https://www.google.com/maps/place/Outer+Sunset,+San+Francisc...
The real saving the author is getting is on rent, the Asian food shops, etc, are not that much cheaper than Walmart, but much more tasty.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_Beach,_San_Francisco
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sunset+District,+San+Franc...
Generally stereotypes as a concept are considered inherently pejorative in the USA.
Secondly, your inference that people are avoiding the neighborhood is because of the local population. People aren't avoiding the area, the neighborhood is mostly staying the same. Large numbers of people moving into a neighborhood is the exception to the norm. Particularly in San Francisco where there are protections on existing residents such as rent control.
Thirdly, in the USA we would view asian-american as a cultural description, or nationality description, rather than as a racial description. When someone says 'asian grocery store' they don't typically mean 'because asian people shop there,' but a place where foods sold in asia are more available. This point of view would be particularly so in the bay area worldview. In the USA, it is generally considered offensive/patronizing to compliment people based on their race for any reason. People want to be recognized for their abilities on an individual level, or because of some meritocratic reason.
I could go on, but the other reasons are more or less permutations of the above.
The OP wrote: "Sure, it’s 80% Chinese American, but [it's cheaper]". That made me wonder too why the ethnicity would be a drawback.
An example of how this plays out is demonstrated in the article itself. The author says '80% asian-american' rather than 'asian neighborhood.'
From a political correctness perspective, people in the US don't want to be seen perpetuating anything that could be considered a form of segregation. Simultaneously it is considered negative to be seen as 'gentrifying' a neighborhood, i.e. disrupting the traditional demographics of a neighborhood.
I do think separating culture from race is dodging half the conversation, but I can't argue with your observation that this is the reality of how most people in the area think. Thanks for the feedback.
the reason you're not getting replies is likely because the US are asleep though.
I think it's a valid question-
although it's probably more about causation; Asian-Americans are less snobbish when it comes to areas to live, my assumption is that they live in area's that Americans wouldn't want to live anyway.
> my assumption is that they live in area's that Americans wouldn't want to live anyway.
yeah, real americans wouldn't want to live there, amirite? trustworthy, dependable, high standards having white americans, not like those filthy asian americans who are only pretending to be citizens.
after all we all know where they're really from wink wink nudge nudge
i've got news for you, pal. "Americans" (i.e. "white people") have been moving into black and latino neighborhoods in SF for decades, pushing them out systematically (see soma, mission) the asians are the only ones with enough money to resist it.
in fact, asians as a demographic have the highest income in the entire country, so that might explain a few things that your shitty conclusions don't cover, like why white people don't seem to be able to displace them.
in the UK we consider white people to be indiginous (even if there are british citizens who are from different descents who are equal to me in every way).
regardless, there is a certain set of areas where white people simply do not live, and they are almost entirely inhabited by Indians or British with indian descent.
(fun fact: on forms they have a "British Indian" check-box)
race doesn't matter, but they're culturally different and I was suggesting that it might explain why they'd be willing to accept lower standards of living for some money saved (which is the case in the UK)
Please stop implying I'm racist because I used the colloquial term "Americans" to mean "white people" who have out-bred and/or killed the native populace.
(personally, I don't agree in any context, race matters in pretty much every context in the world because discrimination based on race is present in every context, and to ignore it only allows that discrimination to continue)
Also, by saying Asian-American what do we mean? is it people with Chinese ancestors, or is it Japanese, or Indian, what about Russian?
[0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%28human_classification%29
race matters, but not for nationality. nationality means the country that you are a citizen of
you can't run these stupid verbal tricks on HN and expect to get away with them.
for example, i know white people of south african nationality who would take great offense if you considered them to be american, or european in any context other than a simple mistake.
Also I sense we both believe that discrimination is wrong, you've taken this fairly strongly. But we approach this matter differently.
Your point about how I would react being described as anything other than South African is dead on. But the truth is that apartheid and colonialism has meant that not all South Africans were born with the same opportunities. So nationality may exist in some abstract sense apart form race but it is not a great equaliser. A whole lot of what I know about the US leads me to believe that this is something our countries have in common.
This is not a verbal trick: I firmly believe that the only way to deal with discrimination is to recognise it even where nobody is using the words. If anything the "trick" is pretending that a stamp on a form wipes out the tremendous advantages or disadvantages of skin colour.
it isn't good to say in polite company, but sometimes it slips out because it's kind of hard to disguise an entire racial worldview (i.e., only white people are real americans)
i'm an american and my race is asian, i hear little subtle things like this all the time, everywhere. it's gone down in the past 10 years but it's still there.
As an SF native, I'm not so enamored with being "in the city" like a lot of people who move here from other places; it's laughable how irrational some people (and businesses) are about being in SF. Frankly, there are only really a handful of 'nice' places to live and be in the city -- but the niceness is quickly lost by the huge inconveniences of monstrous traffic, overcrowding, parking tickets, relentless fog, gentrifying hipsters, and various other things.
