In San Francisco, even $180k tech salaries are no longer enough
nytimes.comEveryone I know is griping about the cost of living. There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism. Housing being this expensive is a choice. The economy and our society would be much healthier if we decided making sure there was ample housing in high demand areas.
We've conflated having a home with a financial asset. We can't have plentiful affordable housing without decoupling this idea. Houses are a poor financial investment once you remove all the incentives involved like mortgage tax credits, fixed mortgage rates, and obstructive zoning rules. Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.
> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset.
And it's a really, really shitty one. My house has roughly doubled in value since I bought it, but in practice that's useless to me. I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless. If anything it reduces my mobility by making it harder to move, since I really need to coordinate the sale of my current home with buying the new one to help absorb that $500k or whatever price tag.
My if house prices dropped by 50% or more drops my net worth on paper, but it doesn't actually change anything. I still have a place to live + my savings, investments, etc.
> I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless.
HELOCs ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_equity_line_of_credit ) exist to solve the problem of cash being locked up in your house. You can take a line of credit using the property as collateral or other purchases.
Sure, it increases one's borrowing power and that can be useful. But "I can use it to go deeper into debt" is pretty limited utility compared to other kinds of wealth.
How does that help? If don't have enough cash now, then how will getting a loan that needs to be paid back with interest help with that. I will have cash for a little while, then I will have way way less as I have to make payments. Then I miss a few and they take my house and I'm homeless.
Assuming the mortgage is paid off!
Yeah, I think people miss this. Generally, the only way to benefit from growth in value of your home is to either downsize or to _die_.
(Also, of course, depending on timescale, doubling may not be that impressive. If you'd put your money in a broad index fund about five years ago, it would also have doubled.)
"Downsize" can simply mean move to a region where the price of homes is less. Our home in Omaha is certainly not smaller in size than the one we left in San Jose.
You conveniently exclude the third option which is to keep working your ass off, build a family with high total income and grow upwards. Your argument only accounts for personal and professional stagnation. Also - you could try dropping this insane San Fran pride linked to your identity and move to another area that is cheaper. The world is full of workarounds if you're not unreasonably vain, vapid, or lazy.
> which is to keep working your ass off, build a family with high total income and grow upwards.
Eh? If you're moving to a _larger_ house (I assume that's what you're talking about here) the last thing you want is house price growth; that would increase the cost delta between the smaller and larger house.
"I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless."
Well, you can move.
I went from the Bay Area to Omaha, Nebraska without going homeless. I retired though, so there's that. (But my wife was able to work from home with the move.)
(Next stop: perhaps a double-wide trailer in Eloy, Arizona.)
> I can't claim that value without rendering myself homeless.
Are you using some peculiar definition of "homeless" as someone who does not own real estate, like in Elon Musk had been homeless when he sold his California houses?
I'm using it to mean someone who doesn't have a place to live. Like say someone who just sold their house and didn't go and use that money to buy a different house. Yes, that's very different than the person asking for change on the street corner, but I thought it was pretty clear from context which I'd be.
Many people rent without ever owning a house, we don't call them "homeless" normally. Even if you owned a house they still allow you to rent. You can even rent while owning a house or several.
I'm sorry my pun bothered you so.
> We've conflated having a home with a financial asset.
This conflation is a coping mechanism by home owners, especially the ones in SF (which the entire city from SF to San Jose) is sitting on a fault line.
The main problem is that building is being blocked by several other homeowners who are petrified of the value of their homes falling. No wonder young people are beginning to look to this policy in China [0] - "Houses are for living, not for speculation".
> Buildings age and not productive assets and can only be a good financial investment if we deem having more of them is wrong. This will be a painful transition given most people's wealth is a single building they live in.
In 2026, it is really a bad investment in the AI age and especially in HCOL areas like SF, given the layoffs and the jobs being off-shored. If you were part of the people who leveraged their RSUs to buy, well that is also a bad idea to do in 2026.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
China is a weird example because they massively overbuilt housing.
SF in particular is wild. There are so many people who oppose any and all new housing because "it isn't affordable", as if just not constructing anything, ever, will let anyone afford anything.
Yeah, it's a surprisingly resilient alliance of NIMBY homeowners who understand supply and demand, and "anti-gentification" types who don't.
If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket. You can see some of that already in areas under the recent round of city zoning changes, where housing prices shot up significantly in potentially upzonable areas the second the new law was passed, even with zero actual practical changes so far.
To me it feels much more like just a significant cadre who resist any change, of any kind, for any reason, who can ignore the personal side effects because of Prop 13 and because their family bought a house in the 80s and they don't give a shit about anyone else who wants or has to live in the city.
>If it was just self-interest from those homeowners, they would welcome densification because that would make land values skyrocket.
They get this anyway, it's just unrealized capital gains.
Rent control is another potent disincentive for change, probably due to fears of OMI/Ellis Act or other downstream effects.
People have non financial interests.
Even today the structure is a declining asset. It’s just that bad land use policy has forced land value up enough to overwhelm that.
I agree with everything you wrote. I'd like to add the pyramid angle.
Fancy mansions have always been overpriced. For property prices to grow faster than inflation, the pyramid needed to grow its bottom. Supply restrictionism was the ticket. Eventually, every shack was priced mansion-like. This required extracting ever larger fractions of the incomes of renters. Some renters wisened up and bought homes (when they still could). Changing sides, they beefed up the scheme's political backing.
No one cares if mansions are expensive, but basic housing should be extremely cheap. This sounds like a handout but isn't. It's what an unadulterated market would provide. It's what the pre-1970 market used to provide.
That's not to say that markets should be left alone. It's to say that the way this particular market was "regulated" was fundamentally corrupt. We could call it negative regulation.
