I’ve heard a lot of things about California transplants (being one myself), but being far right is one I haven’t yet heard.
California is massive, and it isn’t all SF and LA. You’d think that electing Schwarzenegger governor would have been a hint as to some political leanings! California has a sizeable rural community, which is typical Right wing. http://cdn.abclocal.go.com/content/kfsn/images/cms/automatio...
I grew up in the red state part - I haven’t seen the mass exodus though, people have tended to stick to their towns. Mostly people fleeing the coastal cities.
This article misses an option I've seen used by the city which I live in: Austin, TX. Instead of building a serious mass transit system, the city encouraged the greenfield development of high density urban clusters outside the downtown region. So the companies moving in now have option to be located in the Downtown or the "New Downtown" (called the Domain). I think this has been a very successful strategy. But it dep…
The “new downtown” is not the Domain. It’s Round Rock.
And the developers have not done any favors to Austin by building all the massive high rises near the river so that no one else can see any part of the river.
Nor have they done any favors to Austin by continuing to build out massive cookie cutter developments so that they can try to become the next Steiner Ranch — meanwhile causing very grave harm with the massive increased traffic on 183, Mopac, 360, 2222, etc....
> someone making 140k in SF might make 110k-120k in places like Boise or Denver As someone who moved from Pittsburgh to San Francisco and had my compensation quadruple, I call bullshit.
As someone who was looking at the data on glassdoor while writing my comment, and who has dealt with offers from recruiters, and who has an extensive network of friends who are open about their earnings, I call bullshit on your calling of bullshit. There are certainly outliers. There are certainly people with excellent skills who are being underutilized, and who will get paid a lot more if they find the exact right f…
> But if you're in the "average software engineer salary" range in SF, the falloff going to a mid-sized city is not nearly as steep.
But that is exactly why Engineers want to be in SF! Other markets won’t compensate you nearly as well, or increase your compensation as much, as companies in the Bay Area.
However, if one has a family and kids, I could see moving to a city with more affordable housing and good schools as a worthy trade off.
Not the crux of the article, but: > This doesn't mean that they, or the even higher-cost, more congested coastal metros, will adopt Manhattan or Tokyo-style density and transit patterns. Instead, Austin and San Antonio might be the new Houston and Dallas. My goodness, can we /please/ stop this false dichotomy that a city either has to be a Tokyo megalopolis or a suburban sprawlfest? I don't think any reasonable perso…
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.
It's both. City planners are constrained to their own jurisdiction, so they're trying to come out ahead by ensuring that the next wave of growth doesn't leave them behind. They're trying to solve a local optimization problem, where their competition is often the neighboring localities with whom they will share the wider trend of whatever the future may bring, but the resulting wealth will be allocated depending on ex…
The availability of housing probably does encourage household formation and childbirth, so you're right, developers share in the blame. But if you take population growth as a given, some kind of housing development is necessary, and there's an ironclad bipartisan consensus that it had better not be the urban kind (especially not near existing urban centers). I hate cookie-cutter greenfield subdivisions as much as anyone, but we get them because they are what we allow at scale.
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
As an example, I moved from the DC metro area (itself already a high CoL area) to NYC to take a job at Google. I'm currently making 'exceeds expectations' L5 money, which is way more than you can make at basically any tech job in the DC area. And yet there are tens of thousands of engineers here in NYC making that much, at Big 4 and fintech companies. Yes, the cost of living went up a bit, but it's utterly dwarfed by…
Genuinely happy to hear that it worked so well for you. I think what you may be overlooking is that the vast majority of SEs don’t have the experience or talent to be at your technical proficiency ( trying not to sound classist here, just stating facts).
This article misses an option I've seen used by the city which I live in: Austin, TX. Instead of building a serious mass transit system, the city encouraged the greenfield development of high density urban clusters outside the downtown region. So the companies moving in now have option to be located in the Downtown or the "New Downtown" (called the Domain). I think this has been a very successful strategy. But it dep…
i think you’re being generous calling austin’s city development and urban design even a “strategy”. austin for a long time didn’t want to grow at all, so they did everything to basically discourage it. then growth was forced on the city, and they’ve had to scramble to try, unsuccessfully, to catch up. that’s why there’s a double decker highway that doesn’t really help the traffic, an expensive highway that goes around the city that no one uses, a highway with practically no exits that goes through people’s backyards, an expensive train that no one uses and is almost pointless, no way to get across the city quickly, hardly any bike lanes in a city where bicyclists are plentiful, and more and more. austin is a poster child for how to not design and develop city infrastructure.
Not the crux of the article, but: > This doesn't mean that they, or the even higher-cost, more congested coastal metros, will adopt Manhattan or Tokyo-style density and transit patterns. Instead, Austin and San Antonio might be the new Houston and Dallas. My goodness, can we /please/ stop this false dichotomy that a city either has to be a Tokyo megalopolis or a suburban sprawlfest? I don't think any reasonable perso…
> I don't think any reasonable person is advocating to turn San Francisco into Manhattan
What is that supposed to mean? I would settle for it being a less shitty Brooklyn though.
Not the crux of the article, but: > This doesn't mean that they, or the even higher-cost, more congested coastal metros, will adopt Manhattan or Tokyo-style density and transit patterns. Instead, Austin and San Antonio might be the new Houston and Dallas. My goodness, can we /please/ stop this false dichotomy that a city either has to be a Tokyo megalopolis or a suburban sprawlfest? I don't think any reasonable perso…
If there were a Paris or Barcelona in the U.S, tons of people would move there. Cost of living in this "Paris" or "Barcelona" would skyrocket and you'd see the transit system hit the max and cost of housing skyrocket. There are just fewer cities in the United States with good transit systems, low-crime, high quality of life and urban amenities. This hypothetical city would go through similar growing pains as NYC and San Francisco have gone through with decent transit systems that just can't keep up with population growth.
The logical conclusion of this article is that a higher entity, likely the federal or state government, needs to step in and provide resources to help these mid-tier cities with their growing pains, assuming the optimal scenario is not another metro area with suburban sprawl and lots of traffic. As it stands now, it's unlikely this will change until the system gets much worse due to the high cost of intervention. It costs $1 billion for just one mile of rail in Los Angeles and New York City, and Paris has 133 miles of rail to support a population of only 2 million.