Data point of one but my wife and I decided we were done and left earlier this year. Quit my FANG job that wouldn’t support the move, bought a house in a MCOL area and could not be happier.
I’ve even lost some pretty significant weight just getting back to living a non-workaholic lifestyle.
Life is short people. Keep an eye on what’s actually important to you.
I did the same and haven't looked back. I can take a walk without wandering through a sketchy bum colony. The streets aren't lined with RVs. My property tax is in the single-digit thousands of dollars.
I was able to get a concealed carry permit, but ironically, I only carry when I have to travel back to the Bay Area.
The discussion here regarding how fleeing SV workers is disrupting property markets in other cities in the US brings up an uncomfortable but, I think, unavoidable point: local housing policy has nation-wide consequences.
If SV and SF allowed for the construction of additional housing, there would not be a downstream housing crisis in Denver, Austin, etc. The policy decisions of a handful of city councils of the suburbs on the West coast has had a huge impact on these cities -- and has indirectly displaced residents, disrupted local economies, and pushed many people into homelessness.
Housing policy in major economic zones in the US is a national issue, and should be treated as such.
This doesn't even touch on the wider problem of income inequality itself.
If we're being completely honest, the average American would be much, much better off if SV had never produced a single unicorn.
How about those other cities build the housing that SF won’t? There nothing stopping them. And those cities could benefit from the new high income residents. How can “we should all be poorer” be a good solution to high housing prices? There’s always the supply side of the equation and people need to live somewhere.
It takes many months to develop new housing in the U.S. Even when you have local political support, there's a lot of custom manual work and so forth.
It's also very hard to find examples of long-term successful large-scale (town-scale) growth. So we can't just move substantial fractions of people from our largest cities to mid or small-sized cities in a matter of months or years (and get satisfactory results).
Undoubtedly NIMBY forces around the U.S. are partly to blame, but the Covid/WFH exodus is surely the more important factor at this point in time.
Yes, they should build more. But again, that's just pushing the core problem away from SF (one of the most notable cities in the US for over a century, with a history of economic booms and high migration) to what was until recently a large-ish college town known as a haven for slackers.
Having lived in one of those cities as a low-income resident, a medium-income resident, and now a high-income resident, I assure you that the high income residents do much less for these cities than any other group. And no, taxes do not make up for it.
Those same reasons you listed why other cities can't fix the problem also apply to San Francisco. Despite being world famous, San Francisco is quite provincial - nothing like NYC. Their population doesn't even break a million, and it's also geographically limited - the infamous "7x7" miles. Mass migration has affected San Francisco in the same way it has for your city - many high income earners coming in from other states/countries to get a job at a startup or Google/Facebook/Apple etc. These people from other cities are complaining about getting a small fraction of San Francisco's outflows - Why would SF be able to handle it better than your city, when they've had the same problem you're having, multiplied by 10?
Would you encourage your children to go into a homebuilding trade? Which is the kind of question I think about when I wonder who is supposed to build all the houses.
Local housing policy, and more importantly city planning, is just as bad if not worse in Austin than SV. I don't really see city councils on the West coast having any impact on Denver or Austin as the influx of people to Denver and Austin could (and probably does) come just as easily from any other location. Point being, don't let local government in Denver and Austin off the hook for their failure to adapt.
Yeah, Austin and Denver et al have also failed in their housing policy, for pretty much the same reasons as SV. No argument there. But it's hard to deny that SV's wealth explosion and exodus has not contributed to the problems in these cities.
Authoritarian regimes across the Pacific Ocean have consequences on American property demand too. So does migration across the southern border. In fact I think you would be hard pressed to name a thing that happens anywhere in the world that doesn’t downstream from it have an effect on the American property market.
Clearly the solution is for US to annex the Earth like we annexed the Moon and then nationalize housing policy. /s
Our local housing policy does suck, but this is not a constructive direction. You’re simply replacing one power structure with a different one in the hopes that maybe it’ll be better, when what you want to make are specific policy arguments.