If SF wants to be New York of the East, let them be so.
Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country, which is big.
This take is actively destructive. We need to let people CHOOSE to live WHERE they want to live - and let people who buy land CHOOSE to build housing for demand they perceive. That's it. That's the problem and the solution. It should be unconstitutional to limit housing production arbitrarily.
How do we "CHOOSE" who gets to live in the most desirable areas?
By letting people build upward. This is self solving, except for our arbitrary limits on how much housing a land owner is allowed to build.
Ah, I see you are a fan of the Kowloon Walled City.
There's a great book called "City of Darkness" about it - a lot of what we believe about it was a campaign funded by the Hong Kong government to turn public opinion about it negative because they wanted the land back from China.
Most of the reason there were any problems there at all was that there was no legal jurisdiction over it, there are still buildings in Hong Kong that have nearly that density with none of the legal issues.
There was no zoning, no fire safety inspections, no fire safety, haphazard infrastructure, lack of water to drink and clean with, etc…it was basically an unregulated slum (which you can still find in many countries).
Hong Kong has density sure. But no one would call it cheap density.
Should people also be allowed to move into neighborhoods that are zoned as suburban (not so much in SF as in nearby areas), and have them remain that way?
I get the libertarian impulse to let people do what they want with their property, but it seems like part of that freedom should be the right to move into areas where there are zoning restrictions.
Zoning should always have been unconstitutional, and the court case enabling it proved that.
The Supreme Court upheld it a hundred years ago, in 1926, after batting down previous efforts by the same people to explicitly ban black people from neighborhoods. They realized that since black families couldn't afford houses by themselves (they needed to buy houses with two or three families together), they could get around it with single family zoning. Ever wondered why it isn't called "house" zoning? Because it was segregation.
The appellate court in the case threw out zoning, because it was so obvious that it was about race. The Supreme Court overturned it by ignoring the entire appellate court decision and defining a building itself (apartments) as a nuisance, instead of making the petitioners regulate actual behaviors. Because the behaviors weren't the problem, it was the black people they didn't want.
Sorry - this riles me up. :)
You should absolutely not be able to have a say over how much housing your neighbor builds. Sure, if they make noise, or bad smells, or bright lights, THAT you should be able to regulate. But the outcomes of having a say over how much housing your neighbor can build is the strongest root of a whole host of issues - from CO2 to obesity to high commute times and traffic to municipal budget bloat. It causes sprawl. Increasingly, parts of the left and right are starting to realize we need to overturn it.
We have zoning in New Zealand and it wasn't started by segregation.
Zoning has other reasons than racism.
Oversimplifying things down to single causes is an error of thinking.
You've never heard of papakainga?
Zoning and land use code in New Zealand is one of the better examples of structural racism.
In housing law in the United States, we've figured out that because people often use feelings rather than clear statements for their reasoning, we had to pay attention to disparate impact, rather than discriminatory intent.
What you'll find is that in nearly every country, zoning and similar laws originate in or were dramatically expanded to exclude wealth generation by minority groups.
I think you're talking about something different.
My context is discriminatory urban zoning (à la exclusionary zoning or redlining in the US).
I am not sure there are any examples of that for urban zoning in New Zealand. Please enlighten me if you know better.
I agree there is plenty of history of terrible treatment of maori and their land in NZ, but that is a different topic and not relevant. I admit I am ignorant about the history of urban planning in NZ.
What part of the Constitution is violated by zoning laws?
I have heard of laws that prevent the construction of structures that shade other properties (skyscrapers) or block views of the ocean. If those are apparently legal, why not a law that says you can't build a big apartment complex that would greatly increase traffic, for example?
See the Village of Euclid v Ambler Realty case, which is what I'm referencing in my long comment. A federal appeals court found that those restrictions were racially motivated and cause racial segregation, which is unconstitutional (and we've studied this to death since to confirm it). The Supreme Court, nine white guys... ignored that finding when overturning the appellate court decision.
> The Supreme Court, nine white guys... ignored that finding when overturning the appellate court decision.
Higher courts are allowed to overturn lower courts. That's kind of the whole point of the hierarchy.
But regardless, that case was from 100 years ago. Are you saying that the reason people enact zoning laws now is the same? I love living in a suburb and would be equally displeased whether my neighborhood turned into apt complexes, regardless of the complexion of the residents.
Of course you would. That's why it sticks around, because you get regulatory capture. It's the same reason we don't let a CEO write the rules for regulating their own company's competition. That's another more modern reason why it is unconstitutional, it just hasn't been challenged.
Perhaps I have a different understanding of "regulatory capture" than you do. To me, it means that the regulators are captured by the entities they are supposed to be regulating. It often happens when the main job prospects for people in an industry are either as regulators or in industry. If an oil company offers jobs to policy maker whose boss gets voted out of Congress, they can "capture" the regulators, who won't want to kill their golden ticket.
I'm unclear how this applies to zoning rules voted on by the people who live in an area. There is not an intermediary "zoning regulator" who is capturing anyone. Similarly, there is not a constituency that is being "captured" inappropriately. It is literally just a group of people deciding how they want to live.
If this is regulatory capture, then so is having laws against automatic weapons and speeding.
The harms potentially caused by shooting someone or hitting them with your car at high speed are not the same as someone building something next to you that you find aesthetically displeasing. Can I ask you to step back and think about the fact that you just made that comparison?
You seem to be projecting racism without evidence. I specifically mentioned increased traffic from the construction of apartment complexes in a suburban neighborhood. Surely we can all agree that traffic is a reasonable concern? Other similar concerns would include overburdening schools (in at least the short run, before more can be built) and electrical grids (in areas with brownouts/blackouts).
I don't know why you think that the only reason someone might want their suburban neighborhood to stay suburban is the color of their neighbors' skin; perhaps that says more about you than anything else.
