If you're talking about programmers working at non-tech companies? Maybe. If you're talking about people excited about technology, then no.
I lived in NYC for a decade. NYC is media and finance. And while I liked the people "in tech" that I met in NYC, the passion for the work just wasn't there enmasse.
Bay Area does not have much industry outside of tech. New York City is a hub for banking, investing, insurance, government, healthcare, consulting, real estate, fashion, law and more. All of these are now increasingly hiring tech workers directly and also retraining and transitioning their existing workforce to be more technical.
So just by numbers alone Bay Area will never maintain a monopoly on tech jobs, especially considering the NYC employment market is several times the size. However if you just filter to the tech sector the numbers will be very different.
You just can't live in the Bay anymore, that's all there is to it. It'd be great if you could. But anything within a 2 hour commute requires a minimum of $200k salary to survive, let alone get ahead. Unless you're inheriting your parents house or piling into a roommate situation, it's just completely undoable over the long term. Compare this to NYC which has innumerable options when it comes to suburbs, with better transit, lower taxes, reasonably priced homes, and far greater apartment options. I don't see how SF ends up as anything but a place for raising capital in the future. The (true) middle class tech worker dream is dead and gone there.
This, 100%. Seattle is ranked #2 but the cost is ballooning and the environment is very much east coast vs west coast USA.
It used to be better, remote I feel is better in Seattle but the hidden costs of being in the Seattle region involve possible commute, car purchase and the general RTA, fragmented neighborhoods, public transit is improving but nothing near what is nyc. Housing… I feel is cheaper in nyc, food across the board is much more inexpensive in much. Hotels are varied and more inexpensive in nyc.
One thing I have enjoyed is time zone differences. 3 hours difference is a lot and if you can balance that you can have a wonderful Seattle afternoon.
I lived in Seattle for a couple of years, out in one of the suburbs (West Seattle). I would say that housing cost is the primary issue in Seattle, but its nowhere near San Francisco. Outside of that, public transit is pretty good. I have gone back and forth across the city, to Bellevue, even to Olympia, on public transit very cheaply and within a reasonable amount of time. The light rail recently opened up to Bellevue, though Bellevue is not really all that much cheaper lol.
The food didn't feel super expensive, but it definitely wasn't great. San Francisco and NYC are so much better. I have been consistently disappointed with the food in Seattle.
The one issue I see with Seattle is that they have a 30% or so vacancy rate for office buildings in downtown. A lot of companies have left, or will be moving. Many to Bellevue. The city decided to target businesses to fund more progressive policies, but with remote work, the businesses just moved across Lake Washington. Or to other states (like Starbucks). I don't see that changing. So now they have a budget deficit, lots of office vacancies, and the looming threat of more companies leaving. Not sure if that'll change it's standing or anything, but its not great.
>You need a 200k salary to live without roommates within 2 hours of downtown SF
That's a bit of an exaggeration. You could rent a 1/2br in SF proper with that salary. You could easily live within 40 minutes of SF in East Bay/Daly City comfortably at 120k.
Point is the dropoff outside the city limits. NYC salaries are mostly comparable to SF at this point, while you can buy a home under $500k still within an hour commute to the city. That's a fantasy in the Bay.
SF is my favorite city in the world, but as a tech worker in a flyover state I've given up on it being anything but a nice place to visit. I couldn't afford it alone, let alone with my family.
It's not accurate. I don't know where people get these numbers from, perhaps they just vibe based on headlines without looking at the actual data.
Studios all within 1 hour of SF by BART cost at most 2,500 but usually around 2000, cheaper if you're in Oakland/Daly city. 2000*12 is 24000, so if you're take home salary is at least 73,000 you're making a healthy multiple over rent. Just making 120k in the Bay area you're taking home 84,000 per year.
So if you're making 200k you're taking home $10,700 per month, so you can afford a 3,500 rent at most, which could easily get you a nice 2 bedroom within 30 minutes of downtown SF.
Right, you can live the "single guy in an apartment" life with a hellacious commute still for sure. Add a family or any desire to ever own a home and you can forget it though.
