I can't help but think to myself "how does this person live here?" whenever I interact with a service worker in SF, particularly one that doesn't appear to be in school. It's not a healthy reflex but I have to admit I have that thought all the time.
The more I think about SF the more I shudder. There's an interesting video "How to Fix San Francisco" what a guy uses Google Maps to showcase the structure of the town. It was eye opening. SF is jammed packed with people. From the skyview it looks grey with streets and buildings. No nature, no parks, nothing.
But why (serious question)? Other than A) Growing up there and B) Silicon Valley bragging rights the city does not seem to have much going for it. Yet, people still live there and pay a hefty price to do-so.
The city has excellent food, art, music, and other culture. In the suburbs I can't go see a world class gallery of modern art. Or go see a musical. Or go see live jazz. Or go to a bar that specializes in modern cocktails. It is also a capital of activism and support for the LGBT community.
Cities aren't for everybody. Some people really want green spaces and SF doesn't really offer much there but to think that there are no benefits is just wrong.
"The city has excellent food, art, music, and other culture. In the suburbs I can't go see a world class gallery of modern art. Or go see a musical. Or go see live jazz. Or go to a bar that specializes in modern cocktails. It is also a capital of activism and support for the LGBT community."
You can get to SF in a short time from many suburbs. Almost everyone I know wants to be able to do these things at the drop of a hat, but rarely does these things as a percentage of time.
A lot of long time and native Bay Area residents have favorable housing situations, either by owning a family home from before the latest bubble, or by living in a rent controlled apartment or an apartment with a landlord who prefers tenant stability over chasing market rents.
Same situation in NYC, but there are many more people like this. The great majority of police, teachers, and other city workers in NYC are natives with homes bought in more affordable times, because nobody else could afford to live here on with such a low paid job.
The house I share was bought for $30,000 in the early 1980s, paid for by a single uneducated emigrient worker.
This is an interesting statistical breakdown essentially saying that moving to the cities for opportunity used to hold true but likely no longer does for those without college degrees. Therefore it makes more economical sense for people without college degrees to move out of high COL areas, as there is no longer an income gain worth it anymore for them (broadly).
I fear this is a worrying sign that cities will eventually begin to lack necessary labor to keep running.
One must wonder why the income doesn't rise to match. My guess is that technology allows cities to buy such labor from low-COL areas. Improved communications, of course, but there's less obvious stuff like food conservation[1] or precision manufacturing that allows for standard, easy-to-assemble housing parts.
[1] For example, in a recent discussion about Seattle raising the minimum wage, a restaurant association exec said they had ways of reducing the needed labor, like buying pre-chopped vegetables.
>My guess is that technology allows cities to buy such labor from low-COL areas. Improved communications (...)
The very reason for the persistent, vocal push for mass transportation. This allows centrally-planned, carefully routed influx of cheap labor, while at the same time keeping the low earning families out of sight & out of mind. The upmarket city districts won't be defiled by the sight of a 10 year old sedan, or, heavens forbid, an unmowed lawn.
Social stratification follows & "us vs them" perceptions rise.
I’m confused by what claim you’re trying to make here. Are you suggesting that low income people are going to move into rich neighborhoods to be closer to work if we eliminate public transit? Public transit enables higher density, which increases the visibility of low income folk by pushing rich and poor people closer together. It has the exact opposite effect you are suggesting.
>Public transit enables higher density, (...) pushing rich and poor people closer together.
The later doesn't follow from the former - there's nothing about public transport that inherently clusters the affluent around it. Good schools & "nice" neighborhoods would be an overriding concern.
Private transport enables[1] mixing and matching, by the virtue of being rather flexible and quick to react to changes in supply & demand. There's nothing inherent in private transport that would cause self-segregation, nor that would allow planned segregation. Your point about density holds true, but it's still a low-density somewhat homogeneous society.
Public transport, by the vice of being mostly fixed in place and centrally managed, is how one channels people into pre-defined paths and spaces. Sure, higher density is possible, but enclaves of the reliant are created around the transportation hubs, while the affluent can settle anywhere - presumably with no unseemly bus stops & metro rails in view.
Build a bus or metro rail stop, who do you think will tend to settle around it?