Racist outcomes do not require intent. That's why the Fair Housing Act was written to make discriminatory outcomes illegal, not just intent. And no, I don't think you're racist at all, but the outcomes of the policies you want to keep are racist.
If you're open to some books about this, or study work, I'd be happy to cite. Are you open to changing your mind?
You seem to use the word racist in a different way than I do. What I have learned is that an action can only be racist if there was a race-based intent. It cannot be racist if there was not a race-based intent. For example, if a blind person was unaware that his colleague was Asian, and he hurt the colleague's feelings by referring to his hard work ethic, that is not (to my understanding) a racist remark.
Similarly, a policy is not a racist policy if it disproportionately affects people of one race or another. If that were the case, any policy that increased the share of taxes paid by the poor, or the rich, would be racist (against black people or Indian people). But I believe that any change in tax rates is not intrinsically racist, which is what an outcome/correlation-based definition would require.
You're free to share links, but TBH I think we're speaking different languages here. You've also not answered my point about regulatory capture, which you seem to define in a novel way.
Honestly, if you want to understand these issues, you'll have to learn the language I'm using. I would start here, since I think you are leaning on the word "racist": https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1305...
Hm, I don't think I "have to learn the language [you're] using". I am familiar with CRS folks who use terms that way, just as I am familiar with the majority of people who use the terms the way I use them.
If you have any relevant documents, feel free to share. The one you shared does not seem to back your definition of racist/racism, let alone provide reasoning for why your preferred definition is superior to the one I use.
For the record, I find mine to be more apt because I find it useful to distinguish between policies that have disparate impact by race/age/wealth/sex/etc., rather than lumping such policies in with those that seek to discriminate against people based on their race/age/wealth/sex/etc. If we call all of those policies "racist" or "sexist" or whatever-ist, then we have to come up a new term like "intentionally racist" to describe the subset of policies where intent is present.
I generally prefer not to have to make up new terms if we have words that already (for many people) have that meaning. But hey, some people just love doing the euphemism treadmill and its equivalents, as here.
I don't know how to help you. I think you have deep misunderstandings here, and I've seen you say you don't want information about it... so you're kind of stuck. Why did you even respond if you didn't want to learn anything?
Ghost editing the comment, nice. OK well again I think the issue is that you don't like answering questions or defending your position in straightforward ways. Instead you point me to a PDF that does not appear to support your prior reply, and you don't say what exactly your goal was. You also (arrogantly) portray your interlocutors as needing to be educated so they can reach your level of understanding.
I assure you, I am very well-versed on the legal issues regarding disparate impact, race, and sex. I went into this conversation looking to understand what your perspective and motivations are, but little has been provided. I know when to cut my losses though, so I wish you good day.
Perhaps thinking that you need to help me is the main issue? If you wanted to be a courteous member of the community, you could try actually answering some of the questions I raised, or defending your position with logic or evidence. Just a thought!
Yes, but not forever!!!
Growth has to happen in the long run. We have the same zoning as we did before the people looking for housing were born.
We can have incremental changes, or we can have sudden change. It's going to happen predictably or with a ton of political conflict. The better solution is always to allow a self-reinforcing pressure release on housing. I've long said that everyone should be allow, by right, to expand their housing by 2x the median building unit within a half mile radius, by units, sqft, and height.
Suburban neighborhoods then slowly turn into duplexes over one generation, then row houses over another, then finally start building up after a third generation. Predictable, fair, and sustainable.
If you make it slow, you cause the same issues - and then the neighborhood just says "well if it's FOUR generations that's not too bad, is it?" And because the people who don't get to move in later don't get a say... it gets worse forever.
It's insidious, but as long as you allow people to regulate how much housing their neighbors can produce, it always gets this bad eventually.
It’s self reinforcing. When demand is highest, building will be highest, and median unit size will increase more rapidly, allowing more building, allowing more units.
The pace is limited, but the URBAN output increases exponentially, which is exactly what we want.
I wish it worked that way, but from my nearly 20 years of urban land use policy study and writing, I have seen tons of evidence that it does not.
The problem is that the most in demand areas get new buildings at 4-6 stories, and then you get locked up - the airspace above them becomes unavailable for 50-100 years, when there was market demand for some taller buildings from the beginning. It's the same "push down and spread out" that causes sprawl, just more localized.
I mean, yes, when the incentives are the literal opposite of this policy, the the outcomes will be the literal opposite of what we want.
People respond to incentives.
It takes an awful lot of incentives to knock down a "usable" structure. I'd love to build higher-density right here, right on my lot, but unless I squeeze something in on the same lot, I'm out $150k just to start. $150k covers quite a bit of gas to the lot 2 miles away that's empty.
> It takes an awful lot of incentives to knock down a "usable" structure.
Yes, that’s the point. The policy only really changes things when prices become extreme, and the cost per unit of housing becomes completely detached from the cost of building that same unit.
This is trivially happening in much of San Francisco and New York City.
> Growth has to happen in the long run.
This is not sustainable. The good news is that, due to demographic shifts, we might have a glut of housing in 20 years.
Japan is shrinking. Tokyo, however, is growing. It would not be good news if our cities had a glut of housing. We have three billion people of rural->urban shift we still need to do.
Localized growth has nothing to do with total population.
These urban housing crises in every major western country have nothing to do with population growth and everything to do with population concentration.
We should expect this problem to accelerate during periods of population decline, because there will be even stronger economic incentives to move into concentrated population centers.
When all areas have zoning restrictions you've reversed the problem again removing peoples freedom.
No, you have no right to force your neighbors to behave exactly as you want.
