> I personally know I will never be able to afford housing close to work based on how things are now. Currently I'm just saving my pennies and hoping I can move to another job with a lower cost of living somewhere else in a few years.

This is exactly my situation as well. The neighbor to my left bought his house 3 years ago for 320. The neighbor to my right just bought an equivalent house for 570. No can do.

Unlike SF, however, the balance here does seem "worth it". I looked at the job market were I to return to Virginia right now, and while the land is cheap and plentiful, it took some digging to even find a posted role that felt promising. Tech hub job markets are no joke.

Same in Portland. A house down the street was purchased for 180k 2 years ago and recently sold for 520k. And that isn't some outlier. It seems all anyone wants to talk about is how quickly home prices have inflated.

It's funny that the Fed is still dreaming about having low inflation while the number one expense most people will have experiences rampant inflation.

It's impossible to control skyrocketing house prices in booming tech areas with anything other than a massive amount of new housing developments.

Even if everything you can buy suddenly got 10% cheaper, the houses in those areas would immediately increase back to the old level because the prices is driven by a high demand relative to supply.

Makes sense. To me it just seems they act as if inflation was low but in reality they are creating huge asset inflation with the low interest policy.

Housing is not experiencing rampant inflation when you look at the nation as a whole. We have one currency so the Fed has to try to strike a balance that works for everyone.

That's an interesting thought, does the government have cpi-like numbers for different localities, or just the one number?

Rents are included in cpi, but home prices aren't. Now, of course they are correlated, but that's certainly one of the arguments against using cpi.

edit: answered my own question, the bureau of labor statistics has more numbers than you can shake a stick at.

I want to remark that its not inflation, its just regular demand shock to the market. Specially housing takes time to match the supply to demand.

Inflation is generalized increased of nominal costs, not particular to an asset, nor in 'real terms' which is what is happening here.

Isn't it very localized?

Based on this it's nationwide: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA

That says it’s about back to where it was 10 years ago. Mind you there was a fairly big run up to the peak of the bubble but most people here aren’t complaining about prices having risen again to 2007 levels.

Can confirm. I both recently sold my home, and used to be a licensed real estate appraiser before switching to Software Dev.

Our house in the not-super-desirable area of NE Portland was worth ~$265k when we looked at the data in late February/March of this year (strong data supporting that number). When we finally put it on the market in the beginning of May, it sold in 1 day, with multiple offers, for a sales price of $312k.

Yes, that's a $47k increase in value in just over 2 months. When spring hit, real estate prices went bonkers in Portland this year. Also, we bought the house for $160k ~five years ago.

We bought a small one-bedroom condo in downtown PDX for my brother to live in ~3 years ago b/c it seemed like a better investment than random stocks/ETFs. He lived there for a year, and we rented it part-time for another four months.

Purchase price was $145k. Sale price (after only 16 months) was $190k.

We used to proceeds from that sale to buy a two-bedroom house for my parents move into for their retirement. Paid $250k last October; recent sales in the neighborhood suggest it's worth $310-325k now.

So yeah, agreed re: bonkers Portland housing price inflation.

Not inflation, demand shock.

Inflation is generalized increase in prices. Im sure beers and miso-fries have barely changed prices if at all.

My house is alrfull day worth almost 100k more only 6 months later. It’s crazy. Beaverton and Hillsboro are really seeing pricing skyrocket.

Im sure portland is getting a lot, but 300% market price increase in real estate in 2 years sounds like a lot.

This is actually hopeful since there are so many secondary and tertiary tech cities.

This means: we should all buy houses in the secondary tech hubs that are still affordable so our kids can afford to have families at tech firms when housing becomes unaffordable.

Or perhaps actually trying to fix the root issue rather than scrambling for the "F you, I got mine" route and buying property you don't need now on the speculation that its value will increase over the next decades.

Companies should be incentivized (by us, software developers) to hire remote workers for jobs that don't need to be physically in an office.

Please lay out your plan in more detail.

I just want to see the logic of this. You think I can put downward pressure on property prices by insisting on a remote job?

I don't think hiring companies take joy in making your life difficult. They would hire more remote workers if they felt it could work. I prefer working remotely but find it much harder to manage.

It's super easy. You just tell them my rate to work remote is X. My rate to work on site is 1.75X.

Been remote for 10+ years. Make bay area salary and live in a huge house on the beach.

How did you fix the root issue?

Trust me, it's not different this time. The crazy hot housing markets will eventually falter and go down in price. It always happens and as interest rates start to rise it's going to happen in the not too distant future.

I can't wait. I'm in the NW and housing is to the point that a 'starter family' is incapable of living in a 'starter home'. Studio apartments $1,200+.

Self-driving cars are going to be rewriting the commute paradigm. It's important to factor that in.

So I still won't be able to see my kids awake because of a 1.5 hour commute each way, but I'll be able to read the newspaper on the way to work? No thanks.

You do what you like.

