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?