We can’t let everyone choose to live in the same place. There has to be some mechanism, hopefully market-based but it could also be a residency system, that ensures people spread out and live in different places. Even if you could get SF to support a billion people in living space, I’m sure infrastructure and resources like water would cut things off before it got to that many people.
There absolutely does not have to be in mechanism to spread people out. It is cheaper to provide infrastructure to people who are much closer together than it is to provide the same infrastructure to people who are spread farther out.
There's been a website for the last 20 years called Strong Towns that talks about this a lot if you're interested in learning more.
Building up isn’t cheaper at some point. Around 30 stories is the economic limit right now when you consider fire safety, with anything higher reserved for splurges.
Having lived this in China, the economics get wonky in dense cities. I’ve never seen the built up area with lots of 30 stories being cheaper than 4 story blocks. And that is in the most zone-agnostic build happy country on earth.
So go buy land and build a house, just CHOOSE to spend your money and buy land. What's so hard about that? Ah yes we conveniently forget in our youthfulness that we are not original and if thousands of software leeches choose to relocate en masse they will sky rocket the costs on just about everything - simple supply and demand.
The point here is that the existing owner of a house is often happy to build an apartment building, and almost always not allowed to.
As soon as FAANG starts hiring people in Utah, Arkansas and Minnesota for the same roles at the same wages as they hire in the Bay, then people will move. As soon as VCs start funding founders in Boise, Kansas City and Chattanooga, then people will move.
Until then, maybe we work to improve the places where most of us are required to live by our jobs. (And yes, in parallel we can work to reduce the employer-mandated dependence on those areas).
Agree, but I think you mean NYC of the West, not East.
Of course I meant ... East Asia ... it's not that I'm tired enough that I forgot what coast SF is on ...
>Everyone else can move literally anywhere else in the country
This sentiment makes me so angry. People -- very obviously -- need to live where the jobs are.
The fact that we want to say "oh, well if you don't want to live in the rent-seeking machine just go live in the desert" is the left-wing version of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps."
The fact is this. A housing crisis is a slow motion cascade. The landowners profit exactly because housing has been turned into a zero sum game. The more they profit, the more the political opposition will grow. Because the most desirable areas have been cordoned off, every single new resident will likely be on the losing side of the rent-seeking, and thus a pro-housing advocate. Thus, the political situation is a slow motion cascade, and the dam will break, every new building brings more pro-housing voters, every new building makes another new building more likely.
We could end this cycle by working together, but living in San Francisco, the side that has chosen to support rent-seeking cares only about themselves. You can see the political panic happening now. Scott Wiener will be our new rep. We will have hundreds of new units in the Marina. The west side has been upzoned. The only reason we're having the conversation is because the rent-seekers are starting to lose.
> housing has been turned into a zero sum game
Not really. Land has always been zero-sum because there is a limited amount to compete for.
And location is status, even in high density developments (status is often seen as zero-sum).
Book review of Bird's The Land Trap that contains nice detail of unobvious monetary implications: https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/book-review-the-la...
>Not really. Land has always been zero-sum
What? Yes, but you misunderstand.
When you (intentionally) make expanding the housing supply illegal or practically impossible, then you've turned housing into a zero-sum game.
It's frustrating to see the NYT frame this as an AI vs everyone else story, pitting incumbent renters against newcomers, while landlords literally extract rent.
>There is no easy answer, but the only viable solution is building a lot more dense housing and public transit for said urbanism
What about fewer people with the same amount of housing stock? I'm not even arguing that this is the better solution, but I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.
> I don't even see people entertain it for the purposes of arguing against it.
Luckily, we have several recent real-life examples demonstrating why “fewer people” is not a viable solution:
Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives, unacceptable to people even in societies that otherwise accept a high level of surveillance and government control, as well as a lot of babies abandoned in dumpsters.
Weighed against the actual consequences of “less people,” just building more houses is very appealing!
> Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth
I don't think this is true at all.
Birthrates are already declining. All you have to do is give proper sex ed and easy access to birth control and populations will shrink on their own. You don't even have to begin propaganda around overpopulation, though we may need to tone down the "WE NEED MORE BABIES" propaganda that the right is currently projecting.
The fact is, there are a lot of people (18-29% of non-parent adults in the USA, depending on your source) that don't want children. Give them the tools to make sure accidents don't happen (IMO, vasectomies would be more popular if there weren't so many myths surrounding them), and birthrates will decline naturally.
Neither the global birthrate, nor the U.S. population, are currently declining. The U.S. population may decline this year following the Trump administration’s massive increase in violent, capricious removal of immigrants regardless of legal status or criminal record.
Birthrates naturally declining is probably a good thing, but it happens too slowly to make a dent in housing prices without additional interventions.
> dent in house prices
Already dented in Italy and Japan:
https://impatria.com/en/magazine/1-euro-houses-italy-foreign...
https://www.akiyajapan.com/japan/cheap-houses
We're propping up house prices in New Zealand by adding 50% immigrants (I think is fantastic - we're now at 30% population born overseas). Stop-gap solution but it is working at present.
> or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth
People are quite naturally controlling their own quantity of offspring, to the dismay of our leaders who insist on perpetual growth. If we limit immigration (not my preferred approach, but here we are), then the population will naturally start to fall, as is happening in other places.
I mean, ya, it kind of works. Your economy will go to shit for the most part.
>Because you either need to forcibly remove people, which involves an army of stormtroopers kidnapping people off the street and killing innocent people in the process, or you have to control pregnancy and childbirth, involving a level of surveillance and government control over the most intimate parts of our lives
I'm really sad to see this response. President deported a large number of illegal immigrants -- to the extent that he was called the "deporter in chief" -- and he did not employ an army of fascist goons. The insane polarization of the last few years has shrunken the scope of people's imaginations, and I'm sure that people think their only choices are "open borders" vs. "barely-trained fascist thugs."