I'll arrive at work at 11 for my first meeting, having gotten a solid 1.5 hours of uninterrupted work done already, and be wrapping up any collaboration in order to return to my mobile cubicle by 4.

Of course, I'll still be available via skype. The morning stand up may happen while everyone is leaving their driveway.

Soon enough this new daily routine is going to be about as disruptive to productivity in the office as taking lunch, since almost everyone with a car will taking advantage of it. The start and ends of business days are going to become 'private', with people keeping their heads down, and interacting via video and chat/mail as the norm, with face-to-face work performed during the middle of the day.

We may even have to do away with lunchtimes as we know them, since they take away from prime face-to-face work time. Or perhaps, with all the other communication going on, daily team-bonding time over food might be one of few on going reasons for direct interactions.

And vehicles are going to start being designed to be really comfortable to work/play in. Every mid-morning, people are going to have to choose between getting up from the work they are stuck into and moving to the desk in their office, or staying focused on the task at hand. Eventually, people are going to start choosing the privacy and comfort of their car over the relative space of a cubicle, and more and more people are going to start working from the parking lot. Companies may even start expecting a portion of their workforce to bring their own vehicles, in the manner of 'bring your own device' and alter/reduce their use of offices.

Of course, things could go the other way: in the city, you'll want to the car to go pick up the groceries and do errands, and then find a in a nice empty shaded spot out of town for the day, and to find a new spot if anyone sketchy shows up.

This is just one tiny, tiny change as we move from a civilizations of vehicles to a civilization of intelligent transport. Cars and buses are about to be replaced by the equivalent of very small mobile homes/buildings.

You seem to think this is inevitable, but everything you described is highly speculative. There is no evidence that working habits will change as you predict. Plus a significant fraction of people find it impossible to work in cars due to motion sickness.

Why do we even need to get into any transportation system, why not work remotely 90% of the time?

Why don't we work remotely 90% of the time already?

There are deep seated biological and cultural reasons why current technologies don't replace physical proximity.

Some of the more important ones, such as networking, remote technologies can't even try to address. It's terrible for job seeking, lateral career changes and building connections.

Maybe VR/AR offices are the future. Certainly they'd present less legislative and social hurdles than self-driving cars.

Now that I think about it, self-driving cars might not be all that useful to me because if I'm not the driver I can only sleep or stare out of the window lest I get horrible motion sickness.

I wonder how many people are like this.

@Walter

Sounds like a terribly inefficient and unsustainable lifestyle. Commuting just for stand up?

Commuting to collaborate with other people face-to-face for half the day.

How is this inefficient, unsustainable?

It provides the combination of private work and group interactions that are parcel of most white collar jobs. The vehicles will be electric, and many will probably spending any idle time at solar farms, to save on energy distribution costs, if they aren't being used as private offices. It is going to allow people to live where the want, and still do they work they want to.

It sounds as if it would make a lot more sense for people to agree on 2 days per week to be in the office and work remotely the other three or something along those lines.

That's what they do at the company I work for (I'm at a remote location so I'm 100% remote for them).

I think it's the kind of setup that works best, for some kinds of software projects.

And get up 1.5 hours earlier, two days a week, and get home 1.5 hours later, to sit in their cars?

Moreover: the cadence of business just won't let this happen, or it would be widespread already.

The chance that is coming is that cars drive themselves. As a consequence, part of the business day is going to be spent working during the commute.

you could videochat with your kids on the way to work, or spend less time in office because you work during commute

This is a good point.

Note only will that time become productive time, but it might reduce traffic on the roads and reduce congestion.

The real estate to purchase right now is vacation homes 8 hours drive from the metropolitan areas.

400k in Bellevue buys you a dilapidated shack at the outskirts. For anything decent you’re talking $1m and up.

At this point I'd be perfectly happy with a dilapidated shack in Bellevue. Anything to cut down on the soul-crushing commute.

Now if only employers embraced remote-work fully, I'd move to Gold Bar or somewhere else in the Cascades and dispense with the city altogether.

I'd give anything to work remote here. My partner and I have discussed buying a small 'ranch' on the other side of the cascades as a 'weekend home' and downsizing to a small studio here on weekdays. We figure the two combined would be about what we pay in rent each month now, if not a little more, but at least we'd be able to escape on weekends. We love pnw, but hate having to live in the most crowded part of it for the sole purpose of making our commute tolerable.

Come to Monroe, commute isn't terrible, drive is nice, town is great. I wouldn't go closer to Seattle now even if I could afford it.

best thing you can do -- buy a town home or home -- try to manage the minimum 10% down payment (if you can manage 20%, thats great) and then rent out the bedrooms to other single folks. I wish i had done that when i was a entry level software engr.

I'm just above entry level, but by no means a recent grad. Not all of us were lucky enough to land a big software gig right out of college ;)

My family probably wouldn't be too happy to suddenly have roommates. Hah. But yes, if you're young and single, that's a solid option I would think.