If you can tolerate strangers in your kitchen and living room, it's rarely the optimal move to pursue that lifestyle at a high-stress white-collar job in an expensive area, where it's merely prudent. Do it in the sort of place where it's liberating.

I'd also guess that people making the tradeoffs necessary to land at a $100k job are motivated, at least in part, by the desire to live better than this. People who made those tradeoffs during a less severe phase of the housing crisis are feeling a little cheated right about now. Are they the most sympathetic victims in the world? Of course not. They'll be fine. The market will adjust - Bay Area companies will pay more, or have a harder time hiring as word gets around about what those job offers really entail. But it takes time for those cultural memes to propagate - just like it took a while for the general public to catch on that law school is no longer a meal ticket - and people caught up in that latency are going to be a little pissed as the material conditions that their oh-so-alluring "$100k" can buy get worse and worse every year.

As an aside, $1500-$2000 is a lot to pay for a room in Oakland. You'd expect to be in SF for that. Out south and west (towards Daly City) rooms can be $1200 or even $1000.

Fruitvale

That's getting to be a joke. My dad lives in a suburb (about 20 miles away) and it is so built up with new housing there are constant traffic jams everywhere. They have improved some of the roads (they are constantly working on them), but the number of new houses going in far outstrips the capacity of the roads. What used to be drives of a few minutes now, during the day, are often 30 minutes to an hour. None of the local cities are willing to deal with the issue, so it's just going to get worse and worse.

? I live in Charlotte, and there is no shortage of 90-135k$ salaried jobs with full benefits, especially if you code in C# or Java. That salary range is _more_ than enough for the house of your dreams, and the ability to be the sole provider for your family if you wish, (however being a DINK is pretty fun, too).

For comparison, I have heard 90k in Charlotte is like 135k in NYC and 150k in the bay area.

RTP is a much better proposition in that part of the country. Similar cost of living and a real software industry.

On second thought, I think people from SV use pseudonyms (and throwaways) more significantly.

All of which are wonderful places for a centrist/libertarian/conservative white person to live. I dream all the time of having that luxury. Maybe things will go back to normal some day. But the political climate in this country has made practically any red state unlivable for someone like me.

Or, if you really want to influence change and impact the country, staying in a dark blue state and living within an ideological bubble isn't going to change anything. Charlotte has seen a great migration from blue-collar democrats from the Ohio/PA/NY areas, and I believe PHX is seeing the same from Chicago and surrounding areas.

For me personally, virtue signaling do-gooders with billions of dollars that just happen to live in a city with a crippling homeless problem doesn't sound attractive to me.

I really don't want to influence or impact anything. I just want to live a happy life where I don't fear getting murdered at a traffic stop for the color of my skin.

https://www.11alive.com/article/news/investigations/the-drug...

They train the cop to look for impairment signs of marijuana, and guess what, if the blood test comes back negative, then it's the position of the DA and the police department that it's the blood test that's wrong. Surprise, he primarily pulled over black people.

We've also built a new baseball stadium, but it doesn't have access to the city's public transit system because as the county commissioner said "we don't want to invite a certain kind of person here". The transit system, MARTA, is known as "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta".

And don't get me started if you're Hispanic or Middle Eastern. Brown is the new black is the saying.

[1] Yes this Forsyth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WErjPmFulQ0

There is life outside of SV and great salary vs cost of living.

It's definitely not bad. It provided poor miners with a decent place to live. Today a lot of them are still here, renovated and retired miners still live in them, most of them for free (my grandparents for example).

Yep. It also led to one of the bloodiest government orchestrated massacres in US history when striking miners were cleared from their homes in Ludlow, Colorado by the national guard [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

On a more serious note, though, some employers do want to build housing near their headquarters (such as Google, for example), but are blocked by city councils. From what I read here, it sounds like you can't put up new housing anywhere near SF.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/12/12/googles-massive-housi...

I think people get way too caught up in "oh but I pay <insert large percentage> on housing, that's terrible". It doesn't matter. What matters is how much money you have left after having to pay for rent/mortgage, food, car lease/insurance/registration/gas and utilities. If that amount of money allows you to go to restaurants, go on world trips, buy the latest gadgets/hardware then who cares.

I feel that people complain about this because they imagine some kind of unrealistic scenario "oh, I make $150k/year, imagine how much I would be saving if my rent/mortgage wasn't %50 of my income". Newsflash: rent and mortgages are that high _because_ you (and many others like you) make that amount of money, so pick your poison :) Of course, it's a completely different situation for most people that aren't working as engineers for tech companies in the area...

this excessive rent expenditure is landing straight into the pockets of the lucky few who own the land.