Sorry, that should be "President Obama"
The US population may already be declining. In prior years the only thing keeping it increasing was immigration, and immigration has fallen considerably under Trump:
https://www.npr.org/2026/06/27/nx-s1-5871338/tps-population-...
That’s correct, and to my point above, driving immigration down to this degree required a level of violence and cruelty so extreme that even the people who voted for it now disapprove of it. And that’s before the profound economic consequences really hit.
I think its also quite apparent that building new housing is a whole lot cheaper than killing and forcibly removing people, its just that it also destroys the value of an asset that the majority of families still hold. I mean its very basic of course: capitalism has a tendency to destroy the family unit, home ownership is a means of maintaining the family unit, and force against the destruction of the family requires violence, which is overall unproductive and wasteful. But anything that is unproductive is also freely determined, which is where the vulgarity of fascism lies, in its conflation of freedom with "letting off steam," so-to-speak.
Short term you might be right. Long term we have seen that western "education" results in declines in birthrates. Demographics are destiny.
Birthrates go down in the east too whenever incomes increase (and sometimes without income increasing)
""education""?
I bring it up with some people.
To do this you need to either accept:
- the area becomes an enclave for the wealthy with a high unhoused population, where most youth have to move away. People say they don't want this, I’m not sure they are being honest.
- the government regulates internal migration. You need a permit to move from the Midwest to California.
> the area becomes an enclave for the wealthy with a high unhoused population, where most youth have to move away.
Yeah, that's already happened. SF is the US city with the least amount of children, where schools have to close due to declining enrollment.
Yep. And on some level, if that’s what these people want, fine. I disagree, but I don’t live there. I do live in CA, and I’m happy the state is pushing back, and this is not a purely local issue.
What really bothers me is the dishonesty. If this is what you want, then own it. Argue for it. Don’t pretend to care about other people.
People don't bring it up because it requires doing things most understand to not be options. 1 - how would you stop people from moving to SF if they choose 2 - it stops dynamism for the city. You are here because you were already here is the only requisite.
The prices going up is the market creating the incentive for less people to not move to SF and old guard to stay. You already have that. You are not going to bring down prices while limiting people without legislation that goes into dangerous territory of limiting who can live in one of Americas most dynamic cities.
Presently high housing prices are causing this; a lot more people would be living in SF today if there was more supply, which is equivalent to the high prices having kicked people out.
Do you have any policies in mind that could reduce the population without pricing people out? Maybe a Hukou system, or a right-to-reside lottery?
If you prefer to live in a low density exurb, you have many options for affordable housing, there's just a lack of good paying jobs and services in those areas.
... What would the mechanism to achieve fewer people be? The Logan's Run approach?
Governments have mechanisms to make there be more housing, if they want to use them. Only extremely scary governments have mechanisms to make there be _fewer people_.
(Also it doesn't really work; cities which do depopulate tend not to do well, as the depopulation tends to be biased towards the working-age population.)
You're right about one thing - housing being expensive is a choice, it's a choice of those who have moved to SF and despite it making no sense for their financial situation just "trying to make things happen" there to stay there. These are the people who drive property costs up. It's not about "just building more", that's literally never the answer. Building more is solving just for one factor and when you build more - guess what's gonna happen? More density, even higher costs of living because guess what - more people moving means more demand on local services, shops, transit, so higher costs. On top of it - folks who buy these newly built properties aren't going to be making minimum wage at a local coffee and avocado toast shop - they're business owners, entrepreneurs, founders, etc. Your cost of living will keep rising with every new property built and every new transplant.
The real answer is taxes, taxing the shit out of these rich transplants and the corporations. You're in California I can't believe you lot aren't more progressive about jacking up the taxes on the rich to pave the way for a healthy society for the rest. But given that every single tech nerd that moves to SF sees themselves as a temporarily embarrassed millionaire or a not-yet-founder - good luck with that, I genuinely do not see even the younger crowd being pro taxing the rich in a city full of tech leeches.
> “I thought when I’d make $200k I would be able to basically not worry about money at all,” she said, adding that she and her friends stopped going out to restaurants last year and shifted to potlucks and reality-TV nights.
$200k is a lot of money, but I'm glad that when I started making money like that I continued to live my prior life for several years. The savings accumulated during that period has had a huge impact on my later financial condition, and enabled me to do many things (career-wise and otherwise) that I would not have been able to do had I shifted into "stop worrying about money, eat out all the time" mode. Many people I knew did that, and most of them are fine. But golden handcuffs can really lock you into a career/track that you might not want to be on long term.
I feel like both the point you quote and your response are valid, and not mutually exclusive. It's great that you were able to avoid lifestyle creep and that $200K felt like a lot of money that "had a huge impact on my later financial condition, and enabled me to do many things". And I think Katrine (from the article) feels like that should be a lot of money. I don't see lifestyle creep playing a role in her life. Instead, another person they quote says:
> [Ms. Gan]she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in.
I don't understand how rent, utilities, and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in unless you're vastly overspending in one category. If she's paying $60k in taxes then she's got $140k left. That's over $10k/mo. How can someone spend that much without lifestyle creep?
I understand that one could feel pinched at that salary, when including saving for down payment, future kids, and retirement. But that's different from saying the basics consume nearly everything.
So, per the article, it is apparently difficult to find a one bed apartment for under 5k a month. Assuming that's true, half her take-home salary going on rent would get her a lot of the way there!
Even if someone were spending $5k on housing, how do you spend $5k on utilities and groceries (not dining out, it says groceries)?
Also, not having a roommate straight out of college is typically a lifestyle bump in itself. Most people have roommates in college, so getting a place solo is an upgrade.
Can it be a case of she's not earning all of the $200k in cash?
