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San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

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Re: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

#71

Post by jusben1369 »

johnward wrote: post #43
dreamdu5t wrote: post #20

Cry me a river. San Francisco is expensive. It's not the tech workers fault. Nobody owes you a home in San Francisco. The American dream is not home ownership. Where'd you hear that? A countrywide home loan commercial?

As an Ohio home owner who is thinking about moving to California and renting I agree. The dream of home ownership often overlooks the costs and insane amount of work involved in owning home and keeping it nice. I love having a 4 acre yard, but it takes me 7 hours to cut grass.

Well CA will certainly take care of that 4 acre yard problem for you :-) And the climate is sooo mild you'll be shocked by how little house work you need to do vs the rest of the country. No hard freezes or high humidity, no real bugs of infestations. A good exterior paint job will get you 10 - 15 years not 5 - 10.

Re: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

#72

Post by gregd »

I'm moving to Portland

Except the bourgeois cannot afford to live in Portland anymore either. Rentals are ungodly expensive, water is expensive (in the PNW no less), garbage is expensive, electricity is expensive and last but not least, parking is expensive.

Please don't bring your San Francisco salary to Portland.

Re: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

#73

Post by mhurron »

RKoutnik wrote: post #66
api wrote: post #30

I've got a possibly great job offer on the table from SF/SV, but may turn it down. I'd love the city I'm sure, but after glancing around I've come to the conclusion that home ownership is unthinkable to anyone who hasn't had a cash-out event. The real estate market is certifiably, utterly bat-dookie insane. NYC is often considered more expensive, and Manhattan is certainly... well... Manhattan. But taken collectively…

Have you looked into Alameda? It's hundreds cheaper than anywhere in SF proper, quieter/cleaner and my commute's only 20 min.

Isn't that were they have the Naval Base? With the Nuclear Wesasls?

Yes, that is the limit of my knowledge of San Francisco.

Re: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

#74

Post by king_jester »

hayward2 wrote: post #17

I don't understand why tech workers in the Bay Area feel guilty about receiving 'high' salaries of $100 - $200k/year. This is not a lot of money... People on Wall street laugh at these amounts. So do specialized doctors, corporate lawyers, investment bankers, etc. Software engineering is unfortunately a very middle class occupation at this point. I'd love to see it get up into the ranks of the upper class (at least f…

Software engineering is not a very middle class occupation, as you can easily earn amounts more than the average middle class family as a single worker, even in areas that are not tech hubs.

> I don't understand why tech workers in the Bay Area feel guilty about receiving 'high' salaries of $100 - $200k/year. This is not a lot of money... People on Wall street laugh at these amounts.

100-200k a year is a lot of money. That amount easily puts you in the upper quartile of income earners in the US. Comparing yourself as an economic class to the people on Wall Street, who are consistently some of the highest earners in the US, is silly and doesn't make any sense since the vast majority of people do not have income like that.

Re: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

#75

Post by api »

king_jester wrote: post #11
DanBlake wrote: post #8

The reason for San Francisco's high rent/home price is very simple, despite how others like to complicate it more: 1: Its desirable for most people to live here. Possibly the most desirable place in the USA, depending on your tastes. As a result, people are willing to pay more to live here. There are jobs, culture, food, art and much more all in this great city. 2: Rent Control. I wont get too much into it, but my ta…

The main reason why people don't want new residential development is because it will feed into gentrification and push people out because they can no longer afford to live in SF. NYC has been and is going through this problem right now and it is not pretty. EDIT: There are a lot of comments about increasing supply as a way to make housing/apartments cheaper in SF. This is not at all well demonstrated, as in NYC new r…

NYC is more affordable than SF overall.

The reason NYC's still got real-estate-price-itis is that demand still outstrips supply even though they do allow new construction. But the mismatch is not as great as the bay area, where from what I hear nothing can be built and everyone wants to live there.

If you want to see matched supply and demand, look at most of the big cities in Texas. Part of that is geographic -- they're in "flatland" as it's called -- and part of it's that Texas tends to be more pro-development. Supply can rise with demand. Lots of people are moving to Texas too, but prices remain relatively sane excluding a few hotspots.

Re: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

#76

Post by rayiner »

api wrote: post #30

I've got a possibly great job offer on the table from SF/SV, but may turn it down. I'd love the city I'm sure, but after glancing around I've come to the conclusion that home ownership is unthinkable to anyone who hasn't had a cash-out event. The real estate market is certifiably, utterly bat-dookie insane. NYC is often considered more expensive, and Manhattan is certainly... well... Manhattan. But taken collectively…

> NYC is often considered more expensive, and Manhattan is certainly... well... Manhattan. But taken collectively the NYC metro area is actually much more affordable. You can find places to live that are nice, friendly to someone older than 25-30, and at least sanely priced.