Yes they do. But we -- that is, our nominally democratic government, a "power structure" which you have arbitrarily equated with a collection of private corporations -- have placed restrictions on immigration, and some light restrictions on foreign ownership of real estate itself, for precisely this reason.
Secondly, Canada, whose real estate markets have been even more seriously disrupted by authoritarian regimes across the Pacific Ocean, have already placed outright, albeit temporary, bans on citizens of those regimes from parking their capital in the domestic real estate market.
Your characterization of my argument is specious and straw-man-esque. You are assuming that globalization is a given, that borders are always porous, that neoliberalism is the only way of looking at the world. I am kindly inviting you to reconsider your point of view, in light of evidence that it has made housing more unaffordable for the many Americans, disrupted their livelihoods, and dissolved their communities.
Or you can keep making colorless jokes to yourself about the property markets on Mars, up to you.
> -- that is, our nominally democratic government, a "power structure" which you have arbitrarily equated with a collection of private corporations --
Are you responding to me or someone else?
> Your characterization of my argument is specious and straw-man-esque.
Your argument was to effectively transfer local zoning power from local government to Federal government because as you put it, it’s a national issue. True in a way, but the solution isn’t constructive, and you had no policy proposals to accompany this transfer. The one you propose here about limiting foreign ownership of domestic property by citizens from authoritarian countries (PRC, KSA just to name a couple) is something I’m actually on board with.
However, perhaps you think my characterization was inaccurate and uncharitable, so could you clarify the following for me:
>> Housing policy in major economic zones in the US is a national issue, and should be treated as such.
What does treating it as a National issue entail? A broad reading of this is direct Federal intervention into municipal policy which would be a direct power transfer. Could you narrow it down for clarity with actual policy proposals to convey a better understanding of what exactly you have in mind?
I don't really have to propose solutions, actually. My point was the problem, and its inconvenience for many assumptions many Americans have about housing, cities, markets. I don't have to have a ready-made policy prescription on hand to recognize that.
Here are some potential solutions anyways.
Some of these would be unpopular, but we could consider;
1. National standardization of zoning (like Japan)
2. Federal funding for local rail instead of highways (this would probably be the biggest one)
3. Municipal incentives for densification
4. Federal laws regulating the lobbying power of neighborhood associations
5. Beheading local gentry at the guillotine before inevitably being placed in its open maw ourselves (vive la révolution!)
Do it. We got probably 5x the amount of house than we could have gotten in the Bay Area and we don't have to worry about our car windows being broken. We now live close to nature and I'm in such better shape being able to trail run, mountain bike, and snowboard minutes away from our house.
Please don’t, unless you’re willing to confront your own contribution to the situation you’re fleeing.
Wherever you go, there you are.
As someone in Colorado watching the influx of Californians with a dread and frustration over the past 10 years, the majority of newcomers seem to vote and live exactly like they did in CA, creating the exact same problems in CO that they ran from CA to escape.
Watching from Spain, what do you mean "vote and live exactly like they did in CA"?
Here in Spain more and more northern europeans come. I guess many of them are going to settle here (I get lots of questions about taxes and dealing with the spanish state, candid souls), so they contribute to the housing problem but I don't really see what they might import here that can worsen the situation besides their purchasing power.
Also, being Sillicon Valley one of the most productive places on earth, why companies don't involve themselves in politics about housing and city planning?
If I was some top head in such companies I woudl definitely consider it, as it goes directly against my floating line. If I manage to convince mayors that copying the netherlands onto the land around my offices I wouldn't need to pay so much and my engineers would be happier anyways.
They are basically swimming in cash, so IDK, they are involved in politics anyway...
Californians are, perhaps unfairly, notorious for being shallow. This is reflected in, for instance, the story of the California homeowner who wanted his expensive solar panels installed on the side of his roof that faced the street so that they could be seen, rather than having them installed on the more efficient side that faced the sun, but was hidden from the street.