If you're a young person making a certain amount of money I'm certain you can plan to save up money over time. Especially if you're a dual-income couple, you could save money before you plan to buy a house or have a kid. A 2 bedroom is affordable on two 100k salaries in the Bay area. but even then the entire area is very large, not everyone lives in SF or wants to, or would need to commute there as there are jobs elsewhere.
You can't. I'm in SF, and you need to realize that the people already here are not paying the market rates for housing, either via rent or via property taxes.
The current rate for a two bedroom in most of SF is approaching $6000/month right now. Apartments at $5000 have lines of applicants. My partner and I are paying about half that for our apartment... and we haven't lived here that long.
If we were trying to move here for work now, we absolutely wouldn't be able to afford it.
Looking at Zillow, there are 64 2-bedroom apartments in SF alone for <= $4k. If you expand your search out of the city the number becomes much higher...
26 of those units are a dorm at SF State. Most of the rest are effectively Bayview, Ingleside/Oceanview, and the Tendernob. I'm not going to argue that you couldn't live in those locations at all. People do, and I'm sure they're lovely.
I actually think Ingleside is pretty doable, but it's a very long commute for the price. I'm not going to live in the Tenderloin, and you're probably not going to either.
I'm counting 7 apartments (arguably 8) outside of those neighborhoods, and half of those don't list the square footage (a 600sqft "two bedroom" is not a two bedroom).
You're moving the goalposts here now to make it seem like the baseline-acceptable lifestyle for someone in the Bay is to live directly in San Francisco and have a short commute in a desirable area with adequate space.
By the way, the Bay is bigger than SF. People commute from Milbrae, Daly City, Richmond into SF every day by train and it takes less than an hour.
You're moving the goalposts, not me. I specifically said
>current rate for a two bedroom in most of SF
for a reason. Yes, you can get a cheaper place if you live in a place you don't want to live, but my point is that you don't want to live there. This entire thread is about how tech is moving to NYC, exactly because it's difficult to build a good life in SF. I'm saying, yes the prices have increased to the point where you can't build a good life in SF.
If you want to live in the Tenderloin or a dorm at SF State University... by all means go for it, and good luck to you. I'd much rather pack up and move to NYC than live like that.
When there is a line of 50 people to see an apartment, and there are only 10 apartments in the city this month, 40 of those people aren't going to be able to afford housing. We're living in a real life game of musical chairs here.
Yes. Couples with two incomes and successful careers can build a life here. The question is how normal, single people build a life here.
> The current rate for a two bedroom in most of SF...
And the thing about that "two bedroom" is that it probably would have been classified as a one bedroom ~fifteen years ago. Much-to-most of the time, an "N-bedroom" apartment gives you N bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and -if you're lucky- a small amount of closet space. Living room? Study? Get fucked, those are for owners, or folks who started renting 10->20+ years ago.
And that number hasn't budged in decades. It is a completely ossified community. There's the folks who bought their houses 20-30 years ago and stayed put thanks to prop 17, their adult children living with them waiting for them to die, the young single tech workers willing to fork out $3k for a studio or live with roommates, the nepotized $300k+ earning public service employees, and the rest of the non-tech workers resigned to the crime-ridden pockets of the east/south bay that can still be afforded with an entire family's income. That's basically the entire population.
Define "tech".
If you're talking about programmers working at non-tech companies? Maybe. If you're talking about people excited about technology, then no.
I lived in NYC for a decade. NYC is media and finance. And while I liked the people "in tech" that I met in NYC, the passion for the work just wasn't there enmasse.
It’s a pretty simple explanation.
Bay Area does not have much industry outside of tech. New York City is a hub for banking, investing, insurance, government, healthcare, consulting, real estate, fashion, law and more. All of these are now increasingly hiring tech workers directly and also retraining and transitioning their existing workforce to be more technical.
So just by numbers alone Bay Area will never maintain a monopoly on tech jobs, especially considering the NYC employment market is several times the size. However if you just filter to the tech sector the numbers will be very different.