It's crazy, isn't it? I was looking at housing prices recently, for places within a 30-35 minute train commute of work (I refuse to make a car part of my daily routine). In New York, for $750k or so there are 2-3 BR places in good school districts in Westchester, right on the Metro North line. Not cheap, but not entirely outside the long-term plans for a two professional family. Similar places in Palo Alto or the like seem to start well over $1 million. Over a million, to live in a place where the nice restaurant are in strip malls!

And if you can expand to secondary cities... it's incredible what kind of water views you can get in downtown Seattle for $500k.

Re: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

#77

Post by DannyBee »

king_jester wrote: post #52
DannyBee wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You didn't actually address any of his points, except to point out that some folks view gentrification as a problem in SF. I actually agree with the comment you replied to. Severe governmental incompetence in SF has been worse for the city than gentrification.

Both of those things are bad in general for cities. However, OP expressed doubt that increased presence of wealthy residents couldn't be anything but good for a city when clearly it is not so obvious.

Except that when it related to san francisco, some of the things on that wikipedia page are directly contradictory to the point i think parent was trying to make:

IE "When wealthy people move into low-income working-class neighborhoods, the resulting class conflict sometimes involves vandalism and arson targeting the property of the gentrifiers. During the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, the gentrification of San Francisco's predominantly working class Mission District led some long-term neighborhood residents to create what they called the "Mission Yuppie Eradication Project.(image)" This group allegedly destroyed property and called for property destruction as part of a strategy to oppose gentrification. Their activities drew hostile responses from the San Francisco Police Department, real estate interests, and "work-within-the-system" housing activists.[37]"

This is not a problem with the wealthy people!

Now you could argue this is still "not good", but there was no real argument made at all, just an implication of "you should read this wikipedia page since it comprehensively responds to your ideas", and it really doesn't.

Basically, i'm trying to understand whether he actually wanted to participate in the discussion and had substantive points, or just thought it was obvious and covered by this wikipedia page.

Re: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

#78

Post by roc »

georgemcbay wrote: post #34
RyanZAG wrote: post #6

Doesn't seem like a great solution. If the tech guys leave SF, it would be like Detroit. SF and tech are now linked in the way Detroit and cars were. If you try pull the tech out, you'll be left with a husk fighting over crumbs. I don't even live in SF and this is clear to me. Or maybe it's clear to me because I don't live in SF?

Not really the same situation in that massive amounts of people fled Detroit because all the jobs disappeared (company failures combined with widescale automation in the ones that didn't fail). There are tons of tech jobs available in SF. Arguably, there are too many jobs available there which is causing at least some of the cost of living pressure. These jobs are unlikely to vanish en masse like they did in Detroit…

Automation didn't hurt Detroit jobs. There were fewer wrench-turners, but there was an explosion of specialization. As it turns out, when everyone can stamp out a bog-standard ICE, you diversify and compete by creating ever-more-finely-tuned engines with custom parts and electronics that no-one had the time, skill or budget for previously. So what was lost in manual line jobs, was more than made up for in skilled line jobs, CAD/CAM jobs, engineering jobs, supplier jobs, etc.

It wasn't until the Big 3 were on the brink following the banking/liquidity crisis that the greater auto industry started shedding jobs. And by that point, the jobs weren't even in the city in the first place. The losses were suffered by the suburbs.

The job problem in Detroit was that cheap greenfield development deals drew all the new jobs into the suburbs. (with an assist from the highway system, race relations, city politics, etc) And with the jobs, went any economic reason to live in the city center and quite a huge chunk of the tax base.

Despite the difference in reasons, the challenge of San Francisco does share a somewhat-familiar shape with that of Detroit: the rich can justify living there, the young can romanticize it, the poor have little choice but to stay, but the lower and middle classes, and anyone with a family who can afford the choice makes for the exit.

Re: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

#79

Post by api »

fibbery wrote: post #64
jaysonelliot wrote: post #60

I don't understand why the author would move to Portland when we've got our own affordable, culturally rich, tech-friendly cities in the East Bay. Come to Oakland. It's beautiful here. The weather is better than San Francisco, you can ride your bicycle anywhere, public transit is good, and it's easy to get to SF as well as Silicon Valley (which I do regularly). There's no need to leave the entire Bay Area just becaus…

houses are impossibly expensive in Oakland also.

And Oakland can get stabby. So it's stabby and overpriced. No thanks. If I wanted stabby I'd go to Detroit and get a Victorian for $25k.

Re: San Francisco, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

#80

Post by jusben1369 »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #20

Cry me a river. San Francisco is expensive. It's not the tech workers fault. Nobody owes you a home in San Francisco. The American dream is not home ownership. Where'd you hear that? A countrywide home loan commercial?

Putting aside the condescending, finger wagging tone I was struck by the incorrectness of this comment. Home ownership is actually part of the "American Dream" You could debate whether it should be but you can't define it as not being. A quick Wikipedia check on the American Dream:

The meaning of the "American Dream" has changed over the course of history, and includes both personal components (such as home ownership and upward mobility) and a global vision.

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