Well you can't afford a house in Vancouver either so why not go to the USA and earn more.

The spot with the best balance seems to be Seattle. High salaries and housing relatively affordable when compared to Vancouver or SF.

Seattle's housing market is going up really quickly, though. Last time I moved, I definitely noticed higher rents and more expensive purchase prices compared to a few years ago. It's not yet at the level of Vancouver, and far from SF/NY levels, but its trajectory isn't great.

Sounds like a good time to buy a house in Seattle then, if you can afford it.

No. it's the worst. don't come here.

As a Canadian in Vancouver who owns a home, the sad state of Vancouver is even the suburbs are ridiculously expensive.

If I want to sell my downtown townhouse and buy a detached home or upgrade in any way I'm looking at a 1.5 hour commute easily and still not getting much. And once you're outside downtown , entertainment etc rapidly drops off.

Alternatively in the bay area, where I may soon be moving, the suburbs have a strong drop off in cost from the hotspots while still maintaining a reasonable commute and quality of life.

The issue is, Vancouver's infrastructure drops off so dramatically as you get further from downtown.

Sunnyvale (current ground zero of Apple) median is close to 2M - that is only 5x of $400K which a lot of FANG and other engineers pull yearly (and that is the main reason for current SV home prices as, during such low mortgage rates, the market is naturally self-adjusting to 5-6x of prevalent salaries. In 2008 those houses were $700-800K+ - the 5-6x of those $120K-150K salaries back then).

If only there were some way to put more houses on a given plot of land, perhaps by stacking one on top of another, we could somehow break this dynamic. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/san_francisco...

i'm yet to see a high-rise development resulting in cheaper housing, at least in US. No that i'm against it - i like it, when it is done right, for different reasons though.

The housing prices are rising across the globe - one has to put somewhere all this money sloshing around. So, even to just stabilize the prices, one has to build faster than the money are printed - like Alice in Wonderland where you have to run fast just to stay at the same place.

Basically all that NIMBY vs. YIMBY fights is just 2 poor hobos fighting for a penny and completely distracted with that fight while a nice rich gentleman sells them both to slavery and makes away with the money and all the rest of their possessions.

> i'm yet to see a high-rise development resulting in cheaper housing, at least in US. No that i'm against it - i like it, when it is done right, for different reasons though.

It definitely won't be one or 2 developments; there has to be a systematic increase in the housing stock. Which is why the latest California plan (which was shot down in committee) to increase the density around mass transit by default was so amazing.

SF is NYC in the making. I know SF folks don't want to change the character of the city but something has to give; its attracting way too many people and we still need affordable housing for middle class folks.

Right. Only by building up will San Francisco finally achieve New York City's cheap rents.

Replacing large swaths on single story single family houses with multiparty rentals does not necessarily involve any high rise buildings. Paris and Barcelona have proven that very high density can be achieved with four to six stories or less.

are you suggesting that Paris is [more] affordable for software engineers? Quick check shows that the prices in Paris are about E10K per square meter - basically SV prices while salaries as far as i know are significantly lower there.

I have only vague idea about Barcelona - quick check shows like it may be on the scale of E5K per square meter (it was $100K per 2-3 bdrm 20 years ago, so 3x-4x today seems reasonable) So you need to have like at least $60K salary - do they have that there?

Again, i'm not against high[er] density. I'm against it being suggested as the panacea for housing affordability crisis - as far as i see it looks like it may even worsen the crisis (at least for some less fortunate people - like relatively affordable low income communities being displaced by upscale new construction like we have happening everywhere in SV).

Please just show where higher density did help to alleviate the affordability crisis. I think even the massively empty apartments in all these massively constructed ghost towers in China aren't falling in prices.

What evidence exactly are you looking for? If you compare two different cities with different housing densities, you're not only changing the housing density but (likely) also the value of the housing (since it increases availability of services and so on). It's not possible to magically adjust one variable while not touching the others.

However, if the prices in silicon valley were, say, 30% lower than they are now due to zoning which allowed more housing, would that constitute as evidence? You could still say that the "prices are high, higher density housing doesn't work!" - even if the higher density housing would've decreased prices by non-trivial amounts.

In any case, it's weird to see people objecting to basic supply and demand when it comes to housing.

The vast majority of engineers in the valley do not get FANG levels of compensation. Non-engineers earn even less. FANG employs a small fraction of all engineers, also. Using their salary as a baseline to analyze affordability introduces a strong bias towards one extreme of the tail. If one wishes to analyze affordability in general starting that bias makes the analysis not fit for purpose.

What percentage of FANG employees pull 400k yearly? The ones i know who work there make half that.

I agree. The thing with salaries is that you have a minority that is extremely well paid at FANG companies, and love to brag about it, given a false feeling that everybody is in that range.

A good reminder that nobody brags about being paid 100k in tech,

Is 400k really for a lot of engineers? How many years of experience?

Seems way too high to me (I even used to work at Netflix as an engineer years ago).

all the Netflix engineer salaries i know about are larger than $400K. And it may give you nightmares when/if you hear what Netflix offers when it gets into an offer bidding war with a compensation-comparable company :)

To GP questions - there is a lot of info available around about FANG compensation. Wrt. other companies - several guys around have recently landed new jobs - between 250K by a junior guy with 12 years experience and 0.5M by the guy with 20+. Only one went to FANG, a junior with about 10years and he got close to 300K.

I like how juniors are 10-12+ years lol

This may be true, but again these are outliers - most people here are not cranking down 400K. Netflix hires the best of the best so these people are the top 10% of engineers probably... Not the avg joe

Its not true. Most engineers are in the 150-200K range at the most. It is true that some companies like Netflix do pay much more, but Netflix goes for the best of the best. This is the not the majority of engineers. So realistically if you are talking 80% of engineers, then no, they are not making 400K (so they can easily buy a 2million dollar house in SV) they are making about a 1/3 of that.

Ehhh, IF you are at Google/Facebook/Uber, AND you are an L5 senior engineer (6+ years of experience probably), then you might be making close to this.

It is certainly DOABLE, and within reach to get a job at google and stay there for 3 years. But thats the population we are talking about here.

  Sunnyvale (current ground zero of Apple)

The Sunnyvale housing market may be "ground zero" for Apple due to supply, but Apple's "Spaceship" HQ is in Cupertino. Homestead is the border, except for a small chunk just west of Wolfe.

FANG engineers pull $400k WITH RSUs. Base+Bonus won't be that high.

And ... guess what... Bank uses Base (no bonus, no RSUs) to calculate your mortgage.

>And ... guess what... Bank uses Base (no bonus, no RSUs) to calculate your mortgage.

you have obviously never taken a mortgage in US. What bank typically uses is 2 last W-2s. In case if you don't know what W-2 is - it includes base + bonus + FMV of the vested RSUs as of the vest date.

If you made $400k a year I think you can convince a private banker to do something with them.

Yeah, the argument is a bit ridiculous.

You shouldn't go to the bay area because you will never be able to afford a 2 million dollar house on 300k a year.

Stay in Vancouver and just buy a 1 million dollar house on 90k instead.

Where in Vancouver did you find this magical house that only cost 1 million dollars? Are you sure you weren't in Burnaby, or Coquitlam?