You just can't live in the Bay anymore, that's all there is to it. It'd be great if you could. But anything within a 2 hour commute requires a minimum of $200k salary to survive, let alone get ahead. Unless you're inheriting your parents house or piling into a roommate situation, it's just completely undoable over the long term. Compare this to NYC which has innumerable options when it comes to suburbs, with better transit, lower taxes, reasonably priced homes, and far greater apartment options. I don't see how SF ends up as anything but a place for raising capital in the future. The (true) middle class tech worker dream is dead and gone there.
This, 100%. Seattle is ranked #2 but the cost is ballooning and the environment is very much east coast vs west coast USA.
It used to be better, remote I feel is better in Seattle but the hidden costs of being in the Seattle region involve possible commute, car purchase and the general RTA, fragmented neighborhoods, public transit is improving but nothing near what is nyc. Housing… I feel is cheaper in nyc, food across the board is much more inexpensive in much. Hotels are varied and more inexpensive in nyc.
One thing I have enjoyed is time zone differences. 3 hours difference is a lot and if you can balance that you can have a wonderful Seattle afternoon.
Problem is winter sucks in PNW.
I lived in Seattle for a couple of years, out in one of the suburbs (West Seattle). I would say that housing cost is the primary issue in Seattle, but its nowhere near San Francisco. Outside of that, public transit is pretty good. I have gone back and forth across the city, to Bellevue, even to Olympia, on public transit very cheaply and within a reasonable amount of time. The light rail recently opened up to Bellevue, though Bellevue is not really all that much cheaper lol.
The food didn't feel super expensive, but it definitely wasn't great. San Francisco and NYC are so much better. I have been consistently disappointed with the food in Seattle.
The one issue I see with Seattle is that they have a 30% or so vacancy rate for office buildings in downtown. A lot of companies have left, or will be moving. Many to Bellevue. The city decided to target businesses to fund more progressive policies, but with remote work, the businesses just moved across Lake Washington. Or to other states (like Starbucks). I don't see that changing. So now they have a budget deficit, lots of office vacancies, and the looming threat of more companies leaving. Not sure if that'll change it's standing or anything, but its not great.
>You need a 200k salary to live without roommates within 2 hours of downtown SF
That's a bit of an exaggeration. You could rent a 1/2br in SF proper with that salary. You could easily live within 40 minutes of SF in East Bay/Daly City comfortably at 120k.
I was nodding along until the NYC part. Up until ~6 months ago, NYC was more expensive than SF.
Point is the dropoff outside the city limits. NYC salaries are mostly comparable to SF at this point, while you can buy a home under $500k still within an hour commute to the city. That's a fantasy in the Bay.
SF is my favorite city in the world, but as a tech worker in a flyover state I've given up on it being anything but a nice place to visit. I couldn't afford it alone, let alone with my family.
A 200k salary is what... 13k net? You're telling me that income is just surviving in the Bay Area?
It's not accurate. I don't know where people get these numbers from, perhaps they just vibe based on headlines without looking at the actual data.
Studios all within 1 hour of SF by BART cost at most 2,500 but usually around 2000, cheaper if you're in Oakland/Daly city. 2000*12 is 24000, so if you're take home salary is at least 73,000 you're making a healthy multiple over rent. Just making 120k in the Bay area you're taking home 84,000 per year.
So if you're making 200k you're taking home $10,700 per month, so you can afford a 3,500 rent at most, which could easily get you a nice 2 bedroom within 30 minutes of downtown SF.
Right, you can live the "single guy in an apartment" life with a hellacious commute still for sure. Add a family or any desire to ever own a home and you can forget it though.
If you're a young person making a certain amount of money I'm certain you can plan to save up money over time. Especially if you're a dual-income couple, you could save money before you plan to buy a house or have a kid. A 2 bedroom is affordable on two 100k salaries in the Bay area. but even then the entire area is very large, not everyone lives in SF or wants to, or would need to commute there as there are jobs elsewhere.
Yeah that's being very dramatic. Rent in oakland is not that high. Even at $160k you can scrape by in SF proper in a studio.
You just can. Nearly a million people do
You can't. I'm in SF, and you need to realize that the people already here are not paying the market rates for housing, either via rent or via property taxes.