Politically, this manifests as fervent support for causes that seem good on the surface but have dire unintended consequences.
To be fair to Californians, the California constitution is a mess, and incentivizes a kind of aggressive crazy politics.
If you really want to know details (you don't want to know details), here are some articles by locals.
> Also, being Sillicon Valley one of the most productive places on earth, why companies don't involve themselves in politics about housing and city planning?
Occasionally they do but the main power bloc in rich urban/suburban California is homeowners whose property taxes have been essentially frozen at low rates as their home values have skyrocketed. Anything the companies would do politically to help solve the issue immediately runs up against older voters who are well-organized and have nothing but time on their hands and huge amounts of equity in their homes.
This companies can burn cash like crazy. If they hire some smart consultants they can build a situation where the narrative would be current homeowners VS everyone else.
I don't have much experience but even I can do. I don't think the US is short of this people nor this companies short of cash to burn.
And they would do something good for once.
Edit: I remember watching documentaries about SV engineers living in vans ffs. I could get my life almost settled with a couple of years of such salaries.
San Francisco is known for being one of the most progressive areas in the country, and there's a common belief that progressive government policies led to the situation they are now facing.
Before anyone responds looking to argue, I'm not saying whether it's true or false, just stating that that's the perception.
Progressives cluster in dense areas (and/or perhaps density causes progressiveness), and density also causes greater NIMBYism. It doesn't necessarily follow that progressivism causes NIMBYism.
The mistake is that on municipal and land use issues it's a two axis political system.
It's not left/right, it's also urbanist/conservationist.
You will find those on both the left and right that for various ideological reasons end up at the same point of wanting to obstruct new housing creation.
left-nimby's, as they're called, obstruct housing with price controls and other uneconomical demands on housing producers and buyers. Often they reject projects out-of-hand if they show any possibility of making a profit.
There's overlap of both progressives and NIMBYS and conservatives and NIMBYS.
Just as there are progressive YIMBYS and "conservative" (usually labelled "market urbanist") YIMBYS.
The left/right axis is inadequate to describe the dynamics of municipal politics. You need a second urbanist/conservationist axis to describe support or opposition for housing development.
Silicon Valley's problems derive from the incredible income inequalities which derives in part by 1) land use decisions (which include artificially low taxes (ie. prop-13)).
Problems are caused by the rich and established of SV desiring exclusive enclaves of single family homes and not wanting any normal income earning renters to live near them.
People that move elsewhere and maintain this attitude will simply induce the same problems again.
The truth is people vote the same everywhere, we see the same nimbyism in Texas for example for decades, its just now finally catching up with increasing population.
Acting like all the issues are due to recent laws is a easy lie to fall for.
> Please don’t, unless you’re willing to confront your own contribution to the situation you’re fleeing.
What do you mean? I've lived in Colorado and now live in California. Sure, it has serious problems but I'd say some of them are from population density. Millions of people living in small area causes issues. Housing prices? I'd want housing prices to go up if I owned. Taxes? That's a financial question, and the bay area offers world class comp in tech. Traffic? Also bad, but that's from attracting so many people. Crime and homelessness is a serious issue. But I don't think there are easy answers. I live in a safe area, and I would run into other political issues in different states.
That’s a lot of judgement to individuals without a lot of facts to back it up.
If California is broken, it’s not from the people that live there or leave because they can’t stand it the way it is. If another place becomes that way, it isn’t the people coming there that causes it (other than from the population shift).
Everything is crowded nowadays anyway, ant least in the cities. That’s an issue with there being more people in general.
This is a complaint with all forms of migration where someone seeks to escape their bad living conditions.
Generally those conditions are caused by the people who live in them - their culture and ways of thinking - even if they don't understand or can't acknowledge how.
Many people want to escape the consequences of their own beliefs, but don't want to give up the beliefs themselves.
Another example of, "You're not stuck in traffic, you are traffic."
