You can save and live like a king all around the world, Silicon Valley programmers are the infamous %1 in the eyes of world.

So how the hell does this work in SF? Where do your cleaners, barristas, teachers and other assorted pauper servants live? Do they put them in caves under the ground in California or something?

They tend to either live with multiple roommates, commute from faraway places (like Stockton, Los Banos, and Salinas), or live in their vehicles. I remember reading an article (https://www.kqed.org/news/10467044/long-commute-to-silicon-v...) about a Stanford cafeteria worker who commuted from Stockton on public transportation.

Isn't this exactly what I was referring to? Not being able to afford even a 1-bedroom apartment in the city of which they work?

It’s not capitalism; it’s excessive government regulation preventing new housing from being built. (Also the ocean too)

Also extremely high immigration. We're in the high part of our immigration cycle which means depressed wages and expensive housing.

Some people might say it’s capitalism that allowed rich homeowners to take over government to create themselves laws to protect their real estate investment. Laws of the rich to make themselves richer.

That cannot be capitalism’s fault, because the city government is elected. Every adult gets one vote, no matter how much money they have. Every person has as much right as every other to try to convince the elected members of that government to take the correct course of action. If your city government is unfairly favoring one segment of the city’s population over another then you should elect a better one. Not all cities are as badly run as San Francisco. It can be done.

It’s capitalism. We have plenty of housing but a capitalist society protects hoarding housing more than equalizing housing. You end up with more airbnb, “investment” rentals or abandoned properties stuck in legal limbo than inventory for first time home buyers.

you can’t build to infinity when everything is built out…

Well, you’re not completely wrong there. In this case however, San Francisco is full to the gills with 100–year–old two–story houses, which the city government will not allow anyone to knock down and replace with four–story houses.

The real crime here is making six figures and not being able to afford to buy a 1-bedroom apartment. Leftism.

Anyone making six figures can live like a king almost anywhere in the US. Capitalism.

Just not in the places where you can actually make six figures!

It may not have been the case even five years ago and you definitely won't make the same six figures, but that simple threshold is probably in reach in any mid-size american city for a software dev more than a year or two into their career.

I'm a bit confused by housing in San Francisco. The median household income in San Francisco is around $120k, which suggests that making six figures is quite sufficient for living in San Francisco.

But the impression I often get on HN is that you've got people making well above that finding themselves barely able to afford a place to live in SF.

I'm clearly missing something, but what?

I think everybody is just stuck renting and can't get on the property ladder.

Half goes to taxes and half of what's left over goes to rent. After that you have to save up for a pretty large downpayment.

Somebody could have bought a house in 90s for 200K, retired and live in the same house, which has appreciated to 2M now, drawing on 60K retirement. Somebody making 180K cannot afford the 2M house even though these two individuals have a median 120K income and the latter makes much more than the former.

I make six figures and can afford only a modest 1-bedroom in a rural area well outside of an east coast university town. I will probably not be able to afford a house without parental help.

My back-of-the-napkin math suggests you are in a high COL area. It's not an indictment of capitalism if you choose to live in a desirable area, have a generous salary, and just can't make it work. That or you are mishandling your finances, but I don't know your situation. For reference, I am debt-free homeowner in a midwest university town and make much less than you.

I recently started the process of moving from my high cost of living California home to a low cost of living, but still on the coast city. Three years ago you'd see homes in this city for $300k. Almost all of them are now approaching $600k. The areas which used to be considered low cost are now unaffordable to everyone currently living there as well as a large swath of people not making huge total comp at FAANG. Other costs are still less expensive but housing is nuts everywhere I've looked.

The only homes I've seen for $200k need to basically be torn down and are too small for a family.

The Bay Area in particular is something of an outlier in that it's pretty hard to reasonably drive out of the expensive area in, say, an hour.

That's much less true of most metros. Even a fairly expensive city like Boston, while there are expensive suburban towns, an hour drive gets you to some small cities, exurbs, and other suburbs where housing prices are--if not cheap--pretty reasonable (e.g. $300-400K for midrange houses--though prices may have risen). And a lot of the professional jobs are well outside the city anyway.

Even in the Bay Area about an hour's drive gets you to Stockton which has plenty of houses for sale for under $450k that look pretty decent on Redfin.

An hour or so commute each way sucks, but if you can get a Bay Area job that is either fully WFH or that only requires you to come into the office once a week being an hour away wouldn't be too bad, especially if you can arrange the hours on that one day a week you come in so that you are't driving during the most congested times.

I had about a 90 minute commute (either mostly driving or mostly train) for about 18 months--averaging coming into my Boston office maybe a couple days a week. I wouldn't have wanted to do that long term and stretches when I was in more frequently were pretty bad. But it's pretty manageable for one day a week.

> It's not an indictment of capitalism if you choose to live in a desirable area, have a generous salary, and just can't make it work.

It's an indictment of any system that people making twice the median household income cannot afford to buy housing within a reasonable distance of wherever their labor generates that income. It's a terrible situation - communities in which at least half of the necessary jobs do not pay enough for the people who do those jobs to live in the community - and it isn't good for anyone in or around those communities, and probably not for the nation as a whole.

The fact that, yes, yes of course there are other communities where the economics are different doesn't in any way mitigate the fucked-up ness of the situation the GP is describing.

>> Midwest

Is it a failure of capitalism if semi-rich people can't afford to live among rich people on the coasts?

I suppose that depends on how you evaluate the success or failure of capitalism. The richest person in the world would probably say that capitalism is a great success. As far as the coasts, all life choices involve trade offs.

Student loans?