It's possible, but that would be a pretty relevant detail to leave out. Someone who's getting paid in carried interest is in a very different boat than a run of the mill employee.
You think someone in California making 200k is paying an overall 30% in combined federal and state taxes? That seems out of touch with reality to me.
I was making a guess based on having earned less and more than that amount. Just checked with ChatGPT and its estimate for a single person with no mortgage interest was $46k in income taxes and $13k in payroll taxes.
4k for rent 3k for retirement
3k for everything else. I’m not going to sit and itemize, but I could very easily see 3k getting eaten (figuratively)
I'm confused about the quote, because the numbers do not add up to me. Elsewhere in the discussion SV apartments are quoted at $3500/month. When I rent, utilities tend to be under $100, and groceries are about $400. Let's be generous and say "utilities and groceries" are $1000. So "rent, utilities and groceries" are $4500/month, at total federal + CA state tax rate of 40% (estimating high), that means $90k/year to break even. I'm not sure what Ms. Gan filtered via the reporter thinks "consum[ing] nearly everything that comes in" means, but lets say 80% of income that's $112k, although that would still be a $20k/yr surplus (and a 5 month cushion). So there's quite a lot of room "earning below $200,000" and financial distress. If the article meant "less than $100k" I could believe it. Or perhaps Ms. Gan's friends' "rent, utilities and groceries" comprises more things than it literally means?
Saving for retirement should be in the list, along with gym membership and entertainment. Transportation. Why is the default budget "rent, utilities, groceries"?
They don't have an infinite budget, how could they stop worrying about money? You can pick a few categories to splurge on but demands are unlimited and you could blow through many multiples of that before you run out of thing to buy. My focus when making a similar salary was adding to retirement/savings and giving myself more optionality. What would they do without savings if their job (field for that matter) went away? Any spending above my baseline went towards health (cooking ingredients, kitchen appliances and cookware, bike).
I suppose a big change over the past 50 years is that we really boosted jobs that must be done in big cities. Wanna earn a lot of money? Take on a lot of debt and become a lawyer/accountant/etc. But we didn't create more cities. There's more people competing for the same small amount of commutable real estate, and the winners are the top earners.
I'm not sure how you fix it. The organic fix ought to be that businesses want to move out of the overpriced cities. But if that's also where their employment pool and investors are, that's tricky.
UK has had the same issue. The salary gap between London and anywhere else is huge. So everyone aspiring for a high salary wants to move to London. So prices are drastically higher. And there's no rebalancing in sight.
Maybe there's space for some government regulation? Tax cuts for companies hiring in lower CoL areas? No idea. But so long as an increasing pool of people is competing for a barely growing pool of housing, it's not going to get better.
The root cause of the dynamic you're highlighting here is wealth inequality. The more unequal the distribution of wealth in a society, the more concentrated wealth becomes geographically, because as wealth inequality grows, society begins to reorganize into a system which serves ever more lopsidedly to the needs of the wealth holders. The wealth holders, being few, and being social creatures like the rest of us, tend to congregate in fewer and fewer geographical areas. They have the money, so anyone who wants money must live near them to get some. So rents skyrocket in the geographical areas surrounding the wealth holders, which they ironically benefit from, as it creates a smaller amount of land that they need to buy in order to own all the economically significant land in the country, which only intensifies the cost-of-living crisis. Housing regulation cannot fix this, not only because housing regulators can become captured by the wealthy, but also because the root cause of the phenomenon is not addressable by housing policy.
Plus the only group with any disposable incomes increasingly becomes the super rich. So all the support functions of this… restaurants, high end boutiques, wellness clinics, tailors, … start to cluster. The servant class then push prices up further by trying to live a commutable distance to work.
At some point, if there are enough incentives, you should see businesses and employees moving to lower CoL areas, as you saw the mini exodus from SV to Texas. What exactly is the government motivation for relieving the pressure on startup SEs, I'm not sure.
interestingly in areas with higher average wealth there should be a sharper difference between the richest and poorest people in that area. consider Elon musk, and the ratio between him and the 2ed and 3ed up to the 10th richest people on earth.
Maybe there's space for some government regulation?
The problem is largely due to government regulations that prevent people from building housing.
London's a bit different due to its sheer _scale_, and the degree to which it's already built up. San Francisco's a much smaller city, and in theory has a simpler problem. But it's not dealing with it.
I'm from Dublin, which has a housing and cost of living problem, and is on a more similar scale to San Francisco. The first time I visited SF, in 2018, it was kind of Dublin levels of expensive; that is, far too expensive, but not shockingly different to home. It has now really surged ahead. Now, there are lots of reasons for that, no doubt, but one stat stands out to me. Last year, 14,000 units of housing were built in Dublin. This, everyone acknowledges, is not enough... In 2024, 1,600 units of housing were built in SF. That seems catastrophic.
At the very least, it's hard to understand why areas south of San Francisco on the BART haven't really been developed; it seems pretty sparse once you get out of the city. But even in the city proper, space usage seems terribly inefficient; lots of semi-derelict industrial stuff and parking lots and so on.
Larger cities would help more, as the root issues are education and specialization.
A city should be large enough to have multiple potential employers to minimize the risk of getting trapped in a bad job. If you are single, a smaller city can be viable if there is a concentration of businesses in your field. But that won't work for an educated couple, if they are in different fields.
> But we didn't create more cities.
be careful what you wish for. eventually we'll have a 'New San Francisco' and a 'New New York City'. Imagine the acronyms for these, NSF and NNYC. what if we just agreed to stop having kids and replace all the missing jobs with AI? then we could avoid these disastrous city names
But people naturally want to live near water or other natural features and those areas are usually already developed.