I think it's more that they're complaining that when everyone moves out to the sticks to be 'somewhere less crowded' - that place becomes crowded. Or at least more so.
And that the reason why the original place was so crowded is because people like them wanted to all be there, and the politics and other things there are negatively perceived by the people who DIDN'T move there.
Also, when everyone all the sudden starts buying homes in a previously not in demand are, the homes start getting difficult to afford, as demand is increasing. Especially for people who have been living there awhile already, and don't have the cash that the folks leaving the previously crowded areas have.
I've personally seen this same cycle happen 3 times in California (and PNW/Texas).
What people who never lived in California don’t realize is that there are a lot of transplants from elsewhere. California natives tend to stay. The transplants do not. Many of these transplants tend to move back to their home state.
Also many of them are not liberal, if that’s what you were hinting
Did you know Colorado actually receives more people from Texas than California? It doesn't really make sense, because California is 33% larger than Texas, but it's true.
So you really should be blaming Texans more than Californians, and if they are ruining Colorado like they did Texas, you should call them out on it.
I heard that exact same sentiment in the 1990s. I remember people in seattle complaining about people moving from california. (didn't check colorado at the time)
Yup, and look at Seattle now. You used to be able to buy a house in king county in the 90s for under 100k, an example of just one jarring change of many.
Seattle of the 80's and 90's comes to mind, when they hated having people move north from CA. They now have traffic jams in Seattle just like we do in SV.
I'm amazed at how many new Californians we must be creating every year. Those leaving the state are doing so in numbers able to impact the housing market and political situation in seemingly every state, city, and town across the country. All while still increasing our population every year.
So true. In France, with Covid, many of the IT crowd moved from Paris to cities like Bordeaux or Nantes, much nicer destinations.
They brought their votes with them. Those towns took a turn to the woke-left. Took barely a year to see it translate into higher crime, petty theft, etc. Now people are fleeing it again.
lol - that's like begging people to not cash a giant tax refund check to 'help the gov't'.
I get that it causes angst in the destination, but that is the last thing on anyone's mind when they're considering such a disruptive life change. They're moving because they're miserable right now. That it might make someone else slightly uncomfortable politically later?
And that's ignoring the whole 'no single raindrop causes the flood' issue. Beating up on any individual doesn't make a bit of difference. These changes are being driven by macro-economic shifts.
On a side note, what is also likely contributing? Nasty, nasty air pollution 1/4 to 1/2 of the year in the SF bay area due to all the fires.
Not a disagreement, but only to point out bay area isn't just SF. Go south a bit and there isn't really a worry of getting car windows broken either and also plenty close to nature.
I was working in tech in Bay Area and left to a mid-west 13 years ago. My friends called me crazy. Who is crazy now?!!
I was really burned out and though the tech scene was good in silicon valley(startups, good companies), it still felt my life was just monotonous. I had same tech friends, which were competing against each other. Talking about FAANG companies.
I took a pay cut when I moved away to my new place. I joined a small tech company and was happy. 9-5 job and skiing on the weekends. Taking dog to the walk everyday.
It felt like the vast majority of people I knew on IRC lived somewhere in the midwest, mostly Ohio. Honestly things didn't turn out so well for a lot of those people. Glad to hear it worked out for ya!
I’m a 30-something transplant that happily decided to stay in San Francisco, but I have a lot of empathy and understanding for those who decided to leave.
The thing that had the biggest impact on various quality of life issues (and why I stayed) was moving from
the Mission to a quieter and safer SF neighborhood. I bike everywhere, don’t have a car, and can walk to work and several beautiful parks, including one that opened this year.
If I had kids, don’t think it would have been possible at all to stay.
It’s hard to answer this question hypothetically because if you don’t have kids, you don’t pay attention to how the school system works. It’s a beast.
If you have kids and send them to the public schools, you can’t just move into the neighborhood next to the school you want your kid to attend. There’s an entire placement system you have to learn about that takes into account where you live, stated preferences, etc. It’s possible you live next to a school, but your kid has to go to a completely different school in a different neighborhood.
