In San Francisco, Even $180k Tech Salaries Are No Longer Enough

Everyone 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.

> “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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

Worth pointing out that someone making $180K/year in 2016 needs to make ~$250K/year just to keep up with inflation.

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.

My rent has gone up by 15% over the last two years and it is reflective of the increase in salaries in AI startups.

Median household income in SF is $147k. If $180k isn't enough, $147k isn't either.

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.

NY Times has a very strong anti-AI bent. AI hate is basically their agenda these days. They're attacking AI from all sides. It's completely unfair, and shows how morally bankrupt they are.

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...

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.

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.