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Saw someone from the south say that the reason Bay Area people ‘can’t live on 100K’ is they have luxuries like nice houses and cars instead of ‘a starter home in the suburbs’ and a ‘mid range car like a Toyota’ and lady I don’t think you know what you are talking about
Try 3x-ing that to get any of those things and childcare
Not saying it’s not possible, but you can’t compare one of the most expensive places in the world to.. the south.
My theory is that almost every major global city has almost the same housing price issues (except Tokyo, but it’s not easy to move there and live there). My housing options are the same in SF and Singapore.
It would also take me a lot to move outside one of these cities. Not because I don’t think life is worth living outside, but because I value some things more than home ownership.
Essentially I’m never ‘giving up my friends and family and job opportunities and access to food I like to own a shitty home in a shitty suburb where I don’t know anyone’
@skinnylatte haha these people are the types who leave comments on tokyo apartment design videos on youtube calling it inhuman living conditions too
@skinnylatte Second this.
@skinnylatte it's this part right here. "Shitty house in the shitty suburbs with a shitty commute and shittier/no public transit/no biking infrastructure"
@skinnylatte People who don't like cities can't fathom or empathize with people who do. It's a complete mental block somehow.
@skinnylatte the hack for living in bad exurban places has always been college towns for us; you at least get decent transit and some of the culture and food and cool neighbors, and while it's more expensive than living out in the soul-destroying sprawl, it's so much more tolerable than living in the... *hrk* suburbs *blerggggh*
@skinnylatte I’ve lived on the Maryland side of DC suburbs my entire life and at least on the food front I think we punch above our weight because of decades of immigration from El Salvador, Ethiopia, Thailand, Vietnam, India, etc.
When it comes to housing costs, this area isn’t much better than SF because of the huge price run-up since the crash in 2008. My being a homeowner (2-garage townhouse) is just good fortune. Absent any one of the following factors (CS degree, no student loan debt, enough money saved for a downpayment, affordable real estate market in 1998) I might still be a renter today.
@skinnylatte and Vienna, Austria. Non profit housing is the only way to go.
@mayintoronto Vienna is nice but I somehow don’t really consider it a major global city hehe
@skinnylatte Fair. Their housing is ridiculously affordable though.
@mayintoronto when I visited as a teenager on a school trip and was walking around minding my own business, old people there also told the cops to ‘keep an eye on those kids’.
seems great for folks from there tho
@skinnylatte actually its pretty specific to liberal areas where homeowners can block housing development
In Austin they went ahead and overbuilt in response to the housing crisis during the pandemic and what do you know, rents are falling
@orloff singapore has public housing, we still have $1M public housing apts
sf is a whole other thing, it's just dysfunctional and nimbys generally in the bay area
but lots of cities around the world do have $1M median homes (sydney, toronto, etc) anywhere that has 'buy a home that will be your primary investment / equity vehicle'
@skinnylatte there’s also a safety issue. One of our friends moved to the suburbs and now feels like he can’t put his menorah in the window. Like I don’t want to live with people with an HOA because those kinds of rules around uniformity usually don’t end well for people like me.
@skinnylatte the people who disregard childcare and child expenses REALLY do not get it.
That part. It’s basically impossible to spend less than 50k per year just on childcare if you have two kids under school age. So 100k evaporates pretty dang quick when you start off by cutting it in half.
@Jackiemauro @skinnylatte and "just on childcare" is important.
I'm gen x. I kniw so many people that just didn't have kids
@skinnylatte Starter home. What utter bullshit. Like there's a magic place with affordable homes within a three hour commute of anyplace that might offer you a job.
@skinnylatte Can't. That would require calculations. People who specialise on complaining according to pre-set talking points can't do that. "Those poor hobos are guilty of their own poverty because they hang their swags on more luxurious sticks than appropriate for their estate!" is exactly a preset talking point, er, complaining point, not a real argument.
@skinnylatte Also, almost the entire Bay Area is “suburbs” and it is not like “hey find a nice starter home” really applies to the vast vast majority until you are very far away. Like sub-suburban.
It's cheaper here in Dixie because we spend less on frills like sidewalks, road shoulders, sewers, clean water, education, health care infrastructure, public health, environmental monitoring, recycling, transit, public parks, salaries for civil servants (including first responders), disaster prep... list goes on for pages... The weather sure is great, though.