If don’t want to subject yourself to that then you can send kids to private schools that cost between $15k-$45k/year. On top of that these schools hit you up for more money at fundraisers, etc.
Middle School and High School is another can of worms.
I’m also skipping past the huge budget shortfalls SFUSD is facing and the possibility the state of CA takes over.
At some point it just gets exhausting having to think through all this stuff.
A big reason I moved out of SF to a nearby town is because I knew all the schools were great from K-12 in my district and I just don’t have to think through the insane logistics people have to worry about in SF.
Maybe I overthink my child’s education, but for me it didn’t sit well with how much was left up to chance in public education, the expense of private education, and all the logistics and hassle involved for both options.
I left during COVID to be closer to family. I don't miss the high cost of living or the crowding, but I definitely miss the climate and access to nature. I've gained a bunch of weight now that I drive everywhere instead of walk. Just another anecdote to go with the rest in this thread.
It's interesting since as a SDE in India/Bangalore, I would absolutely love to work in California. All the reasons citied in the article applies to Bangalore as well?
For example similarities include, cost of living / rent in Bangalore is high but it's also the city with most tech jobs. The public transport infra is weak and there is an acute shortage of Uber cabs and yet it still is the most fun city for the youth to be in.
I guess what I am saying is that the grass is always greener on the other side. There will always be a tradeoff to make.
> as a SDE in India/Bangalore, I would absolutely love to work in California
As someone who spent all his childhood in Bangalore before migrating to the USA & specifically California, let me give you some perspective. No SDE wants to work in a Shimoga or Davangere. They want to work in Bangalore. Similarly, no SDE wants to work in a Concord or Martinez or what have you. There are thousands of perfectly good cities in California, but the SDEs all want to work in Silicon Valley. I remember during the early days of YC, I wrote to a founder saying I'd like to work with him. So he invites me. I go to see the company. Its just a 2 bedroom house in San Francisco! They've gotten rid of the furniture, put tables & chairs & laptops. So I tell him, look, I have a 2 bedroom house in San Ramon. We can just operate out of that. He says, I too have a 2 bedroom house in San Ramon! So I say, why are you working out of San Francisco ? Because that's Silicon Valley, you see! So 2 people who live 5 minutes walking distance from each other, both in San Ramon, each have 2 bedroom houses with enough space to spare, no cost, have to commute 1 whole hour, all the way to San Francisco every morning, to work in an expensive rented 2-bedroom house, because Silicon Valley. Now if that's not ridiculous, I don't know what is.
In the case of Bangalore, one could argue there is a huge advantage to commuting from say Hebbal to Electronics City, because there is a gigantic 4 million square feet Infosys campus over there. But if you have a collection of 1000s of startups, and each of them is just a 2-bedroom house or some small office building, the same can very well exist in Danville or Pleasanton or Walnut Creek or Clayton or Dublin or Antioch or .... I've stayed in all those places and there's plenty of cheap office space & 2-bedrom houses. But no. All the action must happen in Silicon Valley. Because.
In that sense I really welcome all this disruption. You don't have to go to Colorado or Seattle or whatever...just go 20 miles N/S/E/W...that itself would be a huge deal. Forget cost cutting, Cutting down on the pollution due to commute traffic would be a very significant positive contributor to the environment.
It would be a giant culture shock for an American to live in India, but I was in Bangalore for a while auditing some vendors there, and I have to say I would be very happy to work at any one of those places, they were like Google campuses and I enjoyed sitting in their gardens doing work in between audit meetings. Their work ethic was also very hardcore, so they worked a bit harder than I would be willing to do, but they were certainly as professional and their companies and facilities were as nice as anything in America.
The death of Silicon Valley has been stated and overstated for decades now. This isn’t the first “exodus” we’ve had, and it won’t be the last. But somehow, new blood finds their way back here every time.