In fact, there are a number of locations in the Bay that are much more cost effective, convenient, and in good earshot of anyplace you need to get investor/talent attention. San Jose comes to mind, but it can skew a little rough and has a 'mini Los Angeles' feel to it not to mention warmer. You can also take the light rail from SJ to Mountain View, which in terms of start-up connectedness is probably more well-connected than even San Francisco. MOST tech companies are still in the Valley; you get a lot of them clustered in Redwood City (Oracle, Facebook, EA), Palo Alto/Menlo Park, and Mountain View (Google, Microsoft). More high-tech companies are in Santa Clara (Intel), Sunnyvale (Yahoo) and San Jose (Cisco). Which is why southbound traffic out of the city is always worse than inbound traffic -- everyone wants to live in the city but a large majority of people work in the Peninsula/South Bay. Why not live closer to work? Well because there are so many 'hip' bars, restaurants, and events in SF -- urban living!
All things considered, I wanted to chime in on the Sunset thing. You're under the impression that the Sunset is some super Chinese/Asian neighborhood -- which first and foremost is more likely an exaggeration or a skewed cultural bias on the author's part.
Considering the makeup of other neighborhoods, and despite there being a handful of asian-y shops on Judah and Taraval streets (main commerce areas in the Sunset) it's not as "Asian" as Japantown, Chinatown or even Daly City. The Sunset is full of older "white people", Persians, Mexicans, Russians, Indians and a number of SFSU and UCSF medical students (especially being that UCSF is right on what you might consider the edge of the Sunset).
In reality, you see a mix of people walking around the street and nothing to really give you a sense that 'oh! this is a Chinese neighborhood'... IT'S NOT! The author, as I mentioned, grossly exaggerated from his own perspective bias.
No, the REAL reason why the Sunset is "undesirable" (cheaper) vs other parts of the city -- and to be clear that statement is very thin -- has more to do with its geography than anything else. Sunset is super suburban and not nearly as "hip" as downtown with its sea of rolling houses. There isn't as much to do and it generally takes at least 30-45 minutes to get downtown on public transportation. (This by its very nature goes against the whole point of being in the hip-urban-center-of-the-universe that is SF, this part of SF doesn't feel very sexy)
If you want to drive there's usually too much traffic on the main streets in and out and when you do make it out the only immediately interesting things to do get old very fast and are still hard-ish to get to.
Finally, throw in the fact that it's easily the coldest area in SF to live (see Microclimates http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Weather-as-varied-as-t...). There is fog almost all day long, all year long, and temps occasionally get above 60F but are closer to sub 60F even in the summer! The beach is usually too cold to deeply enjoy, and the water is consistently icy. (Ironically, I often ask myself why it's even called the Sunset without it ever having very much sun... we should rename it to the Fogset.)
So, there is no solid draw to the Sunset. It's mostly Blah! That's a good way to put it: blah! July in the Sunset often feels like it does in January.
While the Sunset is not the most desirable place to live it isn't one of the worst either. No, The Richmond District, Tenderloin, Silver, Crocker-Amazon, and Hunter's Point easily snatch that crown away from Sunset faster than you can blink. They have much deeper problems -- mostly crime, inaccessibility, and general remoteness. Living in these areas is much cheaper than living in the Sunset, so if you are all about living in SF on a dime consider those rougher neighborhoods.
Despite the inconveniences of Sunset it is still mostly safe and suburbia-quiet. It is probably a better 'value' in terms of what you get for your money.
But I'm all down for moving somewhere else, starting-up and living better. I'll be back for the next down; this up is killer.
Sidenote: I can't think of ANY place that I have ever been to where people avoid a neighborhood because of the culture there. The nice thing about California is that it really is a diverse place, moreso than you'll se in a lot of other parts of the country. While not all cultures mesh well together, it is generally inacceptable to avoid cultures. It's usually things like crime, blight, weather and inaccessibility that make neighborhoods undesirable.
On paper SA is supposed to have a purchasing power parity of around -50 to -60% [1] (so, things are on average that much cheaper here than in the USA). Of course, SF is significantly more expensive than other places in the USA (although typically not more than a factor of say, 1.5 to 2x). If we add all this up, we've still only got to (at the outer edge) a factor of say 2 to 4x more expensive, not 10x. One website puts this number at around 2.6x for an SF to Johannesburg comparison [2].
The other issue is that SA has an extremely bifuricated economy (see our GINI index score), and local prices definitely also reflect this. I'm not sure to what degree the PPP measurements reflect this - I believe the PPP number is a national average, and the average prices in SA are aimed at people living close to or below the poverty line. These prices are typically not available (geographically) to your average software developer, who in SA easily falls into the (upper?) middle class category for the country. Their costs are drawn from that environment, too. Even if you choose to be frugal, the shops you find in the suburbs here are much more expensive than what the national average may be. On a similar note, appliances and high-tech goods typically tend to be along the lines of "find the item on the 'net, convert from USD to ZAR, add 10 to 20%", so we're definitely not seeing PPP-level savings there. There are also some other factors which are relatively unique to SA, such as the need for additional security (monthly payments to armed response companies, etc), growing trend (or need?) to send children to private schools, etc.
