all stood out to me how white these areas remain. I saw a handful of non whites and no Asians the entire time. Shocking how the whitest areas are the most anti immigrant. What are they so angry about?! Bringing in mig…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You won't be compensated at the same rates that you would be in California, but the cost of living would make up for it. No, it generally doesn't. It depends on the specific numbers of course (how much of a salary cut, how much cheaper is the housing costs), but a lot of people make that blanket statement because of a mathematical fallacy: The fallacy is if I make half as much, but my expenses are half as much, the…
Housing isn’t twice as expensive in San Francisco, it is 10x. Median price per square foot is $129 in Boise, vs $1550 for Palo Alto, or $993 in SF, $1220 SOMA.
This way, the answer begins to change as your family size grows. Which I think is accurate.
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> You won't be compensated at the same rates that you would be in California, but the cost of living would make up for it. No, it generally doesn't. It depends on the specific numbers of course (how much of a salary cut, how much cheaper is the housing costs), but a lot of people make that blanket statement because of a mathematical fallacy: The fallacy is if I make half as much, but my expenses are half as much, the…
software engineer salary somewhere else is usually more like 20-25% less rather than 50% less -- someone making 140k in SF might make 110k-120k in places like Boise or Denver. They'll pay 5k less in taxes (both due to lower total income and lower state tax rates). So saving 18k in housing costs puts them at least in a comparable disposable-income range. For people in lower-paying careers, the lower housing costs else…
Worth pointing out that this function doesn't work for inputs much higher than $150k or so, and doesn't even work at points like $140k depending on the particular candidate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You won't be compensated at the same rates that you would be in California, but the cost of living would make up for it. No, it generally doesn't. It depends on the specific numbers of course (how much of a salary cut, how much cheaper is the housing costs), but a lot of people make that blanket statement because of a mathematical fallacy: The fallacy is if I make half as much, but my expenses are half as much, the…
software engineer salary somewhere else is usually more like 20-25% less rather than 50% less -- someone making 140k in SF might make 110k-120k in places like Boise or Denver. They'll pay 5k less in taxes (both due to lower total income and lower state tax rates). So saving 18k in housing costs puts them at least in a comparable disposable-income range. For people in lower-paying careers, the lower housing costs else…
As someone who moved from Pittsburgh to San Francisco and had my compensation quadruple, I call bullshit.
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If you're in tech, yes. There are a lot of tech related jobs that Boise has a huge deficit for. You won't be compensated at the same rates that you would be in California, but the cost of living would make up for it.
Would it? From my experience, if you’re coming from a place like Google/FB/well paid smaller companies it’s still not worth it. You have to be making on the mid/lower end for the COL changes to account for the reduction in salary - in part because places like Boise simply don’t have jobs that are comparable to some of the better ones in the Bay, Seattle, and NYC
Yes, the cost of living went up a bit, but it's utterly dwarfed by the salary gains. I'd have to somehow achieve a significantly negative cost of living for it to be worth moving to somewhere like Boise, where cracking six figures for a software job is significant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You won't be compensated at the same rates that you would be in California, but the cost of living would make up for it. No, it generally doesn't. It depends on the specific numbers of course (how much of a salary cut, how much cheaper is the housing costs), but a lot of people make that blanket statement because of a mathematical fallacy: The fallacy is if I make half as much, but my expenses are half as much, the…
Plus, cost of living doesn't account for everything. Most consumer products, e.g. cars, computers, shoes, and clothing, cost about the same everywhere. Living in San Francisco with a higher salary and paying a high rent, your spending on such products will be a smaller percentage of your income than if you lived somewhere with cheaper housing and made less money.
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> there are more Trump voters in New York City than there are total voters in Alabama. I agree with your general point, but the above seems grossly inaccurate. NYC had ~500k Trump voters, whereas Alabama had 1.3M Trump voters and ~2M voters in total. https://www.amny.com/news/elections/nyc-voter-turnout-was-55... https://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/numbers/clinton-trump-presi... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Stat…
Yup you are right. I did not mean to say "New York City" in the second case, I meant to just say "New York" the state, in which 2.8M people voted for Trump.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You won't be compensated at the same rates that you would be in California, but the cost of living would make up for it. No, it generally doesn't. It depends on the specific numbers of course (how much of a salary cut, how much cheaper is the housing costs), but a lot of people make that blanket statement because of a mathematical fallacy: The fallacy is if I make half as much, but my expenses are half as much, the…
Housing isn’t twice as expensive in San Francisco, it is 10x. Median price per square foot is $129 in Boise, vs $1550 for Palo Alto, or $993 in SF, $1220 SOMA.
The article's point is that the churn of spillover-boomtowns will continue: once the current crop of towns starts getting built out and accumulating problems like unaffordable housing, nightmarish traffic, lack of easy greenfield land to develop with cookie-cutter houses on tiny lots and giant office parks, the developers will find the next wave of towns to exploit, probably long before most of the human misery mater…
It's interesting how much blame you attribute to the developers. I would lay this squarely at the feet of city planners and voters; they hold all the keys.
Meanwhile, developers -- as a loose cohort -- are absolutely the executors for the nationwide phenomenon. Their loyalty is to not to the land or their products, but to the cycle of plan, build, and profit. Wherever they are, they're deeply entangled in local politics, and lobby the local officials to let them build homes on farmland to be upzoned. They leave behind subdivisions that don't actually generate enough revenue to the town to make up for their hookups to utilities and services, but the population growth looks good for the town in reports that businesses look at to expand or relocate.
Just like a B-roll of the cities now scrambling to attract Amazon, these suburbs are hoping they'd be picked instead of the town one over when some company with national pockets wants to build a 200-job call center, data center, or distribution warehouse. In mainstream America, these tiny battles between neighboring towns are fought and lost thirty, fifty jobs at a time.