There you just said it. You made those choices, would you put up with a 45 minutevor hour commute during which you can do all sorts of things then you would have plenty left over to save. Choices.
here is a city, Santa Rosa which is 55 miles North of SF.... Think San Francisco’s housing market is tight? This Bay Area city is even worse http://blog.sfgate.com/ontheblock/2...et-is-tight-this-bay-area-city-is-even-worse/ PS you will have to cross Golden Gate Bridge or drive to Larkspur then ferry it to the city. If you work in Silicon Valley that is over 100 miles each way.
Disagree.the commute from Edison/Princeton area into midtown takes about 1hr. Top notch school districts. Rents and housing prices are super affordable despite one of the highest property tax rates in the country.
This same article stated that: He made more than 2 1/2 times the median for 18-34 year old workers. Yes, with a wife and two kids expenses are higher. However, the majorities of others who work in SF manage to live on a lot less a year. Yes, SF is the most expensive city in Cali but to live hand to mouth with a salary of $160K, he needs to re-examine his priorities and make some smart choices. The situation is not that much better in LA with median base salary of even less and most are able to successfully cope. Best to you all.
Actually, in 2007 we have tried living in the burbs, so I know first hand that this trade off is not worth it. Once you done with it, that hour train ride is in reality an hour and a half. So that's 3 hours out of my day and, since you are commuting with the rest of the crowd, you can't do anything on the train cause you can't get a seat. Worst part? The savings are not meaningful, especially considering the losses in productivity.
Wonder how many of these high tech employees can work from home via technology link up and show up physically once a week to tie the ends that cannot be done via long distance. Then they can live 3-4 hours away like normal human beings and not be merely scraping by.
Yeah, so door to door we are talking an hour and a half. If you are averaging 11-12 hour workdays, it's pretty detrimental.
What is driving the real estate up is those foreigners buying up all those million dollar mansions. It's ridiculous that somebody who has a six-figure income can't even buy a house. What you need to do is levy a foreign buyer's tax on real estate in the entire state of California so that way any foreigners are deterred in buying up real estate. In our Canadian city of Vancouver, we had the same problem. There were couples who were BOTH doctors making six-figure income and couldn't even afford to rent and had to live with the husband's parents and meanwhile there were empty houses everywhere in the neighbourhood that were owned but never lived in. The provincial government just had it and levied a 15% foreigner buyer's tax on real estate. Any buyers who are not citizens of Canada and who have not lived in Canada for 5 years for full time have to pay 15% tax when buying a real estate. It worked like a charm!! The market cooled down instantly. Real estate sales dropped by 30%!! For us Canada, 15% did the trick. For California, you guys might need to levy like 25% to see any effect. The only thing is the foreign buying will just migrate elsewhere. Now we are seeing the same problem in other metropolitan cities in other provinces and those provinces are contemplating levying the same tax as well. And that is good, if you can have all the wealthy states to levy the taxes together then eventually all the foreigners will be pushed to buy up properties in less popular cities in America and that way spread a bit of real estate boom balanced throughout United States and people will at least be able to own a piece of land. Once everybody's owned a piece of land then you just drop the foreign buyer's tax and then when the foreigners come back, you just sell the real estate back to them and make a nice capital gain!
Many of these "high tech high earners" like to send their kids to private schools so each kid's monthly fees are good $1000 and that really squeezes up the butt cheeks ;-) Quality living I guess........even if the bumhole is under constant stress!!.........24x7.
Well I think you are downplaying the benefits here by quite a margin. 600k to 700k buys you a very nice house in the Princeton area. Then you get a seat on the train ALL the time. And you spend literally 1 hour on the train during which you can already read all sorts of things, do work, make phone calls or whatever. If you can't come up with highly meaningful and productive ways to cover 2 hours a days then you probably do have an efficiency and productivity problem but more overall in your life and that would feed into work as well. It's not about killing 2 hours, it's about shifting some of your other activities into that time slot.