Have you ever been to a an actual city in your life? The most affluent neighborhoods are the ones with excellent transit. Look at downtown and midtown Manhattan.
I think folks in the trades probably still do well. But the low end has definitely become unaffordable. The housing situation in these cities in untenable so now second tier cities will experience major growth. The Twin Cities metro is one area which I think can sustain a differentiated jobs economy and you can still find reasonable housing... that may not hold long term though.. still there is a lot of land to develop.
A very large portion of tradesmen have associates degrees. In fact, I often wonder if the tradesmen are artificially boosting the income statistics of degree holders in general.
I've lived in Toledo, and I've heard the Twin Cities get colder than Fairbanks in the winter. They have frozen lakes, the only thing they don't have is polar bears.
I grew up in northern Iowa, so the Twin Cities were our closes major metropolitan area. My mom's family is from 2 hours north of them. My wife's parents both grew up even further north. It gets cold, but once it gets below 0F it all feels roughly the same. At that point there is no humidity in the air, which is what really makes you cold to your bones.
I think the biggest thing people have to get used to is that there is roughly a 120F temperature swing from January to August.
One winter I was vacationing in Beijing, Changchun, and Haerbin. Beijing was about -10C, cold I guess. Changchun was about -20C . I took a bus to Haerbin and saw the mercury fall to -40C (they have digital thermometers at the front on the long distance buses in NE China!). Anyways, there is a huge difference between -10C and -40C, when I got back to Beijing, it felt fairly balmy.
Yea I wouldn't recommend doing anything other than hopping between buildings or vehicles when it gets down to -40 (same in both C and F, which I think is neat)
-10C is 14F, which I agree is a pretty nice day if you're properly outfitted.
You can actually do stuff in -40C, just wear a lot of clothes and don't expect your digital camera to last very long when you are trying to take picture of carved ice sculptures and ice bars, etc...
Honestly, the coldest winters I spent were in Southern China, even though it was 5 to 10C out, no indoor heating really sucks and will beat you down quickly.
It will be interesting to see if this is an ebb and flow or a longer term pattern.
>Many of the jobs that offered a leg up to those without a college background no longer exist and won’t come back.
The jobs thing is interesting. I changed careers via a bootcamp (that's a whole other topic but let's just assume they produce some portion of viable candidates (like me!)), and I found a lot of jobs requiring lots of experience, working with 8 frameworks / languages (at least) described as "entry level"... and if you can't say you worked with all those things the impression you're just out and they'd rather sit there looking for someone for a year (giving HR and recruiters something to do I guess) than actually try someone out.
It would be nice to see more jobs / companies open to hiring non traditional type folks for say 6 months trail, reasonably well paid (obviously not the salary for 8 languages / frameworks guy, and find people who can help to some extent now, and later.
It could extend to even other areas of work with shorter term retraining and reasonably paid, but still entry level type work.
Supposedly, more companies used to hire people on a trial basis. That probably went away because today's employees require a lot of HR overhead, and businesses can get in trouble for alternatively hiring people as contractors(if it appears they are treating the contractor like an employee).
The single most reliable source of good tech hires in my experience is undergrad internships. It's a 3 month interview both ways with full pay and benefits. If we could make that more commonplace for folks in mid career it would likely increase diversity as well as reduce hiring misfires.
It does appear that a lot of employers are dependent on younger employees interning before hiring them.
A few of my peers are working for the same company; the ones that interned have quickly advanced in pay and position, and the ones that did not have felt stifled and have not had a position change. The only difference between them is a few years of age.
As someone who is looking around at the same companies, I can say it's affected my decision to apply and accept offers.
I just started with a company after a 3 month contract-to-hire position. Even though the cost to them was double what I was paid (plus a 10%+ placement fee), they saw the long term savings of finding a good fit (and hopefully I continue to be).
As least the article acknowledges that higher income individuals can do better on expensive cities even after paying for housing. HN is full of smug LCOLers who love brag about how much better they are doing than those SF losers because their mortgage is only $2/month or whatever.
One thing I've never understood about this argument is: iPhones/Pixels are $1000 no matter where you live. A new decent sedan is $25k no matter where you live.