I'm not even going any further than HN comments on this one.
NYPost (and also SFChronicle) were constantly talking about this 'exodus' during COVID. How everyone was leaving; how the U-Hauls were cheaper in the egress direction. Seemed like complete and utter BS. I'm sure they made a lot of revenue from ads though.
I remember moving half way across the country to silicon valley in the 1990's and a giant brand-new diesel rental truck was a super-cheap $400. I don't think things have really changed.
There is no exodus, people move to silicon valley to work, for a few years or decades, until they get sick of it or retire, then move out. Someone always takes their place, for a job and/or the weather, and housing prices fluctuate a little but always keep climbing.
Seems like a lot of comments here are quick to fit this into a moral narrative.
The survey results aligned with my impression from talking to folks in the Bay area over the years: Most don't like how expensive it is and are there primarily for the jobs. Once more companies became open to remote work, the value of being in Silicon Valley went down. If housing prices don't drop fast enough to match that, then simple cost-benefit analysis says that people will want to leave. Sure, the weather's nice, but it's not that nice.
People here are saying that this will make other cities unaffordable, but I don't think that really holds up. There's many many cities that people leaving Silicon Valley to move to and distributing the load across all of them should be easily absorbed. Sure housing costs will go up some, but this is not going to turn Spokane into SF. Obviously, it would be great if housing was miraculously cheap everywhere, but that's not reality. Slightly more expensive everywhere and significantly cheaper in Silicon Valley is probably a net win for the country. (Remember that non-tech people do still live in Silicon Valley.)
This seems like an overall good thing to me. The US has been struggling under an incredibly painful demographic shift. We outsourced our manufacturing jobs to China and automated away most of our agricultural jobs. This forced a huge migration into the relatively small number of metro areas with significant service and tech economies, but those cities physically can't grow as fast as people want to move there.
Giving information workers more remote work opportunities lets the country load balance jobs more effectively across its existing physical infrastructure.
Reminds me of the 2000s dot com bust, there was a funny meme that got shared in a chainmail (remember those?). It was one of those "Top Ways You Know You're From the Bay Area" lists, maybe twenty or thirty bullet points.
The one that got me was: "People are leaving due to the economic downturn. But you're not, because you're already home."
And the places they move to are seeing the effects. Rising home prices here in RTP, NC is making life difficult for those not in the tech sector since wages haven't increased proportionally. Good for us that bought homes even just 4 or 5 years ago, but I feel for those who are just entering their careers and looking to buy or even rent a home.
Anecdotally speaking re: RTP, NC but I think the area may have peaked back in summer. Inventory is sitting much longer. I know sellers who sold under asking for a price much more similar to previous years recently.
New construction is always a bit behind here and we will definitely see higher prices in central NC with the various tech companies increasing their presence in the area.
But it was complete bonkers until August. Sellers were getting double-digit all-cash offers 10%-20% over asking price. Never seen anything like that here before.
Maybe, but I had friends making all-cash, over-asking-price offers last summer but getting outbid. Interest rates never factored into their thoughts at all . . .
They simply noped out on shopping because the market seemed so irrational to them personally. I wonder if other similarly wealthy buyers looked around and just did the same . . .
Ugh. I do NOT miss commuting into RTP. What counts as a 1 hour drive these days? Dating myself, but I remember co-workers at Nortel commuting into RTP from well east of Raleigh . . . that was awful even years ago when Nortel still existed.
Know much about folks buying that far out these days? I mean, I hear apocryphal stories about Apple/Google engineers buying up houses unseen in the immediate RTP area but I am not entirely sure I believe those.
We were house shopping 5 years ago this month a lost a couple potential houses to unseen offers hours after going on the market. Most recently I have seen neighbors buying for 10% or more over asking.
I am in Burlington and everything from Mebane toward RTP has just been crazy prices and moving crazy fast. I am very glad I got in when I did. I worked in Chapel Hill for a couple years and could commute on the back roads but going in to Cary or RTP would be at least an hour for me.
