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.
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.
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).
>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.
>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, 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."
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.
> 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.
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:
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I think what they're trying to say is that housing being a good investment long-term is fundamentally incompatible with housing being affordable, and society should choose the latter. Within a given area, home values can only rise so much before:
1. New construction is permitted, thus increasing supply and lowering home values
2. Growth plateaus because demand shrinks—no one can afford homes or residents move away because property taxes become too financially burdensome
This isn't the case with all investments, or at least the growth can be sustained for much longer with other investments. A successfully run company can grow for decades before the exponential becomes unsustainable. When growth stalls, it's a lot easier to sell the stock and buy another than it is to sell one's home and move to another area.
> Moreover most home buyers do not view them as a cash flow generating asset - it’s literally their home.
I don't think this is true. Western governments have subsidized homeownership so much precisely because it's marketed as an easy way to build generational wealth. I don't think most homebuyers view their home as primarily an investment, but growth potential is definitely considered by most during the homebuying process, and homeowners as a voting block often vehemently oppose development because their investments are so precious to them.
Large asset managers aren't buying up significant amounts of property, this is basically an imagined problem that wants to demonize corporations/financiers for a problem created by local land use policy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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. Edit: and nobody talks about climate or commuting costs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
>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.
>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, 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."
> 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.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
People have non financial interests.
> 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...
[flagged]
> This is patently false.
I think what they're trying to say is that housing being a good investment long-term is fundamentally incompatible with housing being affordable, and society should choose the latter. Within a given area, home values can only rise so much before:
1. New construction is permitted, thus increasing supply and lowering home values
2. Growth plateaus because demand shrinks—no one can afford homes or residents move away because property taxes become too financially burdensome
This isn't the case with all investments, or at least the growth can be sustained for much longer with other investments. A successfully run company can grow for decades before the exponential becomes unsustainable. When growth stalls, it's a lot easier to sell the stock and buy another than it is to sell one's home and move to another area.
> Moreover most home buyers do not view them as a cash flow generating asset - it’s literally their home.
I don't think this is true. Western governments have subsidized homeownership so much precisely because it's marketed as an easy way to build generational wealth. I don't think most homebuyers view their home as primarily an investment, but growth potential is definitely considered by most during the homebuying process, and homeowners as a voting block often vehemently oppose development because their investments are so precious to them.
Large asset managers aren't buying up significant amounts of property, this is basically an imagined problem that wants to demonize corporations/financiers for a problem created by local land use policy.
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.
Maybe there's space for some government regulation?
The problem is largely due to government regulations that prevent people from building housing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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. Edit: and nobody talks about climate or commuting costs.
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
I've met multiple people who commuted to the peninsula via airplane, because it was much, much cheaper than living there.
> 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.
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.
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.
Median household income in SF is $147k. If $180k isn't enough, $147k isn't either.
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 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.
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?
> 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.
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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.
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.
https://archive.ph/gD5K3
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...
Why post a garbage link that doesn't even have the article content? It defeats the purpose.
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