Even if housing is 20% of your income in both HCOL and LCOL and it seems completely ridiculous to pay $500k * 20% and not ridiculous to pay $150k * 20%, you can still by more cars, phones, etc. with your remaining $500k * 80%.
This is ignoring the cost of consumables like food, etc. But I believe the same argument applies.
I think the argument is that comparable housing is not the same percentage of your income is both areas - ie, people in a LCOL may be paying the same 20%, but they live in a two-story house instead of a room or tiny apartment.
$100k/year rents you one hell of a nice apartment, though, right? It must be competitive with whatever you can get in a LCOL area.
150k/500k were numbers I pulled out of the air for "well compensated engineers" in L/HCOL. I absolutely agree that people who are not well compensated are fucked. But the thing I've never understood is people who could make 500k by moving to the Bay Area arguing that they're better off staying in a LCOL for purely financial reasons.
Now, note that I currently do not live in the Bay Area and have consistently refused to move there for employment reasons, because there are other things to value besides money. But I've definitely seen the argument made on a purely financial basis, and I think it is misguided.
Much of the value is living next to other people with high incomes, with secondary effects such as your children going to school with others whose parents have high incomes.
> A new decent sedan is $25k no matter where you live.
In the states of course. That logic no longer applies in Singapore.
But yes, many expenses are fixed across the country; they might even be cheaper in high COL areas (international travel, foreign food). So 100k in mobile Alabama isn’t 200k in SF. Once you get over your housing differential, everything else is much more mellow.
Are you saying that "high" COL means a house costs $500k? in my limited experience, you're off by 1.5-3x.
The house I spent my teenaged years in was purchased for less than 100k and will still sell today for less than 100k. I think my mom would get her money back, and maybe some appreciation, but the sale price of that home will reflect the dwindling economy of the town and region it's in.
In contrast, the house for sale a quarter mile from my current apartment is listed at 2.4 million. It's a little bit larger than my mom's, but the plot of land is probably a little smaller (big house, small yard vs. post WW2 development full of ranch houses with yards big enough for kids to run around and play in).
The town my mom's in isn't a food desert, but I can get an order of magnitude more variety of produce, substantially fresher (for most of year -- during the local late summer and harvest season she can get fresh, local, cheap produce).
And similarly, the town my mom still lives in isn't a dead economy, but there's no way i'm getting a tech job with an office within bicycling distance of her house, whereas from my current apartment i can bicycle to a few dozen local technology employers.
Also I'm currently willing to pay a premium for good weather.
You're right, but people aren't talking about the % of their income they pay in housing. They're talking about how much is left after they pay for housing.
Every interaction with a business that has a presence in your HCOL area caries a price premium because those businesses are getting fleeced by their landlords who are getting fleeced by their plumbers who are getting fleeced by their landlords...
The HCOL area isn't the obvious net win it should be on paper. I live in a "blighted shithole" so to speak. I paid $10 for a buffet dinner and $0 for parking. All those nickles and dimes really add up fast.
HN as also full of smug SFers and SVers who love to brag (masking it as a half-hearthed complaint) how much the pay for housing, implying that they can afford it.
Usually, neither type is able to provide meaningful discussion about the topic at hand.
Not being from US, but often traveling there, I have always wondered how mimimum-wage workers are able to afford living even remotely close to Manhattan or SF.
The answer seems to be that they increasingly can't.
Smugness on both sides. The only thing that we can really trust is data and math.
Minimum wage workers in these communities are usually immigrants who double up on very family style living accommodations. It’s still better for them in SF than it was in say Manila.
They live in outlying towns with bus service to Manhattan. You see them waiting at bus stops on Saturday mornings waiting to come in to work when everybody else has the day off.
Manhattan is just one of the five boroughs of New York and it is very well connected to also New jersey and upstate NY and Long Island. SF on the other hand ..
It's a classic thing people interject when it isn't relevant.
You nearly cannot discuss housing costs in Florida or Indiana on the internet without someone from SF feeling the urgent need to say "lol that would get me a cardboard box where I live".
Are people flaunting, or are they participating in a discussion about affordability of housing while you interpret them as flaunting? I only ask this because I've rarely seen people here outright flaunt/brag in the original sense of those words.