Apart from the above price factors making the PPP number unrealistic, most people here also seem to have high expectations of standards of living, e.g. expecting to buy property quite early on, driving shiny new cars, having houses which are usually > 200 m2, come with swimming pools, have large gardens which need gardeners to be hired, cleaners to be hired, etc (this is all a bit strange to me, coming from an eastern European background where we have a far lesser sense of entitlement).
So really, all I'm trying to say is, we're definitely not ~10x cheaper here, especially if you consider typical suburb shopping prices and some of our more unusual, frequently ignored costs. The high standards of living can be considered things we do to ourselves voluntarily (and as you say, sacrifices can be made there).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity
[2] http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...
That rent number isn't based on fancy accoms but since I've been in the southern suburbs all my life some would say that I'm living an entitled lifestyle (CT Southern Suburbs =~ JHB Northern Suburbs). You could obviously halve your rent in some areas but then you'd be living (at least in CT) in places with serious infrastructure issues, cable theft etc.
But I'm interested... from your background and expectations of standard of living, do you think you could make do with R5000 - R6000 /mo in SA? The same restrictions probably apply, share a room, no dependents, cheapest Net access and forget about buying new equipment on that budget.
For SA, R2000 per month for rent seems very cheap to me; was that including water & electricity? I'm in the Pretoria area, which is supposed to be slightly cheaper than JHB, but then it varies greatly by area. A few years back, friends were paying around R6000 to share a 3 bedroom duplex with a tiny garden (including water & elec). A 4 bedroom house in my neighbourhood is for rent at R10000, but I'm not sure if that even includes municipality fees. In my experience, municipality costs come to around R1500-2500 per month for a house that size, with winter months spiking to ~R4000 if you don't want to freeze.
To answer the R5000 / 6000 question, I can't really imagine doing that without both major cuts in standard of living AND cutting major corners with things like (health | life | disability | car | home) insurance, retirement, etc. I've already chosen to be frugal on some of these, e.g. opting for a hospitalisation plan instead of full cover (still ~R1100 p.m. for 1 person, although I'm not getting any special discounts there), choosing 3rd party for my car over (R200 p.m. vs R1200 p.m., but then you have to have paid off your car), but even then these costs add up very quickly. ADSL line rental + cheapest package is still going to be ~R200 per month. A visit to a doctor + medication is often around R500 to R1000. Even if you only budget R20 per meal (water + pap maybe?), that still comes to almost R2000, and we're already over the budget. Most of the software developers I know seem to have expenses in the R20000 to R30000 range. Some of the things which were optional in my 20s are non optional in my 30s, and this also changes the picture.
So yeah, it's perhaps feasible if you forgo almost all safety nets and luxuries, and do not put away anything for the future. Personally, I would (and have) taken a different approach involving part-time contracting work. At the cost of reducing your spare time (I'm assuming we're talking about creating startups here, not just basic survival), it can completely change the risks involved. Again, it varies greatly, but e.g. a R200+ per hour rate is achievable relatively quickly if you're productive, and would give a R16000 per month baseline at 80 hours, or half-employment.
A nice 4 bedroom house on 2 acres is easily 10 to 20+x as much in the Valley vs most of the US. Generally, when running the numbers people adjust for this and look at the housing people actually buy vs trying to do direct comparisons.
Cars on the other hand tend to be close to the same price anywhere you live. But, insurance vary's a fair bit.
So, while directly living a 35k lifestyle in India might cost 500k in the valley, most people are willing to make reasonable sacrifices. And thare are advantages to living in a major city.
It's a sunny country with a tendency to be outdoors, a lot of space, limited public transport, and a colonial history (another conversation). If you're from a cold ex-soviet country then there is no comparison - Australia far better.
1. When I hear people on this site talking about "low" startup engineer wages in SF, the numbers I see are 60k - 80k / year. But this article makes that number look like glorious riches by comparison. Living in the dining room sounds pretty extreme, what are the sacrifices made for living on 60k? Presumably nowhere near as onerous?
2. It's fascinating to me that an Asian-American neighbourhood is cheaper than elsewhere. As a foreigner with only stereotypes to work from, Asian-Americans sound like the perfect neighbours... quiet, industrious, and likely to have kids with similar values whom I'd be glad to have my own hypothetical kids meet. So why then would this neighbourhood be unpopular? Are my stereotypes wrong? Is there something else in particular about this neighbourhood that I'm missing? Or perhaps USAians like to interact with their neighbours more than I do?