The current rate for a two bedroom in most of SF is approaching $6000/month right now. Apartments at $5000 have lines of applicants. My partner and I are paying about half that for our apartment... and we haven't lived here that long.
If we were trying to move here for work now, we absolutely wouldn't be able to afford it.
Looking at Zillow, there are 64 2-bedroom apartments in SF alone for <= $4k. If you expand your search out of the city the number becomes much higher...
26 of those units are a dorm at SF State. Most of the rest are effectively Bayview, Ingleside/Oceanview, and the Tendernob. I'm not going to argue that you couldn't live in those locations at all. People do, and I'm sure they're lovely.
I actually think Ingleside is pretty doable, but it's a very long commute for the price. I'm not going to live in the Tenderloin, and you're probably not going to either.
I'm counting 7 apartments (arguably 8) outside of those neighborhoods, and half of those don't list the square footage (a 600sqft "two bedroom" is not a two bedroom).
You're moving the goalposts here now to make it seem like the baseline-acceptable lifestyle for someone in the Bay is to live directly in San Francisco and have a short commute in a desirable area with adequate space.
By the way, the Bay is bigger than SF. People commute from Milbrae, Daly City, Richmond into SF every day by train and it takes less than an hour.
You're moving the goalposts, not me. I specifically said
>current rate for a two bedroom in most of SF
for a reason. Yes, you can get a cheaper place if you live in a place you don't want to live, but my point is that you don't want to live there. This entire thread is about how tech is moving to NYC, exactly because it's difficult to build a good life in SF. I'm saying, yes the prices have increased to the point where you can't build a good life in SF.
If you want to live in the Tenderloin or a dorm at SF State University... by all means go for it, and good luck to you. I'd much rather pack up and move to NYC than live like that.
You said "you can't" (live in the bay, anymore, on less than 200k). The bay is bigger than SF.
You're literally living in SF right now and talk about the line of applicants for rent.
You are literally describing a place people live and are living in.
When there is a line of 50 people to see an apartment, and there are only 10 apartments in the city this month, 40 of those people aren't going to be able to afford housing. We're living in a real life game of musical chairs here.
Yes. Couples with two incomes and successful careers can build a life here. The question is how normal, single people build a life here.
> The current rate for a two bedroom in most of SF...
And the thing about that "two bedroom" is that it probably would have been classified as a one bedroom ~fifteen years ago. Much-to-most of the time, an "N-bedroom" apartment gives you N bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and -if you're lucky- a small amount of closet space. Living room? Study? Get fucked, those are for owners, or folks who started renting 10->20+ years ago.
>"You just can. Nearly a million people do"
And that number hasn't budged in decades. It is a completely ossified community. There's the folks who bought their houses 20-30 years ago and stayed put thanks to prop 17, their adult children living with them waiting for them to die, the young single tech workers willing to fork out $3k for a studio or live with roommates, the nepotized $300k+ earning public service employees, and the rest of the non-tech workers resigned to the crime-ridden pockets of the east/south bay that can still be afforded with an entire family's income. That's basically the entire population.
...when including government employees and finance workers in the count of tech workers....because they use technology in their jobs.
By that definition they use, the leader in "tech" employment is simply the metro with the most employees.
You skew toward the most populous city anyway if you use most per city instead of per MSA or per capita.
I will keep repeating this and I will keep getting downvoted for that.
You can't out-build yourself out of high living costs.
The only way to fix this is to start taxing dense office space as if it's toxic waste sites. And promote remote work to re-invigorate smaller cities.
We tax toxic waste sites?
Also should all work sites be taxed, or just "office" ones?
To be more precise, we tax (or cap-and-trade) pollution. For example, sulfur emissions and, in some countries, CO2 emissions.
> Also should all work sites be taxed, or just "office" ones?
Dense offices in downtowns.
Anybody have a link to the report? We can put it in the toptext if so
https://www.cbre.com/insights/books/scoring-tech-talent-2026
Added above. Thanks!
sorta weird you are being downvoted for this comment. Maybe Many know you're an admin?