I suppose one could cross-reference all of the places where highway meets water meats geographic feature, but a city does not yet exist - and then propose one.
High CoL jurisdictions like having the offices there, they just prefer that the employees and their families be someone else's problem. I couldn't imagine anything short of a federal right to remote work really doing much.
Comparison is the thief of joy. I know plenty of people who live in SF on much lower salaries. Acting like you need AI bucks to survive is out of touch with the reality of the common man.
A household that earns nearly 400k talking about "I'm not completely hopeless" is shameful. Take some lessons from people who earn a lot less and are more happy.
Seriously. I live in SF with a combined household income that's far less than that and have a pretty lavish lifestyle, eating out every day and whatnot. What are these people spending their money on?
> But she said she saw the strain on friends who were earning below $200,000, for whom rent, utilities and groceries consume nearly everything that comes in.
Let's assume $4000/m rent, $200/m utilities, eating out for $30 every day, and spending $700/m on groceries. That's only $70,000. Round up to $90,000 if you like. Where is the rest of the money going?
I am at a similar salary. I live in Kendal Square; nearly on MIt campus for convenience and due to the fact I relocated to Cambridge from PA when I took my research pos at MIT lab. I pay 4000k a month for a STUDIO. That includes no utilities or anything. Then add groceries and all that stuff. Then add supporting your significant other and various other things…. trust me it disappears fast. Yes there is some cash left over if you do absolutely nothing but stay in your home… Things get tight. I shouldn’t feel pressure given my salary but sometimes I think if things really went downhill… my salary isn’t leaving me room for a care/worry free life style. Not the way it would have 10 to 15 years ago. Things are too expensive…
Taxes and health insurance are the big ones you're missing
I pay for health insurance basically out of pocket. The folks complaining in this article have health insurance subsidized by their employers.
going towards retirement is a much more acceptable answer than the yacht club, but probably both of them.
The article frames the cost of living issue mainly in terms of demand (...because of OpenAI and Anthropic...), which is an important factor, but has very little to say about supply. San Francisco is a major metropolis that looks like a mining town: there's very few high-rise buildings compared to other major cities. It's due to many factors including strict zoning, growth caps, seismic risks (compared to say Tokyo?) and landlords that don't have much incentive to decrease the value of their skyrocketing assets.
Also some recent setbacks like our leaning Millennium Tower.
It might take a political earthquake to change the status quo given how ossified everything is unfortunately.
I think Tokyo is not as bad as SF, since Tokyo is not directly exposed to the ocean
Remote work or satellite offices would permit working where housing was more affordable and it would encourage 2 professional families. It would also encourage families as spare resources might be available for munchkins.
But this seems to be the opposite of what the money wants. Edit: and nobody talks about climate or commuting costs.
Remote work from South America or from satellite office in Bangalore. That is exactly what the money wants.
They've had several decades to do this and it's not dominating the industry. Might keep at it and make it work. Or, it might be looking to AI to get rid of staff. But essentially all of N America is inaccessible to the tech barons if they want butts in seats.
They put all the good jobs in a city surrounded on three sides by a mile or more of water, IDK how this doesn't get mentioned every time a "San Francisco has gotten too expensive to live in" article gets posted since the late 90s.
Median household income in SF is $147k. If $180k isn't enough, $147k isn't either.
> Mr. Woodbury recently moved to Carnelian Bay, on Lake Tahoe, Calif., which is less expensive. Ms. Razniak remains in an apartment in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, which she shares with two roommates and for which she pays $1,650 a month. They’re making the long-distance relationship work.
It sounds like the fellow didn't actually want/need to be in SF. Living in Tahoe is pretty much the polar opposite in terms of urban/rural living. There are obviously places that are near SF that are much cheaper, like Oakland/Richmond/etc.
I've met multiple people who commuted to the peninsula via airplane, because it was much, much cheaper than living there.
I know someone who did that in the 90s to Palo Alto, even though he could have stretched to afford a house there back then. If he had he would be in a much better position today.
What's frustrating is that an estimated 10-15% of SF housing is empty, due to rent control. We'll see how the supreme court case about rent control goes.
Yes, I’m sure eliminating rent control will somehow make the city more affordable, not (catastrophically) less.
If you'd like to type out your priors and why believe yourself you be right, I'd love to hear them.
It's a complex topic and rent control's second order effect is that housing is going empty. People are living in tents when there are vacant apartments. That's a system's failure.
Thing is, social media discussions on the subject are completely pointless. No one ever changes their mind and nothing gets resolved. But I'll give my spiel anyway:
I live in rent-controlled housing in SF. When I was apartment hunting circa 2023, it was fairly easy to find rent-controlled listings if you were diligent. In objective terms, my rent is high, but it's also locked in. Rent can only increase a few percentage points a year.
In the past year, a bunch of wealthy AI workers moved into the city, increasing rents catastrophically. You could find people in the SF subreddit complaining with disturbing regularity about 50% rent spikes and similar. We had new tenants move in to the upstairs apartment recently and they're literally paying $2000/m more than us for the same floor plan. If we had to pay the same amount — if our rent increased arbitrarily due to circumstances outside our control — I think we'd be kicked out of the city. It's just not possible to build a stable, adult life unless you have some security around your housing expenses (or you're filthy rich).
Rent control detractors suggest that eliminating rent control will lead to lower housing costs eventually. That does not help me in the present. Why would I support a policy that will kick me out of my house today, replace everyone in my historically working class neighborhood with millionaires, and then maybe, many years down the line, lead to lower rents? (With a giant "citation needed" on that argument to boot.) It's a non-starter.
Fortunately, building more housing does not require eliminating rent control. We can have both. And if enough housing gets built, rent goes down anyway and rent control largely becomes a moot point.