What is the systemic issue? Some people are too poor compared to others? Insufficient supply of housing in desirable metros? Insufficient supply of desirable metros? Technology and automation allowing for economies of scale that allow fewer people to capture more and more of the gains?
The biggest one is likely housing as a store of value or investment. Countries which don't embrace that view of housing, like Japan, have significantly less problems with housing supply despite having fewer points of concentration to spread the population across.
There, luxury housing (e.g. high rise condos in the heart of the city) are of course still expensive but more affordable housing is broadly available, mostly in residential districts. Houses are seen as a liability and as such property with housing on it deprecates much the way a car would in the US. As a result it's not too difficult to find housing for sale for prices below ~$200k USD in the Tokyo metro area with options opening up considerably if you bump the upper limit to $300k USD. Those prices are unheard of in most US metro areas, with even the most dumpy closet of an apartment you can find fetching prices higher than that. Also note that this is just what's visible to me as a foreigner — there's likely a large number of properties that I can't see.
This is also partially enabled by their extensive public transportation. It's much less of a problem to not be in the heart of the city when getting there costs ¥500 or less and is a ~30 minute ride that you're free to read, catch up on email, etc during.
So in short, 1) housing should be treated as homes, not investments 2) most US cities need more density 3) public transportation needs to be expanded and properly supported.
>This is also partially enabled by their extensive public transportation. It's much less of a problem to not be in the heart of the city when getting there costs ¥500 or less and is a ~30 minute ride that you're free to read, catch up on email, etc during.
Don't forget, this commute is actually free for most commuters, because their companies pay for it. It only costs money to use the public transit if they stray from their normal commute route (and this is automatically calculated and handled by the system), or go somewhere on the weekend.
So not only do Tokyoites not have to deal with car payments, insurance payments, maintenance costs, and fuel costs if they don't want to, just getting to work and back won't cost them anything but time. Plus they don't have to worry much about being killed or maimed on the way to work.
You seem to be confusing a cause and an effect. Japan has been having slow population growth, which turned negative more than 10 years ago, and a stagnant economy in the past 30 years. In these conditions housing does not appreciate well and is not a good investment. When Japan had a growing economy and increasing population it had 100 year mortgages: https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990...
They appear to have reported truthfully. Read the source poll yourself, which the NY Post didn't commission, but helpfully linked to in the first paragraph.
There's a thing they are doing on Twitter these days: "a short history of [false meme]". This fits that pattern very well. I can find mass-market news stories about how [large fraction] of SV residents are planning to leave from this year and each of the past 10 years.
This seems really high, and feels like a biased population. The article says this was based on 1700 responses from 5 counties, but who did they survey?
A lot of families have deep roots here (and houses). They have businesses, friends, families, etc. despite the crap they don’t plan to move anytime soon.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this survey captured more renters, or techies / transplants, or younger folks. Then I’d believe 50%+ thinking of leaving.
Given that this is from the NY Post, it is probably the results of some deceptively worded push poll. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that it was on their web site with no constraints on how many times you could answer.
The most bizarre thing about this problem is that both sides don't want it solved. The NIMBY crowd obviously doesn't want affordable housing, or housing programs, anywhere near their million-dollar home, or city for that matter. The YIMBY often oppose extremely effective (although never perfect) approaches to this crisis.
These people are bringing one of these attitudes with them to wherever they move. The homeless [generally] aren't the cause of homelessness, the homed are. I'm sure many of the QoL problems will follow these people/attitudes around.
I've never lived there, but I image other would share my strategy (not that I ever got to use it) - move there, make a ton of money, move away 5-10 years later, possibly switch to a smaller company (big fish in a small pond). I would guess there's a lot of churn on the population there but I don't have the numbers.
I wonder how this will affect housing prices in the rest of the states. The bay area has a lot of people, if half of them migrate that's bound to have an effect.
