Comment by adastra22

4 years ago

This is insane. I can't understand these numbers. No wonder the Bay Area has become completely unaffordable for long-term residents.

6 comments

adastra22

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vwoolf  4 years ago

The Bay Area is unaffordable because most cities haven't allowed anywhere near enough housing to be built by land owners over the last five decades: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/.

Return building rights to land owners and the problem will be solved. The insane thing is the way coalitions of existing owners conspire to reduce supply and thus increase the values of their assets, and the rest of us just go, "Oh, okay, that's cool, that you're conspiring to embeggar the rest of us."

rchiang  4 years ago

Google makes $5.5 billion of profit per month. I think they can afford to pay some of their higher performers more.

barry-cotter  4 years ago

Indeed. If lots of people with money want to live in a place and building more housing is illegal the price of existing housing will go up a lot. If you want the problem to go away you can either build more housing or make it so the people with money don't want to live there.

mike_d  4 years ago

The problem is not the tech people, it is the boomers who lived here before us. They have manipulated the system, voted down every attempt to build more housing, and leveraged their good luck to engage in rent seeking and siphon off half of the "ridiculous tech salaries."

My old landlords had average non-tech jobs in the 80s, bought a house for under 100k. At some point they used it to buy a second house, and another, and another. Now they own 30+ houses and rent each for 4-7k/mo.

Old next door neighbor's house was owned by her dad, he was a public works employee and owns 6 houses in the bay area now.

Neighbors on the other side were an older couple with adult kids and multiple rental properties in Fremont. They bought a house for their adult son outright before we moved.