I regularly hear about acquaintances getting kicked out of their apartments elsewhere in the country due to sudden rent spikes and thank my lucky stars we're not subject to that horror.
Worth pointing out that someone making $180K/year in 2016 needs to make ~$250K/year just to keep up with inflation.
My rent has gone up by 15% over the last two years and it is reflective of the increase in salaries in AI startups.
Prop 13 y'all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13
Any discussion of the cost of housing in CA has to include this. Want to know why the property market there is so distorted?
It's Prop 13.
TLDR: Property taxes only increase 2%/yr (sorta, its complicated) and reset upon sale of the property. So current owners are highly incentivized to stay in place and not move. Supply is held down, so prices rise.
FWIW, San Francisco was one of only three counties that voted against Prop 13.
> and reset upon sale of the property
So glad Oregon doesn't do this. We cap property tax growth by 3%/year, and it doesn't reset upon sale.
Resetting upon sale just creates so many problems.
Maybe trade volume is held down, but why would supply be held down? Surely if someone sells, they buy/rent elsewhere in quick succession?
The house they would be buying would come with a much higher tax bill.
Personal anecdata: My folks bought their house for ~70k, it is now worth ~1.5M. The taxes are about 600/year for them, they have no mortgage, paid off decades ago. If they were to try to buy their house again, it would be ~8k/mo just in taxes and mortgage. Moving out of the metro isn't an option as no medical services really exist outside of metros in CA anymore. Same for many other services.
Many older homeowners in CA cannot afford to live there anymore, essentially. They are in a gap/trap.
Yes, you could revoke Prop 13 and let things adjust, but even incremental steps would cause wild swings in property values as the market readjusted, likely causing knock on economic effects in the whole US economy.
The way New York does it is they create exemptions like SCHE for those over the age of 65.
The question is how much worse will it be in another 5 years?
Probably a $250k tech salary won't be enough.
I always find it odd that stories like this focus on non-Eng roles.
I know it’s not universal, but IME it was very common for new CS grads to make much then what is discussed here, and far more after a few years. And this was before COVID and the AI boom.
The idea I see presented that even the highly paid tech workers at the big companies can’t afford SF is not really true.
Is that really true?
https://www.craigslist.org/search/subarea/sfc?cat=apa&max_pr...
Shared bedroom, Hercules (50 miles away), Santa Cruz (100 miles away), Shared housing, SRO, SRO, Microapartment, Low Income Housing
Yup, looks true from this
Almost all of these listings are scams... trust me, I have been looking for a new place for the last year.
You need to look for apartments on Facebook Marketplace or Zillow to have any approximation of real rent prices.
The current ask for 850 sqft and decent amenities (dishwasher, washer dryer, etc) in a quiet, central neighborhood is close to $5000/month.
Of those some immediate standouts are:
Scam listings.
One that is >$2k a WEEK.
A bunch of listings not actually in SF.
Anecdotally; A friend of a friend just moved into an awful building on Ellis and is paying $1650/month for a small studio. 1br in my building are renting for $3,300+ and I'm not in a particularly desirable neighborhood, a new building, or a rent-controlled building.
So yeah, it feels really true.
Not really sure how rents are skyrocketing when every 3rd person I know in tech has been laid off in the last year.
> Not really sure how rents are skyrocketing when every 3rd person I know in tech has been laid off in the last year.
Simple: the amount of available housing really is just that low.
I don’t think it’s that simple at all.
I see plenty of vacancies around me.
I think we need to build higher density housing and I also think there is some amount of market manipulation happening.
In SF, the apartment vacancy rate was approaching an absurdly low 3% earlier this year (https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/san-francisco-rent-surg...). Usual estimates put apartment vacancies at at least 5% just to accomodate people moving in and out of buildings in the first place.
As an AI startup founder, my impression is that $180k in the Bay Area mostly gets you new grads or relatively junior talent these days.
However, remote work has fundamentally changed the equation. Expanding hiring beyond the Bay Area, or even internationally (for example, hiring remotely from Canada), can dramatically broaden the talent pool while significantly reducing costs.
There's strange kinship and signaling in proximity. It's similar to college degrees. Working in SF - either in person or locally remote - puts people in a separate bin.
It's not just signaling. Once people move away the kinship factor fades, even when you already know them well past the signaling stage.
This kind of boils down to "I want to live and work with people like me" which is a common feeling, but sometimes veers dangerously.
It's more like being regulars at the same bar. It cuts through demos. It's easier here since almost everyone is from elsewhere.
I refuse to move to SF because you guys are all dorks and I don't want to be surrounded by dorks all day
Totally agree. Lots of people want to work remotely, and in many companies that works fine for certain types of jobs.
Why post a garbage link that doesn't even have the article content? It defeats the purpose.
NYT seems to have finally figured out how to block archive-today.
This snapshot seems to work: http://archive.today/2026.06.29-174214/https://www.nytimes.c...
I don't understand how $180k was enough in San Francisco at any time in the last 15 years -- unless you were partnered with someone with a comparable salary.
> I don't understand how $180k was enough in San Francisco at any time in the last 15 years
Inflation. $180k in 2010 USD is just shy of $300k in 2026 USD.
It was enough for a single person in a good studio or middling 1BR with no kids, probably no car, and no desire to own property.
At some point the idea of working for $AI in SF just to enrich landlords and have a lifestyle that (at least materialistically) is greatly outclassed by some rural cashier at Walmart (3 bedroom house, family, car) needs to be thought about.
I was single, living alone (+ 2 cats, if they count) in a one bedroom apartment in North Beach 15 years ago on a $90k/year salary. I even had a parking space and a car!
I can understand how people did it then - I was one of them - but I don't understand how they would do it now.
I guess you could rent something small. But could you afford a mortgage with $180,000 back then?