Most American cities are only slightly behind Bay Area cities in the housing crisis process and small disturbances radically upset their housing markets. Market rents in Austin almost doubled in the past year alone. If you're leaving SV for lower housing prices you might be surprised.
This is true. I make $150k a year and Boston area rent prices + cost-of-living makes me live close to paycheck-to-paycheck. (I'm not there, but I can save very little even though I try to live frugally, prices are insane!). I simply cannot comprehend how low income people live in major American cities, you'd have to live with many roommates and be very food insecure! Life is hard in the US [1] right now!
[1] In the cities. I'm guessing life in suburbia/rural towns is easier. I lived in a major city my entire life, and living in rural parts of the country not worth it unfortunately. It's my own personal decision, I understand that it comes with significant trade-offs.
Boston rents are much higher than they should be (build more housing!) but $150k is still quite a lot compared to rents? For example, you can rent a 3br unit 10min from Harvard sq for $3700/month or in East Arlington / West Medford for $2800: https://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices/#2022-08-18&3
At $3700, that's about 25% of someone's before tax income at $150K/yr, But your after tax take home in Boston would be something like $104K/yr. So you could do this and be left at $59,600 for all other expenses and savings. This is very doable with no children, debt, or other financial obligations, but you never know what someone's life circumstances are.
You're making twice the median whole household income for Boston... I nearly guarantee you could be more frugal and save fully half your income. You'd have to give up things you don't want to give up, but that most people in Boston don't have either... I say this not as a personal attack, but what I found out about myself after critically evaluating my finances in a similar situation despite being a single father in a HCOL location.
Boston's prices, while not as high as SF, are crazy as well. Many large cities like Houston, Atlanta, Chicago, etc, have prices that are around half of Boston.
The Austin housing market is insane. And with Texas getting a large chunk of their income from property taxes, there's going to be some very major effects when everyone's homes start getting reappraised for tax reasons.
Yeah. The homestead exemption limits tax increases to "only" 10% per year, but it will still be a lot for people who count on their home payment staying static. And, getting the homestead exemption isn't automatic, so anyone who forgot to file it will be ... surprised.
The homestead cap limits annual appraised value increases to 10% over the previous year. In theory, if the taxing units maintained the same rate as last, yes, it would result in a 10% jump in tax amount too. Many taxing units reduced their rates a bit this year, given the higher appraisal values. Surprisingly, many Austin area homeowners reported their estimated tax amount stayed the same as last.
The owner has to live on the property and make it their primary residence, to claim homestead exemption. CADs will not know that until the owner applies for Homestead exemption. Not sure they can make it automatic.
Housing prices have risen everywhere, but they are still dramatically cheaper than SF or even Austin. The average home price in the US is more than 1/2 that of SF. Big cities in Texas are typically cheaper than Austin (Houston and San Antonio averages are around $350k).
If you restrict yourself to specific "tech lifestyle" cities obviously that's a different story.
Yes, houses in nice areas with desirable amenities tend to be expensive, because (no surprise) demand to live there is high. Most of these areas also have the common problem of local government that is very heavy-handed in the zoning in permitting of new housing construction.
Moving from California put a tremendous amount of pressure on the housing prices in Denver. And then Salt Lake when Denver got too expensive. And then Boise when Salt Lake got too expensive. And then Spokane when Boise got too expensive.
We're literally running out of cities in the west.
How about build some new cities that allow high density and public transit? I swear Americans always think they could never survive without free parking. You are absolutely not running out of land out west.
Simple, build this new city next to a water resource, not a desert and build it from the ground up to be low water usage. Manage runoff and limit single family home zoning with large yards. I bet you could make it several times more efficient than the average water usage of just about any other US city and every new resident would take pressure off the water resources of existing cities. How can the answer to “the west is running out of water” possibly be “more suburbs please”?
I’ve even lost some pretty significant weight just getting back to living a non-workaholic lifestyle.
Life is short people. Keep an eye on what’s actually important to you.