There's a difference between:
"Doesn't matter to me, I can afford it lol, sucks for people who can't."
and
"I pay X for housing and get paid Y in salary and that's why living here makes sense for me."
There is an interesting flywheel effect going on in large productive cities, gentrification is pushing out those previously impacted by white flight. NIMBYs prevent dense suburbs, and we don't have adequate transportation for lower income folks to efficiently commute to job centers, what's our plan for folks without degrees? My prediction is a large increase in "welfare".
The answer right now is exurbs. Big City gets too expensive to live in (or doesn't have enough housing) so people move to the suburbs because they're desirable and usually have a nice community, school district, and downtown of their own. When the suburbs fill up or become too expensive, people move to commuter towns (exurbs). Towns with no character of their own, no political force, no real economic activity. The only thing they have going for them is a quick and easy connection to the bigger city.
A few years ago I co-founded a company that provides services to Midwestern exurban towns with the goal of turning them from just a commuter's bedroom into places people might actually want to spend some time (and some money). It's one of the hardest challenges I've ever taken on.
The company is called Citieo [1]. We work with tiny towns (usually less than 10k people, average is about 5500 residents) that have downtowns already built but the majority of their population leaves to spend their money and their time elsewhere. In our area (Midwest, very little public transport), our exurbs are built on major roads instead of rail lines.
Our public-facing presence is a digital media outlet (website, app, facebook) for each city we cover, but most of our work is done face-to-face with local business owners, the Chamber of Commerce, and the city government. It's a very small operation and we don't make a lot of money from it, but we think it's important to try to save our towns and, in the age of toxic social media and outlets like Next Door/Citizen/Neighbors, foster a real life community in your real life downtown. Outdoor, face to face.
That's odd. I live in Geneva, Switzerland, where everything is expensive. College-educated people have huge salaries here, but it rises the cost of labor accordingly. Dishwasher installation was about $400 cash, babysitters take $20/hour. Nobody here will work for less. Why it isn't the case in SV?
Because in America the free market applies to everything except for labor. /s
Seriously though, in the US practically every other option is considered before wages are raised. Wage suppression is real even if people don't want to admit it.
Well, it's not only wages. Even if you pay cash to illegal immigrants here, it still will be quite expensive, they need money too (If you are not that rich, you can find cheap food here, cheap clothing, etc — but certainly not cheap labor). Perhaps it is the culture — the Swiss expect to pay a lot for everything, and prefer local-sourced products and services.
We don’t have legal “minimal wage” here in Geneva (there are some other cantons, which have it, but not us). There are certainly not enough jobs for everybody here, and many other issues, but low wages somehow isn’t one of the problems. I wonder how that works.
Comparing the general population, perhaps. Comparing professionals — maybe not, I am a software engineer here, and I earn less than somebody of my qualifications would earn in Silicon Valley.
Does the source of this article actually say that it's people without college degrees who are leaving? The data only showed net migration, as far as I could tell.
> For the first time in at least a decade, 4,868 more people left King County, Wash. — Amazon’s home — than arrived from elsewhere in the country.
This statement lacks precision and is a poor way to open the article. It implies that this is the only time that particular net change took place, not a net-negative change. EG, maybe 2000 people left last year?
While one can certainly infer, it's poor style IMO.
Doesn't really present anything terribly surprising. Bigger cities have crazier cost of living and wages for the degree-less are, no surprise, not keeping up. I don't think anyone here will be shocked to find out working at mcdonalds or as a janitor in SF or NYC isn't as viable as a smaller city.
I ran restaurants for a time and it seems that city locations get most of the surplus gained by volume eaten away by higher rents, greater regulation (more expensive to build out) and taxes. Lower volume suburban locations had better per unit profit at the end of the day than high volume locations where I worked (provided the low volume location hit a certain threshold).
Yeah, I feel it's a grass roots effort here to drive people to paywall news sources we otherwise wouldn't consider. On any given day, there's one to two links to WSJ and NYT on the front page, even on stories that aren't exclusives.
The cool kids don't mind paying for journalism and all that, and the press deserves our support (etc, etc). Most of the content I enjoy here is written for free by hobbyists or company blogs.
